What Makes a Great Villain in Fiction?

I've always been fascinated about the mechanisms behind storytelling in general. Whether it's books, movies, tv shows, videogames, whatever. Even pro wrestling.

One aspect in particular is an interest of mine, and that is the villain in any given story.

A big reason why a lot of movies fail to impress me much is that the villain's motivations are not given enough depth. Often times the hero is looked deep into, but the villain can simply be evil for the sake of being evil, and that, to me, completely takes the edge off.

If you think of the real world, those that we often perceive as evil may simply have a different perception on things. A greedy capitalist feels that the world simply functions better under a free market, whereas his arch nemesis, the lazy socialist, feels that the world would be better off if the means of production were seized by the state, and the "rewards" were distributed equally, if you don't mind a Steemit joke.

Both are advocating for a specific hard fork, which, yes, would benefit them, but also, in their mind, everybody else.

To both of them, the other is a bad guy, evil, a villain, but in their own mind, of course, they are the hero of the story. Fighting for a better world.

I enjoy stories where this is also the case.

I believe that the best bad guy in fiction is one who believes that he is right, but goes about it the wrong way. We need to be able to sympathize with the motive, but also feel that the means by which he is going about achieving it are wrong, too extreme, or otherwise immoral.

That is something I always look for if I'm enjoying a story of fiction, whatever the medium.

A very good example is a wrestling storyline from 2008 between Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels.

In pro wrestling, wrestlers are divided into two groups: babyfaces and heels. Babyfaces are the heroes, and heels are the villains. The crowd is supposed to cheer the babyface, and boo the heel. The mechanism is that people will want to pay money to see the babyface vanquish the evil heel. The same dynamic can also be seen all over "real" combat sports, such as boxing orthe UFC. Even though the sports are "real", you can often clearly see who the babyface and who the heel is. And the fights with a strong babyface-heel dynamic are generally the ones that draw the most money.

So, in 2008 Shawn Michaes, the babyface, faked a knee injury to win a match by getting a surprise win over his worried opponent, and then continued to fake the knee injury to avoid facing him again.

Chris Jericho, who was also a babyface at the time, called him out on it, claiming that the injury wasn't real.

No one believed Jericho, and kept on cheering Michaels.

Shawn was later on even able to convince Jericho that the injury was real, gaining his trust, until finally revealing that yes, Jericho was right all along, Shawn is totally fine.

This triggered what is known as a heel turn with Jericho, where he would slowly turn from a good guy to a bad guy, resulting in Jericho attacking Shawn and driving his face through a television screen, resulting in an eye injury.

The key here was that Jericho had been right all along, simply defending the truth, but the crowd still sided with Shawn. Jericho's character turned into a great villain who called himself an honest man and a righteous man, and insulting the fans for being hypocrites and brainless sycophants for siding with a known liar like Shawn Michaels.

It was cool storytelling, and was actually a product of Jericho and Michaels themselves, who are friends in real life. The actual creative team had nothing to do with it.

The interesting dilemma there was that it's not like Jericho did anything wrong. He simply felt Shawn was lying, tried to expose him, then trusted him, got his trust broken, and then turned on him, but instead of being looked at as a hero who exposed a scam artist, he was vilified as the bad guy.

But Jericho was also an ass about it, and that's another key. No matter your principles, if you're an ass, people dislike you. But it's an interesting conflict when the ass is in the right in his convictions, but unlikable at the same time.

A truly good bad guy never considers himself the bad guy. He's not killing people, or threatening to take over the world just for the sake of. He actually considers himself to be the hero.

And then the hero of the story is the voice of reason, but can also be imperfect himself - since the hero needs to be relatable, as well, and we're all imperfect in one way or another - and the villain calls the hero out on these flaws.

In a nutshell, the villain needs to be able to justify his crimes to himself, and then attempt to justify them to the audience.

A good modern day good vs. evil story would be the west vs. islam.

From our point of view, muslims are evil and are all about the destruction of the west, and yes, we are at war with them. And yes, to us, they are the bad guys, and it's silly to claim otherwise.

But it's also vice versa.

Muslims hate what the west represents, and view us as the scum oft the earth that needs to eliminated.

They can justify their actions easily by pointing out the flaws and degenerate nature of the west, and they do make points that are definitely relatable. Just enough points to make us go "Well, that thing he said there is actually true". But the actions themselves are so far beyond our understanding of right and wrong that they clearly become the villains.

I think that if done right, the audience can even feel a sense of sympathy towards the villain.

You can get that he's done just vanilla and evil, there's a driving factor behind the actions that you can relate to. Someone robs a bank. What if his wife is seriously ill, and the family is broke? Is robbing a bank right? No. But you can understand why it's done.

A villain needs to create a moral dilemma within the audience in order to be successful.

In my view, anyway. What do you guys think?