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One such strategy is to have your villain, on more than one occasion, actual act against his own best interest and defeat his own plot, kill his own men, etc, in order to convince the hero (and the...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-19T22:13:50Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46700 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T12:28:32Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46700 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
One such strategy is to have your villain, on more than one occasion, actual act against his own best interest and defeat his own plot, kill his own men, etc, in order to convince the hero (and the audience) that he is truly on the side of the hero. He can do this when he perceives the hero is going to prevail anyway, but (for example) instead of letting his men escape a compound, takes action to blow the whole thing up and kill them all. A trait of many villains is _sociopathy_, a complete disregard for human life or suffering. It doesn't give them pause for a moment to kill people, including their own loyal minions, if this serves to advance their agenda. If you like, you can also let such a killing be a cover-up, a way for the villain to ensure there are no survivors that might tell anything important to the hero. But the important thing is, he deceives the audience by doing things, taking risks, helping the hero in ways that _seem_ loyal, so we just wouldn't expect the villain to be doing them. The tricky part is giving him an ulterior motive to do this, but that can be because it isn't possible to achieve his primary goals yet, and his secondary goal is to be trusted by the hero, no matter what the cost.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-07-17T15:28:32Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: -1