How bad are bad guys?

[Deleted member 84247]

That's why I always advocate for more cartoonishly evil bad guys. They have all the good points of a tragic villain while also keeping all the good points of a real badass villain. Until you dial them both up to 1080°...

There aren't many people who can use the line: "I have created multidimensional ghost shark robots to get my revenge" without sounding cringe.

What the fuck? That isn't cringe. That is actually one of the least cringe proposals for a villain I have heard. If someone can create a Doofenshmirtz V2 in WN form (no fanfic) then that person is goated.

I say turn up the cartoony villains.

 

[MintiLime]

My human bad guy is not redeemable in my eyes because they will not choose to change. They will complain oh no! I had it harder than you, but the entire point of them is that your circumstances do not determine your moral character. You could have chosen to be better, to not be jealous, to not be consumed by hate. You chose this and must suffer for it. There is a sense of tragedy but no true complexity in whether they are evil by choice.

In comparison, my BBEG is inhuman and literally is the personification of a corrupted concept. There is no sad backstory other than they were influenced by human evil. That’s it.

The nuance for me comes in the fact that my “good” guys have lots of flaws. Redeemable characters are just human, not pure evil.

 

[CrimsonGenius]

People can choose to be bad without reason or the reason they turned bad is ridiculous. I have a villain who became evil and wanted to turn people into rage-filled crazies just because she was forced to sell a horse she nurtured for years.

 

[HungrySheep]

I think the villains should definitely have some sort of motivation beyond "yeah, I'm just here to cause chaos for the sake of it", but that motivation doesn't necessarily have to be something that makes them likeable.