#so little time...

Villains come in all shapes and sizes.  You have misunderstood villains who are the heroes of their own stories.  Bastards who revel in bastardry.  Terrifying threats of nature who can kill you with a cold glare.  Beastly conquerors and calculating strategists.  Or downright cartoon villains who are boobs are just so much fun you love watching them come and fail every single time.  :P

But regardless of the KIND of villain you want to make, one thing remains eternally true:

As a writer, if you’re going to create a truly great villain, you need to understand your villain, first and foremost.  Their motivation, aesthetic, unique gimmicks, history, worldview, powers, and above all else; effectiveness as a villain.  What your villain looks like will be the image that sticks, try to make it something your audience hasn’t seen before, difficult as that is.  Their abilities don’t always need to be physical, but it needs to be something so deadly that your villain poses a real threat to your heroes, whom your audience needs to care about.  Your audience needs to actually worry that your heroes can LOSE to this foe.  That’s where effectiveness comes in.

If your villain is bumbling all the way through their journey, then it’s not going to feel like they ever stood a shot against your heroes.  That may work in comedy or cartoons, but if you want the threat to be taken seriously, then you need ti give us a REASON to take them seriously. 

They, themselves, need to be deadly, or need to be so cunning that their words and their schemes can break people without even needing to lift a finger. 

What can make for a truly excellent villain is a villain can often boil down to a villain who is just REALLY goddamn good at what they do.  Someone who feels like they’re always two steps ahead.  They’re so damn smart and such a thoroughly dangerous strategist that you genuinely feel hopeless because not even YOU can figure out how the hell you outfox such a cunning threat.  Or they’re so physically dangerous that the heroes CAN’T just beat them in a fist fight because they’ll lose, so they need to really, REALLY think outside the box, because this force of nature has pushed them to their limits, and they’re at the edge of the cliff here, on the verge of toppling over.

Even without understanding the psychology or motivation of the villain, the mere danger they present can make them instantly iconic.  Look at Hans Landa or Hannibal Lecter.  You never truly know what’s going on in either of their heads, and minus Mads Mikkelsen, neither one is a physical threat.  They’re psychological.  Hannibal gets in your head and picks you apart piece by piece for an emotional buffet...before the fleshy kind, and Hans Landa is seven steps ahead before you even know what game you’re playing.  He’s charming despite being a literal Nazi, and goes from funny to downright terrifying despite Christoph Waltz not really being an intimidating looking guy.  And you never truly understand his motives, so much as you do guess.  He’s a very self-serving person, but the “why” doesn’t even matter with him.  He simply DOES, to the point where that kind of IS the key point of Landa, “I’m a detective.  A damn GOOD detective,” more than the whole, y’know, genocide thing.

For as formidable as the Basterds were, you never got a sense that they ever REALLY had a shot against Landa.  He was too smart and far too efficient at his job for them to ever get the drop on him or slip past him.  And while he was hypnotic in every single scene he was in, thanks to Waltz’s Oscar-winning performance, he also made you nervous every time he was on screen because that one opening scene alone made you know damn well just what kind of deadly yet whimsical monster you were dealing with.

But while motivation may not always be the selling point, when done right, you can create a genuinely compelling villain.

The reason so many people loved Thanos in the latter Avengers movies is because his motivations, while misguided, shortsighted, and ignorant, made sense.  You could very easily explain why someone would have the mindset that Thanos did because you can look at his evidence all around you in real life.  What made his insanity logical was that you could argue that the problem he poses is 100% correct, but what makes him a VILLAIN is the solution he came up with to solve that problem.

So many excellent villains in cinema come down to people with good intentions pointing out a very real problem...and coming up with an incredibly horrible solution.  It’s a case where finding the right answer is very, very difficult...so someone like Thanos comes up with a very lazy, very WRONG answer, regardless of outcome. 

Thanos also worked so well because, on top of being a logical psychopath, he’s played to perfection by Josh Brolin, delivering an eerily calm, calculated delivery, allowing some dry humor whilst also demonstrating what a sheer force of power he is as well.  Every time Thanos was on screen, devastation and death was his backdrop.  He made you excited yet SCARED every single time he was on screen, and occasionally gave a window into his psychotic mind in a way that could make sense, but was still dead on balls wrong.

But at the same time, not every villain needs some noble, misguided goal.  Some can just be pure evil or otherwise just really, REALLY fun to watch.

The Joker from TDK wasn’t someone with any desire to “save the universe” the way Thanos claimed.  He was evil at its most chaotic form.  Put aside Heath Ledger’s legendary performance and electricity and look at the character from a writing perspective.  His whole reason for everything he does is because the world is chaos.  To him, he’s just someone who sees the world for how ugly it is, and is pushing Gotham to be as psychotic as he is.  Batman barely has any meaningful back and forth with Joker in that entire movie, since most of their scenes consist of Batman being talked at, but the one line Batman has during their final fight painted it best: “What were you trying to prove?  That deep down, everyone’s as ugly as you?  You’re alone...”

And the reason why Joker, in that moment, is no longer laughing, and just feels utterly irate is because he understands that Batman’s right.  Gotham didn’t eat itself alive the way he said they would.  So it ISN’T that the whole world is crazy...it’s just Joker and people like him.

Joker embraces absolute chaos in the same way a gambler continues betting the farm even when he’s already lost the damn farm.  You’re too far gone, so you just keep digging yourself deeper and deeper into madness in the hopes that you’ll come out it somehow SANE.  Joker’s goals are selfish, and his means of carrying out his atrocities are both psychotic and INCREDIBLY fun to watch.  But every single thing he does is fueled by that simple desire to prove himself right, that he’s not just some broken, pathetic little worm.  That the whole world is just glorious madness, and he’s just someone with a head start on the crazy, soooo might as well help push society to the finish line with him, and wipe out anyone who gets in the way.  (...Stop me if aaaaany of this feels a little painfully relevant these Q-razy fucking days...)

Everything about the Joker in that film is striking.  Ledger’s unbeatable performance, Joker’s unhinged design, all the set pieces he creates, his dialogue, it all creates a truly unforgettable character who left my jaw gaping in awe and horror the first time I saw The Dark Knight.  But eeeeeevery single bit of that comes down to the core of who this character is; some unhinged, selfish asshole who needs to be right.

Even then though, your villain doesn’t even have to be complex if they’re just really, REALLY fun. 

Hans Gruber, one of the greatest villains of cinematic history, isn’t some complex character whose motives are beyond comprehension.  He’s a smug, greedy prick who REALLY wanted to get rich quick, and was killing to kill a buncha people to do it.  His motives are as plain as day, “I LIEK MONEY!1!” 

But he’s just so damn entertaining every time he’s on screen.  He’s already rich with personality, thanks to the late Alan Rickman.  His dialogue is cheeky and entertaining.  He’s cunning, very quick to outsmart his foes in entertaining and creative ways, and above all else, he’s sooooo damn charming.

Or look at a far simpler villain like Colonel Volgin from MGS3.  By all metrics, this guy WAS just evil for the sake of being evil.  He was a big dumb meathead with electric powers and a literal fetish for sadism.  (No, not a joke, Volgin literally got off to hurting people)  But like Gruber, he’s so damn fun when he’s on screen.  Every single time he pops up, he just does something horrible.  He’ll nuke a research facility, beat an old man to death for kicks, grab his boyfriends crotch and squeeze them so hard, you think his nuts will pop (I apologize for that image...)  He’s fun because HE’S having fun.  Volgin’s almost like USSR Joker in the body of Electric Drago.  He’s an active villain who DOES, and his actions result in devastation, making him suitably threatening despite being kind of a dumbass who literally spells out all of his dirty secrets to a guy who knows nothing about them...who was literally getting double-crossed by EVERYONE within his inner circle of villains, and never saw it coming.

He was effective and engaging just from all the horrible stuff he did.  Compare that to someone like the comically named Hot Coldman, who’s every bit as evil as Volgin, but instead of being a giant electric boxer who beats people to death for kicks and shoots lightning out of his hands, he’s just a pasty old man who loves machines and gets killed unceremoniously without a boss fight to his pitifully idiotic name...or any reasoning for why he was so obsessed with AI and machines.

Understand who your villains are at their core, and the rest will follow.

To give you guys an example, I’ll break down my main villain for HISS in a spoiler-free way; Seven:

In HISS, all of my villains have different motivations and degrees of sympathy.  Someone like Straymaker is a deeply sympathetic but incredibly dangerous villain of circumstance.  Whereas someone like Koloss is a big, boorish blowhard who will crush you or gulp you down and taunt you every step of the way.  Each one is dangerous in a unique sort of way, and each one has their own motivations driving them.  No one in HISS is a villain just BECAUSE.  Hell, even Mauler is a bad guy simply because villains don’t get all uppity when ya start eating people.  XD

But the big bad has to loom over them all.  In the sheer of his goals and the threat he poses.  Seven has to the TOP of the foodchain if you’re gonna justify someone like Cadmus or Omen acting as underlings to the fiend.

Seven is an entity that’s existed for centuries.  Little is known about him other than the fact that he intends to wipe all life off the face of the earth.  His endgame is so grand that his powers kind of grew around that.  Seven has power over a corrosive substance known as “Shade.”  It’s the essence of all the lives he’s ended throughout his hundreds of years, reduced to a terrifying blackness.  It consumes all living creatures it touches, enveloping everything they were, and essentially turning them into more Shade.  That’s what fills the vials across his armor, which he can manipulate at will and use like an extension of his own body.  Kasumi is his vector, able to consume shade and store it within his body, which Seven can extract and store on his armor as needed, but mainly uses the Shade to fuel his “Blackout Bombs.”

Think of Seven as a terrorist mastermind, just using supernatural blackness instead of suicide bombs.  He plants his Blackout Bombs throughout various colonies and wipes them all off the map, ending thousands of lives and converting that into pure Shade.  He’s essentially recycling the very people he kills and using their essence to kill even more people.  It’s a horrific cycle that just ends with more and more people gone without a trace, and used to subject others to the same horrible fate.

That’s what makes Seven dangerous.  He’s been very successful in his mission, and the very thing wiping god knows how many people out of existence, he can control with the same ease someone like Pride controlled his shadows, turning the Shade into razor sharp tendrils, a pool of blackness to just absorb life, or coursing through his scythe.

His power and his immortality make him a very effective villain.  Death follows in his wake at every turn and no matter what you do to him, he cannot be killed.  Drop a nuke on the bastard and he’ll walk right out of the radiation and eventually find you.  He’s designed to be an unnerving, intimidating villain.  But being dangerous and creepy doesn’t necessarily make you INTERESTING or UNIQUE.

That’s where Seven’s motivation comes in.

Seven doesn’t want to end all life because he’s evil or just wants to kill people.

To keep things spoiler-free, let me pose a simple question:

“What if you KNEW that there was an afterlife?  Not a conventional heaven and hell, with a conventional god or devil, but something else...something better...”

To Seven, what he does isn’t genocide, it’s kindness.  And that clarity that his ‘god’ has given him isn’t a belief.  It’s as factual as the sky being blue and grass being green.  If you knew such a higher plain of existence were real, would you care AS much about the life you have, knowing something even better awaited you when your time on this earth was up?

For most of us, the answer is yes.  But if the answer is no, then some people may be careless.  Or in the case of someone like Seven, physical life may end up having absolutely no meaning whatsoever.  It’s merely a speedbump on the way to paradise.  And if life has no meaning, and you have the kind of power that Seven possesses...then pray to whatever god and or sandwiches you pray to...

Seven doesn’t view himself or his actions as evil.  He believes himself to be the equivalent of someone like Morpheus from ‘The Matrix’, sparing people from the suffering of physical life and bringing them to paradise.  And he condones abject cruelty and wickedness because, hey, none of it will matter in the end anyway, right?  There’s no reasoning with a man like that, and no line he won’t cross.  You have to find a way to destroy him or else he will one day eventually succeed in his goal...and probably expect a THANK YOU by the end of it.  XD

Don’t ever let your bad guys be cookie cutter.  Find out what kind of person they are, what drives them, if they’re misguided or just greedy sociopaths, and above all else, make sure they are a real threat to your heroes.  If your villain is inefficient, then we never have any reason to feel intimidated by them.  Make overcoming the bad guy the hardest task your hero will ever have to endure.