Creating a villain is easy. But creating one you can sympathize with is accidental. This is what I’ve come to find in the last few days.
My current project started out as a few different ideas that I meshed together, so I found that having a few villains at once would work out in the end. This way I could leave room for more novels once I was done with the central story of this book, and have a much larger overarching story using one villain. But this villain is the one I have found qualities of myself in. I’m not sure if my subconscious molded him, or if it was all just a fluke, but I find the character to be much more effective this way.
The villain started out as the stock one, a bloodthirsty killer bent on dominating an empire. But I took it to the next level of stock characters and made him sophisticated. He wasn’t bloodthirsty, but was still the one wishing for domination. Eventually, he became a person wishing to save a group of people, and in order to do that, he has to do horrible things. This is where things took a turn.
The more I've planned the character's arch, the more I find how much I actually like him. Is he a villain then? Yes, he is. Let’s just say he is still a foil towards one of the heroes of the book. But in the planning, I have found a few strange parallels with history. One of which got me really thinking about some things:
One of my favorite personalities from the past is Atilla the Hun. The thing about Atilla, though, is the fact that he was seen as a “ruthless” leader. But the fact of the matter is that those who wrote about him were emissaries from the Roman Empire. How is that an impartial view? It’s like that saying, “those who win are the ones who write history.” How are we to tell if Atilla was a bad man? Some might say that the Romans didn’t really “win” against Atilla, since he died outside of the battlefield (there are many theories about how he died, including being murdered by one of his wives). But think of it this way. The Romans hated the barbarians who raided them, such as Atilla. He dies, and the Huns break apart due to the infighting caused by Atilla’s sons. The Romans continued on after this, albeit not for very long. They wrote down everything about Atilla, not the descendants of the Huns. So how can their account be true? Atilla had to of had at least a few good qualities if he was able to bring the Huns into a cohesive group. Maybe he was a good leader after all.
This just makes me think of my would-be villain. Could he be a good man? Will he “win”? And if he does, will he be seen as a hero? Because if he loses, you can be sure he will be branded as a monster.
And this makes me think of myself. For whatever reason, I am always branded the bad guy. I do things in a way that I feel is honorable and good, but for whatever reason, modern society (and friends) don’t feel this way. So I sympathize with my villain, and with Atilla the Hun as well. Even with the good we do, we are branded the villains. And for one of them (the fictional one), it is by my hand.
