It seems as though everywhere you look in contemporary fiction, whether in fantasy, science fiction, or even litfic, you see the same crisis of villainy.
We all know the shopworn tropes by now: Evil is a subjective point of view. Why, turn the story around to tell it from the villain’s perspective, and he becomes the hero! Besides, even if he commits the worst atrocities, his obligatory tragic back story justifies his misdeeds retroactively.
As live stream host extraordinaire Daddy Warpig explained during last night’s Geek Gab reunion episode, modern fiction’s villainyc crisis stems from writers’ failure to understand the nature of evil. In particular, they fail to grasp two elements of evil:
- Villains make the free choice to commit wicked deeds
- Villains persist in their vices because they like it, owing to evil’s corrupting influence.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg that was DW’s discussion with me on the subject of evil, occasioned by the release of my new dark fantasy novel The Burned Book.
Listen to the full mini-debate, along with treatments of other subjects literary, on the replay of last night’s episode.
Watch it here [WARNING – Brief, mild NSFW content, and not from the dark fantasy book]:
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One detail many people fail to understand nowadays is the following: yes, you can have sympathy for evil people, but that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t still objectively wrong. For example, if someone decided to murder their mother/father after years of child abuse, you’d understand where such an action would come from, but that doesn’t in any way make that act of murder right.
Trying to understand why people held certain evil beliefs and or performed evil actions is very different from actively sympathizing with what they did. Conflating the two is a bad thing to do for myriad reasons, the foremost being that it makes honestly exploring the nature of evil and trying to learn from it virtually impossible, instead degenerating into blind demonization of a certain person/group/belief system.
The term “hate the sin, love the sinner”, exists for a very good reason…
I’ve got to agree in large part with Daddy Warpig. There are plenty of examples out there of people who do evil just for the sake of doing evil – or out of hatred of the good – not in pursuit of anything else, not for any benefit to themselves. Even going out of their way to harm others. The serial killer H.H. Holmes was one example. He could’ve gotten by and been very rich as a con artist, but the only reason made his money was to pursue his murders.
Tolkien put it best in Return of the King when Sam and Frodo see the two quarreling Orcs and comment: the Orcs might hate each other, but they hate the good more. That’s what unites them.
The opening to Arthur Machen’s novella The White People has another interesting interpretation: that there’s different levels of evil, depending on whether the evil is in pursuit of something good. At the basic level are animal passions and people who fail to the control them. Then there are people who pursue good things in the wrong way or to excess. But above (or below) that are people who want to control reality and decide what is good and bad, as well as everything else. To try and be God. In the novella, Machen’s character calls them sorcerers.
On a side-note, The White People is a chilling read, particularly if you subscribe to H.P. Lovecraft’s interpretation of what’s really going on. Read with that interpretation in mind and it becomes truly horrifying.
There’s only two examples of the sympathetic villain done really well that I can think of off the top of my head.
Magneto, particularly as depicted in the movies by McKellen and Fassbender.
On the one hand, Magneto definitely enjoys wielding power and getting revenge, but you can argue he wouldn’t have started except for other circumstances, and he wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t feel there was an existential threat against mutants that demanded moral considerations be put aside in the interest of survival.
There are a lot of little scenes of genuine regret from the character, and a sense that he truly does want to stop and turn aside, but he also doesn’t feel he has that option.
So he might as well take some pleasure out of it when he feels the targets of his wrath are deserving. And of course that will corrupt him.
The other example is Walternate from Fringe. I won’t spoil what happens in that show.