Building the Bad Guy

[Lalwendë]

There's a useless article in today's Daily Hate Mail by Antony Horowitz who writes those spy stories for boys. In it he bemoans the supposed 'fact' that it is now harder than ever to create a villain due to the mythical monster of Political Correctness.

"Um!", I thought. "Didn't a certain JRR Tolkien manage to create a whole host of bad guys who did not cause offence?" And he was writing in the dim, distant past when it was still OK to thrash small children with sticks, call disabled people 'cripples' and shove them in a corner like a parcel, and not allow black and Irish people to rent a cockroach infested bedsit from you. Yes, yet Tolkien managed to create some of the greatest villains! On rare occasions some loon will pick up on the fact that some of the armies who fight for Sauron are from the 'east', but then of course cannot continue with the argument as it never holds water.

Fact is, Tolkien was a decent writer unlike a certain person bemoaning his own ineptitude in dreaming up baddies. I'm sure I'm not alone amongst those of us who've played in RPGs on here, when I reckon that dreaming up a bad guy is actually much, much easier than trying to create a credible good guy who is not a Mary-Sue! And surely having all this supposed 'political correctness' makes it even easier?! Just have your bad guy drive a bigger car, be a homophobe and be fond of pate de fois gras and you'll be bang on

What's up then? Are Tolkien's bad guys actually not that scary or something? And if they are scary, then how did he do it so effortlessly? And without causing offence? Even in the 'PC' age...

[Hookbill the Goomba]

Interesting idea.
When creating a villain, the main thing one must consider is the characters motives. To simple be the embodiment of evil is not really trying. Once you have a good motive, it is easy to go from there, I would say. It is also a good idea to avoid cliches (black cape, evil grin etce) unless it is supposed to be a parody, of course.
Sauron, for example, is very good as a villain. A disembodied spirit of malice who is represented though his servants rather than his own presence. Saruman, again an interesting character with great motives. There are many in Tolkien that are good. Even ambiguous figures like Old Man Willow have their reasons for being bad.

Besides which, setting it in a fictional world means you can explain away almost anything.

[Raynor]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

And if they are scary, then how did he do it so effortlessly?

Twelve volumes of HoME say otherwise .

A disembodied spirit of malice who is represented though his servants rather than his own presence.

"Hate" to nitpick, but in LotR and the letters Sauron is described embodied at the time of LotR.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

and surely having all this supposed 'political correctness' makes it even easier?! Just have your bad guy drive a bigger car, be a homophobe and be fond of pate de fois gras and you'll be bang on

Right on point; I fail to see why a bad guy needs to conform to the norm. After all, the very position of "bad guy" demonises him and probably also what he stands for. On the other hand, censoring oneself due to whatever legislation is stupid, because you would have to avoid all possible groups that would be offended - right?

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

Originally Posted by Raynor

On the other hand, censoring oneself due to whatever legislation is stupid, because you would have to avoid all possible groups that would be offended - right?

You know, I've been wanting to do a census of sorts to find out just what the most offensive thing in the US is and write a book about it?

I'd provide a hate mail address on the last page...

Here's what makes Tolkien's bad guys interesting [in my opinion]: even the truly evil ones didn't necessarily start out that way. His bad guys have stories, motives, really great dialog...

Now look at Shakespeare's villains. Just a sampling, I haven't got all day...

Iago: whimpering that Othello got promoted over him. Hints that Othello has been doing illicet things with Iago's wife. Oh snap. He's a manipulative creep. Somewhat inept on his own, but great at messing with other people. A bit of a Wormtongue character, really.

Richard III: says he's a villain in his opening soliloquy. That's a good way to judge bad guys, by the way. You want a good villain, give him good monologues. Melkor, Milton's Lucifer, Richard III, Saruman... Dick feels cheated by life, so he's going to be evil. Intense, no?

The Entire Cast of Macbeth: ooh, controversial. Lady Macbeth is NOT the bad guy! Well, sort of. You want a great story, make your characters totally screwed up. Who do you blame? The witches for giving Macbeth the idea? Macbeth for acting on it? Lady Macbeth for goading him? Fate for predetermined bad-guy-ness? Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, Frodo Baggins, and Eru meant for Melkor to be Morgoth and create snow.

Really good writers make their bad guys round. They have histories. They have reasons for their evilness. They have really expansive vocabularies.

Eff political correctness. Pick an idea and embody it in a character.

[Lalwendë]

Thing is, I reckon this Horowitz bloke is just having a rant because he's had writer's block

Tolkien managed to stack up the bad guys without resorting to anything that even today we might get offended at - if anything he was the very model of 'PC'! Possibly by, as Hookbill says, portraying his evil in a very third party way, through the minions, the results of Sauron's works. On the other hand, Philip Pullman (for one) doesn't appear to be bothered in the slightest who he upsets - having an evil woman (sexist!) and an evil priest (irreligious!) in his most famous work.

So there are just two examples which put paid to the ill-founded rant.

[davem]

I found the changes made for the movie version of his book interesting. Reminds me of something Rateliff mentions in Mr Baggins, about a reference to Charles Darwin (a reference to Darwin being 'a young biologist everyone is talking about') was removed from recent US editions of the Dr Dolittle books. Presumably it was felt that even to mention the dreaded name was enough to upset religious sensibilities.

I wonder whether the reason Tolkien's villains are accepted is that the seeting is a fantasy world, & has no obvious direct connection with our own world. Add to that the fact that Tolkien was a man of his time, & there is likely to be less for the loonies to grab onto as a source of offence. Whether Tolkien could get away with what he has done if he was offering LotR for publication today is another question. Of course, as we've been discussing over on the other thread about potential new Middle-earth stories, publishers have a tendency to lay down pretty strict rules for authors:

The whole process of producing mass-market books now works against quality. The paucity of stand-alone genre novels, especially but not only in fantasy, is a testament to their generally poor quality, and that can be blamed on the padding. If you write a good novella, you must pad it to a fare-thee-well to make it a salable novel; so when readers see a novel not part of a series, they almost expect to find an overstuffed novella. If you have a story that wants to be a single tight novel, plenty of unscrupulous operators will urge you to dilute it into a trilogy. Beyond that point there is not much commercial incentive for further adulteration, unless your first name is Robert and your last name Jordan.

Even the tools we write with are conducive to hack and bloat. The copyist-monks of the Middle Ages valued every stroke of the pen, and wasted no written words. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, is an extremely terse work; for all its immense scope and importance, it fits easily in 300 pages of print. We find, at the end of mediaeval manuscripts, reminders of the labour that produced them. One scribe finished a book with the couplet, Explicit hoc totum: pro Christo da mihi potum......

hat was a sign of things to come. Publishers began to discover the selling-power of big books and multi-volume novels, and after the disappearance of the dollar paperback, made them the mainstay of their business. The loose and sloppy prose of the word-processor generation was perfectly suited to their needs. They were publishing books in greater numbers and at greater length than ever before, with editorial staffs constantly shrinking; one hears of cases where a single editor is expected to acquire and publish a hundred books per year. Meanwhile print runs were shrinking, advances and royalties remaining static at best; so that a mid-list author, to survive, had to become a hack, churning out vast quantities of work and sending them to press only half revised. The result: countless acres of what in our especial field is called, with a perfectly justified sneer, ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’. (The more general term ‘Extruded Book Product’ is occasionally used as well. I Googled that phrase and found to my chagrin that my own LiveJournal profile topped the list.) http://superversive.livejournal.com/49083.html

Add to that the real fear among publishers of causing offence (controversy is ok, but don't offend!).

Of course, fantasy has certain rules - mainly based on what Tolkien did, ironically. You can have 'Dark Lords', Goblins, Trolls, Dragons, & wicked Wizards, because that's what's expected by those who read those novels. What I mean is, the people who read such books are unlikely to object to the portrayal of fantasy villains, & the kind of people who would object would not be the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.

That said, an 'Angmarian' villain is not going to cause apoplexy in the way a Muslim villain will.....