: Re: How do you keep a villainous character from being offensive to a particular group? If the villain of your story is a member of a certain group, how do you keep the story from being offensive

Speaking as someone of German descent, no one wonders if you're going to offend modern day Germans by portraying the Nazis as the bad guys. Villainy has nothing to do with your veteran status or your skin color or your handicap sticker. In fact, there have been numerous villains who have been these things and still been great villains (Brigadier Gerneral Frank Hummel, from The Rock, Cotton Mouth from Luke Cage, Sir Leigh Teabing from The Da Vinci Code, respectively). Great villains are great because they are evil and want to do evil things. Sure, this isn't representative of all members of those statuses, and the vast majority aren't going to be offended because of the villains. Hell, Star Trek: Into Darkness caught flack from the Sikh community because the made the villain Kahn Noonien Singh a white man to avoid portraying a Sikh as a villain... without realizing that he was beloved by Sikhs because even though he was the bad guy, he was a great bad guy (even if he was portrayed by a wrong race back then).

This is one case where you probably are better off steering into the skid. If the villain is a great villain, most veterans won't care. After all, if you can't offend people with the VILLAIN, what's the point of having him in the first place.

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: Re: How do you keep a villainous character from being offensive to a particular group? If the villain of your story is a member of a certain group, how do you keep the story from being offensive

More posts by @LarsenBagley300

: How can I determine good comparative titles to include in my query letter? Typically, a writer includes one or two recent titles that are similar in some fashion to the story they are telling,

: How to break up dialog if some of the dialog is not in quotes? I have a technical question. In my story, I've several chunks of dialog where one character's response is a grunt or a groan

: Is it important to research the topic of your novel/story before writing it? Let's say you're writing a story about magic. Does it have to be based on real facts and real magic or can you

: What makes for a successful resurrection? If you've seen Avengers: Infinity War, you'll recall the line "No resurrections this time" being said in the scene just after the first (arguably second)

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