I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, but what would be usually the reason why people would torture someone? Not to justify (torture is unjustifiable in any situation) but I really needed a driving force for a villain why they would w/o sounding ridiculous or implausible, and any reason I come up with falls kind of flat (... Which I suppose is expected, since that's how the reasonings behind tortures are in rl I guess)
I can help you out here. And I want you to know that from a writing stand point this does make perfect sense. Motivation, however shallow, is important for capturing a character.
Yes a lot of the motivations in reality are flat, shallow and outright stupid. And it can be a careful balancing act, showing those motivations making them understandable without straying into justifying them. It can also be hard to make an interesting character with flat motivations.
I think I’ll start off with talking about motivations/‘reasons’ in reality and then talk a little about when and whether we should break from reality when we write about torturers.
Remember that there isn’t a lot of research on torturers. So I’m working from the little bit of research I can access, interviews with torturers and anecdotal reports. It isn’t perfect, but this is (so far as I can tell) the best information we have at the time of writing.
Understanding why torture occurs means understanding that it is structural violence.
I do take questions on abuse, I personally don’t see much point in sticking to the strict legal definition of torture when I’m trying to help authors do a decent job portraying trauma survivors. But sometimes the definition matters. And torture is essentially defined as abuse by government employees*, by public servants in positions of authority.
Over and over again the reasons torturers give for their crimes come back to flaws in the organisations they were part of. Consistently, across cultures and time periods, they describe understaffed, high pressure environments with no training, little supervision and the instruction to produce results or else.
This combines with cultural messages that violence ‘works’ and existing sub-cultures of torturers within organisations to perpetuate abuse.
It’s also worth mentioning that for most torturers they’re coming into an organisation where there are already established sub-groups of torturers. The group dynamics do seem to play a role in all this. Though it’s difficult to say how much when we’re entirely going from what torturers say and they are… demonstrably inaccurate when it comes to talking about torture.
Having said that; torturers do seem to encourage each other to more and more acts of violence. They treat it almost competitively. They will also, sometimes, approach new recruits and bring them into the torturer sub-group, pressuring them to participate.
I’m unsure how much of a role the social factor plays in torturers starting to torture, but it definite seems to keep them torturing when they say they’d rather stop. There are a couple of reasons why.
First of all there’s a sort of implicit threat; refusing to torture is seen as a threat to the torturer sub-culture. And these are people who have already shown a capacity for violence. There have been cases of torturers attacking other members of the same organisation for their opposition to, or refusal to, torture.
There’s also a social aspect; once involved with the torturer sub-culture the individual tends to become more and more cut off from the rest of the organisation. The group of torturers becomes more or less their entire social circle.
We’re social animals. So leaving, rejecting the entire social group, is a big deal. It’s hard for us to do.
The toxic sub-culture torturers form encourages them to root part of their identity in their capacity for violence and how ‘good at it’ the other members of their group think they are. They tend to tie ideas of toughness, dependability, achievement and (often) masculinity to torture. They frame themselves as especially manly, strong and ‘willing to do the tough jobs no one else has the guts to’.
It’s complete nonsense but it’s what they do.
And it means that facing up to the fact torture is pointless feels like an attack on their self worth. A lot of them choose to double down rather then face that reality.
This isn’t a definitive list of relevant factors. It’s my assessment of the ones that always seem to show up. There are usually other factors that feed into particular situations. Rejali’s Three Systems is a worth a read on that front.
Ideas about social hierarchy and transgression are common features. So things like ‘anyone who does That Terrible Thing deserves to be tortured’ or ‘no one Like That would be in this part of town for an innocent reason’.
All of this means that motivation can be tricky to write, because the real motivations are often not the sort of thing we’re taught are ‘interesting’.
Real, honest motivations are often things like:
‘I think those people deserve it’
‘I was told to’
‘Everyone else was doing it’
‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do’
‘I got angry and took it out on someone else’
‘I thought it would work and no one ever taught me another way’
That’s not a definitive list but you get the idea. And probably get the point about these sorts of shallow motivations being narratively unsatisfying.
So let’s step back from the reality and tackle the writing problem at the heart of this: how do we make this interesting?
There are a couple of different approaches.
The first approach I see is to accept that the motivation and the villain are shallow and shift the interest away from the villain.
Villains don’t need to be interesting. And they don’t need to be the focus.
If your story is structured in a way which primarily makes the villain a looming threat and focuses on the heroes, their journey, their relationships then adding detail or depth to the villain is unnecessary.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy does this with several of its major villains. The Shape of Water does it for the main villain. Zelda: Breath of the Wild (yes I bought a switch during lock down, and it’s my first Zelda game I am not sorry) does it with Ganon.
Another approach is to accept the motivation is shallow and shift the focus away from the villain’s motivation.
Villains do not need to have a grand philosophy or deep motivation or underlying pain in order to be a good read. They don’t need to be an intellectual threat to the heroes in order to be a legitimate threat.
For instance Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, I’d argue one of the best takes on the character ever. But if you go back and watch the episodes he isn’t deep. His motivation almost always boils down to pettiness, greed and a vindictive streak a mile wide. It is incredibly shallow.
But he’s fun to watch, because he’s unpredictable and funny. He’s also a legitimate threat to the heroes because he’s so incredibly destructive. More then any other villain his crimes are aimed at effecting large numbers of people. That sets the stakes high without any motivation or philosophy coming into it.
The focus is on what he does each time he shows up, not why.
Persona 5 pulls off a similar trick. Every single one of its villains has a shallow motivation. But each of them also has power over one of the heroes or another innocent person. They don’t need a deeper or more interesting motivation in order to make life miserable for the heroes. And every caper hinges on the heroes trying to stop that worst outcome.
As much as Fullmetal Alchemist is a deep story which touches on many complex topics, neither version (the original manga or the 2003 anime with it’s very different plot) had a particularly complex villain at the end of the story. In both cases the ultimate leader of the ‘bad guys’ just wanted more power. And didn’t care how many lives they destroyed to get it.
Not all stories need a Killmonger.
It’s always worth taking the time to consider what your story needs, rather then what’s fashionable in fiction at the moment. On a personal note some of my favourite stories have been either entirely focused on the heroes or had explicitly shallow villains.
The reality is that most of the time motivations for large scale atrocities are shallow and unsatisfying. Giving fictional villains deeper or more complex motives can work, but it can also mean twisting the narrative up to make it look like the villain (and hence their actions) are more reasonable then they are.
Killmonger’s twisted vision of what would make Wakanda ‘better’ works in Black Panther, just as White Wolf’s similar motivation did in the comics a decade or so earlier. They work because they’re directly competing with the hero’s vision of what would make the world better. And because ultimately it’s about showing why T’Challa’s way is better then the villain he’s facing off against.
But I can think of other stories where giving the villain a ‘deeper’ reasoning just served to make them look reasonable. While they were arguing for torture and genocide.
And… I just think we’ve got enough of that in real life.
At the end of the day your villain should be serving a role within the story you’re creating. Motivation is one of many ways that we try to make sure they serve that function effectively and entertainingly.
But, despite what some people would have you believe, it ain’t the be all and end all of whether a villain or story is entertaining. Personality, plots, aesthetic and sometimes how satisfying it feels to see their day ruined, all feed in to how well a villain works.
The threat they represent in the story isn’t dependant on whether their motivation is deep or nuanced or rational. It’s about their ability to follow through and sometimes the horrific nature of the desire itself.
So I guess a lot of my advice here is to consider what your villain actually needs to do in the story. Then take a step back and consider whether deeper motivation adds anything to that.
Be aware that the more complex motivations and drives you add the further you’re getting from a realistic torturer. Which is not inherently apologia, or inherently a bad writing idea, but consider what any deviation from reality implies.
I hope that helps. :)
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Disclaimer
*The international definition can include groups that control territory, ie an occupying force. In some countries the definition is slightly wider and encompasses some international criminal gangs.