Averting Always Chaotic Evil

Why do baddies have to be bad? (Because that is the question you are really asking here.)

Baddies have to be bad because baddies serve an important literary function. Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." And we are fond of it, particularly in literature.

But no novel is about the whole of war. Novels tend to be about the individual rather than the collective. There are countless novels about the individual at war, and they examine many different aspects of that experience. And because literature uses external struggle as a means to examine internal struggle, novels often send people to war simply to place some aspect of their internal struggle under a microscope. The licitness of that war is not the subject of interest. Its licitness is assumed or made clear so we can move on to more intimate questions.

A novel is a lens, not a widow. It concentrates the attention on a particular issue or aspect of human experience. To do so, it simplifies or eliminates many of the complicating factors that scatter our focus in everyday life. One of the most egregious complicating factors in war is the question of the evil of our foes. One of the reasons so many wartime novels are set in World War II and the American Civil War is that these are almost universally acknowledged to be "good" wars, with a clear right side and a clear wrong side. Sending you hero to fight in a "good" war removes many of the complicating factors that would be involved in sending them to fight in wars of more ambiguous virtue like the Boer War or World War I.

The use of baddies, such as antagonistic races in science fiction and fantasy performs exactly the same function. We don't have to trouble ourselves with questions of whether Kirk is on the wrong side against the Klingons or Picard against the Borg or Aragorn against the Orcs. The Klingons and the Borg and the Orcs are, in literary terms, baddies. Badness is their reason for being.

Baddy society makes no sense. It isn't remotely tenable in the real world. But this is beside the point. Baddies exist to perform the literary function of removing distracting questions so you can focus the attention of the novel on whatever aspect of human experience is to be examined in the context of war.

Creating a race of baddies, therefore, is not falling into a trap. It is simply using a common literary device. The trap would be assuming that the use of baddies is anything other than that.

The only real trap with creating baddies, particularly these days, is to make sure that you don't create the impression that they represent some real human society. To that end, it is actually a benefit to make them just ridiculously bad, and their social structures obviously untenable. The less it seems that your baddies could represent some actual human society, the better they will serve their literary purpose of taking questions of the rightness of the conflict off the table for your novel.

posted over 4 years ago

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4y ago

Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

While some Degenerated humans retain enough humanity to even be sympathetic characters, with their "king" being a polite, idealistic and moralistic individual who wants to rid eradicate every form of discrimination by turning humans in Degenerates while founding a proto-nation where they can live centuries-long lives in harmony with nature. ... I feel that this still isn't enough to avoid characterising all Degenerates as bloodthirsty barbarians.

You're right: it's not enough. The king that you mention seems the out-of-book benevolent dictator (at best), a tyrant lead by wrong ideals at worst. It won't be enough to redeem the entire species.

Another issue is that your Degenerates are capable of being sympathetic characters ... when they retain humanity. So it's not by their own virtue, but by their "hosts" still being partly human.

In order to make them less textbook evil, you need to rethink the core concept. If most Degenerates are "savage, driven by the pentastomids' desires", and the only desire so far is to expand the pentastomids' influence over life, you've got your hands full of a rabid horde of infected animals. Not very different from any zombie outbreak.

How can I avoid falling into such a trap?

Multiple things you can consider:

• Change the pentastomids base desire. If Degenerates are hyper-aggressive, infectuos, and survival-driven, you won't have much chances to portray them in any different light. Maybe the pentastomids do want to grow and infect more beings, but they do in a more conservative way (e.g., a Degenerate wolf has evolutionary advantages over normal wolves, so it has more chances to have degenerate offsprings...). Maybe the pentastomids work by enhancing and prioritizing the individual wellbeing, rather than force it to infect as many others as possible.
• Make them sentient. A rabid animal won't be seen as sympathetic no matter what. But an animal that show sentience, even if prone to anger, is at least more interesting.
• As per Amadeus suggestion: show examples of different behaviour. The degenerates may as well be aggressive towards other civilizations or strangers, but maybe they are very compassionate between themselves.

posted over 5 years ago

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Liquid‭

770 reputation 44 140 116 3

... an entire species in a fictional setting as outright evil - no matter how one treats them, they reward kindness with treachery and violence.

This premise seems incomplete to me, and unnecessarily harsh. Why don't they exterminate themselves? And if they respond so uniformly, they should be easy to bait, trap and kill. That's how our early ancestors dealt with wild predators and big cats, they are so predictable they are easily tricked.

If you don't want them to just be rabid wolves, show them in light where they don't know they are being observed, but have non-rabid relationships. Some person, by accident or intent (e.g a scientist), spying on them, studying their behavior to find a clue to defeat them.

Otherwise, resign yourself to the fact you have created an unredeemable species and you have to find a way to exterminate them. The plot then becomes defeating the pentastomids; by inoculation, or extermination, or finding a medicine to cure the infection.

posted over 5 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

Remember the proverb "Everyone is the hero in his own story."

They might be evil from your point of view, but you need to make sure that their actions are guided by reason, even if it might be misguided. If they come to their conclusions in a rational, understandable way, even if the actual conclusions or reasons are irrational or wrong, the characters won't be chaotic evil.

For example, if they have a history of getting scammed and mistreated, they will see signs for treachery where none are, but they won't just backstab out the blue. They will see something they interpret as treachery and will backstab, before the other can backstab them. It will be rational for them that they backstab their companion, because they saw him go to bed with his weapon nearby, which they might interpret as the other planning to kill them in their sleep, even if he actually was just concerned about local wildlife murdering both of them in their sleep. Small actions can be interpreted in many ways and they will always assume the worst interpretation, but always for rational reasons.

posted over 5 years ago

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Morfildur‭

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I am going for a frame challenge. While scanning the question all that I remembered was a big bag of buzz-words, starting with degenerate, barbarians, nomadic, Indo-Iranians, viruses, and further fluff.

It seems to me that you have overloaded your antagonists with all that you think could raise a sense of fear and exotic, in the hope that the reader will feel compelled to feel the same. It may work for your closest circle, but it is not in these buzz-words that you will find believable non-stock antagonists.

My frame challenge can be summarized as:

The evil that you know best is the one closest to you.

This has the corollary:

The unknown is not necessarily evil, even if you are afraid of it.

My suggesions

First, wash the exotic. You may want an antagonist to which the reader can relate. Bring them closer to you. Write about them in the same manner in which you would write about people that you know, in the setting that you know.

Second, come to terms that in depicting an entire populace as non-stock believable evil, you have to take a racist¹ point-of-view. While there can be people that perceive pleasure in harming others in any possible circumstance, it seems fairly unsustainable for a population living with scarce resources, as is often the case for nomadic tribes. In contrast, a misuderstanding of certain cultural nuances, or even a clash of objectives, whereby two groups of people need a certain resource to survive, may fall into the perceived category that the others are evil. Alternatively, your antagonists could just be ignorants, bigots, or bureaucracy fanatics, as the standard Western evils. Note that not one of these groups profess being evil per se, in fact they are rather convinced of being doing the right thing.

¹ _{Racist as in 'the country to which the MC belongs is so much better than the nation of these evil antagonists'}

Third, while not true in general, I may suggest that in your case less is more. Do not force yourself to explain things unless the explanation serves a very clear purpose to your story. It will make your story easier to follow, and easier to relate with, as the imagination of the reader will fill the gaps.

Finally, the writing advice is to not place the antagonists next to the usual buzzwords of bloodthirsty mindless brutes. Describe their actions as well thought, their speeches as deliberate with a specific albeit not simple style. Ensure that they sound consistent throughout the entire spectrum of emotions. Trace a line in the way you write about them, and the way the MC speaks about them. They may be mindless brutes for the MC, but for you as author they are complex and deep at least as much as the MC.

posted over 5 years ago

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_X_‭

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