488 – Making Your Villain a Major Character

The Mythcreant Podcast

Villains need to be cool and intimidating, but that doesn’t mean they have to spend the whole story locked up in their spooky towers. With the right setup, your villain can be a major character, getting a lot of screen time and development, all without ruining their threat level or bringing the plot to a screeching halt. How do you make that happen? We’re happy to explain! Plus, you get to hear about why Bunny has such a crush on villain romances.

Show Notes

• Designing a Memorable Villain in Prose
• Villain Viewpoints
• Mustache Twirlers
• Dead Boy Detectives
• Vecna
• Hugh
• Mysterious Benedict Academy
• Spinning Silver
• A Study in Drowning
• This Is How You Lose the Time War
• Children of Blood and Bone
• Maximus
• Kylo Ren

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. [Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren. And with me is…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: So today, Chris and I are the heroes of the podcast, and as we established four or five episodes ago, Bunny is the villain. She’s the evil puppet master villain.

Bunny: [Evil laugh]

Oren: That’s good. That’s good. We want her to be in the episode too. So we’re gonna do a bunch of cutaways where Bunny can monologue about her evil plan.

Bunny: I need to come up with an evil plan, which I’ve had this entire time. I think I’m going to, for big and terrible reasons, I think I’m going to start throwing cats off of cliffs. [Evil laugh]

Oren: No! Kitties. It’s all right. They have parachutes.

Chris: I mean, that will be very effective.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Oren: And just say that you’re gonna do that. Every time we cut to you be like, “I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start one of these days.”

Chris: Just hold a box of kitties. And then every cut scene, you’re 10 feet closer to this cliff that’s several hundred yards away. [Laughs]

Bunny: Then I can like monologue to the cat. I’m gonna be like, “Oh, you’re gonna fall off that cliff so bad one of these days. Any moment.”

Oren: So this episode is about making your villain a major character. I’ve noticed that this is the standard in TV and movies. The villain is often very present. I have an article about making the villain memorable, but this is related but not the same. It’s a little different. In TV and film, the villain almost always has a bunch of screen time.

There are exceptions, but they tend to be very around, whereas in most books that I have read, the opposite is the case. The villain is often off screen for most of the story. If you interact with them at all, it’s through seeing evidence of their presence in the world. You don’t come face to face with them very often.

And as a result, I think that’s another reason why movies and TV tend to have more memorable villains than books do. That’s just the nature of the medium sometimes. But I do think that maybe there are ways authors could make their villains more present and that would make them something that people would think on more about from the books.

Chris: I do think it’s worth just going into why we don’t usually recommend villain viewpoints, because this is the main big difference why visual mediums cut to villains so often and narrated ones typically don’t, is because narrated work typically has point of view where when we narrate a scene, we are in that character’s head. And this tends to not work very well with villains because being in a viewpoint of a character just inherently makes them feel more familiar and better understood.

And as a result, they tend to be more sympathetic and less threatening. Usually what we want is for the villain to be threatening. So that kind of works against what their purpose is. And sometimes it even sets the wrong expectations. A viewpoint can also mean that a character is an important protagonist, and they might even think that the villain is going to convert over to Team Good and then be disappointed when they don’t.

We talked before about mustache twirlers and how common it is, and writers definitely have a little more trouble making their villain feel real and nuanced. And unless the villain’s characterization is really good, putting scene in their point of view will really bring that to light and make them look bad. Whereas if they were more mysterious, maybe the readers wouldn’t have noticed.

Oren: Or even just from the outside, not even necessarily more mysterious, but just not seeing events through their eyes. You spend so much work developing your characters that, doing that for a villain, just so that the villain can be a little more present in the story, developing their own narration, and then their voice. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s worth it.

Chris: This is something that honestly, also can be a problem in filmed works. Does your villain have anything to do in their POV scene or cutaway other than cackle about their scheme? [Laughs]

Bunny: Look, I’ll have, you know, I’m holding a cat right now, Chris.

Chris: [Laughs] Cackle and pet their evil cat evilly, but we were watching Dead Boy Detectives recently, for instance, and the season villains, you know, even the ones that seemed strong to start with.

By the end I just disliked all of them because of the frequent cutaways and then the cackling, and then the cut back to the protagonist. And then another cutaway to the villain and some more, “Ha ha ha. Cackle scheming, scheming.” And they’re not really doing anything.

Oren: The Night Nurse was especially bad. The witch wasn’t great either, but with the Night Nurse, mild spoilers, we just constantly cut back to her being like, “And when I get the paperwork signed,

Bunny: Oh, not the paperwork.

Oren: I guess that could have worked as a joke if it was funny, but it just wasn’t funny. It was just very like, “Yeah, we’re waiting, waiting for you to get that paperwork signed. For sure.”

Bunny: You don’t want to like the villain in the way that you would like a hero, but you also can’t be just relentlessly annoyed by them in the way that makes you want to put the book down.

Oren: It certainly didn’t help that the Night Nurse’s character was this extremely bombastic, constantly yelly type villain. Not a funny one. It was just, very loud is the most consistent trait I can give the Night Nurse. It was a very odd combination. At least the witch was interesting. But even so, when we keep cutting back to the witch over and over again and she’s like, “I’m gonna get those dead boys one day. You wait. Just wait. I’m gonna do it.”

Bunny, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: I was thinking about when you might not want to have the villain be a major character, and I think the obvious one is where you want the villain to be mysterious by definition. And then obviously you don’t want, when there’s not really a villain to begin with. If you are battling a hurricane, the conflict of your story is getting people out of the way of a hurricane, right? The hurricane will be there, but that’s not really a villain, right?

Chris: I mean, maybe the hurricane talks, you know. [Chuckles]

Bunny: Maybe the hurricane talks. That’s true. You could have a well fleshed out, evil hurricane, and I would read that.

Oren: Are you going to not believe it? If I introduce a mysterious NPC named Her A. Cane and they’re friendly and they want to be the protagonist’s best buddy. You’re not gonna see that coming?

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Oh, nothing’s up with good friend Her.

Oren: Yeah, Her A. Cane, “A” middle name. Very important.

Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]

Bunny: And that’s how they introduce themselves.

Chris: If you liked nuanced and personal villains, that works great as a major character. If you like a villain that has a dark swishy cape, it’s not impossible to make that villain a major character, but those tends to be the kind of archetypes that may not work so much because the longer they are on screen, the more complex they have to be to stay interesting. And so if they’re just there to be evil, don’t necessarily want them to be in the scenes quite as much.

Bunny: You don’t want to turn a non-villainous… Horror is something that’s interesting because it’s not a villain, like cosmic horror, into a villain because you risk making it less interesting. I’m looking at you Stranger Things.

Chris: Ohh yeah, that was sad. Certainly if you have the Elder God, that is not really supposed to be a person ’cause it’s too great and powerful and mysterious to be personable.

Bunny: But what if it was some guy.

Chris: I stand by my theory that they did that because they did not know how to defeat it, and they needed a way to end the series.

Oren: That one is particularly bad because not only is he a person now, but he’s less cool than we thought.

Chris: I actually really liked him in the backstory before he revealed himself to be super evil, because that was when he had some nuance, because he liked Eleven and they were buddies. That made him really interesting and sympathetic too, right?

Sympathetic villains are also great for being major characters, but oftentimes they’re not as threatening. So that’s a situation where you have maybe two villains. One that’s the Big Bad and in the background, and one is the sympathetic villain that’s your first antagonist.

Bunny: I’m pretty sure they did that earlier in Stranger Things. So I think your theory holds water. It’s especially frustrating in a show that had balanced the cosmic horror with knowable villains.

Oren: And I’m not gonna say it would never work to make your cosmic horror villain into a more personable character. Stranger Things is a particularly bad example. I’ve seen some that work okay, but it’s definitely risky and you really need to think about what are you gaining by doing this? Do you have something that you actually want from this? Or are you just making the villain less scary now?

Chris: It’s that situation where you have a villain who is pretending to be good, which I think we’ll talk more because that is one way to have them on screen, and then as soon as you reveal that they’re a villain, they have a personality transplant and they become a mustache twirler. It was one of those situations, and that’s always very disappointing.

Oren: That’s actually my first method for how to make your villain more of a character, and that is to cheat and not let on that they’re a villain. You’re a cheater now. I hope you feel good about yourself.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Chris: You know, there are many reveals and twists that get writers into trouble. I have to say, I think that’s one of the better ones.

Oren: Because one of the biggest obstacles to making your villain more present in the story is theoretically your villain and your hero do not like each other, and so it’s hard to have them in proximity very often. But if your villain is pretending to be on Team Good, or is actually on Team Good and will turn evil later, that is a great opportunity.

The main risk is that they will turn evil and then suddenly just act completely different. And it’s like, “Well then I actually don’t know this person. This is an entirely different character. And I guess they were just really good at acting.”

Chris: And we’ve talked before about how valuable it is to have a villain that’s polite and charming. Again, this is a great time to have a villain that stays polite and charming, and that shouldn’t change. They just need a conceivable motivation for why they were evil the whole time. They don’t wanna actually need a personality that’s different. Just a secret motivation.

Bunny: A good example of this is probably in a lot of mystery stories. The villain has to be present. Otherwise the reveal of who dunnit…

Oren: Some guy.

Bunny: Yeah, some guy. The best possible reveal. Otherwise it will feel random. You need to have the villain be there rather than it being a character we’ve never met before. So probably the villain and the hero will be interacting quite a bit in these mystery stories.

So it’s not surprising that things like Knives Out have villains in disguise. Spoilers for a couple years old movie. Hugh pretends to be teaming up with the main character because he wants something from her, which is how much she knows about what’s going on.

Oren: Wait, who was teaming up with the main character?

Bunny: Hugh.

Oren: Wait. You were teaming up with the main character?

Bunny: Yeah, it was me.

Oren: I don’t think you’re in this movie, Bunny.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Bunny: Well, he also likes to throw cats off of cliffs, so we bonded. We have a little villain romance going.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: You can also, if you have very specific circumstances, it’s possible to have a secret villain who is only a secret villain to the protagonist. The main example would be the novel Piranese, which hot take, is good, and has a bad guy who, it’s not hard for the reader to guess that he’s a bad guy almost immediately, but the protagonist doesn’t know that.

Chris: Right. And again, this is done without showing readers anything that the main character doesn’t see. It’s just that the main character has a specific perspective and is also a sweet cinnamon roll. And so he does not suspect something, but the audience has additional knowledge.

Oren: We know that guy’s shady.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Oren: The main risk is once the reveal comes and this villain turns out to be evil, you need to make sure that their reasoning for pretending to be a good guy actually made sense.

Chris: There are some situations when they have already done something in the course of being a pretend ally that they definitely would not have wanted to do as a villain, like saving the hero when really they wanted to kill the hero. Why did you do this thing to help the protagonist so much if you actually had this motivation the whole time?

So if they need the protagonist for something, that’s really good. I like allies who, the protagonist help them gain more power because they work as a team and power for the ally is power for the protagonist. But then it turns out this ally was just using them as a stepping stone.

Oren: My favorite is you have a villain pretend to join Team Good while Team Good is taking out another villain who the first villain also doesn’t like. ‘Cause then we cooperate. We have a common goal. But I was pretending to be a good guy actually. I’m just a different flavor of bad guy. That’s one of my favorites.

Bunny: The parallel to this is getting to know the villain because the hero is spying on the villain rather than the villain spying on the hero. I think this one applies in a much more limited context. This is the characters taking on a role to get close to the villain. The risk with this one obviously is making the villain look incompetent when they don’t notice that there are the heroes around.

But this is something that works really well in the Mysterious Benedict Society, which is a middle grade novel where the main characters are kids going to this spooky academy to see what’s going on with its mind control radio waves that it’s sending out.

And so they interact with the villainous headmaster of this academy and his goons, his lieutenants. So you get to know the villain a bit more that way. But I don’t know if this would work so well with protagonists who aren’t child protagonists. Depending on the conflict. If the conflict is the hero is trying to kill the villain, you can’t really have: Hero go spying on villain and interacts with them and doesn’t just kill them and complete their mission.

Chris: I’m trying to remember the name of the movie where we have a female protagonist who romances a murder suspect. That works partly well because we’re not really sure whether or not he’s a villain. So he’s tempting. [Laughs]

Oren: This is a movie or are we thinking about Wednesday?

Chris: (While laughing) Oh, no.

Bunny: It sounds like something Wednesday would do.

Oren: It’s a pretty broad definition is all.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: If outright investigating somebody, then you can balance the threat level. You do have to still make them menacing, which is the tricky one there is trying to balance that characterization.

Oren: These are all various flavors of my second method, which is basically finding a way to force the hero and villain to be in proximity because you have a premise that is something other than “arch-enemies, scorched-earth, must fight now” premise. This wouldn’t work with Lord of the Rings. You can’t really have Frodo and Sauron in close proximity to each other.

Chris: Just make them get stuck in an elevator.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckles]

Chris: Works every time.

Bunny: Ooh, there’s only one bed.

Chris: [Laughs] Stranded on an island.

Oren: All kinds of ways. If you have a lower stakes story, this tends to work better. If your stakes are not life or death, then you could very easily have a situation where protagonist is in close proximity with the villain. They might even live together.

There’s a certain amount of that in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Cause they are, you know, no one’s trying to kill each other, but there are characters who don’t like each other and characters who work in opposition to each other. And they all kinda have to hang out in this small society of aristocrats.

Bunny: Awkward.

Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]

Oren: You can also do the “held captive” model. Often the hero will be a captive of the villain. The risk there is that your hero can end up with no agency, so you need something for the hero to be doing while they are captive. Spinning Silver is a great example of that.

Chris: Yes, Spinning Silver does something that is interesting that I noticed in a couple stories where we have a mysterious villain possessing a lesser villain. This is an interesting combination. So you have your human antagonist who is supposed to be sympathetic because they are at least partially under the mysterious villain’s control. The mysterious villain, when you actually want to talk to them, they control the human antagonist and say a few words, and then they can mysteriously disappear again.

Admittedly, Spinning Silver doesn’t do it, in my opinion, quite as well as A Study in Drowning does. Where in Spinning Silver, the big powerful villain is this demon. Whenever it appears, it’s just like, “Feed me, I’m hungry. Tasty.”

Bunny: [Laughs]

Chris: You’re losing some of your mystique.

Oren: But so sympathetic, who amongst us has not been hangry?

Bunny: I too get hungry. This is what I sound like every midnight.

Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]

Chris: Whereas in A Study in Drowning, the possessor who’s the fairy king genuinely stays mysterious. It’s unclear to what extent he’s even real, but then he shows up more towards the end. But that’s just kind of an interesting combo. So you can have a villain that’s present and still keep your “Bigger Bad” mysterious.

Oren: This sort of premise is also great if you wanna end up with a villain romance.

Bunny: Yes.

Oren: Bunny has some experience with that. Maybe she can tell us about it.

Bunny: Me? I’d never.

Oren: [Laughs]

Bunny: So the long and short of it is I romanced the villain of a campaign Oren ran and it was wonderful, and now I just really like villain romance.

Oren: That was also Chris’s fault. Chris suggested it.

Chris: I did have a habit of suggesting everybody romance people in that campaign. What can I say? I like romance.

Bunny: Chris was the matchmaker.

Chris: That was actually a great example because I was just like, “How is Oren gonna do this? [Laughs] How is Oren gonna pull this off?” The answer is long distance communication, which worked really well. So the villain would just appear in a vision to Bunny’s character and they could have a chat, but she wasn’t physically present, so they couldn’t actually fight.

Bunny: And they went on one date. There was some temptation too, which worked with the character arc of not getting tempted into using this unethical magic.

Oren: That also worked out, because I had several instances where Bunny’s character would be in serious trouble and then the villain would show up as her spectral self and be like, “Hey, I could help you out with that. It looks like you’re trying to save a bunch of your friends from dying. Would you like help?”

Bunny: Well, I guess…

Oren: And so there was some temptation along the way ’cause I had created multiple sides to this fight. So there were points in which it would make at least some sense for the eventual final villain to help the party out in exchange for something else.

And because they had a mutual enemy, that worked out. I also just did a lot of sleight of hand on where that villain was at any given time. It’s like, “She’s around, but you probably won’t find her. She’s very sneaky. Don’t worry about it.”

Chris: This is the villain that also could make blood clones of herself. So if we ever got in a fight with her and we rolled too good, turned out that was just a copy.

Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]

Oren: A very useful power for your bad guys to have in role-playing games is to create copies of themselves that are in theory weaker than they are. Because in role-playing games, you can’t control when your players win or lose fights. It just happens. So you have to be able to keep your villain threatening even when they roll really well. And that was how I did it. It’s like, “This is a bit of a kludge,” but it worked.

Bunny: And it was great. That was one of my favorite character relationships I’ve ever had in a RPG campaign just ’cause it was a lot of fun and my character was constantly trying to arrest their love interest, which was very funny.

Oren: It was very cute. They had a whole bit.

Chris: Reminds me of This Is How You Lose the Time War, different form of long distance communication. It’s all love letters, so they just send messages back and forth. Obviously there has to be some motivation for engaging in communication. Trying to tempt people over to the other side can work pretty well.

Maybe trying to unnerve the other person, if you have a villain who can go into your hero’s dreams, trying to disrupt them by giving them dreams that freak them out, for instance, might be something that you could do.

Oren: And we had also, I mentioned earlier, the possibility of a villain lieutenant with a POV, and this is my third method and that can work. It is usually better than giving the main villain a POV, but you still need to make sure that your secondary villain is actually doing stuff that is relevant to the heroes.

Chris: Not just cackling or watching the big bad cackle.

Bunny: [Chuckles]

Oren: It doesn’t really make any difference if your POV is a guard in the evil base versus the bad guy himself if all they’re doing is standing around. Good model for this is when you have the heroes who are running away, and there’s a lieutenant villain who’s chasing them at the behest of a big villain, because then you can do a cat and mouse scenario.

Everyone associates this with Zuko from Avatar, but that’s a TV show. So it operates under slightly different rules, but it works pretty well in prose too. Children of Blood and Bone did that and that part of it worked out. I liked it.

Bunny: as a random example that this just brought to mind. I’m pretty sure they do that in Tangled too, with the horse.

Chris: Yeah.

Bunny: Maximus the horse, trying to capture Flynn Rider at the behest of the villain.

Oren: It’s been so long since I’ve seen that movie.

Bunny: Me too. I don’t know where I pulled that from.

Oren: That’s a perfect example. And your secondary villain, who you very often are gonna have on a redemption arc. And if you’re not, then I would recommend some other character arc because if we’re gonna just be spending time in their POV, getting some kind of development for them is just gonna make that a more satisfying experience, even if that development is that they have a chance to turn good and don’t take it or something. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be redemption, but it should be something.

Chris: Maybe lieutenant just decides that they’re gonna quit the field and run away from the villain, but they’re not joining the good guys. They run off or something. Just because, again, if you’re in somebody’s viewpoint, you’re getting to know them and having some kind of conclusion or payoff for that person is a good idea as opposed to just casually discarding them.

Oren: If you’re really ambitious, you can have the secondary villain overthrow the main villain and become the Big Bad. That’s hard, because you need a way for that secondary villain to go from a lieutenant to the Big Bad level threat. You don’t want this to feel like the bad guys are now easier to beat. Cough. Cough. Kylo Ren. Cough. Cough.

Chris, Bunny: [Laugh]

Bunny: Yeah, I was waiting for that.

Oren: That’s an advanced level move, let me put it that way, but you can do it if you’re determined.

Chris: In most cases, the lesser villain is there to lose the initial fights so that the Big Bad is still threatening. So they have to have a different role if you want them to take over as a Big Bad.

Oren: The last method that I have is the old fashioned way, which is you just have the hero and the villain clash a lot, if not in direct personal combat, then indirectly through their armies or their ship or what have you. The big problem with this is that if the hero wins these fights, then your villain is basically done ’cause they have no threat anymore.

But if the villain wins them, it can be hard to justify why the story is still going because the villain has won all these fights. Are they not trying to get the hero? Are they not trying to accomplish things? This works best if the hero and villain are fighting over something that is tangible but not a toggle switch.

For example, the novel series Temeraire, the villain, Napoleon, is very present throughout the series, if not in person then commanding his armies that the protagonist is fighting, but they’re fighting over territory. So if Napoleon wins a battle, the story’s not over ’cause the heroes can retreat and regroup and try to do something else.

Chris: You can have a hero that has to be clever and get some victories, as far as just keeping all from being lost. The villain is mostly winning any direct conflicts they have. And again, this is not just conflicts where lives are at stakes, right? There could be anything that they’re struggling over. It could be social clout.

Oren: Why isn’t anyone liking my memes?

Bunny: I’ve got all these funny cat memes, but I want to throw cats over cliffs, so people aren’t going, “Ha ha.”

Oren: No, it’s okay. Bunny. You’ve had your redemption arc. Now you’ve adopted the cats. That’s how we ended this. ‘Cause you had a POV.

Bunny: Oh good.

Oren: That’s the rule. You had a POV. You need a redemption arc.

Bunny: [Laughs] I’m just petting them all without the evil cackling, my box of cats.

Oren: Alright, on that beautiful image, we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you enjoy this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. She’s the professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. [Outro Music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.