AMA: Let's talk about villains! Our villains primarily!

The Necromancer's Lair
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I wanted to come back here because I do have a villain-focus story, just that, these villains are only terrible people with selfish wants. They’re not magical beings.

Take Will, for example.

He’s quite smart, but dropped out of school. He looks young for his age and uses that to his advantage. He doesn’t care about people’s lives if he can get what he wants which is usually alcohol, money, and jewelry and maybe immortality. His temper doesn’t serve him well though because he can go on a maniac-like rampage and kill everyone around him if he gets wrathy. You don’t want to make Will wrathy.

Despite being so evil, there are times when he shows his boyish self like idolizing someone so much he gets flustered when speaking with them, or how he really does enjoy being around the gang he created. Or, despite what he says, how he actually does take care of the younger members in the gang.

I created Will to explore a kind of villain who is villainous for simply being too selfish. All he’s after is his own goal—to be rich, immortal, and have jewels and women on his arms. So, whatever he does, is for that. Nothing more nothing less.

Yet, he does still retain a good-enough heart somewhere in all his evil darkness. But in the end, that’s not enough to save him from falling. It comes back to bite him leading to his demise.

Or, you could take someone like Gahru who used to be a prodigy orphan.

He has some animosity toward the system in his country for not taking care of him well. He’s had to become a trickster to survive. His evil comes from mingling with the wrong crowd and a cult. I wanted to have a villain that is just a person gone down the wrong path and can’t seem to find his way back again.

Gahru does have an ego though. His name means ego (from Arabic algharur). But he’s not always egotistic and even shows kindness towards others.

He’s not a good villain :stuck_out_tongue:

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Gahru made me think of Garu from Pucca

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So Will is a Youtube Shorts creator?

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Hmmmm I only have a few villains in my stories. Villains in my opinion have little to no redemption in their story arcs, so my stories tend to have antagonists rather than villains.

Marlin Cortez was one of my first true villains and comes from my Gemutations books. He was the head of a multi-billion dollar company and had bought out nearly every business within radius of his company. Owned cradle to grave pretty much any process you could think of. He used and manipulated everyone, including family to acquire whatever he wanted. He was also something of a megalomaniac, and used his power and influence to dabble in very questionable practices (up to and including genetic manipulation on unwilling subjects), simply because he could.

Even when Cortez found himself a result of one of those experiments, it didn’t stop his villainous ways, he continued to hound and torment the protags in those books.

Scott Turner also falls into the villainy category for many of the same reasons. He’s from my Brothers Martin books. In his case, he used victims of accidents to test out illicit cybernetic experiments, and in many cases it killed the subjects. He’s Tom Martin’s major nemesis through two of the books.

I transitioned to more antagonistic characters (relatable, but definitely with different motivations from my protags which clash). Renate and Carmen from Before the Fall and Endgame come to mind from my Only Half book series. While Renate was never meant to be a true villain from his inception, Carmen was… but as I continued to write her, I just realized she was a tragic character whose choices were molded by her unfortunate circumstances and personality flaws. I’ve had a “curse”(/sarcasm) of making my bad guys sympathetic and relatable. Even Tom’s brother, Steve, was an antagonist at one point in the Brothers Martin books.

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lol XD

Will: Me tube? Why’s it short?

You know, he’s from 1855. They barely had cameras.

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Good. It’s better that he doesn’t do DMCA takedowns of people who make fun of him.

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If Will lived in the modern era, he would still drop out of school and probably get into drug trade or human trafficking. He’s already doing the latter although it’s still kind of okay in his time. People were rather divided about slavery and on kidnapping slaves. It depended on where you lived, mostly.

When text like this is blurred out these many times, you do click on them, don’t you? :stuck_out_tongue: It’s a story taking place in a 1855 USA-esque fictional country and if you know your history, you know what’s been going on then. It’s like a year shy of the Civil War.

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