Why Villains Exist in Fiction

Villains exist in real life because, let's face it, SOMEONE has to be president.... But in fiction, why is your villain there? What is his function?

What makes your story interesting instead of a conflict or drama-free zone is that your hero (protagonist, main character) is in danger. The villain of your piece serves as a human (alien, robotic, other) personification of that danger.

In the Harry Potter series the relation is pretty direct. Hero Harry Potter is in constant peril because villain Lord Voldemort wants to kill him. A great part of the danger Harry was in came from just that situation--- he was in danger from Voldemort. In other cases he was in danger from followers of Lord Voldemort. In other cases the 'danger' came as a result of his status as a celebrity in the wizarding world--- the Boy Who Lived. But this celebrity status was a result of Voldemort having tried to kill him. Even the bad reputation that Harry got briefly when it became known he speaks Parseltongue (snake language) is a result of Voldemort's attack on Harry when he was a baby.

In most fiction the danger the hero faces is less obvious. In a romance, the 'danger' is that the heroine won't find her True Love, or that she won't win his or her attention or that he or she will marry someone else. In some stories the conflict is Man against Nature--- let's say a story about exploring a distant planet with a harsh environment.

Even in these cases, a villain can personify the danger. In a romance, the villain can be a woman who is also in love with the heroine's True Love and who is willing to go to great lengths to win him. It can also be the True Love's father who forbids the match--- or who needs his son to make a marriage to a rich heiress rather than the penniless governess heroine.

In a space-exploration story, the 'villain' can be some authority figure who wants to cut short the exploration against the hero's advice--- or one who insists on the exploration in spite of the dangers the hero informs him about. The 'villain' can also be a careless or inexperienced team member who is constantly doing things that endanger the hero.

Whether the villain is a fully evil dude out to get the hero, or just a guy doing his job, the villain must also have his good qualities if he is to be more than a cartoon villain. For example, Lord Voldemort had his background as a motherless illegitimate child--- which doesn't really go anywhere near explaining his extreme evil and self-destructive tendency to kill people, especially Muggles, just for fun.

A more realistic villain is the soap opera character Adam Chandler from All My Children. Over the many years of his tenure, Adam has amassed a long list of crimes and other evil actions. But he is also shown as a man who very much loves his twin brother Stuart, who cares for his children (though he drives them all to drink). This human touch accounts for the character's longevity. Soap opera characters who are pure over-the-top evil last only a year or two before someone murders them (and usually everyone in town's a suspect and the killer is often a sympathetic character who gets away with the crime.)

But I believe in old-fashioned storytelling in which the villain is villainous and the hero is relatively good--- or at least less evil than the villain. A lot of modern writers, perhaps to express their idea that there is no right or wrong anymore other than political incorrectness, have heroes who are thieves, con men, or even hit men. Villains, from this type of writer, might well be Christians as in the eyes of such people calling someone a Christian is the same as calling him a KKK member. You can see this from the character Stilson, in Stephen King's 'The Dead Zone', who starts out as a Bible salesman who kicks a dog to death.

But the problem of this approach I think is that you can lose your reader, as Stephen King lost me for all time with a minor villain character he created for his novel 'Cell', which is about how cell phones destroy humanity.

The hero and his companions, a Gay man and a teen girl, are making their way out of the destroyed city when they come across an old woman who wonders what these two men are doing with an unrelated young girl. But this evil woman turns out to be a *gasp* Christian--- a prolife Christian, in fact. The 'hero' slaps the woman and moves on as the Gay man explains his hatred for Christians based on the fact he had Christian family members.

The problem is that the United States (primary audience for Stephen King) is something like 80% Christian, so that large numbers of his readers can be expected to have known many Christians in person even if they are not personally Christian. So when THEY see an old woman going up to two strong young men in order to see if a young girl needs rescuing, they won't recast her as a villain just because she's a prolife Christian who is not politically correct about Gay people. They see her as a very brave woman who is risking her own life for the sake of a girl who might need her help.

Stephen King ruined the book 'Cell' for me, as well as ruining his first important Gay character, with this one slap, based on his misunderstanding of how the average person will react to this villain/hero divide. He could have saved the situation in a number of ways--- lightened the Christian identity of the villain, or allowed one of the main characters to be a stronger Christian. He could have made the villain physically stronger so that standing up to the hero wouldn't have been an act of courage, or perhaps made the hero and his Gay friend weaker or disabled. Or he could have given this villain a selfish motive for intervening on behalf of the girl--- for example, if this villain had been a straight man or a Gay woman with possible attraction for the girl.

The old fashioned hero who has an aversion to doing wrong, coupled with a villain who at least in some circumstances is willing to do wrong, is my idea of a writer's best friend. It's far easier to take your audience along for the ride with you and have them cheering and crying in the right places if you do this rather than if you insist on turning the world upside down ALL the time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~