5.6 KiB
[D] Realistic Villains and Viewpoints
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Author: u/None *
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URL: http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/realistic-viewpoints
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Score: 19
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Created: 2014-11-02T16:59:07
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
There's a real risk of making villains too sympathetic, especially if their villainy is kept secret from the reader (or sometimes even if it's not). That creates some serious dissonance when the villain loses, or when the villain is revealed as having done some terrible things that the reader thinks he's not guilty of.
Assuming that Quirrell turns out as evil as I think he is, I'm curious what the reader reaction will be, and whether Yudkowsky can maneuver around the trap he's created by writing a sympathetic villain.
u/Escapement [+3] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (5 hours later)
I quite agree - there is a lot of fiction where villainy being obvious on the level of a saturday morning cartoon is a good stylistic choice. Others where the villain is extremely obviously evil and does a lot of evil things "on screen" can also be very good stylistically. These are perhaps not 'realistic', but there are other virtues that can be important for a story than realism.
Quite frankly, in many fantasy stories the hero triumphs over the villain by stabbing them or otherwise inflicting violence. Quite possibly viscerally. If the villain is not doing something obviously, blatantly wrong at the time and has all sorts of actual moral justifications that are at all believable, then it can be super tough to rejoice in their defeat, especially if their defeat comes via methods like being stabbed repeatedly.
I mean, imagine if Harry kills Quirrell the same way he did in canon - by giving him a hug that slowly and painfully burned him to death. Imagine if that was graphically portrayed, and we even got a Quirrell POV as he slowly burns to death (possibly with a bit of dramatic irony as it is revealed in the POV that Quirrell actually burned Narcissa to death to bind Malfoy Sr. to his cause more thoroughly or something). If Quirrell is at the time not actually doing anything horrible but is instead just sort of sitting around when Harry ambushes him with a hug-o-fiery-death, I can imagine a lot of reader anger and rejection at the scene, no matter how well deserved QQ's death would be. In canon HP, of course, QQ is a nonentity until the scenes directly before his demise (where he reveals himself to be a hammy, scenery-chewing villain with no justification), and the burn-to-death ending works fine for the story and causes just about zero reader anger.
u/None [+3] (6 hours later)
I suppose the issue here is that Yudkowsky spends so much time writing from the perspective of one not-so-villain, Draco, and has his main character in thrall to the definitely villain, Quirrell. If we're going to spend that much time in their heads looking up to them, then yes, a climactic battle where the hero slays the villain in single combat seems a bit wrong. Ender struggles with this. He understands his enemies too well not to feel grief when he defeats them.
But if you keep the readers out of the heads of the villains, you can have them be realistic and sympathetic while still rooting for their defeat. See Azula, season 1 Zuko, even Ozai doesn't feel cartoonish. And with a bit of balance you can have your cake and eat it too, like in "The Beach" episode where we kind of hope Azula gets the guy or at least burns his house down.
u/Pluvialis [+3] Second Age Sauron (a day later)
Following the Phoenix did a good job of showing Quirrell acting definitely evil, and without it being jarring.
u/None [+4] (a minute later)
A new excerpt from Yudkowsky’s Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters, his RaNoWriMo project. The previous four posts were posted all together and discussed here.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (4 hours later)
Really believing that the sky is blue doesn’t feel like being a Blue-Skyer, it feels like the sky being blue.
My pattern-matcher says that this sentence is accidentally pretending to be wise.
Edit:
It feels pretending to be wise because repeatedly using phrases as obviously true as "The sky is blue" feels like it makes the reader biased to believe in the other things written nearby. (That explanation leaves a quiet strain in the back of my mind, so it may not be the true cause of that feeling.)
It feels accidentally so because it is plausible that EY included that sentence as a reminder to everyone who read this that what is learned there can be applied here. If that was his intent, putting a link into that phrase, as he does in the Sequences, might help.
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
Paging /u/EliezerYudkowsky
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
I think it rings false to me because "Blue-Skyer" denotes some sort of tribalism which is based on the truth statement. I mean, believing that abortion should be legal (for example) doesn't necessarily feel like being Pro-Choice, but it's often the case that people who believe that abortion should be legal do feel like they are Pro-Choice with all the social signalling and tribalism that implies.
I may be reading too much into this though.