The Villain Ensemble

I was feeling a bit down on Friday, but when I got home, I had a letter in the mail! So that was exciting. I still need to figure some things out, though. Also my arm has been hurting/feeling weird? Hopefully, I’ll be better by Monday. I’m out of town today, in what’s planned to be a relaxing history day.

Finished a book that was a history of the steampunk subgenre. It was alright? It was fine. Not sure what’s next.

The Villain Ensemble

I think it’s a bit frustrating that I often can’t find a way to open these Saturday Notes with something other than, “So I recently read/watched X,” buuuuuuut…

So I recently finished re-reading Traitor to the Crown, its third book being The Demon Redcoat. Overall, I recommend the series, I think it’s quite good, and I desperately want other people to talk about this with. One of the things that I think makes the last book, and the trilogy as a whole, stumble though is that we’re given an ensemble set of villains.

To catch you up: the villains of the series are a group of mages calling themselves the Covenant, who are invested in maintaining and extending the reach of the British Empire throughout the world, as they’re using the empire as a focus for their magic, and are trying to achieve immortality. The members that we see are all extraordinarily long-lived already, because of magic, and most of them are based off of real people from European history. 

[There’s one American who I strongly suspect is based off of a real person, but I haven’t nailed down an identity.]

The problem is that I don’t know why all of these people give one whit about the British Empire. One could argue that they’re not really in it for empire at all, they’re there for power (the Prince Bishop is explicitly this case) or other reasons. The problem is, I think for us to buy that, we need more character development from them. One of the members of the Covenant, for instance, is a Jesuit priest and exorcist, and he firmly thinks of himself as remaining faithful to his religion even as he does things like raise demons–because he thinks an angel’s an angel, and a chance to talk to one is worth it.

That’s a frankly bat guano way for a Catholic to think, much less a Jesuit priest and exorcist, but a skilled writer could make that work with the right development. Unfortunately, he has so little page time, and only at most a couple of lines of dialogue, that we can’t get a read for why he’s there at all. His partner is even worse–she is a fascinating historical figure to include, but she has even less reason to be there for the Covenant’s aiding the British.

I’ve talked about before how one of the problems with a series like Heroes of Olympus is that it has over seven viewpoint characters, and a lot of character development for our heroes gets lost in that shuffle. The same is true for villains. I’ve said that villains don’t need complex motivations, and that still holds; however, if you’re going to introduce a bunch of them, and their very nature (like an exorcist consorting with demons) is a contradiction to their stated goals, well, then, we have a bit of an issue. Because you’ve already as much as told us that this needs to be a complex character, and if you haven’t added complexity, then you have a contradiction of a villain.

It’s not usually hard to fix, giving a villain more scenes where things are explained in more detail! Except when you have an ensemble of villains–then you have the problem that you have a bunch of cool concepts but nowhere to use them.

I also think about Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica by Owen; the last arc of the series has the villainous Cabal made up of historical figures (and actually shares a member with the Covenant??), among whom is G.K. Chesterton? For some reason?? This has always baffled me, and even though he’s explicitly the least evil among them, and defects before any of the others, it makes no darn sense, and the fact that at no point does the author ever explain why he decided to make G.K. Chesterton into a villain helping the Big Bad try to take over Time and Space is downright hurtful. Chesterton, as far as we know, was never the sort of person that would team up with a Big Bad like that, much less consent to work with people as evil as his teammates in the books are. It doesn’t make sense, and at no point does anyone try to explain it.

[This Note at one point was going to be about turning historical figures into villains, but then we hit Assassin’s Creed and, uh… that would take a really long Note.]

This doesn’t just apply to villains that are historical figures; if you’re have a group of diverse, interesting villains, we’re going to want to know what’s up with them! Especially if they look very out of place in this grouping! Don’t skip out on that sort of thing–don’t introduce the vague outlines of complex characters if you’re not going to do the work of fleshing them out more. Otherwise, your audience might think you’re not really sure what you’re doing.

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