The Wood Beyond The World Forum Evil

Quote:


Elise, i stil chuckle about your mustachio-twirling comments regarding Shade Calabronn at the end of Maelstrom. In Austin Powers Dr Evil did the same thing, threatening to blow up the earth's core and demanding only $1 million. Haha. (by same thing i meant mustachio twirling.)

But then again, we have bad guys in real life who are in no position to threaten the world at all; instead they isolate one person or few people from the rest of the world and torment them. I'm tihnking of Silence of the Lambs as a good example.

evil, in a sense, is that force that separates you from your comfort, puts you in compromising situation that threatens you, and consumes you with fear knowing you have to do it alone (knowing full well that should you succeed and return tot he normal world, you are still alone with your experience), survive the labyrinth the isolator has placed you in and all the traps and int he belly of the action you find yourself. But it is precisely the actions of the evil that allows for the birth of the hero. The hero is almsot like Agents in the matrix, it can be born within anyone, then again so is neo. the story of Neo in the matrix is about One person: you and me and everyone.

I also see evil as a more Lovecraftean thing. Something outside, something beyond, something unfathomable. And because it cannot be understood a vacancy needs to be filledd in our consciousness to make up for the inability to understand. That's where far stands.
Fear stands in the gaps of what we can't understand. and it suffocates everything around it.

Nick, i'm thinking back to William's comments regarding words and how we use them and how they create things. We don't resent the stick that injures us, nor do we resent the person who holds the stick. It is resentment that we resent. it is the pain we cause ourselves in resenting.

When i get into arguments with some people on the basic forum int he cafe, i don't hold anything against them. words are words as this thread and many others here have demonstrated. nick mentioned somehing akin to the anarchist's cookbook which in itself is just a thing, but is it evil if someone reads it? is it evil if someone builds a bomb from it? is it evil if they detonate that bomb? is it evil if that bomb harms property? evil if it kills people? which people? what if some of those people are evil -- is the bomb 50% not evil?

is it good to harm evil? how the hell does anyone harm evil? and in that case, how do you harm good. seems these things are merely ideas -- not feelings, not quantified by soldiers or advocates of a certain league.

Church isn't good or evil. It's just a structure of religious function. You and Me are not good or evil, we are structures of functions (not to sound cool or mechanistic).

there are friends and enemies. enemies are who you should be playing chess with, enemies teach you more about yourself than your friends do. Enemies challenge you friends accept you. Enemies challenge that acceptance and force us to prove ourselves again and again. If there is evil, it is those actions that rob us of the opportunity to explore the challenges of being and becoming the best friend or enemy we can be.

Quote:


Elise,

Welcome to the Wood.

Depends on the type of evil your talking about. Evil as in demonic or mortal who has no compassion or love for their fellow man. Evil by design/choice, or by accident/happenstance.

For me...the evil monster lurking on the other side of the door is not all that evil or scary. A character with normal needs and emotions, but hides his more sinister side from everyone is evil. The brother gone bad. The father trying to train his son to be like him...ruthless, no compassion, etc. The woman who uses her sex to control and achieve her desires from others. All manners of evil. Just depends on the type you are trying to achieve. As a further note, I find antagonist with human emotions and characterisc's to be more entertaining than the creature behind the door.

I think what we have been discussing, is that evil is in the eye of the beholder. Dwight Swain has a very simple answer to the holy grail of question that most writers ask...."how will I know if the reader likes it?" You will not, until it hits the market and even then its debatable. All we can do is make educated guesses based on our own experiences, likes and dislikes. The rest is the providence of our audience.

Not sure this helps, but welcome to the club.
Nick. (the old fart)

Quote:


Yes, indeed, we're talking about writing. But I think it's worthwhile to look at the philosophical underpinnings.

It seems to me that religion and faith develop to explain the world's phenomena, make them comprehensible, and, to an extent, controllable. To begin with, natural phenomena -- the volcano's erupting = the gods are angry sort of thing. Then psychological phenomena -- the problem of evil, ultimately.

But our main concern as writers is the source of any particular manifestation of evil in a given situation. Elise just asked about this, really. What makes a character evil? I've read the responses, and it seems they boil down to hunger for power -- the desire to dominate other beings -- in short, the objectification of other beings -- which Loekie identified as the immoral in sexual relationships. I'd go further, and say the willingness to objectify and manipulate, even if it's not for self-interest, even if it's in the service of a "good cause" is also evil. (Someone who's read "Lady Aulia's Choice" through to the end would get this, Nick -- nudge nudge, wink wink.)

There's also the more practical psychological aspect of what makes a character evil -- how did he get to be that way? I still have a probelm with this and my main villain in my first two books. He's just the stock mustache-twirler at the moment -- at best a newsreel Hitler. I really don't have a clear idea of how he got to be a villain -- except it must have something to do with his childhood, as well as his social milieu. I'll end up blaming it on Mom and Dad, I'm sure.

The little bit of evil in my protagonist comes from his sister and his first lover manipulating him into undercover politics -- his sister for "good" motives, his lover for entirely personal benefit.

Motivation is a question we all have to address in our work, for "good" characters and "bad." Psychology and philosophy will have to come into it.

Leah,

You know I read and understand the point. What Timu did was evil, but Timu himself is not evil. I think all characters, protagonist as well as antagonist are capable of both good and evil at anytime. Like the antagonist who does not think twice about ordering his troops to kill everyone in the village, and yet spares a small child standing in the muddy streets crying. At that moment...a spark of good rose within the protagonist...for whatever reason, but its that reason that will capture the reader quicker than all the villagers killed.

Dwight Swain, states this in his book, "Techiniques of the $elling Writer," that there is clear points to follow concering the hero vs villian.

In discussing the protagonist, or hero, he states....

Unified oppostion to the hero is more useful in building reader interst than in fragmented oppostion. Small annoying oppostions wear out the focal character rather than overwhelm him, making him more human. Each instance building tension and conflict. But, heroism needs a central figure he can defeat and thus, resolve his problem.

Enter the villain or protagonist.

Broad social forcers may be at the root of your protagonist troubles. But the story becomes more interesting if you bring those trouble to light in the person of one individual. If only so your protagonist can punch the antagonist in the nose and thus giving the readers what they want in the end.

The strength of your villain is the strength of your story.

Writers who lack confidence in their focal characters will try to solve the problem by making the villains weak as well. Result...weak scenes. Remedy: stongrer villain, more stress for your hero to overcome and better to pull the readers in.

Dwight does not offer how to create the perfect villain, for each story creates a different scenaro and circumstances. Give me five words that I must weave into a story of 3000 words and then give it to me again 6 months from now and I will write a different story. So the villain is the same, as is the hero. As they should be.

In my work, you will notice a bunch of little things happen to my main character Nathin, by a variety or protagonist. Someone is always putting up roadblocks or pushing him in directions he does not want to go. Not until the main encounter occurs at the end, and he has to fight for his life and those who travel with him do we see who each little encounter has helped to fortify him, his skill, his resolve. Some of my protagonist are not truly evil, but they can and do commit acts of evil. Though I do have several that are just pure Evil.

Just additional comments.
Nick.

I think if a story is to have real psychological resonance there has to be some weakness in every character, villain and hero alike -- some ambiguity. If it's comic book stuff (and I love comic books) you can paint everything black and white, but not in the memorable stories that last beyond the first reading.

The villain can still be irredeemably bad in his actions, of course, but he perhaps should at least see himself as good in his motivations. He has to do these evil things, for the good of his nation, perhaps. And maybe he gets to thinking that the end justifies the means, and the means therefore aren't evil after all. He certainly should be able to persuade others of some such rationalization, or he wouldn't get anywhere, except by virtue of absolute power. And how could the hero fight absolute power? So there has to be some hint of weakness at least, overcome (temporarily) by the villain's ability to appeal to the desires of others.

Take Hitler, for example -- he rose to power partly because the German people were desperate to feel strong again after being totally screwed by the Treaty of Versailles. Lenin, Stalin -- any dictator -- plays on people's desires and fears. Perhaps any leader, shy of dictator and total evil genius, does the same. Nuances like this belong in fantasy as surely as they belong in "realistic" fiction.

I think there's another larger question lurking in Elise's original -- how can we make anything, any character, situation, setting, new and exciting.

I think all writing should be realistic and filled with integrity. That is, there have to be sensible reasons for a society to be the way it is, sensible reasons for every conflict, sensible reasons for the characters to be who they are, whether they're your protagonists or antagonists. Some convention is no doubt necessary -- touchstones for people to respond to immediately -- but if a story's to be memorable (new and exciting) it has to also be individual, with unique characteristics no one's employed before. Those are up to you, the particular writer.

I think character is paramount, as it happens. Every character, if he's more than a walk-on, has to have a personality that sets him apart from others of his type and others in the story. This goes for the villain, too, of course.

A mere brute is not much of a villain. A villain should be smart, even charming. He should be attractive in some way, so that even the reader, who knows he's the villain, looks forward to encounters with him. This has a dual utility, of making the villain someone worth vanquishing -- someone a bit difficult to deal with -- and someone whose company the reader enjoys, just for the fun of it.

Likewise the hero should have some flaw that the reader can either identify with or feel superior to. Readers like to be able to know just slightly more than the characters in the story, at least at certain points in the narrative. It can be plot knowledge, or character knowledge. Knowing lots more than the villain can work pretty well, but the advantage over the protagonists is probably best limited to hints the reader has to tease out of the narrative. (Careful manipulation of point of view is a great tool for this stuff.)

Well, those are my personal tastes, anyway. I don't know if that's what sells, but that's the sort of thing I like to read.

Well in my writing I hope to leave it up to the reader to decide who and what is evil. This goes beyond Winds of course, and soon I'll start posting some of these other writings up.

A lot of it is about the choices that people made, mostly the choice of how they react to different situations. For instance, in my story Visions of Destiny (which I hope I can post up here soon), 2 characters suffer through the same tragedy, one which affected them both deeply. A mutual friend is a victim of circumstance--in the wrong place at the wrong time--and is killed. One character finds the strength to forgive the killers (who had accidentally killed the friend) and moves on with his life, to greater things, which to most would be considered the 'good' path. The other character lets the incident eat away at his mind...he feels guilt, like he should have been able to do something to stop it, and sadness and anger and sets out on a quest of vengeance that ultimately ruins his life and the lives of all those who are close to him, and it twists his character so much that his anger consumes his life even long after the original situation had been dealt with. He falls into a pit of self-pity and hatred of himself and everything else. Sort of like how Darth Vader came to be, or Gollum from LotR. Those kinds of villains are the kind that interest me most, the kind that we can sympathize or even empathize with, and wonder at whether destroying them is the right thing to do.

This is a very good discussion, with some valid points made.

I think Evil is a strong word, and should be treated as such. I think we have all agreed that positive and negative cannot exist without each other, but 'evil' is an extreme. And it is commonly used by religions to try and control people and make them feel bad for thinking, speaking and acting negatively.

Negative energy runs inside everyone and everything, and cannot be ignored or damned to give way to the Positive. They are equal - just as day gives way to night without fail. This is why I like some of the situations you have all mentioned exploring, particularly Nathin's dilemma, Nick, and yours. Do you make him win over the Negative to satisfy our need for the hero to always 'win' or do you go against that in favour to remain faithful to idea (and realism) of balance?

Now, evil is a different matter to me. One that highlights a different understanding of core values and morals, that includes disregard for other people (or regard for others, but in some warped dictative way), and comes about in specific ways. When creating an 'evil' character, there has to be a specific, logical reason or set of reasons why that character is evil and not just simply exhibiting the negative side of their personality. This I believe will avoid that mustachio-twirling villain you mention Elise (hiya nice to meet you, by the way *wave*), and set us about looking deeper into our characters and the ways people are affected by religion, environment, situations we encounter and whatever else.

I also agree that ignorance and lack of understanding are common reasons for evil and negative actions/behaviour, and that is interesting to explore too.

Scribble

Both good and evil will depend on the setting we give them: what are the scenarios, what is the reason for the struggle.

The Despotic Emperor Ming and the Free-minded, let's-team-up-together Flash Gordon are a perfect match of good vs evil.

as much as people write their (and our) history, history writes its people, too.
the struggle between hero and anti-hero, or struggles between gray forces or the struggles of good and evil, inevitably affect the setting and its consciousness. The reader is part of this setting, a component of this effervescing consciousness.

or at least, maybe this is my agenda, ;-) maybe i'm sequestering your consciousness as my setting.