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ds_workshop2007-11-06 12:42 pm
sage) wrote in ds_workshop2007-11-06 12:42 pm
Entry tags:
round table discussion: villains!
Several people seconded an off-handed mention of doing a post on writing villains -- and LOTS of us are doing either Due South Seekrit Santa and/or Yuletide this holiday season, so this is hopefully a very timely and relevant post. Feel free to pimp this far and wide because I'd love to get a good range of discussion going in the comments.
First I'm going to share my meandering thoughts, and then I've got a bunch of questions for us to consider.
Okay, first, I spent a lot of time in comics fandom, so when I think of villains, I first think of Joker, Penguin, the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Lex Luthor, and so on. THEN I think of scary-as-fuck villains like Hannibal Lechter. And then I think of bumbling villains like Boris and Natasha on Rocky & Bullwinkle. And then I think of the Master on (the new) Doctor Who and how desperate, fearful, and intimate his relationship with the Doctor is.
And I also think of the first rule of superheroes -- which is that a hero is only as awesome as his primary villain is formidable. And so a regular hero is only as cool as the strongest force we see him defeat. Think about Die Hard. Bruce Willis' character has to beat all the people trying to stop him, AND beat the setting working against him, AND beat the clock. The bad guy alone isn't all that scary, but all the combined forces are.
In Due South, it seems like most of the villains are femme fatales, comedic blowhards (poking fun at the US), or anonymous guys we don't care about. The guy who killed Guy Rankin? I still don't know why he did it. The bad guys in MOTB? After dozens of viewings, I remember their motive but I can't even begin to see them pulling off a Federal Reserve heist. Frank Zuko? I remember Irene clearly, but I barely remember Frank at all and can't remember why he and Vecchio hated each other even before Ray became a cop.
Meanwhile, Victoria and Lady Shoes (Denny Scarpa) are impossible to forget. A lot of that (and this entire subject) has to do with gender. The gaze of the camera follows women, and focusing on a femme fatale or a female victim or a hot female witness lets a director establish the presence of the bad guy (in the background) while misdirecting viewers and controlling the way the mystery unfolds.
But fic doesn't work like that. In fic, bad guys are HARD. In comics fandom, at least one could use the extant villains and ride on their canon scariness. But how do we come up with awesome villains for DS fic? Okay, let's broaden the question: How do we come up with villains that don't suck?
I don't know. I do know that watching crime procedurals on TV has taught me:
1. Most crimes are committed by family members/loved ones of the victim (assuming the victim is an individual).
2. Most motives are love (hate) or money (greed).
3. A detective's job is to narrow down who had motive, opportunity, and ability.
4. Bad guys are obvious unless you have some good red herrings around to suspect as well.
5. If you get organized crime involved, then you still have the money angle, but it's hidden a lot more creatively and the stakes change dramatically.
6. If the bad guy is a member of law enforcement, then all traces of evidence are likely to be destroyed before our heroes can collect them. *cue race against time*
But I don't have much experience writing villains, and when I have, they haven't been scary or interesting unless I was free to play with the supernatural. I've written some physically menacing thugs, but they were just random assholes, not bad guys with strong enough personalities to earn a starring role.
So let's talk about how to present well-drawn bad guys. What awesome bad guys have you read or seen onscreen? Name some -- from fic, novels, movies, television, comics, pop culture, whatever. What makes them effective villains?
What characters still creep you out, months or years later? Why?
What different sorts of villains are there? How can a writer use different sorts of villains in the same story?
Do you like villains better when we understand their motivation all along (and can maybe empathize) or when they're faceless blanks to be revealed at the end? What kind of story is served by each format?
What experience have you had writing bad guys in your own fic, and what pitfalls did you have to deal with? What do you know now that you wish you'd known then?
Obviously, no one has to answer everything, but I'd love for this to be a round table discussion. Please jump in with whatever grabs you, whether your examples are Due South-related or not.
Thanks! :D
First I'm going to share my meandering thoughts, and then I've got a bunch of questions for us to consider.
Okay, first, I spent a lot of time in comics fandom, so when I think of villains, I first think of Joker, Penguin, the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Lex Luthor, and so on. THEN I think of scary-as-fuck villains like Hannibal Lechter. And then I think of bumbling villains like Boris and Natasha on Rocky & Bullwinkle. And then I think of the Master on (the new) Doctor Who and how desperate, fearful, and intimate his relationship with the Doctor is.
And I also think of the first rule of superheroes -- which is that a hero is only as awesome as his primary villain is formidable. And so a regular hero is only as cool as the strongest force we see him defeat. Think about Die Hard. Bruce Willis' character has to beat all the people trying to stop him, AND beat the setting working against him, AND beat the clock. The bad guy alone isn't all that scary, but all the combined forces are.
In Due South, it seems like most of the villains are femme fatales, comedic blowhards (poking fun at the US), or anonymous guys we don't care about. The guy who killed Guy Rankin? I still don't know why he did it. The bad guys in MOTB? After dozens of viewings, I remember their motive but I can't even begin to see them pulling off a Federal Reserve heist. Frank Zuko? I remember Irene clearly, but I barely remember Frank at all and can't remember why he and Vecchio hated each other even before Ray became a cop.
Meanwhile, Victoria and Lady Shoes (Denny Scarpa) are impossible to forget. A lot of that (and this entire subject) has to do with gender. The gaze of the camera follows women, and focusing on a femme fatale or a female victim or a hot female witness lets a director establish the presence of the bad guy (in the background) while misdirecting viewers and controlling the way the mystery unfolds.
But fic doesn't work like that. In fic, bad guys are HARD. In comics fandom, at least one could use the extant villains and ride on their canon scariness. But how do we come up with awesome villains for DS fic? Okay, let's broaden the question: How do we come up with villains that don't suck?
I don't know. I do know that watching crime procedurals on TV has taught me:
1. Most crimes are committed by family members/loved ones of the victim (assuming the victim is an individual).
2. Most motives are love (hate) or money (greed).
3. A detective's job is to narrow down who had motive, opportunity, and ability.
4. Bad guys are obvious unless you have some good red herrings around to suspect as well.
5. If you get organized crime involved, then you still have the money angle, but it's hidden a lot more creatively and the stakes change dramatically.
6. If the bad guy is a member of law enforcement, then all traces of evidence are likely to be destroyed before our heroes can collect them. *cue race against time*
But I don't have much experience writing villains, and when I have, they haven't been scary or interesting unless I was free to play with the supernatural. I've written some physically menacing thugs, but they were just random assholes, not bad guys with strong enough personalities to earn a starring role.
So let's talk about how to present well-drawn bad guys. What awesome bad guys have you read or seen onscreen? Name some -- from fic, novels, movies, television, comics, pop culture, whatever. What makes them effective villains?
What characters still creep you out, months or years later? Why?
What different sorts of villains are there? How can a writer use different sorts of villains in the same story?
Do you like villains better when we understand their motivation all along (and can maybe empathize) or when they're faceless blanks to be revealed at the end? What kind of story is served by each format?
What experience have you had writing bad guys in your own fic, and what pitfalls did you have to deal with? What do you know now that you wish you'd known then?
Obviously, no one has to answer everything, but I'd love for this to be a round table discussion. Please jump in with whatever grabs you, whether your examples are Due South-related or not.
Thanks! :D
no subject
The first fandom I started writing in (without writing it would be Who, particularly the New Adventures tie-in novels, great things for scary villains and monsters of the id) was a comics fandom. It's great to see somebody else around who has taken that route. I was, and to a great extent still am, a Marvel Zombie. Specifically, the X-men. X-men has a cast of thousands approach to story telling and more villains than you can shake a stick at. I am also pretty fond of Wildstorm Comics' Apollo and the Midnighter (for the obvious reasons of canon gay and ultra violence)
So looking at what I wrote in the fandom(s), what do I get?
Smoke and Mirrors
Let me explain.
Smoke: the sort of shadowy things that are meant to give you nightmares. Example: the bad guys in the Vampire!Nightcrawler AU:
a) the vampire who bit Kurt is only seen in flashbacks and it's all rather hazy.
b) the actual only concrete villains Nightcrawler and Wolverine fight in the fourth story are firmly in Texas Chainsaw Massacre / 30 Days of Night mould. Shadowy scary vampires up to something nasty in the wheat fields of America.
Another example: A dead AU gave us some canon villains, the Church of Humanity who (before Chuck Austen bollocksed it up) were once again in the shadowy malevolent presence category. A sort of ill-defined malevolent mass.
Now for Mirrors:
a) Five Ways TJ Met Her Father borrowed from some of the nastier AU iterations of Nightcrawler (TJ was a member of the Exiles: Quantum Leap meets X-men) all twisted malevolence and i) the Nazi Nightcrawler, canon rapist and generally unpleasant sadistic and into torture and ii) the completely warped, corrupted, and psychotic Hammer Horror version from Limbo
b) the characters are their own worst enemies school of plotting.
Sure, I had dreams of long epics with the likes of Mr Sinister (scary once you forget the name) and Weapon X, but I didn't have the ability to write them. Likewise, the Sentinel stuff was once again Men In Black and unseen forgettable villains. Ignoring the huge amount of plotlessness, the Authority has one canon shadowy manipulator (the just plain nasty Bendix) (there was also an anonymous wife beating bastard) and in a cross-over with the one Who story with plot, we get the nefarious and largely unseen Time Agency. In both cases in flashbacks explaining the current situation.
So, serious smoke and mirrors girl here.
(I'm going to post this and then get on with dS for sake of sanity)
Now with added Mounties!
So, that's mirrors covered (the whole self villaincy things) so what about smoke?
1) one haunted book that does things to Vecchio's life
2) completely unseen bird smuggler
3) a crate of herrings (Ray/Ray comedy deathfic, yes, quite)
All of those are "Enabling villains". They aren't important as themselves, the can't carry a plot on their own. They are excuses to dig into the character's Inner Lives.
So do I have any real villains?
1) The psychotic alternate Billy Tallent in Wind Them Up and Let Them Go just about counts
2) The BFP, otherwise known as Episodic Romance, a crazy 70000 word casefic. We have an arch manipulator using crazies to do his dirty work, namely screwing over a dead gangster for his money. Did I mention that said bad guy could see the Dead Gangster's ghost? Much as I love my crazy psycho villains (which might explain my affection for Dexter) it's really another ruse. The whole thing started not with "hey, let's write a casefic" but "let Ray K.. (tbc)
Re: Now with added Mounties!
Is it some function of the slash that villains become secondary characters enabling the slash plot? They become "obstacles to romance" rather than fully formed characters.
And yes, on Frankie, I'm going to be using him and the lack of solid characterisation is driving me buggy. I don't know how to handle him without going all pantomime.
Re: Now with added Mounties!