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More On Creating the Villain

Okay, let me just say, the last installment of this? And yes, I'm just going to refer to this as this. I covered literally NOTHING. This is because I can't tell you how to write for a villain. On a seperate issue, I'm going to get to how to write for your villain later. I have other topics to cover first.

The Levels of Evil: And I wish I could have said that "evil" out loud. Comedy. Gold.

The point. There are different levels of evil that, to be honest, can be very hard to measure. By that, I mean, what are the levels of evil and what level is your villain in. Now, there are two levels that are clearly defined.

The Red Skull: Named for the Arch-enemy of Captain America. See, here's the thing about the Red Skull. It's one thing if the heroes are disgusted by you. But when the OTHER VILLAINS, who are just evil to the core, are just DISGUSTED by you, you've reached Red Skull status. If Hitler, yes, DER FUHRER is AFRAID of you... Let's just say that something is very wrong with you.
It isn't easy to reach this level. In fact, as far as I can tell, only the Red Skull is in this category. This is a good thing. Because, to reach this level, you have to be willing to commit any crime, any horrible act and not even have an ounce of regret. Everything you do must have some evil motive behind it. The very thought of you should make the masses tremble with terror. You never seem to die, because the grim reaper is too scared to get within a mile of you. It gets awkward when you kill a guy. Hell won't let you in, not just because they KNOW you'll take over hell, but because there's no punishment bad enough for you. You could come up with one, but you aren't telling them about it.
If you manage to create a Red Skull, I will personally report you to the FBI. Mostly because I'm jealous of yo- WE ARE MOVING ON

Monster: This is the level below Red Skull. Villains in this category are similar to the Red Skull, but toned down one notch. Just one. Honestly, it's more or less the same as the Red Skull, but not quite at his level. Merciless, insane, terrifying, it's basically the highest level a villain can reach, due to the fact you can't reach the level of the Red Skull.
I just know people are going to try and give examples of Red Skulls. That's a challenge, by the way.

Okay, those two are the most clearly defined. One is a evil maniac with no sign of a conscience. The other is the Red Skull.

Now, these other categories are... arguable. It's hard to measure, as I said, anything below pure evil. So, all these other categories are examples that I use, but they aren't offical, AT ALL.

Blue-Eyed: More menacing then it sounds. It's a refferance to the song "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who. This villain, he could have done... lord knows what. Something terrible. A lot and often. But, when he isn't causing mayhem and making people panic in the streets, he has a... a sort of internal struggle. The thought that people fear him, he doesn't really care about that, to be honest. But knowing that they hate him. When people look at him with hatred in their eyes, it may begin to weigh down on him.
Now, this doesn't mean the villain isn't evil. It just means that he isn't completly heartless. He may even meet his end saving the hero's life! An example of this would be Dr. Octopus from Spider Man 2. Not his tentacles though. Those things are nuts.

Insanity Ward: Not reffering to an actual insanity ward. This is someone who belongs in an insanity ward. Now, these aren't people like Hannibal Lector, who could probably make his therapist go insane in, at the most, half an hour. No, these are the guys who, y'know, maybe some kind of childhood trauma or something like that, drove them to the point of villainy. But maybe, MAYBE, they can be saved before they reach the point-of-no-return... I forgot to mention that.

Okay, I'll try to make this brief. The... let's call it the event horizon, is when, at some point in the villain's career, they do something far worse than anything they've ever done before. At this point, the villain is beyond redemption. They can no longer be anything but a villain. Refferance: anything the Red Skull does.

Slasher: These guys are kinda hard to measure since, a lot of times, they overlap with another level of evil (this will never be with Blue-Eyed). But these are the guys who don't have a plan, don't have an agenda, they just to make stuff dead. The Joker is... probably THE example of this. But, the lack of an agenda means nothing in terms of how dangerous they are. Because the Slasher tends to grow over time. Grow in how much death they want to cause. Maybe they start off with just random stabbings- wait, did I say "just?" But, after a while, that just isn't good enough. It may finally lead to the need to, say, destroy a massive office building in Manhattan.

By the way, that is just a dick move right there. The economy is already struggling! Do you need to make it worse with the destruction of X number of companies? Oh, and, uh, the death is bad too.

Enforcer: This is an interesting kind of evil. Like the slasher, the enforcer has no agenda of his own. But the enforcer, unlike the slasher has a reason for doing what he does. Namely, his boss told him to, say, break some guy's leg. Off. These guys get mentioned on the level of evil because, normally, the morality of their actions never even crosses their mind. Think of the Terminator. Preferably, the T-1000 from Terminator 2.
Now, are these guys really evil? If you've ever seen T-1000, the answer is, hell yes. It gets it's own level of evil due to the fact that they don't care AT ALL about the sheer evil of their actions. The others are capable of this, but the Enforcer doesn't care on a different level. Like, the slasher doesn't care about being evil because he's having too much fun. The Enforcer doesn't care about being evil because he just doesn't care about the evil part. He's just doing what he was told to do.

There are other levels, but most of those are kinda minor and not important for the villain I intend to teach you about.
Now, we move on to what may be the most difficult part. Okay, no, let's be honest, this is the hardest part of villainy, plain and simple. I will not accept any debate on this. Because I am right.

Dialogue: I was right, wasn't I? Now, let's cut to the chase and let me tell teach you how to write the dialogue for the villains I know you all want to make. Villains that could rival my top five. Hell, my top one and other one who are struggling for first place. You want to know how I write the ingenius, diabolical lines for my impossibly, heinously evil villains.
Well, funny story there. I have no fucking idea how I do that. What am I thinking when I write the lines for the king of Hell? I have a different question for me. Am I thinking AT ALL when writing for them? I'm not even kidding here. I can write something for my villain, then go back and read it and think, "How did I do that? This is GENIUS!" Well, more often I think, "What the hell was I on when I wrote that? And why is an evil god named Don?" (Answer: It was a joke. There's a cartoonist called John Byrne who's famous for being an ass, and when I was trying to come up with a name I just thought, "Well, I can't call him John... Maybe I'll just call him Don!" Of course, at the time, I didn't think he would be such an important villain.)

Now, I know that there's some thinking going on in there somewhere, I'm just not sure where. So, in order to find out how I do it, I'm going to write some villain dialogue right now.

Okay, set the scene. Uhm, Don is being confronted by a group of heroes. Those heroes will not survive this encounter.

Random Shonen Hero: Byrne! Your reign of terror ends here!

Don: *sighs* Okay. You're here to kill me. The ruler of the world. I would feel sad for you if I were physically capable of it. You see, I became the ruler, or supreme king in some regions, of the world through force. Not diplomacy. Just sheer power. I conquered every nation on earth alone. I decimated every military in every country without any assisstance. In other words, I had tanks shoot at me, missles fired at me, bombs dropped on me. The most anyone ever did was leave a tiny scratch on my face. And I personally slaugthered everyone who defied me. When a battle was fought, I would leave it covered in the blood of the infidels who believed they could stop Don Byrne. And now you... *actually looks at the hero for the first time* And they said my hair looked weird. Also, a sword? The most powerful missle in the world, capable of destroying Australia- which it did- couldn't stop me. It just saved me the trouble of destroying Australia! Yet, you come after me with a sword. *calls his assisstant* Gio? Would you mind finding out who this... person in my office is? Already found everything? Excellent. *puts away phone* Okay, Mr... I'm not going to bother using your name. I'm going to kill you. It will be very slow, and very very painful. And when I'm done with you, I intend to pay a visit to your home town. Once I'm there, I will personally slaugther every inhabitant, reduce every standing structure to ashes, and then I will burn the ground so nothing can grow there for over a hundred years. The same shall be done with your associates. So, that's a few thousand deaths total? Before I kill you, tell me how it feels to be responsible for the largest massacre since I took control?

Wow. That felt good. So, what happened there, with the writint process, was that I first created the scenario, then, knowing Don's personality inside and out, put myself in his head to create his response. By the way, Don's head? It's awesome. Good god, I need to another one now. No, no, not now.
Okay, what we can learn here is that dialogue is based in personality. So, in order to write the villain's dialogue, you have to understand their personality. You have to really be your villain. Before you create dialogue, you first have to be able to see the world through the eyes of evil. This may sound crazy, but trust me. It isn't. Well, unless you're already mentally unstable and may actually become evil. If this is the case STOP READING THIS AND THEN ERASE IT FROM YOUR MEMORY.

Now, this is a bit trickier during RPs. Especially when I have to use a hundred characters at once I'M ONLY ONE MAN GIVE ME TIME THINK JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE!
In an RP- yes, I'm going to just move on from that remark now- I have move really fast in order to write for the villains. I think if you look at the villain's dialogue from my prose, you'll find the level of quality is much higher than the dialogue in my RPs. Usually. If I get really into the RP, the quality is about the same. ... God, I miss playing head games using Gio's power to know everything about everyone. Plus the techniques I got from watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

Good times... Oh, right, uh, I don't know how much I can teach on this topic. Dialogue has an infinate number of variables that go into dialogue. All I can teach you is this. Learn your villain inside and out. Know them better than you know yourself. That's not an exaggeration for me. I can tell you more about Byrne than I can about myself. You- you don't actually have to go as far as I did. I just went a little overboard.

Well, we'll stop here for today. Next time: ... I don't know. What, you think I actually plan ahead? I made all this stuff up as I wrote it!

Description
More On Creating the Villain

Okay, let me just say, the last installment of this? And yes, I'm just going to refer to this as this. I covered literally NOTHING. This is because I can't tell you how to write for a villain. On a seperate issue, I'm going to get to how to write for your villain later. I have other topics to cover first.

The Levels of Evil: And I wish I could have said that "evil" out loud. Comedy. Gold.

The point. There are different levels of evil that, to be honest, can be very hard to measure. By that, I mean, what are the levels of evil and what level is your villain in. Now, there are two levels that are clearly defined.

The Red Skull: Named for the Arch-enemy of Captain America. See, here's the thing about the Red Skull. It's one thing if the heroes are disgusted by you. But when the OTHER VILLAINS, who are just evil to the core, are just DISGUSTED by you, you've reached Red Skull status. If Hitler, yes, DER FUHRER is AFRAID of you... Let's just say that something is very wrong with you.
It isn't easy to reach this level. In fact, as far as I can tell, only the Red Skull is in this category. This is a good thing. Because, to reach this level, you have to be willing to commit any crime, any horrible act and not even have an ounce of regret. Everything you do must have some evil motive behind it. The very thought of you should make the masses tremble with terror. You never seem to die, because the grim reaper is too scared to get within a mile of you. It gets awkward when you kill a guy. Hell won't let you in, not just because they KNOW you'll take over hell, but because there's no punishment bad enough for you. You could come up with one, but you aren't telling them about it.
If you manage to create a Red Skull, I will personally report you to the FBI. Mostly because I'm jealous of yo- WE ARE MOVING ON

Monster: This is the level below Red Skull. Villains in this category are similar to the Red Skull, but toned down one notch. Just one. Honestly, it's more or less the same as the Red Skull, but not quite at his level. Merciless, insane, terrifying, it's basically the highest level a villain can reach, due to the fact you can't reach the level of the Red Skull.
I just know people are going to try and give examples of Red Skulls. That's a challenge, by the way.

Okay, those two are the most clearly defined. One is a evil maniac with no sign of a conscience. The other is the Red Skull.

Now, these other categories are... arguable. It's hard to measure, as I said, anything below pure evil. So, all these other categories are examples that I use, but they aren't offical, AT ALL.

Blue-Eyed: More menacing then it sounds. It's a refferance to the song "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who. This villain, he could have done... lord knows what. Something terrible. A lot and often. But, when he isn't causing mayhem and making people panic in the streets, he has a... a sort of internal struggle. The thought that people fear him, he doesn't really care about that, to be honest. But knowing that they hate him. When people look at him with hatred in their eyes, it may begin to weigh down on him.
Now, this doesn't mean the villain isn't evil. It just means that he isn't completly heartless. He may even meet his end saving the hero's life! An example of this would be Dr. Octopus from Spider Man 2. Not his tentacles though. Those things are nuts.

Insanity Ward: Not reffering to an actual insanity ward. This is someone who belongs in an insanity ward. Now, these aren't people like Hannibal Lector, who could probably make his therapist go insane in, at the most, half an hour. No, these are the guys who, y'know, maybe some kind of childhood trauma or something like that, drove them to the point of villainy. But maybe, MAYBE, they can be saved before they reach the point-of-no-return... I forgot to mention that.

Okay, I'll try to make this brief. The... let's call it the event horizon, is when, at some point in the villain's career, they do something far worse than anything they've ever done before. At this point, the villain is beyond redemption. They can no longer be anything but a villain. Refferance: anything the Red Skull does.

Slasher: These guys are kinda hard to measure since, a lot of times, they overlap with another level of evil (this will never be with Blue-Eyed). But these are the guys who don't have a plan, don't have an agenda, they just to make stuff dead. The Joker is... probably THE example of this. But, the lack of an agenda means nothing in terms of how dangerous they are. Because the Slasher tends to grow over time. Grow in how much death they want to cause. Maybe they start off with just random stabbings- wait, did I say "just?" But, after a while, that just isn't good enough. It may finally lead to the need to, say, destroy a massive office building in Manhattan.

By the way, that is just a dick move right there. The economy is already struggling! Do you need to make it worse with the destruction of X number of companies? Oh, and, uh, the death is bad too.

Enforcer: This is an interesting kind of evil. Like the slasher, the enforcer has no agenda of his own. But the enforcer, unlike the slasher has a reason for doing what he does. Namely, his boss told him to, say, break some guy's leg. Off. These guys get mentioned on the level of evil because, normally, the morality of their actions never even crosses their mind. Think of the Terminator. Preferably, the T-1000 from Terminator 2.
Now, are these guys really evil? If you've ever seen T-1000, the answer is, hell yes. It gets it's own level of evil due to the fact that they don't care AT ALL about the sheer evil of their actions. The others are capable of this, but the Enforcer doesn't care on a different level. Like, the slasher doesn't care about being evil because he's having too much fun. The Enforcer doesn't care about being evil because he just doesn't care about the evil part. He's just doing what he was told to do.

There are other levels, but most of those are kinda minor and not important for the villain I intend to teach you about.
Now, we move on to what may be the most difficult part. Okay, no, let's be honest, this is the hardest part of villainy, plain and simple. I will not accept any debate on this. Because I am right.

Dialogue: I was right, wasn't I? Now, let's cut to the chase and let me tell teach you how to write the dialogue for the villains I know you all want to make. Villains that could rival my top five. Hell, my top one and other one who are struggling for first place. You want to know how I write the ingenius, diabolical lines for my impossibly, heinously evil villains.
Well, funny story there. I have no fucking idea how I do that. What am I thinking when I write the lines for the king of Hell? I have a different question for me. Am I thinking AT ALL when writing for them? I'm not even kidding here. I can write something for my villain, then go back and read it and think, "How did I do that? This is GENIUS!" Well, more often I think, "What the hell was I on when I wrote that? And why is an evil god named Don?" (Answer: It was a joke. There's a cartoonist called John Byrne who's famous for being an ass, and when I was trying to come up with a name I just thought, "Well, I can't call him John... Maybe I'll just call him Don!" Of course, at the time, I didn't think he would be such an important villain.)

Now, I know that there's some thinking going on in there somewhere, I'm just not sure where. So, in order to find out how I do it, I'm going to write some villain dialogue right now.

Okay, set the scene. Uhm, Don is being confronted by a group of heroes. Those heroes will not survive this encounter.

Random Shonen Hero: Byrne! Your reign of terror ends here!

Don: *sighs* Okay. You're here to kill me. The ruler of the world. I would feel sad for you if I were physically capable of it. You see, I became the ruler, or supreme king in some regions, of the world through force. Not diplomacy. Just sheer power. I conquered every nation on earth alone. I decimated every military in every country without any assisstance. In other words, I had tanks shoot at me, missles fired at me, bombs dropped on me. The most anyone ever did was leave a tiny scratch on my face. And I personally slaugthered everyone who defied me. When a battle was fought, I would leave it covered in the blood of the infidels who believed they could stop Don Byrne. And now you... *actually looks at the hero for the first time* And they said my hair looked weird. Also, a sword? The most powerful missle in the world, capable of destroying Australia- which it did- couldn't stop me. It just saved me the trouble of destroying Australia! Yet, you come after me with a sword. *calls his assisstant* Gio? Would you mind finding out who this... person in my office is? Already found everything? Excellent. *puts away phone* Okay, Mr... I'm not going to bother using your name. I'm going to kill you. It will be very slow, and very very painful. And when I'm done with you, I intend to pay a visit to your home town. Once I'm there, I will personally slaugther every inhabitant, reduce every standing structure to ashes, and then I will burn the ground so nothing can grow there for over a hundred years. The same shall be done with your associates. So, that's a few thousand deaths total? Before I kill you, tell me how it feels to be responsible for the largest massacre since I took control?

Wow. That felt good. So, what happened there, with the writint process, was that I first created the scenario, then, knowing Don's personality inside and out, put myself in his head to create his response. By the way, Don's head? It's awesome. Good god, I need to another one now. No, no, not now.
Okay, what we can learn here is that dialogue is based in personality. So, in order to write the villain's dialogue, you have to understand their personality. You have to really be your villain. Before you create dialogue, you first have to be able to see the world through the eyes of evil. This may sound crazy, but trust me. It isn't. Well, unless you're already mentally unstable and may actually become evil. If this is the case STOP READING THIS AND THEN ERASE IT FROM YOUR MEMORY.

Now, this is a bit trickier during RPs. Especially when I have to use a hundred characters at once I'M ONLY ONE MAN GIVE ME TIME THINK JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE!
In an RP- yes, I'm going to just move on from that remark now- I have move really fast in order to write for the villains. I think if you look at the villain's dialogue from my prose, you'll find the level of quality is much higher than the dialogue in my RPs. Usually. If I get really into the RP, the quality is about the same. ... God, I miss playing head games using Gio's power to know everything about everyone. Plus the techniques I got from watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

Good times... Oh, right, uh, I don't know how much I can teach on this topic. Dialogue has an infinate number of variables that go into dialogue. All I can teach you is this. Learn your villain inside and out. Know them better than you know yourself. That's not an exaggeration for me. I can tell you more about Byrne than I can about myself. You- you don't actually have to go as far as I did. I just went a little overboard.

Well, we'll stop here for today. Next time: ... I don't know. What, you think I actually plan ahead? I made all this stuff up as I wrote it!