Creating Realistic Monsters

Conceptually creating a convincing villain is actually terribly difficult if you want to do it right.   When you consider, foremost,  coming up with a strong enough motive to possibly justify said villain’s behavior.   Which, is not entirely the most difficult part of the process, but it’s close.   The most popular justification is the ‘one bad day’ scenario.    As is the case of many comic book heroes and villains, is that quite a few had one.   One moment in their lives that was so awful and terrible it bent and twisted them, one way or the other, into acts of extreme depravity or heroism.   Just a few examples.    Spiderman decided to use his powers to be a hero for good when his Uncle is gunned down in the streets after he (Spiderman) had a fight with him.   The Punisher is another great example.   Retired delta force officer, takes his wife and kids for a stroll in the park, and they all get gunned down in front of him, caught in some mobster’s crossfire.  Batman, for example, he too has one bad day, seeing his parents killed in front of him by a mugger.   These moments fundamentally change their lives, sending them off to be heroes.   The mentality being of course, that they cannot allow what happened to them to happen to anyone else.    Though, I feel I must clarify that I don’t technically view the Punisher as a hero per say, he just kills criminals.   I cannot really fault him for just killing them rather than simply capturing them and allowing them to get loose over and over again.   Which, is a fault of the character of Batman, who only seems to contain the damage his villains cause rather than put an end to it for good.   It’s arguable as to who’s methods are more effective, but not exactly the point of this entry.

The villains also have a similar origin pattern, often simply being a mirror version of their nemesis.   In this way, it makes their reason for fighting each other almost a co-dependent relationship.  The hero needs the villain to satisfy his urge to save the day and protect villain, and the villain needs the hero to give them something to fight against.    A great example of this would be Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, which depicts the Joker’s origins as similar to Batman’s.   One bad day is all it took, and his world was destroyed and he went insane, in a different way.   Or as The Joker himself comments in the comic, “You had a bad day once, am I right?… Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?”  In this intricate dynamic your villain and hero cannot really carry a story on their own and therefore the story becomes co-dependent on this element to always be present.   The villain acting and the hero reacting.

But that’s just the comics, but do not mistake that sentiment for me being dismissive, as I still actively read graphic novels.   Not so much the typical superhero fare anymore.  The problem as I see it with the ‘one bad day’ scenario is that it’s too clean, too easy to justify or explain.  It’s not realistic or, honestly, very believable.  Villains are not just the result of one terrible tragic moment, some villains are born twisted.   Some are slowly, and gradually, driven towards the inevitable event horizon of their own person mental apocalypses.  Some just make a string of increasingly amoral decisions based on morality or greed or patriotism until they have become crooked on the inside.  The real world equivalent of super villains, people like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and (to a lesser extent maybe) Osama Bin Ladin.   People like that aren’t just born from having their parents killed in front of them or their village tragically burnt to the ground.   They are also proof of one statement that I have heard, but cannot remember the source exactly, so allow me to paraphrase: “No villain written could be as bad as history’s worst.”   Which, I semi-agree with.   Who could match orchestrating the deaths of millions of people to a comic villain pouring some fear inducing powder into a cities water supply?  The problem I have always felt with villains I have seen in some stories is that they don’t feel realistic.

Once you’ve made the decision to cross the line and have the power to do so, there is little reason to hold back.   They don’t go far enough to feel like a villain, their plans in many cases are too localized and silly.    The most memorable villains are the ones with depth, who have done a lot of evil things, but most importantly, have compounded them over a period of time.   The ones that just ’snap’ and decide to be evil just seem… fake.   Like a hackneyed plot device that, in many ways, just detracts from the story.  What many forget is that their has to be a motive, someone just doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to kill all the jews or wipe people out of history or fly planes into buildings.   The Joker’s a another good example, he suffers from the ‘one bad day’ problem, or so it seems, but instead he was really on a downward spiral of failure and misfortune even before things came to a head and this happened…

Which, if I woke up looking like that, might possibly justify in my mind spending the next decade or so killing people with lethal ‘happy gas’ and overcharged joy buzzers.

That’s what you need in a villain,  the villain is the reason you follow a story, such in stories and in life, the villain is what defines the hero.   Not the reverse.   Which is also what makes them so much more interesting.   Interjecting a bit of cynicism into my line of thinking,  in life it seems, that people are often more so defined by what they fight against rather than what they stand for.   People don’t just crack after losing one thing, they crack under pressure, or when they see whatever it is they value slowly slipping from their grasp.    The ‘one bad day’ is, in reality, simply the day they realize just how far down the hole they’ve sank.   Without setting up a believable premise, you just end up with a lazily constructed and uninteresting monster.

Sometimes, especially when considering history, it’s not that villains go too far, it’s that they don’t go far enough, and that sometimes the good guy doesn’t save the day.   Or the confrontation is a lose/lose.  Such as in The Watchmen.   Sometimes, too, there is no justice, life goes on even after the worst of crimes.   If you don’t believe me in that regard consider the following statement, which I have made on occasion when speaking of history to people interesting in such things.

In my opinion, the holocaust or the Russian purges are not the worst crimes of the last century.   The worst crimes are the ones that no one thinks about, like how an entire country could allow themselves to sit by and even participate in killing millions of their neighbors and not rising up and stopping it.   People always place the blame on the person in charge, but what about the hundreds or dozens of lackeys and soldiers who knew what they were doing was wrong and out of fear and cowardice helped mad men carry out their plans?   Yet, that’s not exactly what I believe the worst offense was.   The worst offense was that after all he did to people in life, Stalin got to die an old man.  Maybe some crimes are too big for their to be a suitable punishment for them.

People like to see the villain lose, the good guy win and get the girl.   Another thing I’ve observed from studying villains in real life and in literature, movies, and comics, is that in many cases that does not happen in real life, whereas in literature, it happens all the time.   In reality, people leading violent lives on opposite sides of the spectrum, while they can relate to each other in what motivates them to a degree, probably don’t accept how the other reacts to the forces that pushed them down a particular path.  When forces like that meet, it doesn’t end with everything being right.  There will be blood, and someone will probably end up dead or find their ultimate victory to be bittersweet.

As in The Killing Joke, Batman goes to Arkham Asylum to speak with The Joker.   He realizes that, if they keep going they way they are, they will end up being forced into a fight to the death and he wants to prevent that.  Just read it, don’t bother expecting me to write crumby recap as an explanation of the plot.   Anyway, my point is  that at the end, he confronts The Joker after a long night and tries to reach out to him, but The Joker merely informs him that ‘it’s far too late for that.’   Then proceeds to tell him a joke:

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum… and one night, one night they decide they don’t like living in an asylum any more. They decide they’re going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moon light… stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend didn’t dare make the leap. Y’see… Y’see, he’s afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea… He says “Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!” B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says… He says “Wh-what do you think I am? Crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across!”

That says it all about the relationship of those two.  It also shows that once you’ve decided to go down a path it takes more than a last-minute appeal or a heartfelt speech to change your mind.   Once someone has become that corrupt, their is no way back out again.   Which always bothers me in some fare, especially anime, where the villain always realizes what a monster they’ve been and either joins the hero or just apologizes at the end.    A character isn’t just a plot device meant to fill a generic slot in some piss-poor story.   A character is something that is formed and molded over the years to be what they are now, and anyone who makes one that simply changes their whole perspective or views so easily is portraying things dishonestly, which is something I cannot abide.

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