How does a freaking olog come back from decapitation?! Look, I’ve been playing Shadow of War and it’s throwing me for a loop when a Nemesis cheats death even after I’m absolutely sure that he’s gone.
Anyway right now I’m re-reading Orcs (because I’m also playing Shadow of War and it seems like it fits), but I think for the next book I’ll try something a little less high fantasy? Probably another ‘Ology’ book and then Jurassic Park’s overdue for a re-read or Pirate Latitudes (by the same author), or maybe I’ll take a crack at Killer Angels (retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg)? Someone tell me what they’d prefer.
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Bad at Being Bad
I think, aside from the word ‘bad’ being in the title, it’s not much to do with last week’s.
I’m re-reading Orcs by Stan Nicholls, which I noticed doesn’t have that many good reviews on Goodreads compared to some of the other books I pick up. And I think it’s alright, but a complaint I saw a number of times in reviews that I can’t help but agree with is this: the villains are really stupid.
A short while back I did a Note on something I called ‘Stupid Evil.’ It’s when someone writes villains that aren’t just capital ‘E’ Evil, but they’re really bad at it? They’re pointlessly cruel in ways that will come back and bite them. The example I gave in that Note was the Empire in Star Wars: Battlefront II’s story mode, in which after the Emperor’s death, they’re given his contingency plan titled “Operation Cinder” which is to use these weird superweapons to torch as many of their own planets as they can. Admittedly, deciding that if he can’t have the planets then no one else can is perfectly in-character for Palpatine, I don’t understand why the Imperial officers in charge go along with it, considering that they’re burning their own home planets in the Core Worlds for no other reason than because the dead Emperor said so. It is cruelty for no reason other than the writers to say that the bad guys are EVIL. It’s stupid, it makes no sense, and it makes more problems than it solves.
This plan, of course, backfires when Inferno Squad, the elite Imperial black-ops team, sees this happening and no longer wants any part of the Empire, defecting to the Alliance and telling them all they know so that they can destroy the superweapon before it damages any more worlds. Because obviously the leader of Inferno Squad is going to have a problem when they torch her home planet.
I was reminded of that kind of thing while re-reading the book Orcs is about a warband called the Wolverines that renegade on their evil overlord, Jennesta, to go and decide their own fates while collecting important magical artifacts. It’s a fun plot, but there are some things that undermine its efficiency. The main one is that the villain, Jennesta, is incompetently Evil. She’s reprehensible, oh sure: her first scene is a rape and ritual murder rolled together. But she’s really bad at being a villain.
The reason the Wolverines leave her service is because they’re a few days late in their delivering the artifact, and they all know that she would have them executed just for that. She’s constantly torturing and executing people for no reason, or as punishment for perceived failures. When underlings point out that what she’s asking for is physically impossible given the resources they have, she just murders or tortures some more until they trail (and fail) to get what she wants done. When her forces start defecting in large numbers to follow the Wolverines, Jennesta’s only solution is to try having dissidents executed, not understanding that maybe fear of her isn’t keeping people in line as much as she thought. And when leading troops into battle, there’s no talk of strategy or maneuvers; the only thing she cares about is numbers, and when her general points out that the enemy has several thousand men on their side, she just handwaves it and doesn’t even consider how to approach it other than throwing more bodies at them.
Why is she like this? [shrugs] I dunno. She just is. She has another sister who’s an evil queen, and one that’s good but locked up in a castle. She doesn’t want anything other than power, as far as I understand it. She’s not got some deep backstory that explains why she’s a terrible person. Jennesta just is.
There’s another enemy faction, the Unis. They’re fanatical Christian fundamentalists. That’s it and that’s all. They have no deeper motivations behind that, there are no moderates among them that we see (although one character mentions them). They rant and rave about how God wants them to murder all of the Elder Races and the pagan Manis because, uh, that’s what they do, I guess? Seriously, there’s even less characterization to them. There isn’t any missionary work or conversions that we see, just crusades. They’re happy to murder people for the sake of them being Not Them. There’s not even much cursory dialogue explaining that they believe the Elder Races or the Manis do human sacrifice or are bringing down society or something, they’re just murder-happy. Because Reasons. Y’know.
I’m not saying that villains need to be sympathetic; they don’t. But they should at least be interesting, and if nothing else, at least competent. Because these villains… aren’t. And that’s a shame. I like the heroes of Orcs, and I want to see them succeed. But it’s not until they’re cornered that I really have concerns about that, because the villains can’t keep up. The heroes are running circles around Jennesta and the Unis, but not because they’re that smart, because the villains are just that bad at coming up with a plan to counter them. Or coming up with rational thought in general.
If you want the heroes’ victories to feel real, they need to have villains that stack up to their own courage or intelligence or skill or whatever traits you want to emphasize. Jennesta isn’t that. She’s a Stupid Evil Queen that somehow doesn’t get that murder isn’t the solution to every problem, and can’t think her way out of a cardboard box. Yeah, I can still enjoy the story, but that enjoyment is hampered by the fact that the villains are stupid; of course the heroes win, because they’re smarter than a box of rocks.
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