On Stupid Evil
So several times I’ve considered adapting the Notes I release every Saturday on Facebook for Tumblr. Here’s another Saturday Note, from this week, that I thought I’d post here.
I imagine absolutely no one will read it/care, but if that’s the case I’ll just go back to playing Fable III and move on with my life.
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On Stupid Evil
You’ve heard of Character Alignments? Chaotic Evil? And Lawful Evil? And Neutral Evil? And I did a Note about Lawful Good? Well now we’re talking about Stupid Evil. This describes a character who isn’t just evil, they’re stupid about it. And it’s all too common.
The example that struck me most recently was the recently released Star Wars: Battlefront II. No, I’m not referring to the whole scandal with paid content (though sure, that could also count), but in the story mode, we are introduced to the Empire’s Inferno Squadron, led by Iden Versio. She serves the Empire faithfully even after the Battle of Endor, but leaves to join the Rebellion after seeing the horrors of Operation Cinder. What is Operation Cinder? Well it’s this plan that the Emperor had in place in case he died, which called for having these satellite superweapons go around to planets and raze everything on the surface. First on the list were highly-populated Imperial planets. Because if the Emperor can’t have them, no one can.
And yeah, people went along with it.
Alright, what actual benefit does this serve? Other than to convince our heroes that the Empire is irredeemably evil. These aren’t planets that hold Rebel bases, they’re Imperially-aligned planets. But they’re being destroyed for...reasons.
Star Wars has this problem, especially of late, in that it cannot seem to understand why anyone would join the villains. I’m not saying that villains have to be sympathetic, but they have to be understandable to a degree (unless we’re talking like, alien god monster things that don’t work on human ideas of morality, but even then you have to do something other than just ‘they don’t think like us’). The Empire, and the later First Order, is Evil with a capital ‘E’ and that’s it. People join up because they’re forced, I guess, and it’s not clear how or why the whole thing falls apart.
George Lucas’s Prequel Trilogy and Star Wars: Rebels tries to rectify this by showing that the public support of the Jedi was waning, that people wanted a strong leadership in their government to fight the inaction of the rotting Republic, and that most everyday people in the galaxy don’t really understand the whole Jedi/Sith thing going on. But then we have Rebels, which has only one sympathetic Imperial character who turns traitor and joins the Rebellion (Kallus), one Imperial officer who isn’t needlessly cruel for its own sake (Grand Admiral Thrawn), but the rest are glory hounds, violent nutjobs, and raging douchebags.
The Sequel Trilogy takes this even further by introducing the First Order, the “remnants of the Empire” that popped right the flip out of nowhere, have the resources to keep an entire fleet full of warships ready and troops to occupy several systems. Oh, and also have the engineering know-how to make an entire planet into a superweapon. It’s never explained how, but they just do. Nor do we know why anyone supports them. There is some sort of fanatical loyalty to the Supreme Leader, Snoke, but since no one has told us what his deal is, we don’t know why. All we know is they serve him and revere him for...reasons. It’s not even brainwashing, as Finn breaks away from it.
It’s just...Stupid Evil. There’s no reason behind their fanaticism, they just are evil and that’s their thing. There are pretty shallow allusions to the Third Reich, North Korea and the Islamic State, but nothing that really develops the antagonists other than Kylo Ren.
That’s...pretty inexcusable, considering how far into the saga we are.
And it’s becoming more and more common to paint villains this way. Gone are the days of the Assassin’s Creed franchise when the Templar villains have sympathetic motivations and understandable backstories. The main villain of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Flavius, loudly brags about how happy he is that he killed a child and how racist he is against Egyptians. Compare this to Governor Torres, the villain of Black Flag that actively rallies against the slave trade and talks about uniting all people regardless of nationality or religion. At no point is it even clear what the heck the Order of the Ancients actually wants; after they find the ancient treasure they’re been after the entire game, the audience never finds out what they were planning to do with it other than vaguely “take over Egypt,” and the heroes aren’t particularly worried about getting it back out of their hands.
Fallout 4 has the Institute, who at least have the motivation of wanting to make the world a better place with their science. But they’re so stupid that they can’t work out that sending a bunch of androids to the surface impersonating people and killing anyone who gets in their way might actually make people see them as the bad guys. This is handwaved as ‘they’re a bunch of hard science types who don’t understand the need for PR’ but, like...there are people throughout the Commonwealth screaming about how synths (androids) could be anywhere, impersonating anyone, shooting anyone suspected of being a synth, and they don’t think that maybe they need to rethink their strategy? That’s just stupid.
And there are ways around this! It’s so easy to not make stupid villains.
Like I mentioned above, I played a lot of Fable III this week, and in it the main plot is to overthrow your character’s brother, the king of Albion, who is a tyrant taxing the people to death, executing people who protest against him, and giving industry over to a sadist who makes a ton of coin regardless of the unsafe working conditions. But you find out after deposing him that the reason he did so was because he had witnessed an evil slime monster thing from beyond our reality attacking his people, and had been informed that this unspeakable evil was coming back to Albion. He was a horrible tyrant, yes, but he was doing so because he was driven mad trying to raise funds and resources to defend his homeland an evil that he knows he won’t be able to beat. His decisions are bad, but he’s not in a right state of mind, and it makes sense given what he’s been through.
There’s also Reaver, who’s evil and a jerk about it for no reason though, so I guess we shouldn’t give the game that much credit when it comes to villains.
Remember Thrawn, I mentioned earlier? The Grand Admiral in Star Wars: Rebels that is actually competent and not needlessly cruel. Oh, he’s cruel, and he doesn’t care one whit about the average person. But he also realizes that it’s much more useful to get people to work with you than against you, and to extract information from every action, even a defeat. He quickly deduces Hera’s identity as a Rebel officer the first time he meets her in disguise by the context of where she is and what she’s doing. He frequently lets spies live when he knows about them, because he knows he can extract more information out of them if he lets them think they’re undetected. He always runs his battles so that he learns something about the enemy, whether he wins or loses. It’s about the long game, not the momentary victory. He’s a really good villain that way. Too bad the Empire decides that the Death Star should get more funding than his own schemes.
Lord, I really hope that he doesn’t get killed on this show.
I know that it might be difficult to gift every character with a well-rounded personality, especially when it comes to villains. And that’s fine! But there’s a difference between not being able to develop a villainous character, and making them just stupidly evil for no reason. Especially don’t make me sit and question why anyone would go along with these villains.