Why Competent Villains Are Important

Villains are bound to lose in the end. In most stories, the hero will triumph and the villain will fail - and be killed or locked up, usually. Yet, it’s important that it is hard for the hero to win, otherwise the story is boring. That is why you need to make sure your villains are competent.

But what makes a villain competent? And how can a competent villain actually fail in the end? Well, a lot of competent people fail at something. A good planner, a mastermind, doesn’t have to be a good fighter, too, so when it comes to the big confrontation, they might find themselves in a troublesome situation (like Moriarty did at that waterfall). Or their plans are seriously disturbed by the hero’s actions - that can leave even a competent villain wide open for attack. Or they might be betrayed from an unexpected side. Competence doesn’t automatically lead to success, just as incompetence doesn’t automatically lead to failure.

First of all, a villain doesn’t come out of nowhere and the time of the moustache-swirling, hand-rubbing, madly-giggling, purely-evil villain is long over. A villain with a lair, a group of henches at their disposal, and the necessary technology to do their thing has made money before, has made connections, has done a lot of work already. And that means this villain knows what they’re doing. Give them their dues. They can have weaknesses, of course. Vanity and arrogance always work well, sadism is almost to be expected. Because they’ve managed to pull off their plans so well in the past, they’re sure nobody can stop them. Because they have built such a strong organisation, they think they are beyond the law and law enforcement. That works.

If you want to keep it to a lower level, still keep your villain competent. If they’re a corrupt cop, they know how to mask it and doesn’t flaunt the wealth they shouldn’t have too much. If they’re head of a gang, they know how to keep their men under control and they can deal, through more means than just violence, with other gangs. If they’re just a high-school bully, they’ll know how not to be spotted by the teachers and how to pick victims who don’t have a high enough standing to become dangerous. A villain who is laughing stock only damages your hero’s heroism.

A fool is easily vanquished and the hero needs something to do. The power level of hero and villain is not equal. To make things interesting, the villain must be in a much better position at the beginning - more influence, more money, more power in any way which matters. They must be untouchable for the hero to a certain degree. That can be achieved in many different ways, depending on the story. For instance, if intrigue plays a huge role, if you’re writing a political thriller or suchlike, they have political power and influence and they have friends in high places. The hero, on the other hand, must be without all of this. Perhaps they’re a newcomer or they’ve fallen into disgrace for past deeds. It must be very clear who hold all the aces - and it’s never the hero.

Because otherwise there is no story. The story of the hero is always a journey. It’s always a case of evolution. The person at the beginning of the story is not the person at the end of the story. It doesn’t matter whether you use the classic Hero’s Journey or the Heroine’s Journey or something else, this is always true. And the villain plays a big role in that change, in that evolution.

That is most obvious in the classic shonen stories of Japanese manga - and, perhaps, most obvious there in the “Dragonball” series. There’s always the fight at the beginning of a new story arc, where the heroes are too weak to defeat the villain. Then they train and become better, expand their powers, meet new allies, and then in the end face off against the villain again and defeat them. That is, stripped down, how stories work. Only, it’s not always on such an easily visible level.

Even though it’s usually the hero who gets the audience’s love, the villain is just as important. That doesn’t mean you need to make the villain likeable - even heroes don’t necessarily have to be likeable, although it makes things easier -, but it means you need to make the audience see that this villain is a true threat to the hero and that they and the hero can’t succeed at the same time.

The latter is most easily accomplished by setting both the hero and the villain either on the same goal (usually a MacGuffin, see my post about them) or by setting them up so their goal is to defeat the other one. There are, of course, variations to this. The hero happens to stand in the villain’s way without knowing it. The villain is working against a good friend of the hero, so the hero comes to their friend’s aid. Especially when intrigue comes in, things get a bit hard to see through at times.

A competent villain will make it hard for the hero to reach their goal. They will, either by accident or by design, cross paths with the hero and decide that they need to put the hero out of the way one way or other. That is when true enmity between them begins. And they do things which force the hero to take up the fight - a competent villain is the best way to get an unwilling hero to actually start being a hero.

Do your hero a favour and give them a strong and competent villain to fight. It might be easier to turn things the hero’s way with a weak villain, but there’s no challenge and no fun in that - neither for the audience, nor, if we’re being honest here, for you as the writer. Competent villains are good villains (or evil ones, depending on your point of view).

A Bit About The Loki Files

As I just posted my changed release schedule, which now includes a couple of novellas I wrote a few years ago, but haven’t professionally published so far, I thought I might tell you a little bit about how The Loki Files happened and what is to be expected of this month’s and November’s releases.

It started out in February 2014, when I finally got around to watching “Marvel’s The Avengers” (pretty late, yes). Like so many other fans, I fell in love with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, but my imagination was too far-spread to just write some Marvel Loki fan-fiction (not that those can’t be great, mind you). Instead, I developed some kind of other reality, which retained some details (such as Loki being adopted by Odin and raised as Thor’s brother), but changed a lot of other things. I made a lot of twists in Norse mythology for this, but since my Loki actually spread a lot of those stories, it was his decision to spread misinformation. Typical for the trickster god, of course.

The Loki of my world was found and adopted by Odin. As a teenager, he rebelled against his family after finding out about this. He was the odd one out - the dark-haired mage among the light-haired warriors. For quite a while, Odin didn’t know what to do with him, then, as a last resort, he gave Loki a job. Odin made Loki his right arm, his agent to do all the work which the warriors of Asgard were not capable of. And in this new position which gave him freedom, but also a direction, Loki thrived and turned from a troublesome adolescent into a rather dutiful adult. Yet, he’s still very close to his brother (and his mother) and the two of them have a talent for getting into trouble, which is basically half of the stories.

The first of the stories, “Heart of Ice,” has a bit of really dark stuff in it. I had Loki (almost) lose the woman he’s in love with and grow depressed afterwards. Things end on a much higher note, but I found some of the scenes in this one hard to write. A little later, I returned to that new world I had created for another story, this one a light and funny buddy story which centres around Thor and Loki. “Birth of Gods” was a change to shake things up a little and it worked out very well. I introduced Loki’s talent for knife-throwing in this one. With “Agents of Asgard,” I gave Loki a little more to do than before and had him assemble a team. He got his personal weapon in this one as well and I had a lot of fun writing it, too. These three stories will be compiled into “The Loki Files Vol. 1.”

I continued the stories with “Blood of Rulers,” which saw the end of a long war. The story was interesting enough and I got to write more about the Sidhe, which is also a good thing. Afterwards, “Protectors of Earth” brought in a long-term love interest for Thor (a very long-term one, they go way back) and had Loki find allies on earth. I finished the series up with “Servants of Life” and a severe threat to Asgard. In it, I tidied up a lot, which was good, since I’ve not written another story about this specific Loki ever since. These three novellas will be compiled into “The Loki Files Vol. 2.”

I have written several other stories about different versions of Loki, related to Odin and not, his age and not, a frost giant prince, a frost giant with two dangerous brothers… I’ve written a lot of different stuff in the one and a half years before I started writing the Knight Agency (but enough about that). Yet, it was Loki who pushed me back to writing more than the occasional piece of short erotica or PWP. And that is why I want to share the first Loki stories I wrote with the audience now.

“The Loki Files Vol. 1” will be released at the end of this month and “The Loki Files Vol. 2” will follow in November. The e-books will be cheaper than my regular work - not that they are worth less, but I feel it’s right, since they were available at Feedbooks for free before.

Changes in the Plan

Originally, I had planned to edit and release “One for Sorrow,” the first Magpies book, this month, but since things have been hectic since April and I haven’t really written that much (and summer so far was so hot I didn’t really get much work done, either), I have switched to another release which I had planned to do eventually. The first three novellas in my “The Loki Files” series which has been written a while ago (2014/2015) will be release this month and the second three novellas will be released in November. Both “One for Sorrow” and “Grave Diggers” will be moved to early next year (February and May).

There are several reasons for this. One is that the novellas were already edited by me a long time ago for a release on Feedbooks (where you’ll only find the first two chapters now), so I will make the process a little shorter this way (not that both my editing and my writing haven’t improved since and I will certainly make changes and brush up on the text). In addition, I found the editing of the three John Stanton novellas in May much less strenuous, too, and it’s still pretty warm here, so less strenuous work is good. And if I do three of the Loki novellas this month, I can just as well do the other three in November - I don’t plan on adding more stories about Loki and Sarah (and the rest of the gang), so the series isn’t going to grow any more. I give myself a little more of a cushion before I run out of things and can, hopefully, take up writing at my regular speed in a bit. Things have been calming down and once the temperatures come down and the winds go up, I’ll be in a much better mood again, I’m sure. More projects (like a Fantomas restart and a third Black Knight Agency novel) are in the pipe.

The new release plan is like this:

• August 2018: The Loki Files Vol. 1 (includes the novellas “Heart of Ice,” “Birth of Gods,” and “Agents of Asgard”)
• November 2018: The Loki Files Vol. 2 (includes the novellas “Blood of Rulers,” “Protectors of Earth,” and “Servants of Life”)
• February 2019: “One for Sorrow” - The Magpies #1
• May 2019: “Grave Diggers” - Knight Agency #7

By the time “Grave Diggers” is released in the end of May 2019, I hope to have finished “Who is Fantomas” and “Grey Eminence” and, with a little luck, further projects which I don’t know about yet.

X-Men And Fear Vs Oppression

I’ve been reading and watching some stuff about comics and other world-building concepts the last few days and come away with a huge question I think I’m now ready to answer for myself: why are the X-Men in Marvel’s movies and comics actually shown as oppressed?

I know that they have been seen as a stand-in for a lot of different groups of people who are oppressed by society, such as people of colour, gay people, and other minorities. But what I’ve started to realize now is that this doesn’t actually make any sense.

What does make sense is the normal humans in the Marvel universe being afraid of mutants, even hate them, either on a general or on a personal level. The rooster of mutants includes people like Magneto, Storm, and Phoenix - all of whom could easily raze whole cities to the ground. To be afraid of people who can do that is just a normal reaction of our survival instinct. And such fear can easily turn into hatred, too, so it also makes sense that at least some people would outright hate mutants. So far, so … not so good.

But oppression isn’t just one group of people hating another group of people. Conservatives and liberals hate each other, but none of them oppresses the other. Oppression isn’t even necessarily tied to hatred or fear. Women usually weren’t feared by men in the past, but they were oppressed as a group. There’s no sign in “The Handmaid’s Tale” that the men of Gilead outright hate or fear women, but they consider them ‘below’ a man and thus consider it right to control them and take away their rights. The southern slavers before the Civil War didn’t hate black people as a such, but considered those slaves below them and not even fully human, so they saw it as perfectly normal to own them and treat them like cattle. And afterwards, it was still considered true that people of colour weren’t as intelligent and, if you get down to it, worthy as white people, so it was okay to limit them by making certain areas ‘off limit’ to them and keeping the best things to the white people.

Oppression is a systemic thing, it’s built into the foundations of a society. And oppression only works if the oppressed has no way to rebel against it. When women started demanding rights and showed by their numbers and their actions that they were ready to fight for them, they got more rights. When the black civil rights movement picked up speed, oppressive laws fell and the imbalance was righted some (far from completely, there’s still systemic racism in the US which works against POC). When gays started demanding the same rights, laws declaring their sexual orientation illegal fell and rights were slowly granted. All those example of oppression aren’t completely gone now, there’s still something left in the system, but they have left the area of outright oppression.

The point about this is that oppression only works as long as power is firmly on the side of the oppressor. Once the oppressed get power or realize they already have it, oppression becomes harder and harder until it’s gone. And this is where the mutant-‘oppressed group of choice’ analogy is failing.

Mutants are by definition a group with power. Most mutants we see in the Marvel universe have some kind of power which is above human scope. There’s also some who are simply strange-looking or can do things on a very low level, but the majority of mutants seen in Marvel stories has awesome powers. They can read minds, lift things with a thought, control weather, heal in a heartbeat, throw fireballs, freeze everything around them, and many other things. Even if we put aside the most powerful of the mutants, a group of them (as the X-Men, but not only them) could probably overcome a lot of adversity. With a good leader who knows how to make the best of each team member’s abilities (whether mutation or not), such a group could easily take control. Mutants are a power factor of the world and those who have power are not those who will be oppressed.

A lot of people hate the 1% - the richest people in the world. But they will never be oppressed, because due to their money and social influence, they will never be in a situation where they can be oppressed, where their rights and possessions can be taken because they’re powerless to prevent it. The very same would be true for mutants. A lot of people would fear or even hate them, but due to their powers, they wouldn’t be oppressed. The idea alone that mutants can be controlled is ridiculous, no matter whether we’re talking about mutants being forced not to use their powers or whether we’re talking about mutants not being allowed to propagate. First of all, mutations happen at random - while it’s highly likely that two mutants would also have a mutant child, two normal humans can have a mutant baby, too. So stopping mutants from propagation (for fear of them replacing mankind one day) is only delaying, but not stopping the inevitable (if the erasure of homo sapient by homo superior is evolution’s next step). And how to force mutants not to use their powers? Technology might help, but can be tricked or destroyed. The first thing a mutant rights movement would do would be to figure out how to disable technical means. And once they are disabled, the consequences wouldn’t be nice for those who did the oppressing. And the idea of mutants controlling other mutants would only lead to giving some mutants more power to wield - such as turning against their master and using all those mutants under their control against the enemy.

In a real-world ‘mutants are real’ situation, it would be far more likely that mutants would be elevated to a privileged group, so the normal humans could rely on good mutants to help them against bad mutants (mutant police vs. mutant criminals). And if not privileged, they would at least not be oppressed, because every try at that would be fated to fail and only bring bad blood which could spell the doom of humanity.

Elementary Revisited

In 2013 and 2014, I reviewed the first season of “Elementary” on my other blog and decided not to follow the series from then onward, going with BBCs “Sherlock” instead. After “Sherlock” jumped the megalodon (you can’t call the last episode of season 4 with a character who is so highly intelligent and insane she controls others by thought just jumping your regular, old shark), I have decided to give “Elementary” a second try. I was not disappointed.

I did enjoy the first season (which I finished watching just now) and I’m now looking forward to more of this Sherlock. I do enjoy the changes very much and they go a lot further (and are a lot more interesting) than in “Sherlock.”

One of the most obvious changes was, of course, the new location: New York City. Moving the stories from London across the Atlantic is an interesting move. However, since Sherlock has already lived there for a while, he clearly has acclimatized and that means he can do his stuff there just as well as in London.

The second very obvious change was the one from John Watson to Joan Watson. I fully approve of that change and have approved of it the first time I started watching as well. Why? Well, why not? Joan is a great character, played with a lot of nuances, and she dresses more suitably than quite some women in crime series I’ve seen. Still too many high heels, but it will probably take at least a century to get TV and movie productions to finally give their female characters more realistic shoes for their jobs, especially if they’re doing a lot of walking, running, or climbing (or crime investigation).

What else is new? For one thing, this Sherlock is very much into sex (which is a huge change from the original), but he’s not really into relationships (although the first season also tells us why). He’s a former drug addict, which is not really new, but it’s what brings Sherlock and Watson together: she comes into his life as a former surgeon who is now helping people through their rehabilitation phase. It’s not what keeps them together, though, her mandate ends around the half-season mark - which is when the main theme of the second half of the season picks up: Moriarty.

And that is the greatest and best change of this series. Don’t misunderstand me, I think Andrew Scott does a more than stellar job of portraying Moriarty in “Sherlock.” He’s a pleasure to watch on the screen and his turning up in “The Abominable Bride” is definitely one of the best things about the whole movie. But “Elementary” does something I wish would have been done before: it makes Moriarty a woman and fuses her with Irene Adler. I will have to say a few things about Irene further down the road, but for the moment, let’s look at the first part of this sentence again: Moriarty is a woman. Not only is Watson a woman in this series, no, the negative version of Sherlock Holmes is a woman as well. And it works out wonderfully, the audience is completely in the dark about it for a long, long time.

Another nice change is that Sherlock really teaches Watson how to be a detective, once she stops being his guardian. He doesn’t act like you often see, talking her down when she makes a mistake - he explains the mistake and what she missed or should have looked at more closely. He soon trusts her to do her own investigations, too. It’s very nice to see them work together as apprentice and master - and I hope they’ll become something akin to equals (Sherlock will probably always be a little better) in future seasons (which I will get my hands on now as well). It’s nice to see Joan Watson grow into her role - against friends and Gregson, all of whom try to talk her out of it, because of the dangers.

Not to mention that the season also includes one of my favourite bald-headed people, Arnold Vosloo (formerly known as Imhotep the Mummy), and my new entry to that list, Vinnie Jones (here known as serial killer M/Sebastian Moran). Even though I’m still a little pissed that they went with a very cliché hitman for the series (Vinnie Jones’ Moran does look very much like, say, Agent 47 or the aging hitman Vosloo played in a double episode of “Bones”), it’s a pleasure to see Vinnie Jones in that role. Moran is often reduced to Moriarty’s right hand who comes back to kill Holmes several years after his master’s death (since “The Empty House” is the only story he features in - and the premise here is thin), but in this series, he’s just one of the different killers Moriarty employs, although the first one Sherlock meets and the one who gives Sherlock the name of his enemy. He also gets something of a redemption (not arc, but moment) when he kills himself, because Moriarty threatens to kill his sister otherwise. Vosloo as the reluctant killer (who does it to save his daughter’s life) is also wonderful to watch - you can’t go wrong with a guy who can even make a CGI mummy look like it has feelings. It also was a great idea to introduce M, the first villain from classic Sherlock Holmes material, at the half-time mark of the season, then bring him back in as the grand finale approaches (I’m pretty sure he had fun in jail during the time in between).

Names from the novels and stories are thrown in during the series, like ‘Stapleton’ as an alias towards the end of the season - the name of the murderer in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” - or Musgrave as a person who suggested Sherlock to a client. The series doesn’t rely on the original stories, though, but is a very well-made police procedural. While that originally put me off a little (after the excellent “A Study in Pink,” can you really blame me?), I enjoy it a lot now, because it means I really don’t know what will happen in any given episode. New stories, new team, much more competent Gregson, which is much better to look at. While the original stories often give the impression that the policemen aren’t really up to the job, I’d rather say they’re not Sherlock Holmes - which isn’t bad as a such. Gregson is a competent man, as is his colleague Bell, but both also know that there are situations when Sherlock’s very strong mind can come in handy. That’s why he works as a consulting detective for them.

Back to Irene, then. At first, I liked the idea of keeping Irene Adler, whose role in the original stories is blown out of context in most movies and series, in Sherlock’s past, so him finding her as the finale picks up did throw me off a bit. Especially as it looked as if they played into the trope of torturing/killing a girlfriend (first, Irene is supposed to be dead, then she turns up, clearly psychologically tormented) for the advancement of the hero. But then the series did something that had me jumping up and down with glee: they turned Irene into Moriarty. Grouping them (her as a femme fatale working for him) is not a new idea, but it’s the first time I’ve seen a female version of Moriarty (which I would always have liked, especially with Sherlock often admitting he doesn’t understand women) and this version was known to him as Irene Adler who had a relationship with him. A relationship which drove him into drugs when she disappeared, seemingly killed by the serial killer M.

I love how Moriarty is portrayed in the two episodes in which we see her (one of them is her pretending to be emotionally tormented Irene, but I like the second one better). Cold-blooded, clear-minded, manipulating, calculating. She might not be a professor of mathematics, but she surely has a mind to rival Sherlock’s. In the end, it’s her drive to prove herself superior to him which does her in - a fitting idea, since that would also work with a man and is not one of those things you usually see female villains fall over. Seeing her complex network develop towards the end of the season, once Sherlock and Watson start to look around, is very impressive. Moriarty is clearly in control of a large organisation which she uses as she sees fit. If an employee becomes a problem, they’re removed - if necessary, even by forcing them to do so themselves (as she does with Moran, having Sherlock unknowingly relying the message that if he doesn’t kill himself, his sister will die). Now, however, I want to pit Moran’s sister against Moriarty, that could be fun (would it be so farfetched that Ms. Moran, too, is a good killer?).

Was the first season of “Elementary” without flaws? Surely not. But neither was any season of “Sherlock” I’ve seen. With a little more distance to the originals, the series is really good and I’m looking forward to the other seasons. I want to see Watson growing more into herself as a detective and her and Sherlock become an even better team. I want to learn more about Sherlock’s background. And I want to see more of their cases.