What Makes a Villain: Part Two

Oct 28, 2021

6 min read

Content warning: This post explores ableism and racism, including quotations from authors that readers may find upsetting.

Ah, villains. Think about the last book you read with a really good villain—someone you love to hate, someone who makes you just the littlest bit uneasy, someone who leaves you wondering about the difference between good and evil and reminds you that goodness isn’t as straightforward as we like to think.

In “What Makes a Villain: Part One,” we looked at how writers create convincing antagonists. We considered origin stories, the flatness of a pure evil villain, and the depth of a villain whose main difference from the hero is the choices they made in important moments.

My central argument in Part One was that good villains become who they are because of their own choices, their own actions. They are not born evil; they become it. What’s scary about the villain is not that they are evil incarnate, but that they were perhaps once like us—that we, too, could become villains under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Would we choose correctly and become heroes? Or would we make the same selfish choices that the villain did, sliding down the slippery slope of ruin?

What happens, though, when a villain doesn’t get to choose? When an author pegs a character as evil because of the way they were born? When we encounter villains and monsters who are evil by birth, it’s time to check for bias, stereotypes, and for racism and ableism that may be informing these monsters.

What are we scared of?

Villains and monsters emerge from our fears. This makes sense: if you want something to be scary, write about things that you’re scared of. We fear being hurt by these monsters; we fear becoming them.

But many of us have had instilled, from an early age, a fear of people who are different from us. We live in a deeply imperfect society, and it’s easy for us to unconsciously pick up fears of people who look or act different from us. We fear things we don’t understand, and too often, this takes the form of unconscious racism or ableism.

Racism in fantasy

We all fear things that we do not understand, things that are divergent or “other.” In real life and in fiction, this often emerges in societally taught racism—the fear and distrust of people who look different from you.

Racism makes its way into fantasy when monsters or villains are set in physical contrast to the heroes. Are all of the bad characters in a book darker skinned, while the good characters are described as “white” or “fair” or “golden”?

We see racism in fantasy that we hold near and dear to our hearts. These tropes and stereotypes emerge and remain from what we’re familiar with in our fantasy stories. Western fantasy comes from European fairytales of light-skinned heroes and damsels, and these fairytale tropes have lingered.

Are the goblins based on antisemitic tropes or orcs on anti-Asian ones? Goblins are traditionally described as sallow skinned with hooked noses and greasy hair, and they’re greedy and untrustworthy and steal babies and love money. In Harry Potter, they literally run the bank.

In one of Tolkien’s letters, quoted in Jane Chance’s Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, he describes orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” I love The Lord of the Rings as much as any fantasy editor, but reading that description never gets easier.

A lot of monster traits do come from fears and stereotypes, and if you accidentally follow a trope because it’s been around for hundreds of years, it’s okay. Try to recognize where certain traits come from and do better in the future.

Don’t let ableism inform your monsters.

Accidental racism is not the only way that harmful stereotypes sneak into fiction.

Fay Onyx’s “Ridding Your Monsters of Ableism” explores the ways that racism and ableism appear in fantasy and how writers can avoid this.

Consider the word “monster”—what comes to mind? Is it something ugly, or with low intelligence, or blind, or diseased? Does it suffer from limited mobility or erratic movements?

These traits affect real people, and there is nothing monstrous about them.

Build monsters and villains that are monstrous for the right reasons—for their cruelty, their cunning, their malice—not because of things about their bodies that they cannot control.

In the article above, Onyx suggests checking your monsters for the following traits:

Atypical Humanoid Bodies: This includes hunchbacks, joints that bend in unusual ways, bulging eyes, “twisted” or “deformed” bodies, and limbs that are unusual sizes and shapes.
Limited Mobility: Key words to notice include “shambling,” “shuffling,” “lurching,” “lumbering,” “limping,” “hobbling,” and “stumbling.” Also watch for body parts that are dragged along as the monster moves.
Ugliness: This includes descriptions of stigmatized bodies, such as fat, gaunt, or elderly bodies, as well as things that are considered disfigurements, such as blemishes, scars, pockmarks, and blotchy skin.
Diseases, Sores, and Growths: Look out for symptoms of disease, such as labored breathing, as well as words for sores and growths, such as canker, infection, warts, lumps, moles, pimples, puss, blisters, and boils.
Sapient Beings With “Low Intelligence”: Words to look out for include “stupid,” “dumb,” “simple,” “dimwitted,” “idiot,” “moron,” “primitive,” and “savage.”
Any Recognizable Disabilities: This includes being blind or deaf, having cataracts (white eyes), having prosthetic body parts, and using medical technology, such as respiratory equipment.
“Grotesque,” “Deformed,” and “Unnatural” Creatures: Related words to notice include “warped,” “broken,” “disgusting,” “repulsive,” “freakish,” “disfigured,” “twisted,” “contorted,” “malformed,” “mangled,” and “misshapen.”
“Insanity”: Words to look out for include “mad,” “crazy,” “unhinged,” “deranged,” “lunatic,” “maniac,” and “psychopath.” Also, watch for monsters that “drive people mad.”

Villainy should not come from physical disabilities, lack of intelligence, or species.

Onyx emphasizes that when monsters are described as “hideous” or “misshapen,” real harm is done to readers who fear hearing the same things about their own bodies. Too often in fantasy, evil hearts and disabled bodies are tied together. As Onyx writes, “ableist descriptions of disabled bodies being ‘wretched’ and ‘deformed’ send a terrible message about what it means to be disabled.”

Instead of making monsters scary because of their disabilities, Onyx suggests giving monsters abilities that do not reflect real conditions that may affect your readers. Give them spikes or extra defences or the ability to shoot poison. Be creative and diverge from the harmful tropes of associating monstrosity with disability.

Mental Illness in Fiction and Fantasy

Crystal Shelley further explores the ways that mental illness is portrayed in fiction and fantasy in “Depictions of Mental Illness in Fiction.” She points out that while mental illness (MI) is rarely portrayed in fiction, when it does appear “it’s often done in stereotyped, inaccurate, or harmful ways.”

Shelley explores the harm that is done when real illnesses that affect people are used merely as plot points. When mental illnesses are included without proper thought and research to portray these illnesses accurately, people who experience them in real life are painted with similarly flat strokes.

Mental illness is not just explored in a one-dimensional manner: it is often something that only affects bad characters. If MI shows up in fantasy, it rarely appears as a trait in a good character. Instead, as Shelley points out, it appears in villains with voices in their heads that make them do bad things.

As we are well aware in 2021, mental illness affects millions of people in myriad different ways. The extent to which MI affects someone’s life can vary dramatically and, most of the time, has little-to-no harmful repercussions beyond those suffered by the person in question.

But in fiction, and especially in fantasy, mental illness most often appears in its capacity to harm. Shelley writes that “when almost every depiction of someone with MI is linked to violence, the audience’s perception can be skewed to believe that the majority of people with MI are violent.”

Fiction shapes our views of the world around us, and if our primary exposure to mental illness is through one-dimensional portrayals of villains with voices in their heads, this influences how we view the people around us. Writers and editors are working to shift portrayals of mental illness through books exploring MI in non-harmful ways, but there is still more work to be done. It’s still uncommon for MI to appear in fantasy in any positive way, and still less common for MI to appear as a side trait rather than as a character’s defining feature.

What can you do to combat stigma, ableism, and racism in fiction?

By reading this blog post, and hopefully also the resources included, you’ve taken the first step! Educating ourselves on harmful tropes and stereotypes is how we learn to recognize and correct them in our own writing.

If you have depictions of mental illness or disability in your writing and want to ensure that you are not relying on harmful stereotypes, I encourage you to find a sensitivity reader. Unlike in my other blog posts, I am not going to suggest contacting me for that service—I fully and freely admit to not being the best person for the job, though I certainly do my best to point out harmful tropes in whatever editing work I do. Look through online editing directories or search online to find a sensitivity reader qualified to guide your book in the right direction.