: Re: Non-cheap ways to make villains evil? Do you have any tried and true techniques to make villains of your stories truly hated by the audience? I mean, frequently it's "eh, sure, that's bad,

@Karen856

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I love villains, so this is difficult.

What I love about them is their brazen disregard for convention—moral, ethical, political, etc. They represent a freedom that the hero doesn't have. The hero is constrained by some rule or code while the villain runs free. This freedom allows the villain to evolve in ways that inspire our imagination. We wonder, how vile can he become?

By this logic, I would hate a villain that didn't acknowledge his egregious position, his freedom. What I mean is, I would hate a villain that believed that he was more moral (I'm only using moral as an example) than the hero. If this hyper-moral villain became so constrained by his morality that his actions became formulaic, I would hate him. He would have lost the potential to surprise me, to horrify me; he would shackle my imagination. I would wait for his death as a relief.

An example that comes to mind is Blake in the John Cheever story The Five-Forty-Eight. He has done something awful to someone and he is oblivious to it. He is confronted by the victim of his awful act, and he is remorseless, ignorant even, of his misdeeds. Because he does not embrace his awful deeds, he cannot step outside of conventional morality, run free, and scare me. He is simply fighting a moral battle that the reader believes he should lose.

Now that I think about it, O'brien in 1984 is a villain that I hate even more. He is claustrophobic, oppressive, and fearsome. He isn't imaginative at all. He is formulaic, and I can't help but hate the mental confinement. Hate becomes my only form of rebellion.

For me, the irony surrounding good villains is that I want them to meet their demise, but I don't want this to happen just after their villainy has been established. I want them to thrive and then fall.

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