For as long as I can remember being a reader, I’ve had very strong opinions on many aspects of storytelling. One of my strongest opinions concerns villains. I can remember being a young reader and finding some stories weak and thin, but not knowing precisely why. I cranked through the classics, of course: Narnia, LotRs, etc. But some of the others (none of whom I can remember today, of course), left me completely unsatisfied. I might have liked the heroes, I might have enjoyed the worlds, but there was something central missing, I could not articulate why.
Later, I came to a realization: many of the stories I didn’t enjoy had one glaring element in common: weak, unsatisfying bad guys. Even at that point I wasn’t sure why. Why were, in particular, so many of the stories I was reading that were connected to games not feeling as fleshed out as the classics?
Of course, that sentence seems self-evident nowadays, but be gentle with my teenage self…
It wasn’t until college, when my study of drama was in full swing and with a far more academic foundation, that I started to put some things together.
I once played the title role of Macbeth. I had loved the play ever since high school. My appreciation and understanding of the story deepened considerably while working with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production of an African staging that we brought to campus. And then, wrestling with the role itself, my understanding of the dynamics of the storytelling reached intellectual, emotional, and dramatic depths I had never considered before.
It was one off-hand statement of my director, Helen, that would stick with me to this day:
No one is the villain of their own story.
I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before.
Sure, you could play Macbeth like a hand-wringing, mustache-twirling villain. The words are there, for the most part; the actions are certainly there. I mean, how many of his closest friends and allies does he kill, or have killed, to achieve and maintain power?
But that performance would do no justice to the depths of the character’s tragedy.
Macbeth is not the villain of that play, from Macbeth’s point of view.
He is by the end, of course, when he has (spoiler alert) lost everything and starts to realize what he’s done. But until then he is a hero, struggling to win what should be his by all rights, from an uncaring, unfair world.
Of course, he’s being spurred on by his wife and the words of the manipulative witches, but to stick them with all the blame is just another way to weaken one of Shakespeare’s strongest villains: remove agency from Macbeth, take from him the responsibility for all the choices he makes along the way, and he’s just a puppet, a two dimensional melodramatic villain that is not worthy of further understanding or comment.
Macbeth was not A hero at the beginning of the play, he was THE hero. He had just led the Scottish forces to victory not ONCE that day, but TWICE, against TWO separate foes! He had saved King Duncan’s throne from enemies both foreign and domestic, as they say.
And by all the rights and customs of Scotland, Duncan should have recognized his leadership, bravery, and skill at arms by designating him the heir. At that point Scotland had not yet fully adopted what was seen as an English tradition of primogeniture: the king’s first born son was not automatically supposed to be the next king.
But Duncan, of course, perverts the natural, Scottish order of things, as Macbeth sees them, and announces, THAT DAY, that his son Malcolm will be the heir apparent.
Of course, Macbeth IS rewarded; he’s given the lands and titles of the rebel lord whose forces he had defeated earlier, thus doubling his wealth and power. He was poised to become the second most powerful man in Scotland.
But it’s not what he had expected. Not what he had been led to expect by the witches and later on, his wife.
And so, as he himself says, with his ambition thwarted, he was faced with the choice of either settling for being the second most powerful man in the kingdom, or embarking upon a dark path to correct the errors made by King Duncan and the others.
After all, he had proven himself under the most difficult of circumstances; Scotland would be much better off with him at the helm than an untested boy like Malcolm.
And so he starts to make decisions that would ultimately see Scotland bleed while he lost everyone and everything he loved, until he is left alone, with nothing but death in battle as his reward.
This story gives us two things: a relatable villain (who amongst us has not been denied something that we thought we richly deserved at one point or another?), and a turning point in the story where the character, a once-great man, realizes what he has become.
The villain is deep, complex, and relatable. He’s not ‘evil because he was born that way’, he’s not ‘crazy so he does whatever he wants’.
And what works in acting (which is, in the end, nothing but the study of storytelling, really), works in writing as well: your villain, if he or she is going to be worthy of inhabiting the center of your story, is NOT going to be a villain in their own mind.
I try to keep that in mind in every one of the stories I tell. The dichotomy of two characters, each thinking they are the hero, makes for a much more enjoyable story than a melodramatic mustache-twirler vs a Dudley Do-Right.
I have very specific examples in mind of where I know I didn’t succeed as well as I would have liked (no, I’m not going to tell you), but I like to imagine that I’ve done it more often than not.
Now, you go do it!
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