Samhain Publishing

I have terrible problems with villains (and with heroes too, but the heroes can stay out of this for once.) Either a villain is bad enough for me to accept that no mercy needs to be shown to him – and in all my reading, only Sauron from The Lord of the Rings has ever occupied that position – or I will end up hoping for him to be redeemed.

I think I’m too soft hearted, but the fact is that being a villain can’t be much fun. You’re usually alone. You’re lucky if you have minions, but you certainly don’t have friends. And in general, in order to make you believable instead of a caricature, your author will have fitted you out with a backstory full of the kind of misery that can turn any reasonably sensitive person into a monster.

So you’ve been screwed over by your author, left with dozens of weeping psychological wounds, and set up alone against a bunch of self-righteous ‘heroes’ who may have some of the same wounds but have been helped through them by friends and mentors, and now are destined to come and kick your arse.

How can any reader fail to sympathise with the villain in a situation like this?

It’s a puzzle to me. If I make my villain too understandable, then I hurt for him and I want to see him redeemed. If I make him too evil for even me to sympathize with, then I have to accept that he’s never going to win a prize for being a believable, well rounded character.

This is why I generally settle for having antagonists instead of villains. Max in Shining in the Sun may look like a clear cut villain, spending the whole book terrifying our hero after having put him in the hospital in danger of losing his hands, but we don’t hear Max’s side of the story until the end. The elf queens in the Under the Hill series both have the best interests of their own people at heart – they are heroines to their own side – and I like to think that even when we find out which one is the enemy of humankind, we still understand that doesn’t make her evil.

I do have one utter villain – Captain Walker in Captain’s Surrender, whose self-righteousness I find quite repellent, and for whom I didn’t greatly mourn when he got his come-uppance. But I still felt slightly sorry for him at the end. I don’t know that I feel comfortable with the idea that I shouldn’t be. Surely you should feel sympathy even for the devil?

Or should we? Am I too wimpish in this? Is there a bloodthirsty joy that I’m missing out on by worrying about the bad guys? Am I supposed to enjoy watching them get beaten, because they deserve it?

If so, should I make my villains a bit more despicable in future? I’d love to know what you think. Do you prefer a villain you can love to hate? Or is it better to go for ‘understandable antagonist’ so we don’t have to hate anyone at all?

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Villains picture from Wikimedia

Alex Beecroft
http://www.alexbeecroft.com/ 
"Swashbuckle with a bit of swish." 

I live in Yorkshire, in the UK, a few miles from the village of Cottingley. The village is famous for pictures taken in 1917 by two local schoolchildren. Frances and Elsie took photos of what they claimed were fairies at the bottom of the garden at the side of Cottingley Beck. One of their fathers developed the plates and declared the images to be fakes, but news got out and they were examined by an expert who decided they were real. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of Sherlock Holmes- thought they were genuine and wrote a book about them.

The photos don’t look so convincing these days but they certainly had people all over the world wondering for years. In 1981 Frances and Elsie admitted they’d held up cut-out fairies with hatpins, though Frances continued to maintain they had seen fairies for real and the fifth picture was genuine. Hmm!

I love gardens with walls. The Secret Garden was a favourite read of mine. I love the idea of something mysterious just waiting to be discovered. Although the Cottingley girls faked those photos, how fantastic that for so many years people wondered if they were real. Maybe that fifth photo says there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden. Off to look at mine….

In my book Worlds Apart – there’s something at the bottom of Taylor’s garden on the other side of a stone wall. When he was a boy, he saw what lay on the far side but as a grown-up – he sees something different. I hope you’ll read the book and find out for yourselves what’s at the bottom of his garden.

www.barbaraelsborg.com
www.barbaraelsborg.blogspot.com