Or the they could be like: He-man really did me in, perhaps I should focus on something else, something easier and build my power steadily while avoiding the oiled beef cake and his friends.
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Smexactly! ![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Ofc while we are on the topic of Skeletor
there isn’t nearly enough creative insults going around.
To be honest what I perceive from you is a lot of expectations about the villain character, and how he should behave, which the player has every right to defend and nurture. Heck, if done with devotion, it is an huge investment of time, effort and energy. If one were to come at me with such a mentality, I would feel zero cooperation. You’re just expecting the villain to fit into [random hero] story and be cool with it.
Well, no, that’s not how it works. You are basically creating a castrated competition where the villain has to fail, get beaten and bow out of the scene, because otherwise the hero’s journey is less impactful. Terrible way to approach the villain, you just consider them to be narrative tools rather than characters of their own right.
When I made my villains, they had their own story arc. They were characters fleshed with desires, ambitions and goals. My main villain in a server started off as a sort of unintended double agent, it was a consequence of his background. Eventually he started to build a reputation: I literally had guys asking me to be able to kill him; they wanted to be the heroes of their own story and kill a big bad. But here’s my problem. Why losing a character that means so much to me, which has turned into a villain after several years of dedication, and offer it to a random nobody, or even to a friend which killed his character every few months or so, just because that’s the trope? They weren’t important figures in my story and I wasn’t going to sacrifice my character, with much needed development, to let the heroes feel like heroes. That’s a poor reason which won’t really satisfy me and will leave my character not feeling memorable at all.
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When it comes to villains I really like a tale about a conversation, of sorts, between Alan Rickman and a child of one of Rickman’s friends.
The child, being at that irritating age when children keep asking questions about “why this or that” just 'cause they feel like it goes up to Alan Rickman and says:
“Alan, why do you always play villains?”
Rickman looks down at the child and pauses, before answering, in that characteristic voice of his:
“I don’t play villains. I play interesting characters.”
If the story is true or not doesn’t matter. The point of it is still important: One should not try to play a villain - one should rather try to play an interesting character.
For example, I once had the privilige of playing Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Iago may, at least in my opinion, well be the best villain of any Shakespeare play. As well as, perhaps, the most pety and rotten of them all.
My problem, when trying to portray Iago was: How do I do this without becoming a charicature? How do I make him credible - in spite of him being so (to the audience) obviously disgusting?
The solution was simple. He isn’t. Not to himself. On the contrary: In his own eyes he is very justified. He is making many wrongs right. He is getting revenge for what an unfair, unjust and evil world has done to him. He is getting his revenge on all those people who wronged him. In fact, his motivation, what drives him, is the same thing that drives Edmond Dantes (The count of Monte Christo).
The only difference being that Dantes was wronged. Iago just percieves himself as wronged. But in the heads of Iago and Dantes the experience of wanting revenge is the same.
tl;dr
Don’t make your villain a villain who does it all because he is eeeeeeevuuul. Make it an interesting character.
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