How to write a strong villain who isn't really present?
I've been working on a quite large story for a while now, but going through my drafts I noticed one weakness: My villains are very underdeveloped / weakly characterized.
I'll try to generalize the question & example, to keep it relevant for other cases as well:
The main protagonists are not directly facing a villain, but are facing the results of the villain's actions (for example, war). So, they don't really face 'a villain' in the classic "hero vs evil overlord" sense, but instead face the situation and eventually the villain's troops or other minor odds.
This creates a large problem for the story: My protagonists face "faceless" soldiers but are never involved with the (charismatic? power hungry? misguided? manipulated?) leaders. Why would they want to? It would only cause more problems.
I tried to remedy this problem by giving the "other side" a voice, basically a protagonist that is involved in the bigger (background) conflict - but that just feels artificial (at least so far).
It's not that the protagonists are not heavily involved - the problem just is that with a certain command structure, it wouldn't make sense to involve a leader who should delegate, not run around and do it himself.
Example: (and my problems with it)
A large war between two faction breaks out.
Anna, for some reason, has the key (let's say, a magical artifact?) to make one side win over the other at the expense of her life. She doesn't want either side to win but can't leave the area either, so she tries to stay under the radar.
Both sides make it a priority to hunt Anna down - whoever finds her first and brings her back gains a huge advantage.
Now, I would say the leaders of the two factions do the only thing reasonable: they delegate the issue. Search parties, troops, etc. They maybe even give one high ranking member the responsibility to solve the problem.
And this is exactly my problem: there wouldn't be one person searching for Anna, there would be dozens, hundreds or more (depending on the resources available). She would never face the same 'hunter' twice if she keeps changing location, which would be the reasonable action.
The only way to have a reappearing presence would be to bring the leading person in the picture - but he would most likely just be sitting in some headquarters and organize his men. He would only come into play when Anna was captured, without any build up - and then his job would be done and he would be out of the picture again after delivering her.
What are good techniques to make an impersonal (background) conflicts more personal for the protagonists, or give the conflict a "face"?
Is it necessary / expected to force a person (that usually just sits behind a desk and wouldn't have a personal connection) directly into the scene, even if he would just delegate the issue and wait for results? (which isn't very exciting)
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/21555. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
Your character can experience (and may not experience often enough) the results of the opposition leader's actions; or hear second-hand tales of the atrocities committed by their direct orders. This can feed the fire of her disgust, or hatred, or resolve, just as much as personal interaction.
She encounters a handful of refugees escaping a massacre, in which the soldiers were shooting captured children, point blank range, just to do away with them. In some other case, they are ordered to set every building in a village on fire, to drive out anybody hiding, anywhere. They shoot and kill pregnant women with their hands up to surrender.
Pick your level of war crimes and sadism. Darth Vader killed a whole planet full of people as a test.
I agree it is not realistic for a general or King or President or Prime Minister or Emperor or whatever you have at the top of the chain of command to wander into the field and put themselves in mortal danger. Hitler never really did that; psychopaths that reach that level of power are generally both smart enough and self-interested enough to put their own safety above all else. So everything the rank and file knows about them is known second-hand, by the atrocities they ordered, and the terror they created to ensure compliance of both the populace and their own soldiers -- fail to follow your orders and you will be summarily shot in the head.
Again, Darth Vader illustrates; just failure to complete a mission was enough for Vader to use the force to choke a ship commander to death, in front of the man that has to replace him.
Your true villain may not ever show up; but the protagonist(s) can know who they face and if they are making any progress against the villain by the stories they hear. Perhaps in the end all they know is some generals murdered the King and ended the war.
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To the rank and file of an army, the "villainous" overlord of the enemy army/nation/empire is simply a caricature created by the propaganda arm of their OWN military intelligence.
Little of what the grunts know can be called the straight dope.
It is all propaganda.
The only slight exception happens when the opposing leader is just so tactically brilliant on the field that his fame spreads across the battle line (as in the case with Napoleon).
So given that, how would you write such a villain? You write it as it would be written by the propaganda arm of military intelligence. =)
for example, did you know that that napoleon was a tiny little man was a pure fabrication by british military propaganda?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43338. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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So give your villain more to do. Raise the stakes.
If the General overseeing the various troops and hunters doesn't feel scary enough, give him more motivation. Give him someone REALLY scary to report to who is breathing down his neck and has no tolerance for failure, or even lateness, on pain of death. Or the Bigger Bad is holding the General's family hostage or something, so that the General's ruthlessness isn't even purely business but personal to save something entirely unrelated to Anna. Maybe if the General's side wins the war he can extract some tribute from the conquered land which is a cure for some fatal disease his child has, and that could be a way for Anna to win him to her side by having one of her allies procure the cure for him in exchange for the General backing off. And so on.
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