Post History

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 of 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.