Why I Less-Than-Three Villains

I’ve been working on some short stories lately, and I can’t help but notice a pattern in them and some of my novels: many of them are about how the main character comes to be the villain of the narrative.

In some stories, I have a character who’s conventionally villainous from the standard point of view (the school bully, the nasty teacher, the Dark Lord, the supervillain, the scary ghost, the criminal mastermind) but who actually has pretty good ethical reasons for acting the way he or she does. Often, in those stories, I’ve (tried to) set it up so the conventional heroes don’t know what the “villain” knows; or maybe so the villain has a reasonable set of moral beliefs that most of us could accept, but in the circumstances under which she finds herself, those beliefs compel her to do something we’d think of as wrong. In still other stories, I try to give the all the characters moral downfalls, so that even if what the villain is doing is clearly wrong, it’s still not obvious that we should be cheering for the hero to stop him or her: sure, Moustache-Twirling Professor Sinister may have been responsible for a murder, but Strong-Chinned Captain Manly is complicit in the systematic exploitation and enslavement of an alien species.

It’s certainly important to have villains with credible motivations, whether they’re the antagonist or an anti-hero: even evil people believe they’re right, either in the “Of course profits are more important than the environment!” way or in the “I know dumping toxic sludge in the river is wrong, but I feel justified in doing so because all that matters is me!” way. But I don’t think that’s the only reason why I’m so intrigued by the bad guys.

Part of it is certainly my own political, ethical, and cultural background. Let me give you an example: Nazis. Now, I’m not a Nazi, nor do I think that Nazism or any similar ideology is remotely morally acceptable. But I still hate the contemporary trend of using Nazis (or Nazi stand-ins) as villains that everyone is allowed to hate. The idea is usually that Nazism is so monstrously wrong that whoever adheres to it must be a monster; therefore, if the bad guys are Nazis (or Death Eaters), the reader doesn’t have to feel for them or ask how and why these characters chose to be Nazis. Bad people are Nazis because they’re bad people, duh!

But as a Jew who was educated in the history of the Holocaust from age six through high school, I find this portrayal of Nazis as soulless bad guys to be wrong. Not because Nazis deserve better treatment or are misjudged, but because the very thing that was most scary and evil and pernicious about Hitler – the thing that my classmates and I saw again and again in documentaries, in visits from survivors, in stories – was his ability to convince otherwise reasonable and good people that he was right.

If you were a Jew in pre-Hitler Germany, you couldn’t know beforehand which of your friends was a “bad guy” likely to turn you over the the SS and which was a “good guy” who’d hide you in the family house. People who had up to that time been kind, understanding, and charitable might support Hitler; people who’d been selfish and mean might oppose Nazism. To say that Hitler came to power because a generation of Germans was born monstrous makes evil so much less frightening and powerful: we can stop it just by identifying and killing off all the monsters! Yay!

Portraying bad moralities like racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and sexism as “things inherently bad people do” also scares me because of the way it limits what those things can be in real life. Let’s face it: I often say homophobic things without being a gay-basher, or do racist things without being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. So do many other people. Most of us don’t do it on purpose, but it happens, because we’re all still learning about people who have different experiences from us. But when there’s only one model of prejudice (anti-Semitic = Nazi = inherently bad person), it’s easier to dismiss real-life complaints: “Oh, sure, I said that fraudulent salesman ‘Jew’ed me, but I’m not anti-Semitic. Only monsters are anti-Semitic, and I’m not a monster. Therefore, the actual problem isn’t my anti-Semitism, it’s your over-reaction.”

So because I’m not into this “villain from monsterhood” thing, I wonder. And because I wonder, my stories wonder, too: how do people get to be bad guys? How can bad guys believe the bad things they do? Who gets to say who’s a bad guy? How can you stop being a bad guy if you are one? How can you even tell if you’re a bad guy? How can you not tell? How can anyone smile, and smile, and be a villain?

One of the things about making your protagonists characters who are conventionally villains is that your actual villains – well, your antagonists – wind up being characters who think they’re heroes but are actually doing some bad things. Those kind of characters interest me, too. How do you know whether you’re a hero or a villain? Are you either one or the other, or does it depend on the person telling the story? And, if it does, who gets to tell the story?

This is probably also one of the reasons I don’t like characters who either don’t have flaws or whose authors don’t acknowledge that they have flaws. In the first case, I don’t want to read about someone I don’t believe could exist. I don’t know any perfect people – do you?

I consider myself a decent person, but I don’t think any of us can avoid doing wrong things on a daily basis. We say things that hurt our friends’ feelings; we walk past homeless people asking for spare change; we sign a petition to stop world hunger and then forget about it, or figure Al Gore didn’t mean us when he told people to cut down on driving, or leave it to someone else to protest institutionalized racism and Guantanamo Bay. If not doing wrong means always doing the right thing, even the saintliest person has done wrong.

In the second case, when a character has flaws that the author of their story pretends don’t exist, I feel cheated. I wrote a blog entry on why a few months back, so I won’t get into it again, but I guess I’m the sort of person who prefers uncomfortable facts to happy fictions (or at least, who thinks she does). I don’t want to paste over my moral shortcomings with excuses or placebos. If something is the way it is, then I’d rather know about it than not. At least if I know about it, I can figure out if I can change it.

And I guess preferring villains also comes with a good ol’ helping of Liberal Guilt. It’s hard to ignore the fact that I live in one of the most developed countries in the world, in a society that has a history of portraying itself as heroic while simultaneously destroying other peoples, taking their land, appropriating their traditions and culture, and oppressing their citizens. In the past few hundred years, Europe and people of European descent have been some of the villains of this planet. How do you deal with a horrible past that you had no part in creating but can’t help but maintain by virtue of your existence?

Finally, as a writer, I can’t help feeling somewhat responsible for villains. The reason they exist is solely for my benefit. Every story needs a protagonist, true. But just a protagonist is no story. Nobody wants to read about Luke Skywalker sitting around at his aunt and uncle’s house or Harry Potter living happily with his un-murdered parents. The villain (or antagonist) is the story’s engine. He or she or it is what makes the plot move. In real life, there’s absolutely no reason to want a murder to happen; if you’re writing a murder mystery, you not only want to make one happen, you need to. So, on a meta-level, how can I possibly condemn characters who do bad things when their creator (me) specifically made them for that purpose?