I would love to see a modern retelling of "God Vs The Morning Star" but instead of the story being like:

"demons and hell are sexy fun badasses and God is boringly evil👿"

it's an updated story where the Devil is truly evil in the most horrifying way possible as society has developed an updated idea of what true evil is.

Take Christianity which has been oversaturated with mysogynistic ableistic conservatives and make the Devil the personification of evil who wishes to corrupt everyone into those assholes.

For example, "The Devil believes that women should be slaves and Lilith is the original not-feminist Girlboss who is willing to throw all other women down in order to succeed"

or

"The Devil left Heaven once he saw that God was allowing gay people to exist without torturing them."

or

"The Devil is a massive abuser who will try and manipulate anyone into believing that it was his daddy issues that made him this way so that's why it's perfectly okay for him to do whatever he wants"

Instead of the Devil being an insanely attractive perfect guy with a bad boy exterior, why don't you make him an abusive incel with a huge superiority complex and the most manchild-infused tantrums ever?

Make God the omniscient compassionate God they are supposed to be.

Make evilness seem unattractive, immature, and horrible to be the victim of.

Hi :)

That is a good question!

Evil wins in the end

"Evil" can mean many things in fiction

a bully/rival

a powerful criminal

a crime syndicate

an evil government

demons or monsters

actual powers of evil

What is a win?

Both lose - the good guys lose it all, but the bad guy also doesn't come out unscathed

Leading into a sequel - the good guys lose it all, but it's used at as a new plot for the sequel to try again and win this time

Evil really wins - the evil powers win it all

How to write it?

You have to decide how you want your reader to feel after putting down your book. You don't want them to be too frustrated, so you have to keep in mind that you can shock them with the ending, but it needs to make sense. They should feel like you really thought this through and that in hindsight, it's brilliant, not that you just made something up for shock value.

If you want to go into a sequel, you can also put in a tiny little bit of hope. Just enough that the reader goes from feeling helpless for the protagonist's situation, to getting excited for how they can turn things around in the next book.

I hope this helps and good luck writing it!

For this I would like you to direct yourattention towards the Fire Nation from Avatar:The Last Airbender. I know I reference this show a lot, but that’s merelybecause it has such amazing writing. If you haven’t watched it, I would recommendit if only to admire the writing of the characters, places, and people.

On that vein, here are some thing that canmake your empire both believable and terrifying.

Make it Good at One Point

Noteverything starts off just evil. Sure, some people set out to directly opposethe good of the world, but sometimes they startoff at the good in the world. Sometimes the things they begin doing is goodbut turns bad at some point.

It’seasy, really easy, for good intentions to turn bad. And perhaps their citizens,or at least their soldiers, don’t know that others consider them evil. They believethat after all this time, they’re still doing good—and on that vein, make themdo bad will still believing they’re good.

Have the Leader Charismatic

Thereare a lot of Evil Empires where the leader is a clear madman. Take EmperorPalpatine—the man is straight crazy once he drops is façade. There’s no gettingaround that. But before he does, he’s a trusted man. People put their faith inhim and believed in him—he seems like a very nice man.

Have yourEvil Emperor be like that: nice, kind, loving in a twisted way that’s hard tosee is manipulative. Straight up insane is fun to write no doubt, but havingyour leader be influential can lead to some very interesting scenarios. Charismaticpeople can change the minds of even the toughest of heroes if they’re given theopportunity.

Start at the Beginning

As I saidearlier, they don’t always start off bad. However, sometimes they do. Understandinghow it go its start, how it grew to be what it is the heroes know it to be whenthey’re opposing it, can make it interesting. And on that, understanding howthe one(s) in power became the way they are can be interesting as well. Knowingwhy they’re doing what they’re doing and knowing motive could be key to whatthe hero(es) need to defeat them.

All of that being said, there’s no right wayto do it, just interesting ways. You can play off of things that you know, ormix them up, or try something completely different. It’s entirely up to you. Inthe meantime,

One of my three works-in-progress is a murder mystery set in one of my established fantasy worlds. I am currently writing the antagonist’s story and meshing each event with the protagonist’s timeline via the calendar. My antagonist is a woman whom we’ll call Bad Grandma for the sake of this post. She takes what she wants and damn the consequences. I see Bad Grandma as a pirate in the truest sense…

(Image: Eugène Delacroix, “The Abduction of Rebecca”: a scene from Ivanhoe in which Rebecca is kidnapped on the orders of Brian de Bois-Guilbert.)’

On Writing Bad People

There's been a lot of nonsense going around that writing sympathetically about evil/cruel/bad characters is endorsing their evil, or (in the worst case), evidence of the writer's own evil character.

First of all, fiction is not real life.  Period.  You can write a thing without wanting to experience it.  You can write a thing without wanting anybody else to experience it. You can write a thing while wanting to experiencing it, but also knowing it's morally wrong. You can enjoy reading or writing a horrible thing without being a horrible person.  Period.

Now I've gotten that out of the way, I want to draw a parallel.

Consider the great genre of angst and darkfic.  Often these fics revolve around horrible things happening to the good characters, the heroes.  Why?  There are as many "why"s as there are authors.  But one "why" is the desire to see people broken, to be reduced to whatever the core of their character is, and to fail.  Extremity amplifies personality, and catharsis is a real thing.  It is satisfying to see Hamlet lying dead, with the grieving Horatio left to tell the story.

That set of emotions is what's fun, for me, about reading and writing evil characters.  Evil characters are *already* broken.   They are already fallen from grace, even when the moments grace happened offscreen.  Nobody's evil at thr-- okay, nobody's evil at seven.  Sometimes you want to see the ghost of that seven-year-old.   Sometimes you want to see that seven-year-old utterly obliterated.  Sometimes you want to see that seven-year-old redeemed.

And sometimes you want to see that three-year-old with guns and rockets, gleefully stomping around murdering everybody within reach.  Because you were that three-year-old, and you envy the freedom and the rage openly expressed, and you can let Kylo Ren or Eridan Ampora or Angelus do the satisfying things, both sexual and not, that you can do when you aren't hindered by a conscience.  

Well, the thing is, his motives don’t have to make sense to us. They only have to make sense to him. The best villains, as the saying goes, always believe they are the heroes. And fortunately (sort of) you do have a built-in reason for his belief that he’s a hero: he’s a Nazi.

This is gonna take a while. BUCKLE UP. We’re gonna talk about aliens. And Hitler.