# Every Good Book Needs a Villain



## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

Bound by flesh or threat, for a book to be a good book, does it need to have an elemet of peril?


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## Eric C (Aug 3, 2009)

Every good book needs conflict, whether external or internal, preferably both. Does conflict always require a villain? I don't think so. Tolstoy once said: "The best stories don't come from ‘good vs. bad’ but from ‘good vs. good.’ "


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

Ah tis a question of vantage point then? Like the War Tolstoy spoke of - 'good' really does depend on which side of those spiky bits of metal you're standing on 

Staying away from the no man's land of contrived metaphors, isn't at least some notion of villainy required, some stirring of negative emotion in the reader - rather than just simply conflict?


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## R. M. Reed (Nov 11, 2009)

There's "Man vs. Nature." Nature isn't a villain, really, but often threatens the survival of humans.

Also many villains, in stories and real life, think they are good. The conflict escalates a lot more when both sides think they're right.


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

I know it's a well thumbed cliche, but it's often remarked that 'the only difference between terrorists and patriots is victory and the passage of a few years'

Man Vs Nature sounds suspiciously like a Bear Grylls featurette - in which case I direct you to the notion that in this case, the action of drinking your own urine is the natural enemy (and remedy, miraculously)


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## Alpha72 (May 9, 2012)

I agree. Every good story needs a strong villain.

This is actually why I really disliked the recent Avengers movie. The villains were way too weak.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

I just read a good book about the life and works of author Will Jenkins (Murray Leinster). It didn't have a villain at all.   

Mike


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

Agreed Alpha, even if the villain is weak - there needs to be charisma at least... Surely..

Jimiked... Ha ha, OK - well I realised the biography rebuttal would surface at some point, people in the real world don't have Arch villains right? Maybe not arch villains, but certainly antagonists - the gate keepers of barriers which we must over come... OK they don't wear capes (most of them) and only occasionally talk with an affected camp German accent - but villains in a minor sense or even group sense - they often are... School yard bullies, tyrannical teachers, over officious admissions tutors, sociopath neighbours, psychopathic bosses, that leg of the table you repeatedly stub your already injured toe on, negligent health care professionals, abusive spouses, my 'friend' Dave, the remote with nonfunctional volume button, caravan holidays in Wales, the state, rival factions, traitors, whistle blowers, McDonalds staff that seem to be deaf to the words 'no pickles'... The list is endless - and populated by villains of every tier of evil - even if that evil is fulfilling their own obligatory prerogative of being counter to yours


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## Klip (Mar 7, 2011)

Alpha72 said:


> I agree. Every good story needs a strong villain.
> 
> This is actually why I really disliked the recent Avengers movie. The villains were way too weak.


Totally agree  Also kept thinking "but Loki is not like that AT ALL". Loki is actually one of the most fabulous mythical characters. In this movie he was just like a petulant teenager.


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## Katja (Jun 4, 2011)

It's hard to give enough conflict to keep me reading if there's no actual villain in the story. So I'd say yes — for it to be a good book, the villain has to be the type you love to hate, but also believable.


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## John Blackport (Jul 18, 2011)

You need an externalized goal to manifest.... a monster to be slain, an invasion to be turned back, a hurricane to be weathered, a disease to be cured.

Otherwise the whole story's just a bunch of _feelings._


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## Geemont (Nov 18, 2008)

I think a weak mindset wants a strong external villain.  It gives them a sense of purpose. The white hats vs black hats where good can have an battle with evil.  I've grown to dislike these kinds of stories; I find them mostly childish and jejune.  

Give me ambiguity, uncertainty, inner conflict.  Give me a Raskolnikov over a Harry Potter.  I want complex psychology before fast paced action.


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

Childish _AND_ jejune - a thesaurus perhaps listing in your top 10 too then. 'Weak' is a pretty strong condemnation for an opinion or assumption - especially when you justify it by saying that your higher ground, fit for judgement, is based on the internalisation of the exact same thing we have been discussing - a devil in the mind is still a devil, and just because it's external counterpart is more accessible - doesn't necessarily mean it's bought any more cheaply.


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## Geemont (Nov 18, 2008)

grudginglycurmudgeonly, maybe you should review this comment:



Alpha72 said:


> I agree. Every good story needs a strong villain.
> 
> This is actually why I really disliked the recent Avengers movie. The villains were way too weak.


The need for strong villains _is_ weakness--or laziness, if you prefer. I can't tell you how many times stories have been spoiled by making a villain artificially strong to with stand the onslaught of powerful characters. For example, a Marine platoon in the jungle encounters a monster, but the monster must have super powerful regeneration to withstand the hail of machine gun bullets and fragmentation grenades so it can come back to eat more soldiers chapter after chapter. It just becomes silly to have the monster survive all that damage--I say it's weak and lazy story telling by making the monster so strong. Better, have the characters be biologists without weapons, and the monster as mortal as any large animal.

The only real need for strong villains, as I see it, is for a flashy visual type of confrontation--like you'd see in a movie. I have not seen the Avengers, but the whole idea that your characters are so strong that you need _stronger_ is exactly my point of weak storytelling. The authors should never allowed themselves to be pushed into a corner whey feel the need to create such extraordinary characters. And it's not limited to fantasy or movies.

A few years ago I read a thriller were the protagonist was super smart and super sexy gal who had to catch a super smart and super rich serial killer who had super secret access to black-op technology. Bombs, guns, helicopters, night vision goggles, kidnappings, hacking CIA computers, and all sorts of stuff. O what a load of rubbish! Weakness personified. Compared to an Irish crime novel where the protagonist was just a copper trying to solve a murder committed 17 years ago where a pivotal scene was in a pub, getting pissed, knowing that one of the friends and family around the table is a killer. And the "villain" was just run-of-the-mill working class, but the reader understood the "need" to murder by the end of book because it was rooted to true psychology of the time and place. Now that's takes more strength to write, IMHO.

And "jejune" as been in my vocabulary since the early 90s.


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

I respect your right to have an HO, really I do - but you seem to be drawing some kind of inversely proportional: strength of villain to quality of book - wall chart, you make some fair points - and I concede that interesting stories can potentially be, on occasion, marred by the ludicrous.

That doesn't mean that a villain, or let's broaden it - an antagonistic force (describable as a villain or villainy), isn't crucial to making a story a, a good story. As I said in response to the comment you've quoted, a villain at least requires some form of charisma - so that despite his psychosis / twisted morality / large collection of cats - we can find some humanity in them, or identify with them even if just shamefully and on a very tenuous level. Look i draw the line at Giant alien transforming space robots too, it doesn't interest me, in fact I would much rather they replace the robots with bears wrapped in tin foil, but if you can show me a story with no villain - internal or external - that makes a good read, I'll spin on a dime, I'll be as vexed as hell but - ill eat humble pie and make a big semidigested pastry mess by falling on my sword

Congrats on the scrabble vocabulary, bet you're a blast at parties... What with all the intense moody literature you read and undisguised disdain you hold for those outside the Mensa quotient


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## Geemont (Nov 18, 2008)

grudginglycurmudgeonly said:


> That doesn't mean that a villain, or let's broaden it - an antagonistic force (describable as a villain or villainy), isn't crucial to making a story a, a good story. As I said in response to the comment you've quoted, a villain at least requires some form of charisma


Villains and conflict are different; broadening the definition is a tenuous approach. A villain can cause conflict, but conflict isn't necessarily a villain.

In fact, I would say, "villain" is a stereotype of antagonist which, though unwritten, probably has certain rules and formulas to follow. Not necessarily cackling and mustache twirling in glee as they plot evil deeds, but requiring tropes nonetheless. For example, James Bond movies have "villains" as driving force for the conflict, but natural disaster stories inherently don't have villains. A fully realized character with authentic thoughts, emotions, and yearning would cease to qualify as a villain.

You may be right that "villains" require charisma, but they also tend to be fanatics or sociopaths and over-the-top and, at least in my HO, a bit comical on occasion. Think Bond villains again. Perhaps that's good for some kinds of storytelling, but the great evils of society and history are, mostly, to crib from Hannah Arendt, committed by ordinary people who view their actions as normal--as per Adolf Eichmann. What she called the Banality of Evil.

And I hate Scrabble and don't attend parties.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Every good book needs an antagonist. That's not the same as a villain though.


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## Ergodic Mage (Jan 23, 2012)

_Rendezvous with Rama_ by Arthur C. Clarke as well as _Inherit the Stars_ and _The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_ by James P. Hogan are examples of great books without villains or antagonists.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Ergodic Mage said:


> _Rendezvous with Rama_ by Arthur C. Clarke as well as _Inherit the Stars_ and _The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_ by James P. Hogan are examples of great books without villains or antagonists.


And in _Rendezvous with Rama _ what do you think the ship is?

I would say you have too narrow a definition of antagonist.


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## Geemont (Nov 18, 2008)

Wikipedia says:



> A villain (also known in film and literature as the "antagonist," "bad guy", "black hat", or "heavy") is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters.... Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines villain as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot"





> An antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend. In other words, 'A person, or a group of people who oppose the main character, or the main characters. 'In the classic style of stories wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain/enemy, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively.





> In literature, conflict is the inherent incompatibility between the objectives of two or more characters or forces. By its nature, conflict is unstable. One side must always win and one side must always lose in the end. However, this instability is desirable because it helps hold a reader's interest in a story.


By these definitions, _Rendezvous with Rama_ has conflict, may have an antagonist depending on the broadness of interpretation, and no villain.

A Perfect Vacuum or One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem might count as books without villain, antagonist, or even conflict; they're:1) a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature and 2) fictional non-fiction essays. Truly original thinking.


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## Twofishes (May 30, 2012)

Kerouac's novels, is Neal Cassady an actual antagonist or is he partly an allegory for Kerouac's alcoholism? Or is Cassady the protagonist to Kerouac's own self loathing?

What I mean is, can any author write a villain without externalizing  their own inner conflict? Can conflict ever be anything more than a device to define the protagonist?


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Geemont said:


> Wikipedia says:
> 
> By these definitions, _Rendezvous with Rama_ has conflict, may have an antagonist depending on the broadness of interpretation, and no villain.
> 
> A Perfect Vacuum or One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem might count as books without villain, antagonist, or even conflict; they're:1) a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature and 2) fictional non-fiction essays. Truly original thinking.


There are many novels where the antagonist is not human._ Old Man and the Sea_ or McCarthy's _The Road_, for example.


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## purplepen79 (May 6, 2010)

I have a game I play when I watch movies--the more cardboard and over-the-top the movie villain is, the more often he or she pops back to life. No good psycho dies once . . . that would be a waste of a good psycho and a chance to terrorize the beleagured hero or heroine one last time . . . or ten last times, as is the case with some b-grade horror flicks. Gotta love how tough some villains are--they must have skin made of diamond-reinforced teflon.



Geemont said:


> The need for strong villains _is_ weakness--or laziness, if you prefer. I can't tell you how many times stories have been spoiled by making a villain artificially strong to with stand the onslaught of powerful characters. For example, a Marine platoon in the jungle encounters a monster, but the monster must have super powerful regeneration to withstand the hail of machine gun bullets and fragmentation grenades so it can come back to eat more soldiers chapter after chapter. It just becomes silly to have the monster survive all that damage--I say it's weak and lazy story telling by making the monster so strong. Better, have the characters be biologists without weapons, and the monster as mortal as any large animal.


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## purplepen79 (May 6, 2010)

Twofishes said:


> Kerouac's novels, is Neal Cassady an actual antagonist or is he partly an allegory for Kerouac's alcoholism? Or is Cassady the protagonist to Kerouac's own self loathing?
> 
> What I mean is, can any author write a villain without externalizing their own inner conflict? Can conflict ever be anything more than a device to define the protagonist?


I think it's impossible for an artist to be so objective that he or she doesn't externalize some inner conflict in his/her work. In fact, a novel without some kind of externalized conflict on the part of the author would likely lack passion and emotional engagement, a key element for me when I read. And I think most villians, as well as most heroes, represent important archetypes in the psychology of the author. I even took to calling fantasy "archetypal memoir" at one point . . .


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## smallblondehippy (Jan 20, 2012)

What if the main character is hero _and_ villain? Anyone read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? All the way through I couldn't decide whether this guy was a hero or a villain. A bit of both I think, which is what makes characters interesting.


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## henryandhenrybooks (Sep 6, 2011)

Depending on the genre...
But every suspense, thriller, mystery needs a villain.
A book is only as good as it's bad villain.
In my opinion.


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## QuantumIguana (Dec 29, 2010)

There's nothing wrong with the monster that the heroes can't stop, it happens all the time. Bows and arrows vs. tanks, for example. There are often encounters in which the weapons you have are useless against the enemy. Your choice then is to lose or adapt.

I think the trend to have the hero little different than the villain is getting a bit trite. People aren't Dudley DooRight and Snidely Whiplash, but there really are some pretty awful people out there. And the heroes have flaws, but they seldom rise to the level of being little better than the villain.

There doesn't have to be a villain, all that is needed is some obstable. Planes, Trains and Automobiles comes to mind, it's about a man trying to get home. There's no villain, just obstacles in the way of getting home. That's just one example, that theme has been used pretty often. You can have a story without conflict, but I would say that the conflict is implied by its absense. A feel-good story about Christmas at Grandma's house might feel good when you can't have that. The implied conflict is between the ideal and what you actually have.

Sometimes the conflict is a choice. In a coming of age story, a character might have to make choices. Neither is bad, but the choices will determine how their life turnds out.


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## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

I agree that every book needs a conflict.  If you really did try to do a book about a person's actual daily life, it would be about the most tedious thing you could imagine with pages and pages of sitting there doing very little.  Your main character should have some kind of conflict to overcome and emerge either better or worse at the end.


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## Ergodic Mage (Jan 23, 2012)

JRTomlin said:


> And in _Rendezvous with Rama _ what do you think the ship is?


Rama is the challenge which is not the same thing as the antagonist. It may have been a while since I read the series (the other books do have antagonists) but there was no place in the book where Rama opposed the crew of the Newton(?).
The conflict arises from the challenge of learning about Rama not from the ship itself.

The same goes for _Inherit the Stars_, the conflict is the MC and others learning about Charlie and his history. Charlie does not oppose them (he is as helpful as any 50,000 year old mummy can be) so he also is not an antagonist. Ditto with _The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_.

I am familiar with the notion of Nature being interpreted as an antagonist, but for me Nature (like Rama and Charlie's history) does not care if the challenge is overcome or not.


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## Simon Haynes (Mar 14, 2011)

I like books where you could rewrite the thing from the antagonist's POV and it would still work just fine. This tends to filter out evil baddies and cartoon villains who are mad n bad for the sake of it. It also throws a different light on the protagonist - especially his or her flaws.


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## Kenton Crowther (Jan 5, 2012)

A dastardly villain is great--but the best is the one with a bit of charm and panache--like Rupert of Hentzau in 'The Prisoner of Zenda'. The actor Gerald Mohr (who played Philip Marlowe on radio and numerous villains in Westerns) said you should always leave a little bit of likeability in the portrayal of a 'black hat'. Gives depth, I suppose.


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## QuantumIguana (Dec 29, 2010)

Sometimes you really can turn things around and have a good story. Look at the fights that kings have had. The villainous usurper is only held to be a villain because he lost, and the winner wrote the story. But when the usurper wins, then the former king is held to be the villain. For the averge peasant, it's pretty much the same, life's going to go on much as it always has, the peasants just with all the fighting would end.

Other times, it really isn't reversible, there really are some awful people out there.


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## purplepen79 (May 6, 2010)

QuantumIguana said:


> Other times, it really isn't reversible, there really are some awful people out there.


You can say that again--to go off on a non-fiction tangent and real-life villains, I'm reading Massie's incredible Nicholas and Alexandra and can hardly bear it, especially coming on the heels of reading The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA about the short and tragic life of Louis the 17th of France, the worst account of child abuse and murder I've ever read.

Rasputin: fascinating, complex, and evil, utterly evil. And Robespierre--I believe he was possessed by a spirit of wrath that turned on him in the end. I'm all for shades of gray and flawed heroes, but I don't like books where every villain has a softer side and a sympathetic motivation. There is evil in this world, and sometimes it walks around on two feet and looks and sounds perfectly reasonable. Check out Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door sometime--it's chilling.


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## grudginglycurmudgeonly (Jun 9, 2012)

Geemont - you passed the test - you can be my friend... 

The dictionary definitions always come out when a debate gets tired: Villains, villainy, antagonists, conflict - whether justified by democracy or merit, it doesn't matter to me, meaning is fluid. Words are awkward fits to the forms they try to represent, your understanding may be different to my understanding or to every one of the last 150 editions of the Oxford English dictionary. The idea of Correct useage is entirely relative to time and context, and therefore far from universal.  

I still can't believe nobody has mentioned the Nazis yet, that's normally the next step. Nazis. There you are, I've said it. Hitler used words..

I've always been interested in the idea of a book where 'hero' and 'villain' is entirely personal choice, where you pick a side and see how it turns out. 

I don't know if it's being British, having been brought up on the punch and Judy soap opera of domestic violence  and possessing an accent that is only one crack of thunder away from that of a holywood masterclass in cad, but I find well written villains intoxicating - if they can seduce me with charisma or cause, I will always cheer them on. And Ive been that way since childhood - every time Jerry dropped an anvil on Tom's head, and Tom staggered out from under it, facial features contorted into the shape of the blunt instrument that's just struck him, a flotilla of birds circling his head, I would feel his pain. I longed for the day Tom finally managed to catch the sadistic little snake and shoved him in to a blender, smug grin first.


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## Klip (Mar 7, 2011)

grudginglycurmudgeonly said:


> I still can't believe nobody has mentioned the Nazis yet, that's normally the next step. Nazis. There you are, I've said it. Hitler used words..


Have you watched "The Wire" ? The series? You might like it... very much like your description.


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## Geemont (Nov 18, 2008)

grudginglycurmudgeonly said:


> I've always been interested in the idea of a book where 'hero' and 'villain' is entirely personal choice, where you pick a side and see how it turns out.


Might I suggest:



The author presents each side on the Battle of Gettysburg as honorable gentlemen fighting for the cause they believe in. Now hardcore Southerns will still view the Northerners as "villains" but that's a cultural thing.


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