You might think the answer is obvious: just have your villain be clean shaven! Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Villains need coherent motivations like anyone else, and they need aesthetics that won’t seem silly to the audience. How do you do that without leaving the villain drab and boring, or making them into the latest bad guy who is actually right but kills people so you won’t notice? Fortunately, that’s our topic for the week!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And?
Oren: Oren.
Chris: [evil voice] Mwahaha! I have tied Oren to the train tracks. Bunny, you must choose whether to save him, or your beloved drawing pad, which I’m dangling over a flame.
Bunny: No!
Oren: Yeah, you should probably go for the drawing pad, honestly. That’s pretty expensive.
Chris: That’s pretty expensive. I’m sorry, Oren. You might feel a slight sting.
Oren: Plus, the trains in America are really slow. You have time to go get the drawing and come back. It’s fine.
Bunny: How am I supposed to complete my next comic, Chris? [laughter]
Chris: Yes, it’s all part of my master plan to destroy Oren, or alternately, your drawing pad. Either one. Devious. Minions! Go forth! [evil voice] Or die. [laughter] Got it! So this time we’re talking about how to avoid mustache twirling villains.
Oren: There’s actually a cheat code for that. You just make them clean-shaven, and you’re done.
Chris: Yeah. Wow.
Oren: I didn’t make this up, because Chris has a post on avoiding mustache twirling villains, and this came up in a Reddit argument where somebody was trolling someone by pretending to not know what mustache twirling was, and claiming that if somebody didn’t have a mustache, they couldn’t be a mustache twirler. And so this person was like, you’re obviously trolling me, here’s a post that explains what that means, good day.
Bunny: Wow, I didn’t realize the fix was so easy. I need to stop writing villains with facial hair.
Oren: Yeah, it’s solved. The character in question was Vadic from Picard season three, who, I don’t know if I’d qualify her as a mustache twirler. She definitely chews the scenery a lot.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that sentiment. I think she’s a little too far. So what are we talking about? What is a mustache twirler? Obviously not literally a villain twirling their mustache, although they have! That’s what it’s based on. Essentially any villain that’s one note or flat, and what happens is they tend to come off as comical rather than scary, just because they’re so over the top and kind of cartoonish feeling. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’re boring, because they only have one characteristic and don’t have anything interesting about them generally.
Oren: In the wild, I would say most authors don’t set out to write this. But the most common way I’ve seen it happen is that they set out to write either the Joker or Darth Vader, and don’t have an understanding of the very specific circumstances under which those two villains actually worked, and so they put them in the wrong story and they become mustache twirlers.
Chris: Yeah. When people are trying to write villains, they don’t think of their villains like normal characters, and so their villains just do things because they’re villainous and those are villainous things to do, not because they have the same reasoning another character would have to take actions.
Bunny: Capital V Villain.
Chris: I think another issue is that villains often have a smaller part in the story, which just doesn’t encourage depth, doesn’t encourage a lot of character development. But yeah, a lot of times the storyteller is trying to copy a big bad that they’ve seen in other stories, and they don’t know what they need to do to make that villain menacing. And this is a really common problem. We see it in manuscripts all the time. It’s the most common problem villains have in manuscripts. It might be the most common problem villains have in general.
Oren: Yeah, although nowadays we’re going in the other direction of the villain who totally has a point and is super sympathetic, but is still evil for reasons.
Bunny: Gotta punch them. Gotta punch their bad villainous self and just leave the point dangling.
Oren: Look, they might have a good point, and then they might blow up a room full of civilians for kind of no reason. Who knows? It’s impossible to say.
Chris: Look, we want to punch people. That’s the most important thing, that there are people to punch. If the villain is not somehow really bad, how do we get our punchies in?
Bunny: Look, gotta blow up a room full of civilians, or else how do we solve… climate change? Please applaud my messaging.
Oren: It’s really the only way. But that doesn’t tend to be a big problem in the manuscripts I edit. That’s a problem that, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s just a Hollywood thing or not, but I very rarely have picked up a client manuscript and been like, the problem here is that you’re trying to make your villain have a point but also be evil.
Bunny: I think that Hollywood has noticed that people praise villains that are more than mustache twirlers, so it’s what do we do with that without working too hard? People like messaging, right? They like it when stories say something. Let’s have the villain say something. Then we can punch him.
Chris: I’ve also seen writing advice where to try to make it more interesting, instead of looking for issues that are naturally nuanced, they just say, oh, take a black and white situation, and now graywash it. What if we have an issue that’s clean cut where somebody is trying to save the children and the other person’s not, but then it turns out the person trying to save the children only wants to sacrifice them? Or something like that. That’s like the mentality, and if you apply that to real world issues, it gets very messy.
Bunny: At best it gets very weird.
Chris: But a mustache twirler happens when the storyteller is not trying to do that. They’re not trying to have it be gray generally. Usually they’re looking for a much more clear cut villain, and they end up making a villain that is very flat.
Oren: Yeah. One of the main causes that I’ve seen is simply that a lot of spec fic stories have end of the world level stakes, and it’s challenging to create a villain who would realistically want the world to end, because they live there too. And so that becomes a bit of an issue. You can do it, you can make reasons why a villain would want the world to end, but a lot of authors struggle with that, and so they just end up with a villain who’s like, I just want to watch the world burn, man. Because I’ve also seen The Dark Knight.
Chris: So how do you know if you’ve written a mustache twirler? Honestly, if you’re not deliberately trying to make your villain sympathetic or well-rounded or not a mustache twirler, there’s a good chance your villain is a mustache twirler. People just end up making them by copying famous evil villains.
But if you want to know, okay, what traits does a mustache twirler typically have? Okay, so cackling, threatening everyone around them, playing with weapons, that would be a typical villain type, but it could be something else. For instance, maybe your villain is just really snobby, and is just always snobby, and every sentence they say is another opportunity to be snobby. Or they’re cold and they constantly make cutting remarks, and that’s just like their entire personality. Take any trait that we would associate with an asshole, or a villain, or somebody that we’re likely to make into a villain, and just have them do that and not really have any other traits that are opposing that in some way, and you’ll probably have a mustache twirler.
Oren: Yeah, the weapon playing with one is funny because I see that a lot in client manuscripts and even in some published stories, but it’s not super common in movies in my experience, which is usually where a lot of these authors are getting their bad habits from. So, I don’t know where that one came from. That just pops up a lot, the bad guy who’s so cool because he’s playing with a knife, and he’s doing knife knuckles or whatever.
Chris: Gotta throw some darts, maybe? Throw some darts at the hero’s face on the dartboard?
Oren: Yeah, that’s another common one. Various unsafe gun handling practices.
Chris: To kill humans… for reasons. Humans just have too much spunk. You can’t let them run free or they’ll overthrow your empire because of all the spunk that they have. [Chris laughs] Their free spirit is unlike any other alien race in the galaxy.
Bunny: Exactly, they’re too threatening because they’re so cool. Now, there’s one Mystery Science Theater movie, I’m forgetting the name of it right now. Prince of Space. That’s the name of it. But the villain is Kronar. His opponent is Starman, who is also an alien, but the conflict takes place on Earth for some reason. And Starman is just a man in a really dorky costume. I hope I’m remembering this one right. It’s because his spaceships are, like, gas powered?
Chris: He wants our oil?
Bunny: Yeah, I think he wants our oil or he wants our technology. Maybe in this humanity has just started developing a warp drive or something? And he’s like, I’m so tired of relying on my gas powered spaceships, which take forever to go across the galaxy.
But I bring up Kronar because I feel like he’s the archetypal mustache twirler. Like he’s got this long pointy chicken nose, and a mustache, and he’s got an evil laugh. He goes, let me see if I can do it: Hengh. Hengh. Hengh. He does it like that. And yeah, I don’t know. When I think of mustache twirlers, I think not of manuscripts, but of Kronar. And I’d recommend if anyone’s is my villain a mustache twirler, if they resemble Kronar at all. Yes, they are. They are a mustache twirler. Do the Kronar test.
Oren: But in Kronar’s defense, he at least has a motivation. He has a thing that he wants that will personally benefit him, which I’ll admit a lot of mustache twirling villains I read in manuscripts don’t. So why are they doing this? I don’t know. Because they hate joy or something. That’s where the Joker and Darth Vader come into it, because those characters, often it’s hard to really say that they have any particular motivation for doing what they’re doing. They’re just evil. But they have other aspects – mostly they have really high novelty that generally these mustache twirling villains don’t have.
Chris: It also does matter that they are movie villains.
Oren: Comic villains in the Joker’s case, but yeah.
Chris: Because if you have visuals, then the aesthetics mean more, and they make a bigger impression. And both Joker and Darth Vader really have aesthetics that stand out. Then when you have an actor and I mean, to some extent an illustrator too, but I think actors especially, are very good at taking their lines, like an unremarkable villain line, and rounding it out and making it feel a lot more realistic. When you have just the text written on the page, you have to add more nuance to it to make it work and make it feel realistic, because you don’t have somebody who can play against it and round it out. I do run into a lot of writers who want to copy Darth Vader. And just the first note is that he is a movie villain, not a book villain. And so his outfit just wouldn’t have the same impression if it were in a book. There are some famous villains from books that are like Darth Vader, but they don’t really enter the story that much, like Sauron or in the Mistborn series, the Lord Ruler is like this too.
Oren: Okay, so Mistborn books have a lot to recommend them. But honestly, the Lord Ruler is not great as a villain. He’s very average. He’s a generic guy. He has one interesting thing going for him, spoilers: which is that you think that maybe he was the former Chosen One and that the Chosen One turned evil. And that’s neat. That’s a cool concept. But that turns out not to be true. He actually killed the Chosen One and subverted destiny.
Chris: Yeah, it’s weird to have a twist that makes the story less interesting rather than more.
Oren: Yeah, so he’s basically just a less interesting Sauron. Because Sauron is at least serious and almost more like an Elder God kind of villain. Whereas the Lord Ruler is just a guy.
Chris: Well, like Sauron, Lord Ruler is not really in the scenes. He’s just built up like Sauron is. And Sauron, you don’t even really see him at all. He speaks in like one scene -that should have been taken out, because it does not make him sound impressive.
Oren: Excuse me, Chris, have you forgotten recursive Sauron from the Hobbit trilogy? We see Sauron all the time. We see him so many times.
Chris: Oh, man. If anybody’s not familiar with recursive Sauron, it’s the funniest thing. It’s one sign that the Hobbit movies are bad. I think it’s the second Hobbit movie. I just remember seeing this in the theater and being like, really? They’re doing this? Where you stare at the eye of Sauron, and it shows a silhouette of Sauron as the pupil of the eye. And then it expands. And there’s another one. So it expands till the pupil takes up the screen. And then there’s a new iris. And then it just keeps going. It was a recursive Sauron over and over again. It’s like somebody thought this would be a good effect for the movie.
Bunny: That’s very, very Microsoft Paint. [Chris laughs]
Chris: But in any case, that’s part of the issue. Is that when you have a villain that’s flat, that’s just pure evil, sometimes as soon as they show up and you start depicting them, they come off really flat and looking bad.
Bunny: Yeah, I will say just to add on to the villainous aesthetics thing. That can be used to make them look cool, as in the case of Darth Vader. But it’s also really easy for that to tip over into just looking goofy again, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Lots of pointy angles, or like Jafar, reds, billowing capes, booming voices, signature laughs. I’d also say that in regards to why these mustache twirlers are just uninteresting and not very good. Another reason for that is if you do want to make your villain something other than Mysterious Sauron or Darth Vader, there’s just not that many ways for them to engage with the hero in an emotional sense or in a non-cliché sense, because they’re all evil all the time and will probably just cackle at the hero.
Chris: It’s gonna be hard to have a conversation.
Bunny: Yeah, again, look at Prince of Space, which I just figured out that I was getting the villain’s name wrong. It’s Krankor, not Kronar. Krankor, just look at Krankor and don’t do that.
Chris: Kronar would have been better, honestly. That would have been a better villain name.
Oren: Yeah, Krankor sounds like he’s cranky.
Bunny: He is cranky. His costume looks very uncomfortable.
Oren: Truth in advertising, then.
Bunny: [imitating Krankor’s laugh] Ehh, ehh, ehh.
Oren: And there’s definitely also a question of shifting tastes. Because these things come and go, but I feel like my impression is that looking at books that are coming out now, the general taste is that villains who wear classic red and black with sharp costumes are considered cheesy to the point where it’s sometimes fun for the hero to wear those things to be like, aha, I’m the classic villain, but I only do good things. Whereas if the actual villain does it, then they really need something to make that new and fresh or it’s just gonna feel boring. It’s, oh yeah, hey look, the villain dressed as a villain, everybody. Give him a pat on the back for figuring that out.
Chris: I do think that in books, the aesthetics, again, they don’t matter as much, so I don’t think you’re gonna have a villain who’s gonna seem as comical because they have a swashy red or black cape. But I do think that if you want to get something from it, you need to make it a little bit more unique. I suppose if you had an urban fantasy setting, or a setting with really high realism, and the villain walked in with a swashy cape and it just felt very out of place in the setting maybe, but usually it’s more about you need to have some level of novelty.
Oren: And when I think of really good book villains, like the few I can think of that actually have an impression and stay with you for reasons other than them being bad, you’ve either got your Elder Gods style villains like Sauron, or you have villains who your hero can talk to, because you need that to build attachment to the villain. You need to be able to talk to them, otherwise there’s just nothing interesting going on in scenes where they’re in. And even if that conversation is hostile in some way, it’s still a conversation. There’s still something that they have to say to each other than, I’ll stop you, villain.
Chris: [dramatically] No, you won’t.
Oren: I think the most successful example of that is Napoleon from the Temeraire books, because he’s the villain, Mr. Actual Napoleon, and he’s just a guy the hero can talk to. They have a lot in common, they’re on opposite sides. He actually has a slight problem of being a little too reasonable, and at some points you have to ask, why haven’t the good guys switched sides to work with Napoleon? And I think Novik at some point realized that, because she reminded us that Napoleon reinstated slavery in the French Empire, so he wasn’t actually a super nice guy.
Bunny: No, it’s a rather rude thing to do.
Oren: But if you didn’t know that, there are a number of books before she reminds us of that, where you could very easily be forgiven for wondering why the heroes aren’t just working for the French now.
Bunny: Another villain that I think really does it well, and I don’t know if either of you have read this book, but this is Wildwood by Colin Meloy. The first book’s villain is the Dowager Governess, who in the setting, there’s three locations mainly, and so she used to be the governess of this town. She was married to the governor and they had a child who died, and then she tried to use dark magic to bring him back, and people did not like that, so they cast her into the woods. And then they all think she’s dead.
But what happens is that one of the protagonists of the book, Curtis, encounters her before we know she’s evil, and she’s really charismatic and kind, and she’s a capable, really charming political leader. She’s got a whole army of coyotes, and you see how she’s gathered this army is because she’s been strategic and mobilized this scattered, basically diaspora, the society of coyotes, which are looked down on and been like, hey. I can give you glory, and I’m going to treat you with respect, where a lot of other people haven’t. So you can see why she’s a formidable opponent, and also when Curtis is on her side, she can be genuinely kind, but very pragmatic.
And it’s impressive how sympathetic, and not even necessarily sympathetic, it’s just how much we enjoy interactions with her, because they have so much nuance, even when the end goal of her plan is the ritual sacrifice of a child. It’s literally the killing babies thing that we say when we’re talking about villains being over the top, but Wildwood manages to make it work, I think in large part because we do have so much contact with this villain before we realize that she’s a villain.
Oren: Yeah, although I might be concerned about authors trying to imitate that, because that sounds like it could very easily become another example of the villain who’s the leader of the marginalized group, which is a bit overplayed these days.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. I think it also helps that when it comes to the coyotes, we have an understanding of why she’s able to lead them, but then we have individual coyote characters who aren’t just the bad guys that get shot at and die. There’s a- he’s still, in the scheme of things, a minor character, but Dimitri the coyote is one who defects, and we see more of them than your average mooks. But yeah, I think it helps that the book doesn’t really focus on whether the coyotes are oppressed, or whether they’re just a scattered subgroup that needs a collective identity, and she gives that to them. I don’t know, for me I just see that it helps because we see why she works. That she is cunning and smart and able to mobilize people, and we see why people would agree with her.
Chris: I do think it’s worth asking, though, if somebody really wants a Sauron, because some people do. They’re very inspired by that archetype, and that’s what they want to write. What can we do to make the super evil villain come across a little less moustache-twirly? I would say that mostly you just have to tone them down a little bit from what you’re probably thinking of, and round them out. Making them polite and personable, because that’s one thing that Bunny just mentioned that made this villain so striking, is that she was really charismatic. And that’s one thing that is really missing from a lot of villains that come off as too moustache-twirly, is just making them polite can make such a huge difference. It really can.
Bunny: Why would people want to hang out around this person? What makes them compelling?
Chris: If you’re thinking about it strategically, again, they have every reason to want to charm other people. It’s just one other form of power. So that definitely helps, but mostly you just have to make their mannerisms less villain-like and more person-like, including some positives, usually.
Bunny: I also want to say that when you’re thinking about including motivations, it also helps if their motivation isn’t just power, because that’s vague. I think it would help to be like, what do they want to do with the power? Or for what reason? Because I feel like in a lot of cases, we have a villain that’s just, they want to take over the realm. They want more power. And I think that’s been done so many times that it’s hard to make that not moustache-twirling if it’s devoid of anything else.
Chris: I would add some kind of political philosophy to that, maybe. I think you could still have them be pretty evil, but have something that they want to do with the realm, for instance.
Oren: Yeah, and at that point, you can tie it into real-world motivations, right? It can be, they want to take over the realm because they want to enrich their own country, right? Nationalism, everyone loves it. They want to take over the realm because they hate taxes, and they don’t like having to pay taxes, and the democracy keeps putting taxes on them. None of that. We’re going to get rid of that. I don’t like taxes for me. Again, very easy to understand motivation. Usually power is a means to an end, not an end in itself, unless you’re doing some 1984 stuff.
Chris: And then it’s worth thinking about, if you want your villain to threaten people or lash out, it’s not that you can’t do that. You just have to think a little more critically about how it’s going to actually enhance their threat level, rather than just come off as over-the-top. For one thing, if they’re just harming people who are obviously less powerful than them, like their own minions, which just reduces their own assets and makes them feel out of control, which is the opposite of what you want, or just helpless victims, that doesn’t make them seem any more impressive, because that was easy.
If they’re going to be going and just killing things, you should instead show them killing something that it actually takes a lot of power and skill to kill. So that actually shows off their prowess, as opposed to just puppies or whatever. Usually that’s because the biggest question that’s holding their threat back is whether they are able to achieve their dastardly goals, not whether they have dastardly goals. Usually it’s pretty easy to establish that they’re going to do something bad, so the fact that they are going to harm is not in question, and therefore killing puppies doesn’t really change anything. It’s just over-the-top.
Bunny: Yeah, I think also people want to show that their villain is cruel, and there are ways to do that can A, show that they’re cruel, but B, also not show them being just cruel. You can show both that they’re cruel and that they’re strategic by having them be cruel in places where it gives them an advantage. And it doesn’t give you an advantage to, I don’t know, torture the lackey who failed to bring them the jewel or something like that. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if you can show them being cruel in a way that furthers their own goals and isn’t excessive, I think that would work a lot better.
Chris: And then the other thing you can keep in mind, if the question is not whether they can do bad things anymore, but whether they will, which only happens in narrow circumstances such as if your hero is a prisoner, and you have this prison overseer or guard, right? At that point, the hero is at their mercy, and the question is whether they will hurt them. At that point, it makes a little bit more sense for them to lash out, because that shows that the hero is actually in more danger. Whereas in a normal situation, it doesn’t.
Oren: One thing that I think is useful to think about, because we want our villains to act menacing sometimes, right? Like a friendly villain is good, I am a fan of that, but I think it’s also reasonable that authors are going to want their villains to be scary and have an evil grin or something that really drives the point home. And I think if you want to do that, you want them to be menacing when they have achieved a position of power, and you use that. Because again, it’s just more effective that way, rather than depending on some actor to really sell the expression.
Chris: Certainly an evil smile is going to mean more if your villain has just gotten a big victory than if your villain is, oh, this failure is all part of my secret plan. Really, I’m going to turn this around. Evil smile.
Oren: Or even if the villain and the hero meet before the battle or something, and the villain is just like, aha, I’m evil! We haven’t fought yet, calm down. [laughter]
Chris: That just goes to show that you can’t just use those kinds of trappings to make a villain feel threatening on its own. There has to be substance behind the style. If you have a character that’s just wearing the black cape and swishing it around and having an evil smile, but you don’t actually show them doing any damage, then it’s just going to feel like it’s all hype.
Oren: Yep, that’s true. Alright, with that, I think we are going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Bunny: We have killed the episode! Mwahaha! [laughter]
Chris: If you would like to bring the episode back to life, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Flawless segue.
Chris: My promos make perfect sense. What are you talking about?
Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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