this blog has sort of come about because of a bunch of things: 1) it's close to halloween, which is villain-party-time! 2) villains are my favourites (which i think is pretty well known by now lolol) and 3) i had a long conversation the other day with one of my sisters about villains which got me to thinking about why exactly i find villains so interesting - why do i like writing them so much?? 

(this is super self-indulgent, haha, so hopefully you'll forgive me for that!!) 

see, the thing is, this isn't new for me. i've always had a tendency to like villains or 'bad' characters - when i was eleven, i read dracula for the first time and i was kinda disappointed that in the end (spoiler alert? ) dracula dies. it wasn't that he was necessarily my favourite character - i loved mina murray from the first reading and arthur holmwood is a (slightly problematic maybe?) favourite too - but he was the one who stayed in my head afterwards. he was the one i found most fascinating. 

(just to say, it doesn't work with every villain. my fascination for joffrey baratheon doesn't apply to ramsey bolton; similarly, while tom riddle is my boi, umbridge is not my girl. there's not really a hard-and-fast rule about why or who - or, if there is, i don't know what it is - but it's not a blanket thing for all villains just because. it's a hit-and-miss thing ) 

why i like them is strange and varies, too: there are villains i like because they're hilariously cartoonish (look we can all agree that disney villains are brilliant, with all the best songs, okay??), others because they're clever and calculating and their game-playing is so addictive, others still because they're charismatic or enchanting; others again, like tom riddle and dracula, because they're clearly dangerous and evil and unapologetic about all of that. sometimes they're even fun, in a dark and damned way, because they could do anything almost - and you have no idea what or when or how but they could. and that's exciting in a character. 

for me, though, the biggest thing with a villain - the thing which makes a villain great, whichever type of villain they are, is that they're understandable. they make sense. maybe only to themselves (and the reader, importantly), because they don't have to make sense to anyone or anything else in the story, but there's an internal logic which makes them tick. a good villain doesn't see the world quite like the 'good guys' or even like anyone else - and the good guys don't have to get that, but as long as there's enough of it there for the reader to grasp a bit of it, it's good. 

(this is different from being justified. villains, unlike good guys, don't have to stick to doing things which are justified. some of the best villains do things which any random person picked off a street would say is completely unjustifiable. and that's okay - because villains only have to be justified to themselves. a good guy can't kill an entire family because one of the family punched them once. that's totally unreasonable by any measure. a villain can. for exactly the same reason - only, it's not unreasonable. to them.) 

and that - that different, twisted, off-the-beaten-track logic; that completely unreasonable, often selfish and deeply self-centred worldview; that complete rewriting of behaviour and rules and acceptable practice into two groups, one for them (and, sometimes, theirs) and one for everyone else, is so much of what i find so fascinating and what is so much fun to write. 

because it's creating a totally different way of looking at things - a way of looking at things which most of us would never think about things and goes way way way beyond teenage egoism or standard arrogance - and it's realigning the world inside that viewpoint. only, for everyone else, the world outside the villain remains the same. 

and here's the thing: villains don't necessarily have to do super bad, super evil things. not every villain needs to be drowning kittens or setting orphanages on fire in order to be a villain. sometimes people get carried away in wanting a villain to be Bad and they forget that, like, a villain is a character in and of themselves. a villain can't and shouldn't just do whatever terrible thing you feel is necessary for the plot. that's not how it works. 

equally, a good villain doesn't have to be forced. some of the worst (i mean, in the interest of clarity, the least effective  not like, yk, least-good) villains are overly evil: they're obviously the villain from the first line you meet them in - they're generally evil and nothing else, and it's easy to get stuck then adding more and more and more 'evil' stuff to the character because that's literally all they are. (this is also the problem with having too many villains - villains, like spices, should be varied. this is, also, incidentally, part of my issue with ramsey bolton: for me, he's just joffrey 2.0. he's practically the same character just with a different backstory. and that, for me, is boring. ahem... anyway!) 

villains, ultimately, are not just there to be a foil to the protagonist. or to be a political point. or to symbolise whatever feeling/thought/ideology/intangible thing you want them to symbolise. that's not to say they can't be those things - voldemort was specifically designed to be a counterpoint to harry potter; various marvel villains are designed to make specific points about classism or capitalism or communism or whatever. but that's only a jumping off point - or it should be, for them to be a really great villain (to me, at least. other people may well disagree ). 

and look, villains are fun. should be fun. to read, to write - all of these things. they shouldn't necessarily be comfortable and that's okay; they don't have to be likeable and that's okay too. they don't need redemption or sympathy (sympathy for the villain is something no one should ask me about ever because i can rant about that for days trust me ) or a tragic backstory (also something i can rant about for days oops). all they need is to be allowed to be themselves, in all their petty, vindictive, dangerous, murderous, manipulative, scheming glory

all this rambling to say it's halloween 2k21 #letvillainsbevillains