Non-cheap ways to make villains evil?
Do you have any tried and true techniques to make villains of your stories truly hated by the audience?
I mean, frequently it's "eh, sure, that's bad, he's got to be stopped" but the audience would rather observe the villain more, learn, maybe try to get them to change their ways. Or worst of all, pity the villain in the end for failing to execute their just revenge, or not getting along with their plan for what would -really- be a better future, even if through baptism of fire.
Now what to do if you want the readers to wish the villain dead in worst way possible?
Of course getting the villain to kill one of most liked characters may work wonders here. Except it will definitely alienate the audience, it's cheap and disliked. It's something that will make the readers hate the villain and hate the author for writing the story that way.
Now what to do to have the readers feel a warm fuzzy when the villain gets hurt? A good healthy dose of schadenfreude? A good dose of ire when the villain gets away with their shenanigans? Make them love to hate that character, feel the story was written just right, no cheap gimmicks, and the villain is still really worth all their hate?
This all without loss of the basics: keeping the character fully believable and with completely logical (or at least sufficiently emotional) motives driving them, at least moderately competent and sufficiently interesting.
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On the flip side, let me comment that one thing I really dislike in many works of fiction is when we are told that someone is a villian, but he never actually does anything evil. To take a well-known book as an example: Consider "The Picture of Dorian Gray". The whole point of the book is that Dorian Gray is a horribly evil person who nevertheless does not suffer for his crimes. And yet ... what does he actually do that is evil? He's rude to his girlfriend. That's about it. The fact that his rudeness leads her to commit suicide left me thinking more that she was mentally unstable than that he was to blame for her death. I've seen lots of movies where at some point I find myself saying, Wait, what did this guy do that justifies the hero destroying him like this?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/6827. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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A villain you want to take down is, at his/her core, someone who does not care about the suffering of others.
- An evil wizard who wants to murder every witch or wizard who isn't a "pureblood," regardless of how skilled or what the person has done.
- A plutocrat who became rich by destroying businesses, and then dismisses people who don't pay income taxes as "refusing to take responsibility for their lives."
- A religious fanatic who thinks that everyone not of his faith deserves to die, and that he is fulfilling God's will by killing "the infidels."
- A parent who thinks that his/her child is so tainted and corrupt by being gay that the child should be shunned, disowned, and thrown out of the house, never to return.
- A bishop who moves a child-molesting priest to a new parish rather than reporting the crime to the police, and then refuses the victim Communion when he speaks up.
You get the idea: someone without empathy. Someone who either does not see that other people (heroes, villains, NPCs) are also people with feelings, or simply does not care because the villain him/herself is convinced of his/her own absolute and utter superiority.
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