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My bad guy is very very very complicated.
My entire story exists because for thousands of years (no one knows why) regular people from everyday life have been showing up in a magical forest filled with elves, Cyclopes, giants, dragons, gryphons, and humongous forest creatures.
But there was a first.
This is the villain.
When she, Hylla, appeared in the forest, all the elves and other creatures had no idea what to make of her. They didn’t know if she was a threat.
So to determine this, the leader of the elves challenged her to a duel. If she wins, she gets to live among them. If she loses, she loses her soul. In the Forest, EVERYTHING has a soul. And everything dies.
Hylla losses the duel, has her soul taken, and put into a pearl neckless. Because everything that has a soul dies, everything that doesn’t LIVES. the people of the forest didn’t know this. But now it was too late.
In pure rage, Hylla kills and destroys whatever she pleases. No one can stop her.
Eventually, she kills the elf that took her soul under what would be known as hope bridge, the bridge that goes across the eternal river, which goes around the entire planet and splits the forest in two.
With his dying breath, the elf leader speaks a prophecy that tells of a warrior with a blade of bone, who comes from a foreign land and will finally put an end to Hylla’s reign. She now calls herself the huntress.
Only the huntress knows of this prophecy, so she kills all of the humans who show up in the forest.
This is simply the way things are.
All of the people in the forest have lost hope.
Now here’s the problem with my bad guys backstory.
She WANTS her soul back. But she DOESN'T want to die. When she gets her soul back, she becomes mortal again, so she has two desires that oppose each other.
If she doesn’t want her soul back, then she will have no reason to go around killing people, therefore she wouldn’t be the bad guy.
If she wants to die, then she would want her soul back, and then she wouldn’t kill all the humans because she wants them to kill her. So she also wouldn’t be the bad guy.
How do I fix this problem. I have to cut out one of her desires to make her have a pure motive, but whichever one I take out makes her not the bad guy.
I’m really really stuck on this one.
(4)More posts by @Kaufman555
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What if getting her soul back is actually the way to SAVE her life?
So the elf leader said she would be killed by a warrior with a bone sword. So what? How many times was that guy right about anything since she's met him? 0?
Still... the thought that maybe this once what he said might not have been completely random garbage wouldn't leave her alone. So while killing every human she encountered - just to be safe - she spent quite some time hunting down survivors of his tribe to get information from them. Why did he say what he said? Did he know something she didn't?
And finally, she found out that it wasn't his own prophecy, but that he found... idk... maybe some ancient text that said something along the lines. But not exactly the way he said it. In fact, while she understood why he thought it was talking about her, that wasn't necessarily the truth. It was talking about the soulless huntress. Which clearly sounded like her, but if she managed to get her soul back that would not be her anymore. So all she had to do was get her soul back before the warrior with the bone blade appeared - forcing her to continue killing all humans on sight while searching for her soul.
Everyone is always in conflict, and everyone stands at the precipice of fulfilled wishes and realizable dreams, only to step away from the edge.
She wants to never die. She already has this with her soul being protected in the necklace. There must be some benefit, some pleasure, some power that comes from living united with one's soul. This benefit can grow to motivate all types of "magical thinking" for how she might imagine she can have both immortality and live.
It could be simple, like without a soul you can't enjoy food, or music, or sex. Any of these desires, and gold-plated memories from her past, may bend her toward a path of mortality. Memories of rotten food, out of tune music, or disgusting lovers push her back toward immortality.
Eventually a human who isn't human (a halfbreed, chimera, gollum, or robot) wins her heart through some insightful cooking, singing a haunting love ballad, and giving her (perhaps unbeknownst to either of them) the necklace he found attractive and bought from the bearer. They start playing sexual dominance games involving bondage and safe (not steel) weapons.
Then cometh the end.
I went too far with one of many resolutions, but the balanced conflict is there, intrinsic in the loss of soul but not volitional existance.
Turn it on It's head:
Villains SHOULD be conflicted creatures. No soul = no mercy. The prophecy is ambiguous enough that it may not mean she dies - only that her reign ends (and a new one begins). A human may be the only one who can handle the necklace in a critical way, so only a human can give it back to her without the soul going back into her. Or perhaps someone gives her their soul, and takes on hers for themselves - thus neither has their own soul, and both live forever (this works well with a romantic end-game). She doesn't fully know/understand this, so she kills to preserve her half-existence-but she has doubts about her interpretation, and waffles in her actions.Deep down, part of her questions the rightness of what she's doing, and wants an end. Once the necklace is returned to her, she has her soul but not in her.
She perhaps becomes an immortal queen instead of a brutal tyrant once she can again experience normal human emotions. She is a tragic but redeemed figure, and victory is obtained not in her defeat but in her being liberated. Hate loses and forgiveness wins. When the characters pursue her defeat they are acting soulless and when they pity her and try to figure out how to be merciful, they show soul. The harder they fight her, the stronger she becomes, and vice versa.
When a character is a tad insane and want it all they can only do one thing, find a loophole. A story I heard before was about a vampire who wanted to become mortal again but was afraid to die. So she eventually found a loophole by tethering her life to another immortal creature and sealing it away, making her an immortal human.
Seeing you work in a realm of magic, and there is a prophecy you could deal with the prophecy that is said to kill her would also be able to grant her wish. I once read a story in which a demon (who was peddling souls) explain that prophecies are contracts. They only come true if certain parties uphold their end of the " deal" and that as long that hasn't happened yet the deal could be interpreted in different way and therefor exploited for personal gain.
As you said a blade of bone is required for her to be killed, but if you can also make it so that the blade is the only thing that can grant her immortality while retaining her soul or something like that, the huntress would have motivation to let part of the prophecy play out, and if it doesn't go according to her plan, kill the human and wait for the next one.
This would create a dynamic between the antagonist and the protagonist seeing the antagonist needs the protagonist to survive until a certain part is played, but before it is completed.
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