Let's talk about: What NOT to do when writing a villain

Because I decided I would be angry at a book other than Throne of Glass, for once.

So yesterday, instead of being productive, I decided to start reading The Young Elites by Marie Lu, thinking I might take a break from reading about Celaena Sardothien and deconstruct this book instead. I think I'll probably have to read through the entire book before I decide whether or not to deconstruct it, because right now it looks like it's going the Shadow and Bone route—the entire middle of the book seems like it's going to be a training montage, and I have literally nothing to say about magical training montages.

But I still have things to say about this book. Important things.

First, some general impressions:

- The writing isn't terrible, but there's something about it that's awfully...soulless. I don't know how else to describe it. I guess...while there are Things Happening and the protagonist is getting emotional and stuff, the writing doesn't...feel emotional. It's like I'm watching these characters through several panes of glass, not really seeing them as real people.

This is a purely subjective thing, and I know that. But still, it matters to me. Soulless writing is a huge negative factor in my reading experience, because reading it just makes me feel like on some level, the author didn't care about this story.

- The worldbuilding is vaguely interesting. It's supposed to be based off...er...either Venice or Renaissance Italy, I can't tell, and there are manta rays that fly in the sky, that's cool. But like the writing, the setting just feels so hollow. It's like I'm watching the characters run around a set with cardboard cutouts that are vaguely Italian-flavored, rather than a real, living location.


And now, we get to the most problematic aspects of the book: How NOT to write a villain origin story.

1. Don't bring up topics like emotional abuse unless you're fully prepared to go into them.

This is, admittedly, a sore spot for me, and it falls into the same category of Bad Writing as Doing Trauma Badly, Doing Torture Badly, and Doing Mental Illness Badly.

Here's the problem with writing about things like trauma and abuse: everyone responds to it differently. Some people honestly aren't that affected. Some people are very affected. So it's not really fair to say "A character can only react in xyz way to trauma!"

At the same time, it's kind of ignorant to perpetuate the idea that things like abuse don't really affect people except to give them something to angst over. It's shallow, it's harmful, and it really shows me that the author hasn't bothered to do any research or even just think very hard about what they've just written.

Look: long-term emotional abuse screws with people's heads. It makes them think in certain ways that will seem utterly baffling to people who've never had such experiences. Here's just one article about some behaviors people can develop due to growing up in a dysfunctional family. And the psychological consequences can last for a really, really long time.

Here's what happened in the book:


"Get up, you ungrateful little thief," he hissed in my ear, yanking me forcefully up. Then his voice turned soothing. "Come now, my love. You're making a mess of yourself. Let me take you home."
[...]
"Where were you planning on going? Who else would want you? You'll never get a better offer than this. Do you realize how much humiliation I've suffered, dealing with the marriage refusals that come your way? Do you know how hard it is for me, apologizing for you?"
[...]
"Come home with me now," he said, pausing for a moment to stare at me. Rain ran down his cheeks. "Good girl. Your father knows best."

I can sort of see how, if the author has never experienced anything close to emotional abuse or manipulation, this is just here to show how evil the protagonist's abusive father is, and the protagonist doesn't react with anything other than righteous anger. But the problem is, that's the kind of reaction you'd expect from someone who is just hearing this for the first time, not someone who has been exposed to this for a long time.

This is emotional abuse. It's blatant emotional manipulation. And again, if you have been living with this for your entire life, you don't hear something like this and think "how dare he make me feel bad." You listen to this, and you are still angry, but you also think, "I've caused so much trouble for him, I've made things so hard for him, and he was just trying to do what's best for me." And that crippling guilt and self-doubt will tear down your anger really fast. That's why it's often so hard to escape from a situation with emotional abuse, and it's never the victim's fault if they can't get out.


You cannot write a scene where one character emotionally abuses the other without explicitly acknowledging that what that character's doing is wrong, harmful, and f***ed up. You cannot write a scene like that just to show how *evil* that character is. That is utterly lazy characterization and you are trivializing an act that in real life hurts many, many people.


2. Using a history of abuse to establish a future villain's motivation is cliché and more than a little problematic.

Seriously, this is about as original as Chosen One fantasy plots.

I know that in real life many abusers have a history of being abused. But I still don't feel comfortable seeing that as justification for this trope, because it heavily implies that if you experience suffering, you inevitably want to inflict pain on others.

Which ties into my next point.


3. Explaining a villain origin story by saying the character "always had dark thoughts" or "was selfish in their childhood" is extremely lazy and insultingly simplistic.

Human nature can't be reduced to such straightforward cause-effect denominators.

People can be nice and charismatic and also selfish. People can be cynical, prickly, but fundamentally caring. People can be selfish and giving, egotistical and insecure, sensitive and angry. People can have terrible thoughts sometimes without that making them terrible people.

Look, go and read a biography of Hitler. You'll see that by and large, he had a pretty normal life. No one would've predicted that he would be responsible for the atrocities committed during WWII. Heck, go read biographies of historical figures in general who were responsible for terrible acts. By and large, they will probably seem like normal people.

This is lazy. It's cliché. It's not new or fresh by any stretch of imagination. And it utterly snaps my suspension of disbelief, because these kinds of people don't exist in real life.

.

Maybe by now you're wondering why I care so much, other than the fact that I care about bad writing in general, and I already mentioned that emotional abuse is Kind Of A Thing for me.

From the time I started writing, many of the stories I came up with had to do with people who walked the fine line between "hero" and "villain," "good" people who do "bad" things, and "villains" who seek redemption. This is a topic I've spent a LOT of time thinking about. (Why is a story for another day.) And from that perspective, it really just sucks to see a book that is about the lowest common denominator for villainy get so much praise for being "bold" and "daring."

In an interview, the author stated something along the lines of it being "fun" to write about a character who was so "twisted." Aside from the fact that this really trivializes and almost fetishizes the protagonist's history of emotional abuse, I have to wonder if this is why the writing feels so "soulless." There's something about the narrative that's so removed from the protagonist, even though it's in first-person POV. And I wonder if it's because the author somehow failed to connect with the protagonist on an emotional level by treating her emotional abuse without any depth and writing such a cliché, "stock" villain origin story.