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).