This isn’t quite a post about writing. It is more a post about writing and real world intersection.
It is also of course good advice to any young lady contemplating matrimony. It’s also fairly useless. To the extent that a willingness to be violent and to push people around is read by the back brain as “oooh, he’s gonna lead the hominid band” and most women like marrying upwards. Mind you, I’m not sure it’s as universal as believed, or at least most romances show the hero as being clean cut, rich, and kind. Regencies will sometimes allow him to be a “bad boy” in the sense that he keeps mistresses (which he immediately discards when he falls in love with the girl) or gambles, or is excessively reckless, or… Never that he’s really rotten through and through, kills babies and tortures puppies for fun, or steal old ladies’ false teeth or something.
Which leads me to believe that the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.
There is however a hook where ladies like bad boys and readers like bad boys, if you do it as “he did it but it’s not his fault.” It stimulates maternal (and possibly paternal) feelings and feelings of specialness too, as you’re the only one who understands and can rescue this wounded creature and make him what he was meant to be.
This is the same reason that giving your character a great handicap or an awful history works. We always want to be the knight on the white horse who saves the victim, even when the victim is not exactly simon-pure and has a five o’clock shadow.
So… This brings us around to where Kilted Dave asked about how to write villains so that they’re not just moustache twirling evil but have reasons and are to an extent sympathetic.
I’ve never found that particularly hard to do, though when I was a young and inexperienced writer, it caused a few of the books to flip on me and make the villain the hero.
I know why that happened and I see dangers in it for both writers and readers.
It happened because once I’d given the character sufficient justification for what he’d done, then what he’d done was no longer unwarranted, and it blurred the moral lines between right and wrong. The most obvious result of this for a writer is gray goo.
Supposing you don’t flip it enough to make your “hero” a villain, what you have are two characters fully justified in going at it and then any suffering is one of those things, and it all ends in goo.
But it’s more realistic, isn’t it?
Yes, and no. I mean, was Germany after WWI fully aggrieved and a victim? Oh, sure. Was Hitler justified in what he did? Oh, hell no. Even if he thought he was. For one he was attacking his own people, as well as trying to establish a system that couldn’t work. (We’ll leave aside all the other stuff, okay? Not getting this into a discussion of WWII. We know where that ended last time!)
For another because, well – what he did was still his own responsibility.
The cases in which both people’s or both people are forced to be at each other’s throat for reasons beyond both of their controls are probably less than one percent, if that. And the cases in which they’re both fully justified is even less.
So, why have we learned that this is “good storytelling.”
Partly it’s the post modern thing, and part of it takes us back to WWI again. The only way Europe could heal was to say “it was neither of our faults. We were pushed to it through circumstances beyond our control.” Only it was both of their faults, so the narrative didn’t take.
But it took in writing. “More sinned against than sinning” is an intoxicating thing to write. “How can I justify this REALLY bad thing?” You can’t, but you try, and so you pile on injury on your villain, and then you know you’re the only one who understands him, which is intoxicating.
And if it results in gray goo the reader can say it’s more realistic, and they’re clearly “smarter” because they “get that.” Etc.
But carried on long enough it destroys readership and writing and the feeling of “right” in an adventure. It too gets infected by the ambiguity that has been so in vogue since WWI. Worse, because our brains are really bad at distinguishing fantasy from reality, we end up looking at real life through the prism of these stories our subconscious thinks we witnessed. We will look at someone who’s done something heinous and wonder what happened to them to make them that bad. Next thing you know, we’re writing soppy poems to the Boston bombers.
When I was very little, I liked westerns and other such books. At one time I was talking to my brother about how villainous a villain was and he said, “Well, he’s a victim of society.” He proceeded to explain to me how the villain was marginalized, viewed as the Other, and therefore nothing he did was his fault. I think this view held till I was sixteen or so. And it was wrong.
We’re all victims of society in the sense that none of us gets everything he wants from the cradle on, or if we do, that might be the greatest violence you can do to anyone.
BUT to consider that everyone who commits a heinous crime is just a “victim” of something worse in his past is to ignore the millions of walking wounded and decent people: victims of every sort of abuse under the sun, can’t win for losing strivers, people who are genuinely cast out, sometimes for reasons they can’t either understand or correct – people with aspergers, for instance – who yet don’t feel the need to kill anyone, attack anyone, rob anyone, or commit worse abuses on their fellow men.
In the end, unless there’s great mental impairment (and that’s really not easy to write) your evil is your own. You might have been influenced to it, but you can’t say you were made to do it (unless it was blackmail or possession.)
Sure, your villain might think he’s fully justified. In DST as we learn more through other stories of Athena’s father’s grievances, he probably was partly shaped into what he is by his upbringing, being betrayed by his best friends, etc. BUT it does not justify what he does. He chooses what he does. He chooses his means to stay alive and young. And in the end, it is his villainy, and not anyone else’s.
In writing as in real life, too much sympathy for the devil leads to injustice towards those who might not be angels, but who are still honorable, decent and trying not to hurt others.
*OT: I have updated subscriber content. If you’ve subscribed or donated above $35 and you’ve not been given password to the subscriber page – look in tabs at top – you should email me at goldport, and I’ll send it. A couple I tried to send bounced back, I think because I did something wrong.*
According To Hoyt 
> the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.
Having tried it both ways, I am FIRMLY convinced that “girls like [ kinda ] bad boys” is absolutely correct.
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kinda, yes. But not outright evil. Yeah, they fall for some SOBS but that’s because they have illusions…
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Sorry, Sarah, but you’re applying logic to female hindbrain activity. It’s like applying mayo to calculus. Chicks dig bad boys. Period. EOS.
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So not true!! I love a man in uniform or one who is a good provider.
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Emily, that’s known as the “NAWALT” defense (Not All Women Are Like That). Uh huh. David also killd Goliath… but as any bookie will tell you, that’s not the way to bet.
Girl + Bad Boy = captivated girl / bedroom activity.
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I have a big weak spot for the idea of a man who might be able to kill. Of course I’d want one of the sheepdogs, a protector. But is it always possible to tell who is a sheepdog and who is a wolf? A wolf can be smart enough to pretend otherwise, or even be under the illusion that he is more of a sheepdog himself.
And even with the wolves there is the fantasy that maybe he can be tamed. Owning your very own monster, an attack dog you can control so that he can pass in normal society too as long as he is with you is an appealing power fantasy – in spite of what the feminists say most of us are aware of our relative physical weakness compared to the males, but one way of bypassing that is getting one of those guys who can scare most of the other men as your mate.
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Yeah. A guy who’s at least a bit dangerous.
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There’s also the… Aslan aspect, I’ll call it. He’s not a tame lion.
When I first met my husband he hadn’t had more than five hours of sleep a night in months, had seen the sun for about two minutes in the last four weeks, and it was the evening meal so he looked like… hm… Anybody read WereGeek? Their DM after a week spent playing video games constantly. (Recent strip, not linking to avoid spoilers. Totally awesome strip.
http://www.weregeek.com/2006/11/27/ artwork gets much better)
Anyways: pale, intense, scary guy. Intimidated the heck out of me, and no I didn’t fall for him then and there!
But as time went on, I found he was the only one willing to walk a D&D noob through stuff, and found him to be fair— he tries to meet you on the level you’re at, so the guy who memorized all the rules gets met on that ground, and someone like me that forgets to re-roll for crit gets met on that level. It’s not fun to obliterate easy targets.
That said, he CAN obliterate HARD targets… and that is awesome.
Having power and knowing when to use it properly is incredibly sexy.
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Eily, even when I am wearing cammies there isn’t a line of women on my porch. Should I post my financials on the front door? ;-)
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Yes also a picture of yourself. Do you have any references? Anyone who’d provide a cover blurb if you were a book? Are you in a red state or a blue state? If you’re in a red state it’d work. If you’re in a blue state you’re SOL. Try to get some fix-ups. That hubby and I met.
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Yes. I saw the handsomest young man in cammies at lunch today. If only I were 30 years younger, oh well.
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ROFL. No one would blurb me, sadly. Blue state recently but we have some recalls working to try to reverse that …
The cammie thing is an inside joke. A few years ago I was sitting in a diner in Eagle Colorado during an elk hunting trip with friend. I was wearing desert camo BDU’s and got a lecture from the reservist waitress as to how I was non-regulation…
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Oh, yeah. That’ll happen. Mrs. Dave and I are always doing double-takes when we see folk wearing uniform items who are most definitely out of regulations. Then we realize they’re silly-vilians. Oops.
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SPQR is married. He’s being a brat.
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Sorry I didn’t detect the sarcasm.
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I’m sorry, I thought you knew I was pulling your leg. My apologies.
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it’s hard to, on line. I just happen to know the undead Caesar personally.
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Crap, this means John Scalzi won’t come to my convention now, doesn’t it?
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I don’t know. I’d love to see that.
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John Scalzi won’t come to your convention because your married?
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Why would anyone want John Scalzi to come to their con?
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bearcat wins the internets for today.
emily61, it was a reference to a silly kerfluffle elsewhere about conventions and harassment policies.
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Which I have yet to see addressed from a legal standpoint. Not so much the, “everybody needs to feel safe” angle as much as the, “who’s on the hook if the cops get involved” part of the question. I have been told (IANAL) that when a con sets a policy on minors at the shindig, it must be suitably vague or the convention (and concom) becomes legally liable if a minor is given alcohol, gets injured when out of parental control, etc. This strikes me as a similar problem. If a con institutes a policy on “harassment” (I have yet to see one that addresses it in the legal sense as a crime, which comes down to what an individual state considers criminal harassment, which is typicaly repeated behavior that threatens an individual’s safety), are they then legally responsible for enforcing it? I suspect this may begin to get into contract law, but my jurisdoctorate is from the school of It Stands To Reason.
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Robert got a lot of pepper vodka at 16 because the friend who gave it to him thought he was 21 — and because this was a friend of ours, Robert assumed he knew and had our approval to give him the vodka. Fortunately the worst Robert did was make a lot of inappropriate jokes…
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@kilteDave “It Stands To Reason”
Leave it to you to bring up Ferdinand Feghoot!
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From the little I recall from a long-ago “war” inside the SCA over site waivers, you simply cannot abandon your right to sue. So people can — and some will — sue over anything. Stated policies might give them an idea, or convince a weak-minded judge|jury that you could have done something about it.
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There was a time that California sued on behalf of a minor who had broken at an SCA event because his parents wouldn’t. As soon as he turned 18, he got the money and signed it over the SCA.
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Um… I’m having trouble understanding this one.
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It’s California, your not supposed to understand, understanding requires a working brain, something they discourage in their citizens.
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I think mary’s comment was intended to describe a situation where some minor was allowed to do something at a SCA event, (alcohol??). Because his parents would not sue some SCA chapter, a California agency sued as guardian ad litem and got a judgment or settlement against SCA. Then from her comment, I understood that the minor when reaching his majority and gaining control of the funds, returned it to SCA.
Never heard of the incident (the above is my translation of mary’s comment) but love the honor of the young person.
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I thought it was that the kid broke an arm at a SCA event and since the parents did want to sue, California sued “on behalf” of the minor. Then the kid donated the money to the SCA when he came of age.
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Oh, I thought the minor broke something (arm, leg, nose) and she just forgot to name the body part.
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I like mathematicians. It’s a sickness.
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No. Some of us have serious “Ick!” reactions.
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That’s what I said. But he said it didn’t count.
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I have serious ick reactions. I probably could write it, but I can’t read it — same issue as with paint-the-room-red horror. I can write it by the numbers, but someone ELSE has to proof it, because ick.
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Somehow, it never does– a tiny group of idiots keep making the same mistake over and over, and it’s “all women.”
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Well, actually —
There was this film Jud Suess. The Nazis did not stint on villainizing the main character. Promoting tyranny, oppressing the helpless poor — when the woman he was interested in married, he had her father and her husband arrested, and her husband tortured — which is how he got her, because that was the price of his freedom. It was shown to SS units, to populations where the Jews were about to be deported, and to concentration camp guards, and the camp commandants admitted it caused guards to abuse prisoners.
Nevertheless, it induced swooning fan-girls for the villain of the piece.
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Okay, I knew the Nazis were evil, but I didn’t realize they also supported corruption of their own troops in order to encourage more evil. With training films, no less.
I guess it’s hard for people who’ve committed war crimes and civil crimes to tell on you for your war crimes and civil crimes, though. I guess that was the point.
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In theory, you weren’t supposed to like the Holocaust. In theory, it was a dirty, nasty business that required nerves of steel for the magnanimous German to carry out, however necessary it was — it was the depraved Slavs, recruited in the East that enjoyed it — which is why SS men who applied for transfers away from it were transferred and suffered no penalty (except decreased chances of promotion).
In theory.
In practice, you need the sort of people who don’t mind.
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This question has been addressed many times in many forums (fora? forii?). The consensus seems to be that, because men are not allowed to act like men any more, that women seize on the next closest indicators which would clue them in that someone is strong and/or a good provider. This is often the asshole they meet somewhere, who they see as strong, not because he defended them from something, but because he says whatever he wants, treats people badly and gets away with it, and then treats them as if they are expected to do whatever he says, rather than actually being a decent person with integrity.
All of this appears to hit hindbrain triggers that tell the emotions that, because he gets away with all this stuff, he must be a strong person, who will protect them. If he has a sports car this feeds the provider side of the equation.
Sounds insulting, doesn’t it? It wasn’t meant to be. Many of these discussions I have read have included several women who went through multiple relationships that came about in just that fashion. Some of them gave up, and some finally broke out of the cycle and learned to look for better indicators.
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I wonder how much of that is more a matter of “aggressive and ready to do violence” rather than out-and-out bad. Military males have both of those qualities in spades, hence the historical ease with which they acquire bedmates. Add something nifty like wealth (in the form of “hi, I’m a pilot,” or “certainement, cherie, all my maille is spanish steel”) and you’ve got a hope of social and financial advancement. While most young women won’t ever have any exposure to those particular brands of “bad boy,” many will meet the more generic bad boys of sports players and tough guys like bikers.
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I wonder how much of that is more a matter of “aggressive and ready to do violence” rather than out-and-out bad.
This. Very much so. As best as I can tell, the part of the female hindbrain that finds bad boys attractive is trying to select for “will be willing to fight to protect me & our children” (and some other related traits). And because the hindbrain is ridiculously bad at evaluating moral character, women under the influence of their hindbrain often don’t distinguish well between “and only fights when there’s a good cause” vs. “and fights at the drop of a hat.” A smart woman will let her intellect sort out these two (preferably when she’s not hanging out with the attractive guy, lest the hindbrain drown out the intellect with its hypnotic chanting of “you want his babies, you waaant his baaaaaaabies…”), but many women fail to listen to their intellects, with results we’ve all seen before.
Note that the “listening to the hindbrain instead of the intellect” isn’t a failure mode peculiar to women, by any means. To see the male version of this, just look at how many guys end up falling for women whose beauty goes only skin-deep (and often end up divorced a few years later), when they should have gone for the other woman who, though she might be less attractive in surface beauty, would have stuck with them through thick and thin.
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Gah. Forgot to close my bold tag — only the “This.” should have been bold. Sarah, if you’re able to edit comments, would you mind fixing my blunder for me?
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Only sometimes. Let me check if WordPress is in a good mood with me today.
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To see the male version of this, just look at how many guys end up falling for women whose beauty goes only skin-deep (and often end up divorced a few years later), when they should have gone for the other woman who, though she might be less attractive in surface beauty, would have stuck with them through thick and thin.
Yeah, men should REALLY learn to look at the personality underneath more, before jumping into anything that could wind up with a long-term commitment. More than one guy I know is paying for his lack of perception. My own mistake was somewhat different.
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“the other woman who, though she might be less attractive in surface beauty, would have stuck with them through thick and thin”
They’re all married.
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You are wrong– I didn’t get a chance to show my dedication until I was in my late 20s (married at 31)… They are NOT all married (maybe now– cause I was probably the last one… j/k)
Of course if you want a passel of children, you need to find her early ;-)
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And thanks be to God, one of them is married to me. Don’t know what I’d do without such a faithful and intelligent woman at my side.
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Nope, Rob, some of us just never get asked and so after a while we ease out of the market.
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On the shelf.
To be sure, after a few decades of the single life, one gets set in one’s habits, and might find it hard to switch.
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too true!
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Hard to spot, too, although I don’t know why; is it the lack of throwing ourselves on guys while half naked*?
*deliberately ambiguous. Not trying to insult folks here, but I have had guys tell me that it’s a single woman’s fault for not making it more clear that she was “in the market”– while at the same time complaining about how there aren’t any ladies left.
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Don’t ask me. I already got in trouble in this thread once.
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Wait, I thought you are trouble– how can you get into trouble?!
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Human Klein bottle. *nods sagely*
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D*mn it, Mollusc, you owe me a keyboard!
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Exactly.
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*slow clap* Well played, sir. Well played, indeed. My hat off to you.
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Sigh. Husband admits I did everything but glue a jewel on my belly. Apparently he just couldn’t believe it that a “beautiful woman” wanted him. He’s a nutbar. Also, apparently, he lacked a mirror.
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Well, clearly you are an impostor, because any real woman would be able to navigate such self-contradictory logic.
(Runs, even though it’s hopeless)
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not necessarily.
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Oh, and to support your main point, everyone does know that the character of Severus Snape from Harry Potter had thousands of fangirls way before the final book came out, right?
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Well, some of them may have figured it out, the way I did. I finished reading book six and said to myself, “Rowling wants us to believe that Snape was a double agent all along, but I don’t buy it. I think he’s a triple agent, and Dumbledore ordered him to do that thing in book six* because it would get his mala fides firmly established with the Death Eaters.”
But yeah, WHOLE lotta fangirls who really thought he was That Bad, and still thought he was hot. See also the Draco in Leather Pants trope. (Insert standard TV Tropes warning here re: the potential lost productivity of spending all day clicking around that site.)
* I know almost everyone here has read the books, but you never know who might stumble across this post later without having read the books, so I might as well try to not spoil the “Luke, I am your father” moment.
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A good chunk of Potter fandom sulked because Draco was never revealed to be anything except what he appeared to be. . . .
You notice the little contradiction here: you fall for the bad guy but want him to be really the good guy. Why not fall for the good guy, at that?
It might be Aristotle’s dictum that we like our characters to be as good, or a little better, than we are. (Which includes more forms of goodness than the moral, but does include the moral.) This fandom perhaps is for those in denial: they like the character that is as good as they are, but since they delude themselves about their character, they imagine that he, too, is as good as they fancy themselves to be.
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“Why not fall for the good guy, at that?”
The good guy may have issues in helping you reenact “Fifty Shades of de Sade”.
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Fortunately, thank heavens, I have no interest in enacting that. the closest I hanker for is fifty shades of garden shed. WHAT? I need a place for my tools, dang it.
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He reminds me of my favorite teacher.
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Yeah.
Well, actually, most battered women who consulted Theodore Dalrymple could tell, but didn’t bother. He asked them whether they could have told in advance that he was dangerous, and they denied it. Then he asked whether he could have told, and they say, well, yes, you could have — and when pressed on why, enumerated the evidence that would have led him to conclude it.
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Sheepdog vs wolf?
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Oh yes. And you know, sheepdogs were after bred from wolves, not sheep. Lot harder to put the dangerous in than the tame.
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And very few dogs will mount a sheep.
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Thank you for your tireless efforts in establishing that bit of scientific wisdom ….
;-)
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But before we got him “The Big Snip” our small terrier-mix tried it with one of our female and neutered cats. The cat, understandably, was rather freaked out about it all. He did catch her rather by surprise. I guess we can call it ‘bi-species/curious.’
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That’s not true, your just trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
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Exactly!
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The difference between men and women:
Women: “He”s a bad boy, but I can change him!”
Men: “She’s a good girl, but I can change her!” ;-)
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LOL!
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“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien….”
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IMO you can have a story without a villain. You can have an opponent with “different loyalties” than your hero. Both can be shown as good guys and you can see that they could be allies against a common foe (in another story).
As an example of what I’m saying. The hero works for and is loyal to the British Empire. His opponent works for and is loyal to the French Empire (alt hist where Napoleon did create a French Empire). Neither Empire is bad but there can be situations were they are at odds. Your hero in on a mission for his Empire where he comes into conflict with the French agent (perhaps where the British agent is trying to get a small country to join the British Empire and the French agent is trying to get it to join the French Empire). In a later mission, both join forces to protect a neutral country from being forced to join the Chinese Empire.
I think those sort of characters could be written without getting into “gray goo”.
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Oh definitely you don’t have to have a villain. Just off of the top of my head Robert Heinlein had many stories where there was no real villain (or the villain was relatively unimportant), but instead an antagonist or antagonists who simply opposed his protagonist for what they considered to be good reasons.
Of course sometimes the antagonist wasn’t an actual character, but rather the circumstances that the protagonist had to overcome to achieve their goals.
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IIRC, Tunnel in the Sky was like that, where the circumstances the people find themselves provide all the adversity they need! That’s also the theme of my novel, “Lost”, although I did add in some ‘mammoths’ just for good measure.
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Well of course you’d add mammoths. Mammoths make everything better. :)
Seriously though that is a type of story I’ve always enjoyed. In day to day life I’ve found actual out and out villains fairly rare. But challenges that you need to overcome to achieve your goals is something I, and I think most people, encounter almost constantly. These type of stories are good inspiration for when that happens.
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Certainly. The only thing here is that it stops being a good/evil story, and becomes a game. They aren’t foes, so much as opponents. Where such stories slide into grey goo territory is when the writer shows that neither is actually a hero. To use your example, each agent is shown to have committed acts of deceit and murder in the service of their state, and neither demonstrates any guilt over these facts. If the game of beating their opposite is shown to be more important than limited collateral damage, you’re getting mighty near to the goo.
I guess what I’m saying is that you can do it that way, if you can do it that way.
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To write one of these that’s more than a game, your character needs to have a loyalty to something that his opponent lacks. Say, your character is fighting because otherwise he believes the land his family lives on will get raped (a lot of the reason) or he must at all costs protect those who depend on him.
Can you have two equally good men fight that way? Sure. But then it’s tragic — truly tragic. And most books can’t sustain that. It also needs a certain type of story, more national than person, if it makes sense (though it can be religion or even belief, rather than country.)
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One where the institutions involved are themselves characters, albeit ones without their own dialogue. They end up speaking through their champions. The trouble here is that this kind of character-driven drama just isn’t as much fun, in a lot of ways, consequently readers will – likely – stop paying attention if you stretch it out too long. The Mad Wizard did this a bit in the Honorverse when the Manties and Havenites in a particular battle were both decent people. Realistic as hell in that kind of circumstance, but isn’t that the problem? It was hellish. Part of the reason for Sherman’s famous quote. Honestly, I can only take so much of that kind of realism before I use a book for kindling. I need to have heroes in fiction to act as a counterweight for the foolishness and rank stupidity and outright villainy I see in the world around me. Something has to balance the heartache of our existence.
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National loyalties, yes — so we’ll exempt mil sf. Richthofen is one of my recurring characters and frankly there are NO good sides in that war. OTOH even there… It’s slippery and it needs a writer with a very firm sense of history. Otherwise you end up with poems to Boston bombers…
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Or the Hundred Years’ War.
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Yes. Two heroic characters of incorruptible character can produce a story of heart-wringing anguish. (Though it’s hard to come up with an ending.)
It’s two morally gray ones that are problematic. I contemplate them and how it would not matter to a soul which one won, and there’s nothing to choose between making one or the other happy.
And then there are the two stygian characters, where I really wish they could both lose.
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IMO in the “two good guys” competing/fighting, it may come down to which loyalty the reader agrees with. IE British readers might come down on the side of the British agent. Of course, even a “good guy” can have annoying features so that may be a factor in “which guy to root for”. [Smile]
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Corriea’s Dead Six isn’t a perfect example of this, because there is a villain, and the two good guy antagonists end up joining to fight the villain in the end. But most of the book is concerned with the two antagonists against each other (done in first person alternating between the two, which makes it really awesome). Having the two join in the last part of the book to fight a true evil is great way to write such a story, you create the reader angst of who they should root for, and them not knowing who will win, and then solve it by having the two join forces. It is difficult to do successfully (at least I assume so, having never tried it, but having read a lot more unsuccessful attempts than successful ones) but like a Hail Mary with the clock running out, when the catch is made in the end zone it is spectacular.
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Ah, yes, that’s one fix.
The real problem with Good Guys Against Each Other is that since they are good guys, they have Good Goals. Furthermore, their particular goals have to be important and incompatible, or they would be willing to give them up. If John Doe wants to win to save an orphanage with the prize money, and Richard Roe wants to win for the challenge of it, Roe might throw the victory — or offer to donate enough prize money to save the orphanage — because he’s a good guy. But if Roe wants the money for a hospital. . . .
And so it’s very, very, very hard for a happy ending that actually doesn’t try to weasel out of it.
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It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to write believable villains. After all, we’ve all had the desire to do wrong at one time or another. For the most part we don’t because we’re good people who were taught better, or because we’re scared of the consequences. Or some combination thereof. Just write somebody like yourself, that isn’t that good, and who for whatever reason isn’t that worried about the consequences.
As an example: Who hasn’t thought about robbing a bank? You don’t do it because stealing is wrong and prison sucks. Now imagine someone who’s really angry about the recent history of bailouts. That shouldn’t be too hard. On top of that make this character the kind of person who’s really impressed by their own cleverness. I think we’ve all met someone like this. And they do tend to be clever, just not as clever as they think they are.
Now you’ve got someone who’s believable, even a little sympathetic. But not too sympathetic. Because no matter how justified his rage at the banks might be, when he goes to rob that bank he’s putting innocent people (low-level bank employees and customers) in danger because he’s so self-centered he doesn’t consider the impact his actions will have on other people.
That to me is a completely believable villain.
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This reminds me of Walt in Breaking Bad. Decent family guy, driven by horrible circumstances, turning to crime and being sucked under by it … I only saw 2 seasons, but that’s where it was heading … I thought he was a very sympathetic ordinary guy-turned-villain … until he sank too low.
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I’m beginning to think I’m the only person in America that hasn’t seen that show.
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No, there’s two of us. I haven’t watched it, either. The Daughter Unit and I are going through the Jeeves and Wooster collection. We dropped cable a couple of months ago, and got a Hulu, Acorn and Amazon Prime subscription.
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I wouldn’t put it on your to-see list. It got to the point that I couldn’t stomach it — the “good guy” went too far, and my kids tell me it just gets worse from that point.
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I like the show, it has some good acting, decent writing and some good direction.
But I will agree that it gets very very dark. I thought it was hilarious that they set up a website for Saul Goodman.
http://www.bettercallsaul.com/
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I tried to watch it, but couldn’t stand to see what happened to Malcom’s dad.
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No interest in seeing it here, either. By the way, I’m familiar with Hulu and Amazon Prime, but what’s Acorn? (In this context, I mean — Google searching is turning up lots of stories about James O’Keefe’s expose on ACORN, which is making it hard to find out about anything else by that name.)
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Guessing, but try acorn online — looks like it goes with hulu and such.
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I know there’s a channel called Acorn you can subscribe to if you have a Roku. It has British TV shows on it.
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Three.
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I don’t think anyone in my family has.
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http://acornonline.com/
They have all those high-end Brit-TV shows. They also have an internet subscription service, The Daughter Unit loves it.
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Thanks. Will check it out.
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Having had more dealing with tweakers than I care to think about, Breaking Bad hits too close to home for my taste.
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Nope I haven’t either, but then I don’t have TV, so if I want to watch something I download it and burn it to a DVD, and only find something worth doing this for once or twice a year.
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Darth Vader. Practically the first character interaction upon introduction is one in which we see him choke a man to death and snap his neck. He participates in torture, sanctions the killing of innocents and destruction of entire planets and we’re told he’s the Emperor’s right hand and personal emissary. Let us no forget the fiat dissolution of a (atrophied, but still existent) governing body. This is a BAD MAN. Not bad like RES or myself, who are simply misunderstood, but genuinely evil, one who chose to go to the dark side, we’re told. The rest of the trilogy is about his son finding the spark of good in him and igniting it.
And yet.
In Ep. 1-3, he’s portrayed as something of an ingénue. A prodigy who is “destined to bring balance to the Force” (and since when has stasis been that good a thing, really? what doesn’t grow, dies, non?), who becomes a hero in his own right, and then tragically falls prey to manipulation by the scheming spider pulling all the strings. The last we see of him in Ep. 3, he’s killed children who trust him, Force-choked his pregnant wife (please, no comments on the apparent lack of medical facilities to repair a damaged trachea) and attacked his best-friend and mentor, after murdering a group of co-conspirators. And we’re expected to see him as a tragic figure. Tragedy, yes. But let us keep in mind: he chose that path.
I’m just a little annoyed with Lucas for trying to turn Anakin into some kind of messianic hero. Redemption is good (and all too frequently rare in today’s genre fiction world), but this is verging on the ridiculous. The second most evil person in the galaxy is just a scared, misunderstood little boy?
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Of course Lucas wrote it that way. He’s a liberal. Liberals can’t see evil. All they see are victims, virtuous aliens, and their opponents who are “evil”.
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Nonsense. Their opponents are evil.
What is conventionally called evil is, OTOH, a chance to demonstrate your superior moral sensitivity. Cheap, too.
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Worse there are novels in the Star Wars canon where we see worlds that celebrate Darth Vader as a hero because he liberated them.
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See, now that doesn’t make any sense. (I don’t actually remember any of those, but I haven’t read any of the EU stuff in forever.) Who had it so bad under the Old Republic that Vader and the Empire were an improvement? Unless we’re talking the … um … forget the name, from Zahn’s books. Grey skinned killing machines. At which point, I still don’t buy it.
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It was a long time ago. I don’t think a Tim Zahn. Possibly a Michael Stackpole.
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It was Zahn. But it works in this case, because the Noghri are being deceived. There was a major battle near their planet a few decades ago, the Empire fighting the Rebellion, and the debris from the battle has done massive damage to their planetary ecosystem, that much is true. But the ecosystem would have healed on its own just fine; the robots the Empire has sent down to “clean up the damage” are actually causing more damage, so that the Noghri will continue to be economically dependent on the Empire, and the Empire’s contract with them under which they send off most of their young men to die in exchange for enough food for the species to survive.
So Zahn doesn’t actually paint Vader as a hero here; he paints him as someone who makes himself look like a hero in order to enslave an entire species.
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Noghri?
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That’s them. Love the species, in concept.
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Anakin Skywalker/Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Vader was actually in mind when I posed the topic yesterday (Yes, I am proud that I provided the prompt so the kilted guy could get all the glory – I’m just fated to stand here holding this pilium, I guess – damn this armor is hot – and let me tell you, standing here in all this rattle with this shooting pain in all the diodes down my left side is no joy ride…).
If we accept that every character is the hero in his own mind, then Vader has to have built a set of values that he’s internalized in service of something greater than himself in which he believes deeply, and that omelet justifies all those broken eggs. I actually like the stuff in http://darthside.blogspot.com/ over the crap that Lucas et al. wrote for the prequels, but even restricting to the canon, the overriding motivations of moving from disorder to orderliness works as his motivator, taking into account Anakin’s own origins as a slave with a really bad midichlorian infection, with no father, and then the first adult male who takes an interest in him, the guy who rescues him from slavery, is killed, and he’s left with junior apprentice Obi Wan, who just won’t accept what is necessary to win the Clone Wars and prevent chaos, and his sweetie Padme, who he has to marry in secret because of the Jedi oath of no-nookie, adding to his frustration. With Palpatine Anakin finds the fatherly approval he never had, from someone with power who is also interested in “orderliness”, and the only thing that breaks him out of it is seeing the Emperor’s effort to discard him and replace him with Luke.
I don’t know why that makes him choke Natalie Portman, but hey, George Lucas.
The other characters I had in mind were the boss dragon from Our Hostess’ Shifter series and The Chairman from Larry Correia’s Grimoir books. Both have codes of conduct, who are working in opposition to something they see as really really bad, and as a result they cause bad things to happen which they justify given the really really bad things they are trying to prevent. Again, both are pretty certain they are the heroes in their personal stories, and while they recognize and admire aspects in their opponents (the good guys), both dismiss the restraints the good guys operate under as naive and more likely to lead to ultimate failure in preventing the penultimate really bad thing. Basically “I’ll do anything to prevent X” villains.
If one reads Vader as “I just EEEEEeeevil – Hu Hwa Ha Ha Haaa” then there’s really nothing there storywise when he turns unevil in the last reel of RofTJ. If only George had sold Star Wars off to Disney before he did the prequels – There was so much more potential in the story of how a child who became a hero becomes a villain, who we know in the end will be redeemed.
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See, I saw your prompt as more serious and it was going to be the prompt for another post.
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Non Aerumnae, Sarah. And I’ll look forward to that post.
The effective 3d portrayal of villains and villainy has been something that’s been percolating in my mind after a bunch of the ebooks I’ve read of late – most of the time the good-guy characters are done rather well, but the bad guys often just walk around in “I’m a bad guy” t-shirts, and I’d like to avoid that.
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Study Mr. Whickam in P & P. You can tell how he got that way. He’s still a bad guy.
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Huh.
You know, in a novel currently in revision, a number of women have told the heroine that what happened to her mother was a deeply meaningful lesson to her, and how she had chosen her life accordingly.
Mind you it goes from double-dyed villain to heroism, because you can cast the same events as explaining just about anything.
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There’s always the fun of when you don’t have them as a POV character. Then it’s a lot harder to reveal their motives.
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Spear-holders, meh: don’t need those. I can always use another shield-brother, though. We’ll get the armorer to look at that diode thingy you’ve got going on.
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Though The Darth Side I linked above does have the occasional lefty trope overlay (specifically the “Cheney is Vader” thing, as was fashionable at the time – The Darth Side was published online circa 2005), I still think it is much better than anything Lucas has written in the last 30 years. Here’s a brief extract in Vader’s voice that shows the character’s philosophy as Brown interprets it:
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Nasty but workable. Is THE DARTH SIDE still available on-line?
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The original is still up at http://darthside.blogspot.com/, and Mr. Brown also has a chronological order version in html or pdf available for download at http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/Darth_Vader/
It’s good fanfic.
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That’s troubling. I actually agree with Vader on that one. Better to tear off the bandaid quickly, and get the discomfort over with. The trouble is, that’s not his call.
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In S.W. Episodes 1-3, I thought that Anakin was portrayed as whiney and immature. Now Othello would have been a good model to use.
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But Othello was a tragic hero, and not a villain at all. To borrow a line from another of the Bard’s works, “say not he loved too wisely, but too well.”
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Yeah – so what would have been great is if George Lucas had Vader be just a little whiney somewhere in eps 4-6, so when we saw the whiney self centered brat that Anakin was, we’d go “Wow! It all makes sense now!”
But George really isn’t much of a writer, so that didn’t happen.
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Yeah, well, he had a few ignominious moments in 4-6. Obi-Wan’s explanation of his lie — I’d have had him honestly ignorant, others would have him admit to being afraid of telling the truth, but either would have been better.
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This is the best analysis I’ve seen of the difference between the first three and the final three.
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The reason for that is that picking a side seems too much like “discrimination” and “othering.” Even when leaving race or ethnicity out of it, defining what is good and what is evil is seen by the elites as an act of bigotry. Listen to how they rail against “moral absolutes.” Indeed, in Episode 3, moral absolutism is attributed to the Sith!
However, the worst offender in this is not a movie, but a video game: Pokémon Black and White. I like the games’ gameplay, mind you, but what struck me was that the good guys literally had no value system they were willing to stand up for, while the bad guys’ main sin wasn’t only their actions (mostly thievery), but the very fact that they had a passionate belief in a moral code (in this case, animal rights.) The game condemns them for being “absolute.”
I’ll say this: morality is hard. You have to stand by principles even when it isn’t convenient, and you have to pick a side instead to trying (and failing) to please everyone.
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Hey, once I heard that absolutes are for the Sith, I started rooting for the Sith to win.
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Indeed. How can you believe in the Jedi, who seem to have no strong convictions?
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Kind of watching “Clone Wars” with my husband– meaning he watches it, and I do my computer stuff in the same room. The girls join in at will, and the baby baron randomly interupts. /end digression
At the start of every episode, there’s a quote.
Most of them, we utterly tear apart. The ones that are OK are modded Bible quotes. The ones that are good are statements of the obvious.
When it comes to Jedi and Sith, I know I’d work with one– and utterly piss them off by refusing to join the club.
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Short summary:
in their story, good is stupid, but evil is dumb.
Good does things like stand there pontificating, or jumping out and yelling “I have you now, evil doer!” rather than killing Mr. “I collect body trophies from Jedi.”
Luckily, evil does counter-productive evil for crits’n’giggles. They betray allies for the heck of it.
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Well, some people do. Blackbeard once blew out the light and fired his pistols, crippling one of his own men — and laughed afterward, saying he had to remind them of who he was from time to time. And another time, they talked of their future destination and used brimstone under the decks to simulate it. Blackbeard was the last guy out, and rather proud that he could take it longer than others.
Once during the Moscow Show Trials, one guy on trial appealed to a screen behind which Stalin sometimes watched. Stalin lit his pipe. The tobacco smoke revealed that, yes, he was really there, and he was watching his old ally get condemned on preposterous charges and would not lift a finger. Pure gratuitousness, there.
Certainly you get the adolescent poseurs who are willing to do just about anything to make themselves look cool.
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“Certainly you get the adolescent poseurs who are willing to do just about anything to make themselves look cool.”
Why in the world is cool or hip so important?
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Well, there are people in the world who can’t understand why books are so important, so I dare say there are many motives inexplicable to those who don’t share them.
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That’s what 20 more years of marinating in Hollywood “culture” will do.
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Let’s see … I did one out and out black-hat villain (who really and historically did wear a black hat!) who was pretty much a psychopath, which was easy enough to do. I refrained from any kind of back-story. The other sort-of villain was the parent of a hero in one book, and the heroine of two others – and I had a bit of fun, working him out. A hot-tempered, impulsive man, embittered by the loss of the two people he cared most about, with the habit of speaking out most cruelly to his remaining children. The son winds up hating his guts, the daughter is ambivalent, and even a little sympathetic – but she cuts him no slack. She grieves when her father dies, but she is a little relieved as well. To quote KiltieDave – he chose that path.
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When I reached that point in your novel, Celia, I felt instant kinship to the heroine. I knew someone like that evil person. “Twisted” doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.
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Thanks, Mike – the character actually just sort of grew from what he was in the Trilogy, but I had to work out why and how in the next books. Bits and pieces of people I knew, some more of people I had heard or read about. He was the ‘bad dad’ – the polar opposite of Vati, the ‘good dad’ – who was based very much on my own father. (Especially the free-thinking part.)
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Nope, grey goo.Your characters’ opposed patriotisms leads at best into a grey and nihilistic “prisoners of history, doing as we must”. For some reason “Our Man In Havana” comes to mind.
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As my high school history teacher told me once, “There’s always a reason why, but there’s never an excuse.” I think I was late with some homework.
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Robert’s teacher said so too when he told him the cat had eaten his homework. Which — since the cat spit it up — is when Robert put a ziploc of pulp on his desk. He was given an extra day. I still don’t think the teacher believed it.
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I believe that some kids pursue artistic verisimilitude by slathering the paper with goodies and then encouraging the dog to eat it.
Aeh, it’s easier to do the homework. If you ever remember it.
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No. Euclid had a genuine pica. He ate one of my contracts before I caught him. For about two years we had to hide all paper. That was a fun call to editor (not Baen) BTW “Cat ate the contract.”
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No, I’m sure your kids didn’t do that. But I’m sure the teacher was thinking of the other kids he’d known, who had done such things.
Do cats actually have a digestive system, or does it all come back out in hacking up goo?
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For giggles (because it sure ain’t the pay …) I teach some community college courses online. Everything is online, the syllabus, my “lecture” in text form, and the assignments are uploaded to the online class software server. This last spring, a student’s excuse for not submitting homework to my class? That she was working on the homework in the library, and didn’t have a printer to print it out.
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“Broken printer” is the new “dog ate my homework.”
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Rawle, she was supposed to upload it. Not submit it in hardcopy.
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My bad. “The website doesn’t work” can be her alibi then.
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Sometimes you have to teach the dog to delete it on the computer instead.
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test
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Since we are talking about villains, there is also the “no villain” book, where the antagonist is an overwhelming force like a terrible storm or man against the antarctic. I was trying to think of some examples, but they seem to be few in fiction. Most of the books I’ve read have been glamorized non-fiction (Into Thin Air, The Perfect Storm). McKillip occasionally writes villain-less books (The Tower at Stony Wood, The Bards of Bone Plain). In her books the protagonists are dealing with fallout from cataclysmic events in the past, although they don’t know it at first.
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Tunnel in the Sky by Heinlein is one of my favorite examples, and My Side of the Mountain is another. See also any other shipwreck-type stories: Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Hatchet, etc.
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Because struggling to tame nature is sooooo dead white male today, I think the zombie story has replaced much of these.
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Wow, I never though of zombies as a metaphor for overwhelming natural disaster but it fits. What a great observation. I’ve been avoiding zombie books (and I am soooo tired of sexy vampires and werewolves – speaking of the ultimate “bad boys.”) I had forgotten about Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson. I really enjoyed Swiss Family Robinson when I was a kid. Liked the movie and the concrete “tree” at Disney too.
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Zombie Apocalypse and “prepper” fiction, yeah. Could use some better writers in that genre, or at least ones who refrain from turning everything into a government conspiracy, including natural disasters. I nearly threw my Kindle against the wall when a character speculated that the gubmint was causin’ the drought (in Texas!) and it was those chemtrails!!!
Ugh.
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I haven’t read Tunnel in the Sky, but the other four were the first four I thought of when this was mentioned (although I hated Hatchet it is still a good example of this type of story). Jim Kjelgard also wrote quite a few books of the ‘man vs. nature’ type, including Fire-Hunter which later at Jim Baen’s request David Drake did an excellent job of expanding. (expanded version titled The Hunter Returns)
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I’m not sure I ever read Hatchet, though I saw the film based on it many times (hooray for VCRs and broadcast TV!). What was it that you didn’t like about it?
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I read it (or at least as far as I made it before it hit the wall) when it was new, so keep in mind this was a long time ago. But I recall the premise being good, but thinking the book was stupid (poor writing) and the main character was so stupid it was amazing he could remember to breathe.
I don’t like stupid main characters, which is probably why I hate 99% of all comedy movies. I don’t recall any examples but I seem to remember getting the distinct impression the author didn’t have any experience in the woods theirself also. Which to be honest if you go back and reread My Side of the Mountain you will find some glaring errors in it also, but the author was a good enough storyteller that the story just eddies around them like a stream around a rock, without it really disturbing the story.
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I hate stupid characters too. Which is a pet peeve rather than an objection to how badly they are done, because I find them painful even when it’s entirely in character.
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I’m working on a story that has no intrinsic villain to it — picking up the pieces after the magical war — so I added one — one picker up does think this gives her ambition enough scope. :D
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1. … most romances show the hero as being clean cut, rich, and kind….Which leads me to believe that the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.
People’s idealized images of how they behave can be quite different from how they actually behave.
I agree with you (farther down the post) that the idealized behavior affects real behavior, but afaic it only does so to an extent.
2. …you’re the only one who understands and can rescue this wounded creature and make him what he was meant to be.
So you put him on the cover of Rolling Stone, this “complex”, vulnerable, misunderstood lad. Whatever made him go astray? It must be capitalism’s fault. Islamophobia. And racism.
3. …it blurred the moral lines between right and wrong. The most obvious result of this for a writer is gray goo.
The other extreme, i.e. to make heroes impossibly good and villains impossibly bad, is dangerous too. When done on behalf of the author’s pet cause, it smacks of propaganda rather than art, and the reader may so relate to it, one way or the other.
4. In writing as in real life, too much sympathy for the devil leads to injustice towards those who might not be angels, but who are still honorable, decent and trying not to hurt others.
Who are we to think we can minister to the devil? Old Screwtape must be howling about this attitude: pride perverting charity.
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In my experience, in a romance you have to dig to get to the kind.
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this “complex”, vulnerable, misunderstood lad
Cute. You forgot cute. Very important, cute.
Indeed, some of his supporters are so silly as to actually let it slip that they don’t think anyone that cute could have done anything that bad.
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Okay, since I seem to be the only person here who doesn’t read Rolling Stone could someone please enlighten me as to what kind of faux pas they made on the cover?
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They put a photo of that handsome young Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – the surviving Boston Marathon bomber – on the cover. Wasn’t he dreamy?
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Ok, that sounds like something stupid they would do to try and create controversy and sell copies. On the plus side it appears they are giving out free range targets with each issue now.
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*sigh*
The range I belong to forbids using targets of recognizable people.
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Dude. Live Free or Die.
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I don’t read it, either. I saw the kerfuffle in the news.
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I see your “girls like bad boys” is wrong because that does not sell as fiction hypothesis falling short if we consider instead the expanded hypothesis that “girls like bad boys but cannot admit it to themselves”. That explains both the observed facts of dating behavior and the fact that girls do not like outright evil in fiction (that sells).
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Not all observed facts of dating behavior. I’d say “Some girls like bad boys” — but not the majority. The bad boys have their counterparts. They’re not bad girls, per se, they’re usually clingy and helpless though. Let’s call them both “primitive minds” in the sense that they have yet to adapt to the new reality — since the paleolithic or so — where there’s more to power than hitting the other guy on the head. POWER will attract any woman. But physical power and physical violence tend to attract ONLY a certain type of woman.
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Good point. I also suspect that the ones who are not attracted to bad boys take themselves out of the dating pool early via marriage or long term boyfriends.
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I prefer good guys, but I didn’t find my husband until I was 40. I lived in NY, he lived in AL. We met through a mutual friend at a WorldCon.
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Personally I think it’s more a matter of some Bad Boys knowing how to spot and how to manipulate certain types of women.
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Listen in to some of my client interviews for a month and I will convert you from your less than 49% position to 90+% …
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sounds like selection bias
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I’ve thought about this, and I wonder if the dynamic really is less about obvious power/violence, and more about at least being self-propelled. Having forward momentum. There is only so much beta “I dunno, what do you want to do?” a girl can take–unless she *wants* an adult baby, in which case she’s a lost case from the beginning.
It is entirely possible the men who have enough gumption to order their own meals and suggest fun things to do get snapped up right quick, which would explain the sea of betas and jerks left to pick from. (I will add the military frowns on “I dunno, what do you want to do?” and tends to FIND things for people to do if their self-preservation instincts don’t kick in beforehand. Also, a sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant at rest, or so I have been told…)
As always, speaking only for myself (and yes, looking but would rather be alone than put up with a beta or jerk. I learned how to be picky from my cats. Don’t judge me.)
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Even the “I dunno, what do you want to do?” factor doesn’t turn off ALL women, even if it does most: a decade or so back, I had a roommate who was quite seriously dating a girl about as indecisive as him. Just about every time she was hanging out at our house, their conversation sounded like this:
And yet they’re now married, quite happily last I heard. (I’ve lost touch with them in the years since then.) A good reminder that ALL generalizations have exceptions, including this one.
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That video was supposed to start at the 0:38 mark, but apparently when WordPress changes Youtube links to embed codes, it also throws away the extra parameters like what time to start it. Just skip ahead to 0:38 if you want to see what I meant to post.
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Dan and I went through a “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” phase, but the circumstances were normally as follows: two small kids. Me, trying to break into writing. Him, working 12+ hours a day as coder. In the rare moments we could get away (usually when our friend Charles, innocently dropped by to visit. We’d see his car park in front, put on our coats, open the door to him and scream “the kids are in bed, there’s food in the fridge, bye!” as we ran out the front door.) we’d drive off and go “what do you want to do?” “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” We invariably ended up a) at cheap diner. b) if we’d already eaten at dollar movie theater. c) at barnes and noble, browsing.
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This goes both ways, yes some men like limp dishrags of women who do whatever their man wants them to. But speaking at least for myself I prefer a woman with a little fire, who has her own opinions and likes and dislikes. Yeah I would like them to agree with mine most of the time ;) but I want them to actually be hers, not just an echo of mine. I want a woman who actually uses her head for something other than a place to pile her hair when she fixes it up to go out.
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My husband often says he likes women who can beat him up.
Not sure why he grins and hugs me when I point out that I’d have to use tools to do that, or that the only way I could abuse him is verbally…..
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Well yes there is something sexy about a woman who can kick butt, one reason totally unrealistic shows like Xena are so popular. Speaking for myself however, stupid women are irritating, (not just women, stupid guys are irritating to, but I don’t find guys sexy) so one who has enough brains to know when she needs a tire iron to get the job done is sexy too.
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On the other hand, one of my friends says she couldn’t have gotten along with a man would SHE could beat up.
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Ok, that is a little confusing, but I think you meant she couldn’t get along with a man she could beat up.
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Yes. Stupid fingers.
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Thank you. A lot of what you said is why I have never finished reading “Atlas Shrugged.” I never made it past the train in the tunnel. So there were a lot of Socialist jerks on the train. Don’t tell me they deserved to die for the accident of being on the wrong train. I found it disgusting, shut the book, and left on a free book pile.
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I saw that scene as a varient of “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”. Not so much saying that they deserved to die, as that they did not deserve and were not kept safe by an ethos (The Sons of Martha for Kipling fans) that they had undercut by their beliefs and actions.
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Liberals demand credit for their intentions. Conservatives are more results oriented. Only justification I can come up with for a Nobel Prize to someone who’s only accomplishment at the time was getting elected.
Generally speaking a man chooses a woman for what she is, or at least what she appears to be to him. A woman is more inclined to choose a man for what she thinks she can mold him into. Almost invariably both sides experience significant disappointment in their expectations, thus the high divorce rate due in part to the failure of those expectations.
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Note: in no study of actual marriages has anyone been able to show me the legendary “50% of marriages end in divorce” statistic. In some places, with some statistics, there are half as many divorces as marriages– but many states don’t report these at all.
The best study I saw was by phone, calling people up and asking them if they were married, how long ago and if they were still together.
The only stat that came close to 50% was women over 50 or 60, I can’t remember; their husband start dying.
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I remain astonished how the mainstream narrative continues to cover for Hitler’s economic actions in the 1930s. He is rightly excoriated when the bodies started piling up, but the half decade plus prior to that is something of a glossed over matter. Is there too much a resemblance to current bad boys that are still admired?
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Yes.
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Yep. They don’t see the problem.
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When my brother started his apprenticeship for tattooing there was a German deli two doors down from the place he worked run by two old German ladies. Always interesting. The place was full of German labeled products, German language magazines and newspapers, umpha music …
His friend Steve would go over for lunch, and they would dote on him. “Steve, Steve. Let us make you a sandwich. You are zo zkinny!”
They had a regular stream of old German customers. Would roll up in new Mercedes and nice suits. I’m still convinced they were hold-overs from project Paperclip.
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“Is there too much a resemblance to current bad boys that are still admired?”
What’s the line from Jonah Goldberg: “Other than the racism and genocide, what [does the left] disagree with Nazis about?” His point being that an informed conservative or libertarian can give a laundry list of policies, but not so much with an informed lefty.
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This took me way back to middle school. It reminds me of Sartre’s “doomed to be free” idea, which made a lot of sense to me at the time and still does- even though it may just be how I see it through the lens of memory and past experience.
Unless we’re pretending to be psychic, we judge people morally by how they act (well, I do). It can be pretty complicated or very simple depending on what information we’ve got available. I’m okay with flawed heroes, and villains who occasionally not only refuse to steal candy from an infant, but perhaps even pat them on the head and direct them to play somewhere else away from area of imminent violence. It doesn’t make a murdering scumbag any less a scumbag, or a heroic good guy any less a good guy to have a little complexity. Note I said “a little” not 90’s comic book antihero level of “complexity.” *grin*
I do think it says a lot about a character, or a person for that matter, if they are aware of and take responsibility for their actions. Generally speaking, if I see a character saying (or acting in a manner that typifies) “the ends justify the means. This objective good is so good it justifies literally anything I do in pursuit of it,” that generally tells me I’m looking at an evil character. A good character, forced into a similar unenviable circumstance, I would see more trying to wrest whatever good possible from a bad situation (i.e. shoot on sight orders and militarized borders vs. forced ring immunization to combat a truly terrible and virulent disease).
Looking back, a rather lot of the villains I’ve come up with seem to be like that… Maybe my bad guys need a new gimmick. *chuckle*
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A person who believes he’s right and good and moral, but it objectively wrong on all three counts.
A person who is morally strait and suffers for it who nonetheless brings about ill results from his right actions. (David Feintuch’s Nicholas Seafort)
What do you call it when someone says, “I love him/her,” and means it, but means “I love…” to say “I have ownership rights in him/her,” rather than “I will accept (accept, not, take) whatever he/she is willing to give”? Think about how much is motivated by jealousy and envy, called love, but actually eventuates from a lack of respect for others as individuals.
M
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I think you call such a person “President Obama” or possibly “Mayor Spitzer.” Back when I listened to Mike Medved’s show in the 90s he talked about knowing Hillary in law school and her being the “mother hen” everybody turned to.
Poor interpersonal border recognition is not a capital crime, but it causes more harm than any crime this side of genocide.
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Wow! That’s not where I was going, but I get your point. Yeah.
M
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When “I love” turns into “I own” it ends (If the possession is very lucky) in someone being rescued by her former boyfriend and a parent, with the financial help and coverage of some high school friends. Dear G-d but I stand in awe at “Chad’s” being willing to help her after she ditched him for the monster.
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The villains I usually end up hating most passionately are the stupid ones. Not stupid in the sense of not being able to develop working, well, short term working, tactics or strategies, but unable/unwilling to see the longer term consequences of their actions, maybe because they are so wedded to a certain narrative that they are completely unwilling to see it does not correspond with reality, no matter how many proofs are pointed out to them. Yep, pretty much the worst case leftist prototype, not the cynical version but the true believer one, somebody who loves the preferred narrative way more than he loves the people he claims to be trying to help, and perhaps the one who is genuinely trying to help is worse than the one who actually doesn’t care all that much but sees those people only as suitable props in that narrative. Another example might be the suitor who goes after the girl of his dreams by all means necessary, including trying to blackmail her by threatening to ruin her family or beating up the man he perceives as his rival, and no matter how many times it’s pointed out to him that his actions are only pushing her further away from him he will still persist.
Also the villain who is busy building the scaffold in which he will be hanged, but will just sneer at anybody who tries to point that out to him, and you do know that even when it’s pretty much inevitable he will end up hanged there he will be able to do huge amounts of damage to everybody around him before that. With that type it’s also not completely satisfying if he gets defeated without realizing how stupid he has been, I always want to see that moment of ‘oh no, the hero was right all the time’ too. Yes, that would be the usual secondary antagonist in most catastrophe movies, like that mayor who will not admit that there is a man-eating shark in the water, or that the volcano is about to blow.
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Hmm. is this a love-to-hate sort of hate or a throw the book against the wall sort of hate?
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Depends. Could go either way. Part of the thing is how frustrating it feels to me, if the hero feels too ineffectual too long and perhaps concentrates on trying to save the villain from himself instead of finding out good ways to defeat him, or perhaps work around him if it’s a catastrophe story I may get tired of waiting for the reward. Also if the story is too sympathetic towards the villain, lacks a properly satisfying defeat and the villain gets painted as mostly tragic. For example certain recent Rolling Stone cover made me livid. I want that type of villain both humiliated and defeated. But if the reward part is satisfying – or rewards, this type of stories should not dangle it too long but give a bit here and there in along the way too or I may get tired of waiting – it can be a very good love-to-hate thing.
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And about that Rolling Stone cover, the most infuriating thing was this: if that kid _is_ certain kind of stupid they may have given him exactly the kind of reward he wanted. Even if he personally is not, there are such people, and that cover may encourage some idiot to try and do something similar. You should humiliate these types in public, not reward them.
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Yeah — what we need is not gun control but media control. What outlet needs more than a story or two for an event? That would curb the publicity they crave.
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Yes. EXACTLY.
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At the risk of being W-way outside the path of the “villain descriptors,” I wish to say a huge THANK YOU to Ms. Hoyt! Years ago, when I was in college, studying lit., the war-wounded/psychologically damaged hero was a very big deal. So was the ambiguity of nearly every plot-line. When I objected, I was told by a PhD. candidate/TA, that if I couldn’t handle ambiguity, I should go into accounting.
It was the age of deconstruction, during which (true story), in a psycho-history class, “The Velveteen Rabbit” came in for discussion as a sexually-charged story. Go figure. . . .
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But what of the anti-hero? Okay, it was mainly the fact that during summer camping vacations there wasn’t much alternative that I slogged through the Thomas Covenant series. The guy really was an asshole who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (or rather, whining and self pitying) to his heroic destiny.
Right now I’m finishing off a story I have no idea what I’m going to do with, with TWO evil characters locked in a room. One is a xenophobic misanthrope thrown into an alien prison on trumped up charges, and the other an alien considered a monster to her own people he is expected to shank. (Kinda hitting on the liberal policy of being opposed to the death penalty, but always happy to talk about their opponents getting killed/raped in prison). It’s really twisted, and the only reason I’m writing it is to get the damned thing out of my head so I can get back to my book.
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Well — I HATED those books so much that I littered out of the trains window between France and Germany. So, I can’t help you.
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Well, at least we have that in common. Except you got the satisfaction of killing them. They were my sister’s so I couldn’t. And throwing them against the wall of the tent wasn’t very satisfying either.
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It’s good to know I wasn’t the only one to hate Thomas Covenant. A clue, writers (though I know present company doesn’t need to be told this): when your “hero” starts off his career by committing rape, you’re not actually writing a hero. And when I hate the protagonist of your novel, I will hate the novel. (See also: Catcher in the Rye.)
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YES.
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Strange – I liked the Thomas Covenant books. However, now, looking back after seeing that so many people thought they were terrible,I think it was because I mostly ignored him and focused on the other characters, except where he does the heroic thing at the end.
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Sarah, please send me my password. Thanks.
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“… the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.”
Not from my viewpoint. Here’s what I have seen:
Good gal attracted to a bad guy because she thinks he’s good inside and that she can reform him.
Good gal attracted to severely jealous guy because she’s flattered that he’ll pummel someone for looking at her.
Low self-esteem gal attracted to a bad guy because she feels she doesn’t deserve anyone better.
Low self-esteem gal attracted to a woman abuser because she feels she should be punished.
Bored gal attracted to a bad guy because she wants drama and excitement a la Bonnie and Clyde.
Naive gal attracted to a con man because she cannot get past the suave external appearance.
I believe that the above scenarios are common. It doesn’t happen as much in the other direction. Guys like to date the bad girls and marry the good ones. That’s a cliche that also is true. Also, there are fewer bad girls than bad guys.
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“Good gal attracted to severely jealous guy because she’s flattered that he’ll pummel someone for looking at her.”
Well of course. Such passionate interest in her. Unlike those cold, bloodless non-violent ment.
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“Bored gal attracted to a bad guy because she wants drama and excitement a la Bonnie and Clyde.”
Also true. The founder of the first battered women’s shelter in Great Britain recounts the story about how one women killed herself the night before she was to move out, into her own apartment. Suicide note said she couldn’t live without the only man who made her feel alive.
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I think that Mary Shelley played a perceptible part in spreading the “I blame society” meme. Her father, William Godwin, was one of the first people to propose that criminal were Driven To It By Society, and that’s exactly what we see happen to the Monster: His only parent casts him out the day he’s born, and when his wanderings put him in contact with other people—toward whom he shows nothing but good will—they also abuse him. So he vows revenge on his maker and commits horrendous crimes to get it.
On the other hand, the films show the Monster being created with the defective brain of a criminal, so his criminality is innate, reflecting the theories of crime as atavism/biological deficit that were popular when the films were made (at the height of the eugenics movement, which may not be coincidental).
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I guess one reason you feel more sympathy for the monster is because none of his victims is developed well enough to feel wholly sympathetic, either they are weak/stupid like Victor Frankenstein or more or less ciphers like his bride, not much of a real personality gets shown there so you can’t feel that much for her, compared to the monster whom you have gotten to know quite well before his turn at the time when he was still fully sympathetic. I do think that is one of the weaknesses of that novel, your sympathy goes mostly for the monster in spite of the fact that he does really go very bad and does kill total innocents. Now if we had gotten to know the little brother or the bride a bit better… my guess would be that it may not all be because of her father’s ideas, maybe Mary Shelley fell in love with the monster character while writing. Can happen. :)
But I can easily understand all the rewrites which change the story so that the monster gets his chance, ones where no icky murders happen (heh, Mel Brooks’ version is one of my favorites) or sometimes ones where the monster does spend the rest of his life atoning by trying to save others.
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Girls do go for the bad boy. I have been dumped for being “too nice” or boring but stable for the bad boy. As far as my reading I like flaws. I am flawed, everyone is flawed. The hero has to have a weakness, a sin or a dark side or its just not “real” If the armor is not a little tarnished my mind goes bullsh*t
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“Many of my violently abused women patients have told me that they find nonviolent men intolerably indifferent and emotionally distant, rage being the only emotion they’ve ever seen a man express. They leave them quicker than they leave men who have beaten and otherwise abused them.”
Full text here
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Girls who like and hunt good men aren’t likely to wind up in anybody’s office having problems, or having their dramas discussed and remembered by their friends. Because they’re busy being happy.
That said, my sister-in-law practically had to stalk my brother before he’d even notice that she was interested in him, because he was so used to pursuit. His previous girlfriends had mostly been a shallow lot, not geeky and not anywhere vaguely near his intelligence. He had some kind of American Graffiti fantasy going, I guess.
So it may be that good boys don’t notice good girls liking them, unless the good girl works very hard.
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Whereas a lot of bad boys not only notice girls being interested in them, but assume that the uninterested girls are also interested. Unless you club them over the head and stomp on the body.
And then they look very puzzled, like the laws of physics just expired.
What’s really puzzling is why good boys believe all the bad boys’ crapola, even about themselves, and disbelieve their own lying eyes to the point of disbelieving girls who really really like good boys.
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Oh, and the way you get discerning girls is to have them raised by a strong father who’s also a good man, a strong mother who’s a good woman, and to be surrounded by good people who aren’t fricking nuts. Insecurity, desperation, and a lack of well-formed character make women tend to do stupid things against their long-term best interests, the same as men.
Our society at present is in the business of making women desperate, insecure, and stupider than God ever made them, and men too. We see the results in people’s stupid choices.
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THIS. Both because I almost had to do a belly dance before husband realized this — and we wasted four years because of it. Second because his sons take after him. “MOM! You always imagine girls like us.” “ONLY when they’re practically hitting you on the head with the clue by four.”
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I know a single male blogger, middle-aged, who recently heard that an acquaintance from high school had died in an accident. She had had a full if short life with a happy family. But what everybody in his high school had known but him, and what he had refused to believe back then when told, was that she had a desperate and huge crush on him, that was even bigger than the crush he had on her. People finally got him to believe this years later, when she was married and moved and gone.
So negotiations never even got to step one, and she went on to be happy with a perfectly nice guy and have perfectly nice kids and life.
The sad thing is that I know a lot of wonderful guys, and wonderful ladies, in the sf community who are too shy or unobservant for their own potential happiness. We really need more matchmakers throwing parties, inviting these handpicked people, and not telling anyone the actual purpose.
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We really need more matchmakers throwing parties, inviting these handpicked people, and not telling anyone the actual purpose.
YES. If I could find it on Youtube, I would link the scene from Amazing Grace where Wilberforce’s friends set him up with Barbara Spooner. Not having such a link handy, I’ll just have to quote it.
Barbara: “Mr. Wilberforce, I understand that you have an interest in botany.”
William: “Botany, Miss Spooner? What makes you think I would have an interest in something as tedious as botany?”
(Friends look concerned.)
(Barbara fails to keep a straight face, snorts with laughter.)
(Friends look puzzled.)
William: “Sorry. Private joke.”
(Friends start to look hopeful.)
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I wish this were the case. Where others hear the music to the dance between the sexes, I am alas tone-deaf.
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This is where other people you trust can be helpful. I’m bad at social cues myself but I was fixed with a man I’m now married to.
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“Where others hear the music to the dance between the sexes, I am alas tone-deaf.”
All I get is white noise.
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The funny thing is I can recognize it in others fairly well, ie she likes you, but directed at me it better be about as subtle as a train wreck. And when it is that obvious I usually interpret it as they are just joking around and having fun.
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Yep. That’s me.
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Well, I don’t know that anyone had a crush on me, but I found out long after high school that many more of the girls would at least not have laughed at me than I thought.
Of course, I was chicken, and totally inept, so it ultimately didn’t matter much, but I certainly would have liked to figure it out sooner.
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Geez– I didn’t notice that the now-hubby liked me until he kissed me. I was surprised and then I started to notice him. ;-) We have been married 20 years now.
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LOL. I was shocked when Dan proposed… to be honest he couldn’t kiss me before that. it was via phone.
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lol ;-)
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Ditto.
I knew I liked him, but I was in full “I must figure out how to find him a Japanese girlfriend” mode… thank goodness he figured out that subtle wasn’t working.
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Umm– yea ;-) We were in Florida and we were friends… good thing the hubby realized that I didn’t recognize subtle either.
I was almost 28 and my experience with men and boys hadn’t been good up to that time– so I had decided to be a spinster and was enjoying it up to the hilt. ;-)
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“Girls who like and hunt good men aren’t likely to wind up in anybody’s office having problems, or having their dramas discussed and remembered by their friends. Because they’re busy being happy.”
Like.
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I’m working on the outline of a story where the main plotline is Single Woman Chases Good Guy.
Her problem is that he thinks she may interfere with his doing his duty.
You need to give your hero some reason why not to fall into the heroine’s arms and live HEA or you have no story.
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Lovely. Due to the trauma of seeing his parent murdered and being sold as a slave, Thorby Rudbek becomes a ruthless capitalist, selling ships and weapons to the Sargonese slave traders? Or Baron Harkonnen’s actions are excusable because when he was a boy they took away his sled?
Pfui. We admire heroes because they overcome adversity, we despise villains because they use their adversity to excuse heinous acts. “I didn’t receive Sexual Harassment Training so I didn’t know not to suggest employees go without undergarments, or that putting somebody in a head lock and ramming my tongue down her throat was not an appropriate form of greeting”?????
Athena Hera Sinestra should have murdered her father, taken over his sea-city, led an uprising against the Clones and established herself as omnipotent ruler of Earth, then led a war fleet against Eden? Miserable childhood, don’cha know?
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Pfui.
I actually concur completely.
You can take my Anakin/Vader character analysis as an effort to forensically reconstruct and understand the compelling story George Lucas thought he was writing – I think obviously not from a HW perspective – when he brought forth that which he spent all that money filming in Star Wars eps I-III. I think the people who helped him write it had enough talent to make sure that Anakin/Vader was at least the hero in his own mind, but I don’t have any evidence for that. I know that Lucas has talked about the Hero’s Journey stuff being the underpinning for so much of what he did, at least in eps IV-VI, which are, I think, much more Human Wavey than eps I-III.
I think the answer to the question “Why is Vader a villain?” in Lucas’ mind was pretty clearly that Vader is a victim – of his birth, his parentage, his history, his nasty midichlorian infection, of Obi Wan’s bumbling mentorship, and of Palpatine’s manipulations and seduction. In the end Anakin betrays and destroys everything that he believed in, supposedly to save his pregnant wife, who by the way he kills, because George Lucas.
But (assuming a well rounded 3D character) Anakin chose to do what he did – He could have chosen not to (Anakin walking in on the attempt to arrest Palpatine was Lucas’ attempt at this pivotal choice scene). In at least this form of heroic storytelling, I think there has to be such a choice – a character choosing one way makes them a hero, and choosing the other makes them a villain.
I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with this – I think every day that choice is repeated, in large and small ways, and so the hero has to continue to choose to be heroic, and the villain has to continue to choose villainy, which is where I come back to the character being the hero in their own internal storytelling. That’s the only thing that can sustain those daily continuing choices.
Understanding all of that seems to me to be the center of building bad guys. Since Lucas did it so poorly I think it makes an interesting case study – Could the Anakin/Vader part of the Star Wars story be fixed to pull it out of the goo? Or is the premise too tainted to let it become HW?
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Monsieur le Mike avec the flying, kindly do a guest post about this for me, yes? Danke.
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Wow – I would be honored. I will begin whipping the creativity slave gnomes with greater ferocity and send you whatever they churn out for me.
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Could the Anakin/Vader part of the Star Wars story be fixed to pull it out of the goo?
I like Tom Simon’s analysis which Mary Catelli linked up-thread. Should I ever get around to running the Star Wars RPG game I have slow-cooking on my brain’s back burner, my setting will have the original three movies (Episodes IV-VI) as canon, as well as Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy. But the prequel trilogy (Episodes I-III) will be Imperial propaganda, created to disguise what really happened. Should the characters say something that reveals they know about those films and the events depicted therein, the Rebellion agent they’re working with will laugh contemptuously: “Wait, don’t tell me you believed that nonsense? I mean, come on — midichlorians?!? Anakin Skywalker being a virgin birth? Really? No, here’s what really happened: You see…”
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Sarah, I was thinking of something along these lines, but a bit divergent. I am completely indifferent to in any way justifying the antagonist. I want him effective then I want him evil.
Given the choice between two evil actors, the more effective one will be the more evil, because more can come from his crimes. So, you start with a character who has several laudable attributes. He works hard. He’s a good student. He owns up to his mistakes & learns from them. As a result he becomes an effective person possessed of definite virtues.
NOW the author must DERAIL this character. Maybe like Ted Turner he loses a sister to cancer and blames God. Or maybe like Reimar Horten he loses his brother to the British, and vows revenge. Maybe like Tom Sunday he loses an election for sheriff and blames Orrin Sackett for his problems.
He’s not a victim. He has willfully made bad choices (that he rationalizes if he’s weak). But first, he must manifest enough good in his life to accrue the respect, accomplishment, wealth, and connections he’ll expend on his campaign of evil.
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Oh man, I loved that story. You want to tell the story of a good man gone bad, that’s the way to do it. Broke my heart, it did, but you could clearly see it was his own choice, or string of choices. I even remember Tell noting what a good cattleman Sunday still was at his lowest point. William Tell Sackett is one of my favorite heroes ever.
Now if you want to write a bad boy with a heart of gold, Logan, Nolan, and Milo are all great examples of how to do it right. Heck, even Lando would do, plus he has the “did hard time in a Mexican prison” thing going for him. :)
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“Now if you want to write a bad boy with a heart of gold”
High Lonesome
But, yeah Logan and Nolan are great examples of the bad boy with a heart of gold trope, I don’t see it with Milo and Lando so much. I just don’t see them as bad boys, I mean sure they are both a little rough around the edges, and hang out with a shady crowd at times, but other than Lando breeding a mule by stealth out of a guy who owes him money’s jack, what do either of them ever do wrong?
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I guess Milo and Lando are less “bad boy” and more “grim badass”, with Lando having a heavy dose (for L’Amour) of gritty. I stand corrected. Oh, and that breeding things was hilarious.
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Yeah, while some “bad boys” are no-holds-barred evil, some are just heroes without the filigree.
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If you put the villain already in charge, you can have the hero be the one who acts, and the villain be the status quo guy who only acts under pressure.
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But doing evil is easy. It’s attractive. It has so many good features. And of course you can always tell yourself that you’re being intensely competitive or practical or smart, rather than realizing that you’re being evil.
I think a lot of evil is done by people who are sure that either everybody else is doing it, or that they’re smarter than everybody else and that’s the only reason why everybody else isn’t doing it.
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“Well, he’s a victim of society.” He proceeded to explain to me how the villain was marginalized, viewed as the Other, and therefore nothing he did was his fault.
I can think of situations where the first two would be in situations where the fault was less than Normal Well Adjusted Guy, but none where it totally removes it.
Problem of making absolute rules off of… just stuff?
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The irony is that when a certain Normal Well Adjusted Guy is introduced — a pillar of the community — you already know he’s going to molest children or beat his wife.
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YES. I hate that.
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There are shows that go to some lengths to show that well-adjusted White men who are the pillar of their communities are the most evil people around. I guess it’s written by leftist slackers.
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To be fair, they tend to be played by folks like AJ Robinson. (Garak, and that kid killer from Dirty Harry.)
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He was half the reason that DS9 was almost watchable.
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I enjoyed DS9…but agree.
“It’s insidious.“
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(Speaking of bad guys one loves; I have considered that in person, I’d probably shoot him inside of a week– and for cause!)
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I don’t know … if he could get a decent hem on my slacks … you can’t find a good tailor just anywhere…
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I’m an obvious unsophisticated barbarian, with my dislike for recreational lies and preference for comfort over style.
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No, no, I am not saying you are wrong. He should be shot. I am just saying … wait until he takes in a few things first…
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Blackmail still leaves a choice.
Girls don’t like a pushover, nice guys finish last because they don’t know how to be assertive, in a positive way. And bad boys are usualy overbearing, which is enough like being assertive to be close enough for government work.
The hindbrain has a hard time destingishing good & bad attention. All that is known is they are paying attention to me. Whether or not it will ended badly is in the future and that is temporal logic/reasoning handled by a different part of the brain than emotion.
If someone is telling you what you want to hear and it’s making you feal good. It kind of hard sometime to step back and look at it objectively, and say this is going to end badly. Even if some do, there are those that go injoy the ride while it lasts.
As to why people do evil things, they do them because they think they can. They might not understand the difference between my shoes and my wife & kids, or any number of reasons you’re not going to understand because you’re not broken.
I as a reader don’t needed to understand why your bad guys do the things they do, and unless your cracked in the head yourself proable going to do a bad job of it.
Remember bad people do bad things because the want to. Everything else after that is just the excuse and stories they tell themselves to justify it to them selves and to the world at large.
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There’s a lot of truth in what you say. It used to be “he’s a villain because he’s bad” was perfectly acceptable, with or without mustache twirling. There are levels of evil though, and evil IS seductive and good people will do evil things thinking they’re doing good — look at how “envy” has been turned into “social justice” and some decent people buy into it. BUT not everyone who pushes the meme is just misguided. And a lot of them, even though they might have good qualities ARE evil. Then there are people who are just rotten. Take Eva Peron saying she couldn’t be happy knowing there were rich people in the world when she was poor. she seemed to think this was a good quality. Why? I’ve been poor to desperately poor, I LIKED knowing there were people richer than I in the world. It meant some day I could be one of them, maybe. (In fact, at our most desperately poor, Dan and I used to take sandwiches in the car, park in a very nice neighborhood, with a beautiful view of gardens and mansions, and eat our dinner there. It was “eating out” for us. It cheered us up.) You can see someone who can’t stand for anyone to have it better than them would be a horror when given power, right?
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I have a biography of Eva Peron, which I think should be interesting, I just haven’t brought myself to read it yet, because of the fear of finding out it is written by one of her acolytes.
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Yes, I can see how that could come about. Doesn’t mean I understanded it or even that the person involved understands why they even did what they did.
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P.S. An interesting series of books: Tipping point, Blink & Outliers, all by Malcolm Gladwell.
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The problem with nice guys is there are guys who are genuinely good, and then there are “Nice Guys” who are only good because they expect it to pay off. (They’re easier to spot because they are typically only nice to the target-du-joure). Holding the door or doing you a favor earns them Nice Guy Points which they will get very pissy about when they discover they can’t cash them in for a little nookie.
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My thoughts on this are that the “Nice Guys” have been told that girls like guys who respect them. In turn, the “Nice Guy” concludes that girls have sex with guys they like.
“Since girls like guys who respect them, and girls have sex with guys they like, if I act nice, I will get sex!” they think (keep in mind that this is their assumption. I have noticed that they are never explicitly told this.)
Then it fails and they get frustrated, believing that all girls are mud.
I don’t see it as the “Nice Guy” scheming to cash in his niceness for nookie; I see it as being left to assume that being good got you laid. They were never taught how to be sexually appealing in the first place.
This article elaborates on this problem.
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I can’t remember where I heard the quote, and I’m probably going to mangle it, but it goes something like this, “Women respect a gentleman, and sleep with cads.”
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Duly noted. I’ve heard similar things myself.
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Rather hard to sleep with multiple gentlemen… not that I’ve seen women who like cads giving gentlemen much respect.
Then again, I don’t consider a guy who chooses his behavior to get into a woman’s pants a gentleman, so I’m on the wrong side of a lot of “nice guys.”
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I threw a lot of fish back in the pond for their saying the equivalent of “You’re a woman, and therefore you’re always right.” Ick.
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I see. You wanted to be treated like a functional adult, not a charity case.
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Yes. It’s amazing how many men confused empowering women with “there, there dear.” Also I wanted someone able to check me when I get the bit between my teeth. NothatIeverdothat.
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Good to know.
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Bit between the teeth? *looking innocent
I would never–
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yeah. Me neither. I have never run around with a lighter threatening arson, for instance. (And no, I’m not giving circumstances. A) It was my property. B) I WAS very UPSET and it seemed logical to me at the time. Dan stopped me and talked me down. :-p
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LOL– oh yea… ummm.. no my incident had nothing to do with lighters ;-)
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Illustrated:
http://youtu.be/v-8_LWq236Y
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Don’t make me start linking to Kinky Friedman….
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“…how to write villains so that they’re not just moustache twirling evil but have reasons and are to an extent sympathetic.”
Another writer said that when she writes evil characters she imagines them as very selfish normal people.
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One thing to be considered about the “Evil Emperor” (or would-be “Evil Emperor”) is “why is he supported?”.
In some stories, the Evil Emperor rules by fear and only the Heroes have the courage to fight against him.
In the Real World, that *might* work for a extremely small village but not for a larger political entry.
Obviously, you can have the Evil Emperor supported by less powerful badnicks but IMO there must be more to be gained by the common people than “if we obey Him, He won’t kill us”.
The classic reason for the common people to support the “Evil Emperor” is “He protects us from the bad people” and/or “He brought stability after the collapse of the prior order”. (Never mind that He was responsible for the bad people or the collapse of the prior order).
Chris Nuttall wrote a novel about the rise of a dictator in Britain who while evil had provided meaningful work for people in Britain who wanted to work but had no jobs. The Heroes found that after they over-threw the dictator, they had to continue some of his programs because they were good ideas and popular.
In short, the Evil Emperor (while truly evil) may not be evil in the eyes of plenty of good people.
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You push this far enough and you lose the Evil Emperor. Take for instance the Baron in Girl Genius. Best thing to happen to Europe in centuries.
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One of my favorite things about the Baron is that he doesn’t want to rule. He sees it as a necessity or duty. He’d much rather be working on his own things, but if he’s going to have to hold it all together, then by thunder he’s going to do it right. Which is to say justly and ruthlessly.
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However, another way for that to come about is for someone to decide that he needs to take control to save things, but perhaps he doesn’t, really. Then we get Kodos the Executioner from Star Trek, who murdered thousands of people because he thought the food shortage would result in everyone dying otherwise.
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No argument there. There was a “fan-fic” about the first Star Wars movie (the first one made). Basically, it showed both Vader and the Emperor as the real good guys because the Republic was falling anyway and they were trying to build something to take the place of the Republic. Based on what we *saw* in the first movie, it made some sense.
The problem is that I seen/read about too many unrealistic “Evil Emperors/Overlords” in my time.
An author can have an Evil Overlord in his/her story but it works better IMO when we see reasons for the population to either support him or at least not support the Heroes (beside fear).
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Girls like bad boys, Women on the other hand like strong men, at the minimum an equal,preferably stronger.
However its easy to mistake “bad” for strong.
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I’d say that’s a good summation of the discussion thus far.
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Okay, you’ll find this amusing. I just had a dream whose plot was entirely lucid, though absent of any motivation for the villains, and Sarah Hoyt played a starring role in it.
As our story opens, I had met Sarah at a convention, and we were walking towards her car, engaged in discussion. As we crossed a bridge over an empty canal, I noticed something odd down in the canal. Two time-travellers, an Italian and a Spaniard from the Renaissance era (in the dream, I just somehow “knew” this; in an actual story, I would have to judge by their clothing or something), were carrying a metal ladder and a machine gun respectively — and the Spaniard with the machine gun was setting it up to fire at the people crossing the bridge, while the Italian was placing the ladder against the walls of the canal, and drawing his sword.
I grabbed Sarah’s arm and pointed, and we both dove off the other side of the bridge. Then, using the bridge for concealment, Sarah worked her way around to the Spaniard’s blind side and attacked him with her bare hands while he was busy shooting innocents on the bridge, slamming his head into the ground. Then, having either disabled or killed him (and she obviously didn’t care which), she turned the machine gun on the Italian, just in time to stop him from killing a Catholic priest who was, it later turned out, the target of their time-travelling assassination mission. By the time the Time Patrol showed up, it was already all over. Sarah was granted a medal for her heroic actions in a small, highly-secret ceremony, and then the Time Patrol left to return to their normal duties.
Congratulations, Sarah: apparently you’re a Hero(ine) of Time! :-)
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Blink. Well… er… WHAT?
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Basically, I really shouldn’t read this blog right before going to bed; it apparently does weird things to my brain.
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Don’t feel bad, I had a dream where Rush Limbaugh and I were reporting on a horse show– it was run by a family trying to save a rare breed that are basically Lipizaner (sp?) horses but more sturdy– and folks kept trying to kill me because everyone else was too famous, but I was important.
Then there’s the one when I was playing World of Warcraft where I was in an abandoned summer camp and the wolf-men were after me… or the reoccuring nightmare where Witchhazel as a badass villain is trying to boil me in a kettle in Batman’s world. (Once or twice, Batman busted down the door to save me at the last moment.)
Sometimes, it’s kinda cool to think back to last night’s wake-up-in-terror dream and see it as a recut pop media thing!
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(pouts, stamps feet) I never get cool dreams.
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You do– you just don’t remember ;-)
Sometimes I wish for a peaceful night actually.
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Trust me, it’s MUCH cooler the next morning– waking up in terror because the witch that Bugs Bunny feuds with tried to kill you is kind of embarrassing…especially when you can’t get back to sleep.
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There is a witch in Bugs Bunny cartoons? Dang, I really must watch more cartoons, I miss all the references the cool kids make.
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Witch Hazel. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Hazel_(Looney_Tunes)
On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 11:37 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > bearcat commented: “There is a witch in Bugs Bunny cartoons? Dang, I > really must watch more cartoons, I miss all the references the cool kids > make.” >
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http://youtu.be/gYtgsLnEl38
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A few years ago, Stephen King reported that his young son (3? years old) had a nightmare that Cruella de Vil (villainess of 101 Dalmatians) was after him.
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Oh, I’m not too bothered by bad dreams, even if I wake up scared. I’m even ready to joke about things that scare the heck out of me in daylight, as soon as I count fingers and toes. But the longest dream I ever remembered involved a short, unspecific running while being chased, hiding in a (cheap) motel room, and then finally, when the guy came to the door and I opened it, I attacked him, pulling him into the room and calling to my family to help. Then it was over. Total apparent time, maybe 10 minutes. Real dreaming time, of course, unknown.
I am not certain, but I always kind of felt I was female in that dream. And for some reason, there was a small amusement park set in what appeared to be a wildlife preserve. Not as a park space cleared from the preserve, but actually part of it.
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