Are warm and fuzzy villains a good idea?

[fictualities]

So, how do like your villains? That is, how evil (or not evil) should they be to make for a good story? Do you prefer vast impersonal forces of doom (like the distant, unutterably alien forces in HP Lovecraft)? Or do you like your villains to be flawed, misguided creatures who have at least the potential for some kind of redemption, even if they

Comments

[lame_pegasus]

I must confess I have a great weakness for the "redeemed villains" - I encounter them in literature, in movies and even in fanfiction (which brings me to an interesting response to pearlette's comment: in jodancingtree's tale Following the other Wizard there actually is a redeemed orc. And her Canohando is one of my favorite characters in fanfiction). It may be a decidedly christian idea, but I simply like the thought that even the worst character might be able to change the course of his life and find a new purpose.

I'm not even able to see Evil as something entirely impersonal. Satan has - IMHO - a clear personality, only one devoid of even the faintest hint of love, compassion or pity (Voldemort is a good example, though Mrs. Rowling makes him a tad too one-dimensional for my liking). Did you ever read The Stand by Stephen King? His Randall Flagg comes rather close to my idea of the pure evil - feasting in horror, enjoying the disaster he causes like some cruel child and staring in absolute disbelief at his final downfall

[fictualities]

I simply like the thought that even the worst character might be able to change the course of his life and find a new purpose.

I like this idea too! It's one reason I love the character of Gollum so much -- he comes so close to this. He doesn't make it, but he gets awfully close. (And I love Jodancingtree's fic too, for just the reason you say here.)

I'm not even able to see Evil as something entirely impersonal.

I see what you mean. A couple of people have said down-thread that it's hard to see something completely impersonal as evil. Maybe I chose my words poorly in the original post -- I guess I'm interested in the kind of villain/antagonist to whom the word "evil" couldn't really be applied. Evil's an ethical category, and for a vast, impersonal villain "ethics" in the human sense wouldn't be a meaningful category. Some fantasy/sf tries to imagine creatures SO different from us that their motives would be incomprehensible to us (and probably ours to them). Faced with an antagonist like that, what kind of a story

Here from <lj user="sistermagpie">

[moonspinner]

I haven’t read The Stand, but I have read the Eyes of a Dragon in which the villain Flagg appeared and I really have to say how much I love (well not love precisely but you know what I mean) that character for what it represented - pure evil. I don’t think Flagg is exactly the type of villain you’re describing in your meta. That villain would probably not even be a villain in its own eyes - just SomeThing that does not see humanity or may be even sentient life as the irreplaceable treasure that we do and perhaps can even provide a logical reason why humanity should be eliminated (environmental pollution, wars, diseases…) Great meta. I’m adding this to my memories, if you don’t mind.

[lipsum]

I spent ten minutes typing a reply. Then my computer crashed. The Borg don't want me to show u my meta ;)

Will try again later.

[fictualities]

he Borg don't want me to show u my meta

IM IN UR COMPUTER ASSIMILATIN UR HARD DRIVE

:D

God, that happens to me all the time, and it drives me nuts. It would be nice if LJ had a save feature for comments as well as for posts (though the strain on the servers would be huge, so I guess I can see why they don't).

[fictualities]

I remember being very bewildered by the White Witch when I first read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe because that book never hints at why she wants it to be always winter and never Christmas

Yes yes! I think Lewis is very much in his villain-as-unknowable mode there. The White Witch is personal in that she taunts, she's cruel, she's pretty clearly after power power power. But she's impersonal in that we never get the sense -- do we? -- that she's had other options.

In this case I think she's in the story, though, not so much as a manifestation of something completely inhuman, but as a personification of a human value. She's allegorical, representing one polarity in a human ethic, in a way that Lovecraft's Cthulu is not. Lovecraft's Cthulu is just differentStill it would be extremely cool to extract the White Witch/Jadis from this allegory and think about her motives. That would make a great premise for a fic, wouldn't it? Come to think of it that's what a lot of fan fiction does -- explore the motivations of characters

[mkcs]

The best Lovecraft villain for me is the Colour out of Space. The human protagonist sees it as evil -- utterly malevolent and wrong -- but I can't help imagining a ship's log like this:

"Ambushed at farthest point on route. Crash-landed on unknown planet. Took cover from pursuers in local waterway. Area was low in fuel, so it took a long time to gather enough for an attempt at an escape velocity. Joe is still down there, as his pod didn't quite make it. Suggest orbiting in 6.1 time units to collect him, as he should have powered up enough by then for a second attempt. Planet is of little interest, as it is utterly inhospitable to life."

[fictualities]

Joe is still down there, as his pod didn't quite make it.

Bwah! I love this. :D The "Joe" is priceless. Not what I thought of when I thought about Lovecraft fanfic, but you make the point that most of his horror is a matter of perspective. No matter how strange his vast entities seem to us, to them they're just going about their business. Hee!

I've friended you,by the way, if that's okay -- thanks for your cool insights on this thread!

[kameni]

You could add the Cylons to the list of villains that began as inhuman, and became more human through time.

I think it's really hard to look at something utterly inhuman, utterly impersonal, for a long time. And perhaps harder to write about it. Certainly hard to watch it.

More later after I've had coffee.

[kameni]

Ha! I see that darius just mentioned A Fire Upon the Deep. I just looked up Vernor Vinge on Amazon looking for the name of that book.

Anyway... Vinge's book is fascinating, really a wonderful book, but I found it a bit tough to... well, to care about as much as I care about my favorite books. An entirely inhuman intelligence is hard to empathize with (or empathize against), and although I like to have my thoughts provoked, I also like to have my emotions engaged. So I've never sought out any fan fiction based on Vernor Vinge's work (as one example of what I mean by being really engaged by a work).

I guess I also have a hard time conceiving of something utterly inhuman as evil, regardless of how destructive it is. And it seems as though humans begin personifying things when they react emotionally to them. (Hurricane Katrina, for instance, in Spike Lee's documentary - I'm thinking of an image of a symbolic jazz funeral for Katrina that was filmed.) Maybe the next step is to soften the evil and try to understand it in a human kind of way

[fictualities]

I guess I also have a hard time conceiving of something utterly inhuman as evil, regardless of how destructive it is. And it seems as though humans begin personifying things when they react emotionally to them. (Hurricane Katrina, for instance, in Spike Lee's documentary - I'm thinking of an image of a symbolic jazz funeral for Katrina that was filmed.)This is a great point, and I love your example too. We're geared to respond emotionally to each other. If something functions as an obstacle, but an inhuman obstacle (like the weather, like natural forces) it's harder to know HOW to respond to it. Certainly it's harder to tell a story about it. I mean, there are all kinds of disaster movies about impersonal forces like earthquakes, fires, volcanoes, etc. But those disaster movies work as narratives because of the human conflicts within them. There's an initial conflict about whether the disaster might possibly happen. Then there's a conflict about how to respond to the disaster. Then there are a whole bunch of sub-conflicts

[kameni]

You know, now I'm imagining a Bambi Meets Godzilla crossover with Teasel Meets Meteor.

[darius]

You've put your finger on one of the many excellences of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. It opens with a prologue from the omniscient point of view --
The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much overrated. Most automation works far better as part of a whole, and even human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.
[...]
Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.
The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to escape. ...

-- and then drops it for human-level points of view and a warmer prose style for all the rest of the book. I don't want to spoil it, but yeah, Vast Uncaring Forces, check. If he'd ever even brought back that POV, much less humanized it, it could hardly but have weakened it.

I heart Vernor Vinge.

[fictualities]

Oh, WOW, A Fire Upon the Deep sounds fascinating *adds to top of reading list*

Very interesting that this vast impersonal POV only appears at the beginning of the book, though. I wonder if it would even be possible to tell a story that felt like a story -- disruption, conflict, narrative climax, resolution -- from a completely impersonal vantage point.

[darius]

I'm surprised to find the text online.

I wonder if it would even be possible to tell a story that felt like a story... from a completely impersonal vantage point.

I can't think of any attempts to do that -- that surprises me, too.

[fictualities]

*cavorts* Oh, this is very cool! Oh, how I hate you for sending me this link before I got my grading done! :D

It's amazing how much good stuff you can find on line these days.