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Most of the stuff above covers what would be my initial response to your post. I agree that the trope of the super-evil-kills kittens while laughing manically-dresses in black and leaves a vent open in his superbase - badguy is overused. But in it's defense I would just like to point one thing out. It's easy. It's easy and it takes almost no thought for the reader to digest. Sometimes the plot and themes of a story have other things to focus on and giving the reader a generic bad guy can give you the space you need to flush those things out. Much easier then making reader second guess the bad guy's motivations at every turn. Just some food for thought

asciibard wrote:You've caught the notorious cat food thief and are about to call the cops -- but what's this? He says he befriended a starving kitten and this is the only way he can feed him! If you throw him in jail the cat will starve, and then who would be the REAL villain?

1 - Throw him in jail, kitty dies but you can afford that BMW.
2 - Let him go, kitty goes on to win the cat show and the thief gets rich, you go broke and lose your pet store and have to steal food to survive! IRONY!

Thus concludes the shortest interactive novel ever; point being your antagonists should be human, believable, and pitiable so that you can force your poor reader to agonize over the decision when it's finally time to put them in their place.

Remember the "there's always option number three" rule ;P
3 - Throw him in jail, take the kitty, buy that BMW, kitty goes on to win the cat show, you get rich and build even bigger pet shop and you get even richer. The thief rots in jail. Sweet justice delivers sweet victory!

LVUER wrote:Remember the "there's always option number three" rule ;P
3 - Throw him in jail, take the kitty, buy that BMW, kitty goes on to win the cat show, you get rich and build even bigger pet shop and you get even richer. The thief rots in jail. Sweet justice delivers sweet victory!

I'm not a good enough writer to pull that off. I'll just feed the thief to the cat.

I'm glad for all the thoughtful answers! It's interesting to see how other people view this topic.

On a related note, I also don't like the tendency for characters to have that weird evil-sensing instinct (you know, the whole "there was something I didn't like about that guy/girl/turtle/whatever" thing, which almost always turns out to be the right feeling even if the other character isn't obviously evil)... though I suppose you could have fun with it if you made it an actual power your character has.

Then again, that would make the story boring, so maybe not :-T Unless... you wrote it so nobody believed your character about obviously evil people.

I think the magical evil-sensing instinct is in most cases just lazy foreshadowing. It would be weird to have the bad guy JUST SUDDENLY EVIL OUT OF NOWHERE! so they throw something like that in so the audience will be suspicious in the the back of their mind. Unfortunately, it's done so clumsily most of the time that it's a dead giveaway the minute the hero says "That smartly-dressed, nice guy gives me a bad feeling..."

I think the reason why people like to write something like that is because it's simple to pick a side then. There's no pity for the bad guy, you just hate them and it's easy to justify the actions the hero takes to eradicate the evil. When in fact, the good guy is doing evil also by eradicating the evil. It's easier to overlook things like that when you make the guy horrible enough to justify the hero's actions. If there's a motive, if there's feeling and heart within the bad guy, it's harder to make your hero seem like they're "good".

I don't think all stories are like that, just plain black and white. I've read a few that aren't all good-vs-evil. Have you read Frankenstein? Don't watch the movies, the book is completely different. The ending makes the monster not seem so bad, but he does do reprehensible things. There's also Yu Yu Hakusho. I don't think the bad guys that show up in the manga are necessarily good or evil, just somewhere in between.
And Code Geass. Lots of strange things going on there but there's not a real evil or good. I mean, Lelouch is basically an anti-hero anyways.