I would love to see a modern retelling of "God Vs The Morning Star" but instead of the story being like:
"demons and hell are sexy fun badasses and God is boringly evil👿"
it's an updated story where the Devil is truly evil in the most horrifying way possible as society has developed an updated idea of what true evil is.
Take Christianity which has been oversaturated with mysogynistic ableistic conservatives and make the Devil the personification of evil who wishes to corrupt everyone into those assholes.
For example, "The Devil believes that women should be slaves and Lilith is the original not-feminist Girlboss who is willing to throw all other women down in order to succeed"
or
"The Devil left Heaven once he saw that God was allowing gay people to exist without torturing them."
or
"The Devil is a massive abuser who will try and manipulate anyone into believing that it was his daddy issues that made him this way so that's why it's perfectly okay for him to do whatever he wants"
Instead of the Devil being an insanely attractive perfect guy with a bad boy exterior, why don't you make him an abusive incel with a huge superiority complex and the most manchild-infused tantrums ever?
Make God the omniscient compassionate God they are supposed to be.
Make evilness seem unattractive, immature, and horrible to be the victim of.
look i was raised hindu, and maybe it was obvious since so many of our stories involve people like this, but it's so weird that people get mad that abusive characters in fiction are also given redeeming qualities, and those redeeming qualities are elaborated upon in context of the person.
'it's abuse apologia-' no it isn't. it's about realizing that abusers aren't mustache-twirling villains, and how no amount of talent, skill and kindness you might have will ever excuse your harm. abusers are people; dehumanizing bad people and making them into caricatures ignores the reality that horrible people can and do lead lives that are upstanding in many ways.
Any tips on what if evil wins at the end of the story??
Hi :)
That is a good question!
Evil wins in the end
"Evil" can mean many things in fiction
a bully/rival
a powerful criminal
a crime syndicate
an evil government
demons or monsters
actual powers of evil
What is a win?
Both lose - the good guys lose it all, but the bad guy also doesn't come out unscathed
Leading into a sequel - the good guys lose it all, but it's used at as a new plot for the sequel to try again and win this time
Evil really wins - the evil powers win it all
How to write it?
You have to decide how you want your reader to feel after putting down your book. You don't want them to be too frustrated, so you have to keep in mind that you can shock them with the ending, but it needs to make sense. They should feel like you really thought this through and that in hindsight, it's brilliant, not that you just made something up for shock value.
If you want to go into a sequel, you can also put in a tiny little bit of hope. Just enough that the reader goes from feeling helpless for the protagonist's situation, to getting excited for how they can turn things around in the next book.
For this I would like you to direct yourattention towards the Fire Nation from Avatar:The Last Airbender. I know I reference this show a lot, but that’s merelybecause it has such amazing writing. If you haven’t watched it, I would recommendit if only to admire the writing of the characters, places, and people.
On that vein, here are some thing that canmake your empire both believable and terrifying.
Make it Good at One Point
Noteverything starts off just evil. Sure, some people set out to directly opposethe good of the world, but sometimes they startoff at the good in the world. Sometimes the things they begin doing is goodbut turns bad at some point.
It’seasy, really easy, for good intentions to turn bad. And perhaps their citizens,or at least their soldiers, don’t know that others consider them evil. They believethat after all this time, they’re still doing good—and on that vein, make themdo bad will still believing they’re good.
Have the Leader Charismatic
Thereare a lot of Evil Empires where the leader is a clear madman. Take EmperorPalpatine—the man is straight crazy once he drops is façade. There’s no gettingaround that. But before he does, he’s a trusted man. People put their faith inhim and believed in him—he seems like a very nice man.
Have yourEvil Emperor be like that: nice, kind, loving in a twisted way that’s hard tosee is manipulative. Straight up insane is fun to write no doubt, but havingyour leader be influential can lead to some very interesting scenarios. Charismaticpeople can change the minds of even the toughest of heroes if they’re given theopportunity.
Start at the Beginning
As I saidearlier, they don’t always start off bad. However, sometimes they do. Understandinghow it go its start, how it grew to be what it is the heroes know it to be whenthey’re opposing it, can make it interesting. And on that, understanding howthe one(s) in power became the way they are can be interesting as well. Knowingwhy they’re doing what they’re doing and knowing motive could be key to whatthe hero(es) need to defeat them.
All of that being said, there’s no right wayto do it, just interesting ways. You can play off of things that you know, ormix them up, or try something completely different. It’s entirely up to you. Inthe meantime,
Bad Grandma, the Bread Machine, and Murder #amwriting
One of my three works-in-progress is a murder mystery set in one of my established fantasy worlds. I am currently writing the antagonist’s story and meshing each event with the protagonist’s timeline via the calendar.
My antagonist is a woman whom we’ll call Bad Grandma for the sake of this post. She takes what she wants and damn the consequences.
I see Bad Grandma as a pirate in the truest sense…
(Image: Eugène Delacroix, “The Abduction of Rebecca”: a scene from Ivanhoe in which Rebecca is kidnapped on the orders of Brian de Bois-Guilbert.)’
On Writing Bad People
There's been a lot of nonsense going around that writing sympathetically about evil/cruel/bad characters is endorsing their evil, or (in the worst case), evidence of the writer's own evil character.
First of all, fiction is not real life. Period. You can write a thing without wanting to experience it. You can write a thing without wanting anybody else to experience it. You can write a thing while wanting to experiencing it, but also knowing it's morally wrong. You can enjoy reading or writing a horrible thing without being a horrible person. Period.
Now I've gotten that out of the way, I want to draw a parallel.
Consider the great genre of angst and darkfic. Often these fics revolve around horrible things happening to the good characters, the heroes. Why? There are as many "why"s as there are authors. But one "why" is the desire to see people broken, to be reduced to whatever the core of their character is, and to fail. Extremity amplifies personality, and catharsis is a real thing. It is satisfying to see Hamlet lying dead, with the grieving Horatio left to tell the story.
That set of emotions is what's fun, for me, about reading and writing evil characters. Evil characters are *already* broken. They are already fallen from grace, even when the moments grace happened offscreen. Nobody's evil at thr-- okay, nobody's evil at seven. Sometimes you want to see the ghost of that seven-year-old. Sometimes you want to see that seven-year-old utterly obliterated. Sometimes you want to see that seven-year-old redeemed.
And sometimes you want to see that three-year-old with guns and rockets, gleefully stomping around murdering everybody within reach. Because you were that three-year-old, and you envy the freedom and the rage openly expressed, and you can let Kylo Ren or Eridan Ampora or Angelus do the satisfying things, both sexual and not, that you can do when you aren't hindered by a conscience.
The id wants what it wants, and writing can be all about the id. If you want to criticize my id, you'd better be sitting in a darkened office with a notepad.
Any tips for writing well-rounded antagonists who are really, really unsympathetic? If it matters, I'm rewriting Cap 1, and I want the Red Skull's motives to make sense, but I want to minimize people thinking well of him. He's a Nazi. Come on. I don't want to encourage the already widely held misconception that crazy=evil. But I don't think making him not-crazy will work, because his evil plan is pretty crazy. I've done a little searching, but haven't found much about keeping evil unsympathetic.
Well, the thing is, his motives don’t have to make sense to us. They only have to make sense to him. The best villains, as the saying goes, always believe they are the heroes. And fortunately (sort of) you do have a built-in reason for his belief that he’s a hero: he’s a Nazi.
This is gonna take a while. BUCKLE UP. We’re gonna talk about aliens. And Hitler.
Let’s take a step to the left for a moment and I’ll example-explain. There’s this TV show, Ancient Aliens, which I love because it’s amazingly stupid. It’s a great exercise in critical thinking. It’s about how aliens came to earth in Humanity’s distant past and may or may not have done everything from creating homo sapiens to teaching Hitler how to build a functioning time machine. (We will totally get back to Hitler in a minute; the time machine may have to wait.)
So there’s a guy (several actually, but imagine there’s just one, it’s easier) who believes aliens helped the Egyptians build the pyramids. His reasoning goes like this:
1. How could you build something like the pyramids, something so huge and esoteric, without modern machinery?2. You couldn’t, and we don’t know how we did it. We know nothing about them! Oh, the mystery!
Here’s where his logic takes a branch. He assumes that Egyptians couldn’t build the pyramids without help because he hasn’t taken the time to educate himself about the ancient peoples and their understanding of geometry, physics, or building technique. He hasn’t studied ancient Egyptian culture and isn’t aware of many records that tell us exactly how the Eygptians managed labor and building materials during the building of the various megasites. We know pretty much exactly how Egyptians built the pyramids. But that requires a lot of hard work and study, and that’s boring. So he builds off this faulty moment of ignorance towards:
3. The Egyptians somehow got modern machinery. Or even...futuristic machinery.4. Aliens. It could have been aliens. Oh god! Aliens! That’s so interesting!5. PROFIT!
Then he writes a book and enters the weird, echo-chambery world of ancient alien theorists, where everyone he meets confirms his theory. And all this seems super harmless, because the idea of something otherworldly interacting with humans IS really interesting, it’s really fun to explore even if it isn’t true --
Until you try to explain it to a modern Egyptian person. Because it’s their ancestors you’re suddenly saying are too stupid to have done this amazing thing on their own.
Assuming ancient Egyptians were hapless idiots is pretty racist. Nobody questions how white builders in the middle ages put up great stone churches and castles in England, even though in comparison to the modern era they didn’t have much more to go on than ancient Egyptians did.
But this man who believes in Ancient Aliens doesn’t care, because the story is great and doesn’t hurt him personally, just a bunch of brown people he’s never gonna meet. And because his entire story is built on ignorance, when confronted with the evidence of his ignorance, he claims it’s a cover-up, or a misinterpretation, or that people are out to get him for telling the truth. (Sorry, Mulder.)
Now, this isn’t Nazi-level bullshitting, but it’s the same basic idea. In Mein Kampf, Hitler draws on very early iterations of this ideology: he posits that because there are superficial similarities in the buildings of ancient cultures, and certain spiritual similarities in many faiths, that one superculture, the most superior of all cultures, must have seeded itself everywhere in Humanity’s distant past. (This is both provably false in some cases and easily explained in others, but “a pyramid is a very stable and relatively easy-to-build architectural construct” isn’t as interesting as “Mysterious ancient superculture did it!”) And he decided that the purest strain of this superculture has been passed down in the blond, blue-eyed version of the Nordic peoples. Why? Well, his reasoning boils down to “They are the most objectively beautiful people and so they must be the best, because I said so. Do you want these boys behind me to put the boot in?”
In reality it was likely because he was raised in a culture that valued those physical characteristics and devalued others. Racism: it’s what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
The entire ideology of Nazism is based on “because I said so” backed up by incorrect anecdata, confirmation bias, and lies published as facts. And in some sense, MCU Red Skull doesn’t fully buy into Nazi ideology because he’s a scientist and he knows a disprovable theory when he meets one. Comics Skull is a full-on, Jew-hating, Aryan-glorifying Nazi; MCU Skull gives the impression he doesn’t really give a shit about Judaism one way or the other. Not that this makes him any morally better -- he doesn’t think Jews are responsible for Germany losing WWI, but he doesn’t care they’re being murdered by the millions, either.
He’s interested in the power ancient myth can give him, not the politics it can support. He doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t look Aryan, because what gave him his unique look also gave him power.
But while he doesn’t believe it’s racially-based, he still buys into the theory that there can be an ubermensch, a superman, something that matches the Aryan construct. And more importantly, that if you are one, you aren’t bound by the constraints of ordinary men and women, and they should serve you.
Skull’s big boner is for power. He wants to rule the world. And he genuinely believes he’s the best guy for the job because he’s the strongest. He believes he has the right to rule. It’s why he wants Steve on-side, because Steve, by virtue of being a brother-in-Erskine, has earned the right to power.
You find the depth of a villain, often, in their delusion. It’s admirable that you don’t want to associate mental illness and evil, but this isn’t mental illness. It’s more akin to denial. This is something that someone has told themselves is true for so long that they have to believe it because otherwise their life fucking falls apart.
Skull’s motive makes internal sense -- I am the strongest, therefore I am the best suited to rule, and under my rule everything will be much more orderly and precise and people will be happier anyway. If he actually managed it, he would be totally baffled by the fact that people under his rule aren’t happy, and he would punish them for not being happy, because they aren’t confirming his delusions. (Much of the cultural pageantry of any dictatorship is based on the idea of The People furiously and continuously performing happiness in order to prop up the ruler’s idea that this really is the best arrangement for all concerned.)
If you want a baddie to do something bad, you can make them incapable of normal human emotion, like some serial killers, but that’s fairly rare. Your other option is to look around for why they would do this bad thing, and what ideology would make that make sense. As long as the logic works for them, and we can see it working for them, we don’t need it to work for us. We know might doesn’t make right and that social Darwinism is based on a deeply flawed interpretation of Darwin’s work, but we can see a social Darwinist at work and go “Oh, he’s a social Darwinist, that’s why he does that horrifying thing we would never ourselves do.”
Uh, so, yeah, it boils down to “If it makes sense to him, that’s all you need.” Sorry about the detour through genocidal maniacs I took to get there.
