Yestderday, Erica Orloff was talking about villains. And the perfect villain. I started to compose my reply to her post and realized it was going to be the length of a blog post, so I transferred a lot of those thoughts over here.

I like funny villains. I like villains that if they weren’t so damn evil you could hang out with them. I like the Hannibal Lectors. I loved Hannibal. And I loved him in a “I would totally be his lover” kind of way. Which is terrifying because that’s clearly not a healthy type of guy to like. Cause he might decide later he wants to wear your skin as a hat. And who needs that level of drama?

It’s absolutely important to me that my villains believe somehow that they are the good guys, though I don’t always get to fully express that. I’ve got a novel now where the villain will be the hero/protagonist in a future book.

Mostly I believe “villain” just like “hero” is a current state, not an end state. So if a hero in this book becomes a villain later, or a villain in this book becomes a hero later, it’s all about their individual journey and the choices they make that lead them to that. When we watch a hero fall or a villain rise to goodness, we see it’s all about choices. Almost no one is irredeemable. Almost no one is incorruptible.

Under the right set of circumstances, you or I could save the world or destroy it. My hero in SAVE MY SOUL was a villain, in fact pretty much a serial killer 500 years ago. He’s grown as a person since then, but he was what he was. And if his story from 500 years ago were being told, we wouldn’t think of him in warm fuzzy sexy ways. (Well due to my earlier Hannibal comment, I might, but I really shouldn’t be the yardstick here.)

My hero in KEPT was a hero, then became a pseudo villain for survival. So that’s what makes me tick about villains, the complete changeability of the whole thing. And I like things really gray.

Traditionally villains were these creatures whose motivations we could never penetrate. They were highly cheesy and one dimensional. And that’s because we feel safer with villains like that. To think your next door neighbor could be a villain borders on paranoia. The world feels safer when it’s reduced to greater simplicity. I tend to like the “image” of the textbook cheesy villain with the understanding that there is more than meets the eye going on in the whole thing, and glimpses into the underlying story. I love the “evil villain monologue” in a rather perverse way.

What terrifies me about a good villain is…he believes he’s right. Even if he’s destroying the world, something in his head makes him justify his behavior. Whoever he’s hurting is justified because of what he’s doing. And that makes it complicated for a hero, because often a hero is just a slightly different flavor of villain. Especially the type of hero that does this or that for “the greater good.” Whose greater good? If you’re one of the sacrificial lambs, he’s the villain of your story. Even if he’s the hero of thousands.

In our day to day lives we’re all probably someone’s hero and someone else’s villain, and we internally justify it all. That’s what’s scary.