villains – One Thousand And One Parsecs

So this is why so much of fantasy sucks right now…

…because it’s impossible to write a villain who’s truly evil if your moral compass reflects our current-year’s understanding (or lack therof) of good and evil.

Seriously, it explains so much, especially the concept of “emotional ethics,” where characters are deemed to be good or evil based on how likeable or relatable they are. This happens ALL THE TIME in modern fantasy, and I HATE it. I don’t care if your character has friends or pets a cat or has a thorough and well-written backstory. If they do something I find to be wrong or immoral, I will judge them accordingly.

Great video. Worth watching.

Fantasy from A to Z: V is for Villains

Back in the early days of the internet, when it was still a fun and carefree place, there was this thing called the evil overlord list (which is still up, if you want to read it). The list is organized like a top 100 list of resolutions that the smart evil overlord has made, in order to avoid the fate of all the not-so-smart evil overlords who have come before him. It’s got some really hilarious zingers, including the last one:

Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.

Yikes. Explains a lot about the world today, doesn’t it?

But all joking aside, villains are a staple of fantasy literature—including the super campy villains that we love to mock with things like the evil overlord list. And there’s a very good reason for that. Every great hero needs an intractable problem to overcome. And while man vs. nature and man vs. self provide a certain degree of conflict, nothing provides a hero with more opportunities to prove himself than man vs. man.

When I was learning how to write fiction, the popular advice when writing villains was to remember that every character is the hero in their own story. Thus, every villain you write shouldn’t think of himself as the bad guy. Instead, he should think of himself as the good guy, who only does morally questionable things because that’s what needs to be done.

I do still think that there is validity to this advice. I still remember the moment when, as a young boy who was starry-eyed for all things Star Wars, I first saw the opening cinematic for the computer game Tie Fighter. It blew my nine year old mind to think that my beloved Rebel Alliance might actually be a band of terrorists, opposing the forces seeking to restore law and order to the galaxy. Suddenly, the one-dimensional conflict at the heart of my favorite franchise had a whole other dimension to it. I was hooked.

But in the last few years, I think people have become hungry for villains who are truly evil to the core. The transition probably began a while ago, around the time when Breaking Bad was still new. Walter White is an extremely complex and nuanced character, with a rich and well-developed character arc, exactly in line with the old writing advice. And yet, by the end of the show, he is genuinely evil. He gets a bit of a redemption arc in the last episode, but he is not a good guy by any stretch—and he admits it. In fact, the scene where he finally admits as much to his wife is, in many ways, the capstone of his character arc. He has no illusions about the fact that he never was a hero—not even in his own story.

These things tend to be cyclical and generational. From the mid-1960s to about the 2010s, I think most readers preferred villains who were nuanced. Even in Lord of the Rings, which really took off in the 1970s, Sauron is more of a force of nature than an actual human person. Besides, the true villain of Lord of the Rings is the ring itself, and everyone who interacts with it has a slightly different reaction, with some of them passing the test, and others failing (and, in the case of Boromir, redeeming themselves afterward). Besides, Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings at the tail end of the last cycle, where from the 1910s through the 1950s the villains were unambiguously evil. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories are a great example—there is no redemption arc for the Stygian priests or the remnant of Xuchotl.

The older I get, the more I have come to appreciate stories with unambiguous heroes and villains. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be black and white—just look at Lord of the Rings for that. But there’s a lot more room for nuance and complexity between two extremes than there is between different shades of grey. Again, Lord of the Rings is a good example of this. You can make a solid case that the true “hero” of that story is Gollum, who succumbed entirely to the ring and had absolutely no desire to save the world at all. And yet, the ring is unambiguously evil, and Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, etc. are all unambiguously good.

What would a revised version of the evil overlord list look like? Most of the tropes in the original list are based on recycled old franchises that have mostly faded from cultural relevance now. Would the new list include things like “I won’t waste time fretting about the corruption of my soul” or “I’ll harbor no illusions about being the good guy”? I don’t know, but I suspect that a good number of items will remain relevant for a long time. After all, whether or not the villain sees himself as the hero of the story, a good villain is always very competent at what they do.

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Playing with Tropes: Pragmatic Villainy

So as part of my effort to blog more often, I’ve decided to bring back the trope posts. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, perhaps you remember the Trope Tuesday series that I used to do. Those were mostly just a rehashing of each trope’s tvtropes page, with a bit of commentary at the end. For this new series, though, I’m going to assume you’ve already read the page and are familiar with the trope, and focus on the commentary. I’m calling this series Playing with Tropes, and I’ll do a new post on the first and third Monday of each month.

To start off this new series, I’d like to take a look at Pragmatic Villainy. There’s something especially chilling about a villain who not only possesses power, but knows how to wield it too. In fact, one of the scariest villains is the guy who rises up the ranks through sheer ruthlessness and ambition, starting as an underling and rising to the top. These villains know how to inspire and manipulate their followers, how to use their limited resources efficiently, how to form secret alliances and backstab their enemies, and how to keep a strategic perspective while making brilliant tactical plays. It doesn’t matter whether they command an empire or whether all they’ve got is a cargo-cult following on some far-off backwater. No matter where you put them, these are the guys who are truly dangerous.

It’s worth pointing out that there are a lot of figures from history who fit this trope. A badass colonel when the French Revolution began, he took advantage of the chaos to rise to power, declaring himself emperor and restoring order to his broken country. He then took his armies and conquered nearly the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean, destroying the Holy Roman Empire, invading as far as Egypt and the Nile, and leading his troops through the gates of Moscow before suffering defeat before the Russian Winter. Ever the pragmatist, he developed the modern canning process in order to supply his troops with food. And even after the European powers crushed his armies and exiled him to the island of Elba, he still found a way to escape and very nearly did it all again.

And Napoleon is by no means the most prominent historical example. Hitler was extremely pragmatic, and probably would have won the war if he’d actually listened to his generals and not interfered with their ability to do their jobs. Stalin was also quite pragmatic, identifying and removing his rivals and ruling with an iron fist. Today, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are some of the best examples of this trope.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell whether a pragmatic villain is really a villain at all. This is because pragmatic villains often see evil as a means, not an end. You won’t see a lot of gratuitous puppy-kicking with these guys—in fact, you may even see them pet the puppy for the cameras… before quietly taking it out back to skin it.

That’s not to say that pragmatic villains are more redeemable than your average big bad. Far from it, in fact. As Darth Vader put it, “if only you knew the power of the dark side!” In the clash between good and evil, evil often has the upper hand right until the middle of the third act. Even when evil doesn’t have the upper hand, the old poem often applies:

Might and Right are always fighting
In our youth it seems exciting.
Right is always nearly winning.
Might can hardly keep from grinning.

—Clarence Day, “Might and Right”

To really pull off a pragmatic villain, it’s important to make sure that your villain is truly evil. Grand Admiral Thrawn from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe was a great example of this, as was Admiral Ysanne Isard. Even with limited resources, they pulled off some brilliant moves: Thrawn by placing a cloaked warship beneath a planetary shield, to make it appear that he had shield-busting weapons, and Isard by spreading a lethal pandemic that, while curable, was extremely expensive to treat, thus spreading panic and instability as everyone fought over the cure. Yet in spite of their pragmatism, it was clear that neither of them would stop at nothing in their rise to power.

What’s really awesome is when a pragmatic villain manages to pull off a Xanatos Gambit. In fact, pragmatic villains are the only kinds of villains who can pull that kind of gambit, simply because of all the planning and foresight that must necessarily go into it. For the same reason, there tends to be a lot of overlap between this trope and the Chessmaster.

When a villain falls short, it’s often because they were lacking in this trope. A huge example of this for me was The Hunger Games. When the villains in that book backpedaled after Peta and Katniss threatened to kill each other, I pretty much threw the book at the wall. The kind of people who can be manipulated by angsty lovestruck teenagers are not the kind of people who rise to power in a totalitarian dictatorship. And while there’s certainly a place for B movie villains, the Evil Overlord List exists for a reason.

Trope Tuesday: Foolish sibling, responsible sibling

Whenever you’ve got two characters who interact with each other a lot, chances are that one is a foil of the other. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big reason is that it helps to highlight certain character traits by providing contrast. Because the contrast is the important thing, the relationship between the characters can take a variety of possible forms. It may be that one is the hero and the other the sidekick, or (if they’re villains) perhaps one is the Big Bad and the other is the Dragon. If enemy mine or one of the other frenemy tropes is in play, they might be on opposing sides.

Foolish sibling, responsible sibling is what happens when the character foils are siblings. It’s a subtrope of sibling yin-yang that contrasts the character traits of responsibility and recklessness, duty and prodigality, and how the two opposites somehow manage (or not) to live together and stand up for each other in spite of their differences.

It may be used to set up an aesop, usually along the lines of “be like the responsible sibling, not the foolish one,” but that’s not always the case. It might be that the younger sibling is closer to earth and the uptight responsible one needs to learn how to loosen up. Simon from Firefly kind of fits that mold, though he learns to loosen up not from his sister River so much as from the rest of Mal’s crew.

In a lot of stories, it’s not necessarily meant to send a message so much as set up an interesting dynamic between two equally sympathetic characters. In the movie Gettysburg, for example, Lawrence Chamberlain is the commanding officer of the regiment, and thus has to lead the men, follow military protocol, etc, while his annoying younger brother Tom calls him by name and forgets to salute him, runs around chatting it up with union soldiers and rebel prisoners alike, and generally seems a lot more loose and carefree.

Usually, the responsible character is the older sibling, for reasons that should be fairly obvious to anyone who grew up with siblings. As the oldest child in my own family, I can readily sympathize with the dutiful son, since I more or less was one. That’s not always the case, though. In sitcoms where the middle child is the main character, usually it falls on them to thanklessly pick up the slack (yeah, being the middle child pretty much sucks). Bart and Lisa from The Simpsons are a good example of this.

I played with this a little in Desert Stars with some of the minor characters: as the second oldest, Surayya generally tries to do things by the book, whereas Amina tends to be more mischievous and conniving. Michelle and Lars also fall into this trope, with Lars a carefree academy dropout and Michelle a hardworking (though also fun-loving) mechanic on her father’s ship. Between Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home, though, Lars completely turns around, so that by Heart of the Nebula (not yet published) he’s quite possibly one of the most responsible characters in the book (and I still have yet to give him a viewpoint … hmmm).

In Sons of the Starfarers, I’m playing with this character dynamic a lot. Isaac is the oldest son, who always knew he would leave on his father’s starship to fulfill the Outworld traditions and seek his fortune as a star wanderer. Aaron, on the other hand, kind of got roped into the whole thing unexpectedly (see Star Wanderers: Benefactor) and hasn’t yet matured. The events of the story will no doubt give him a growth arc, but in the meantime, the dynamic between the two of them is a lot of fun to write.

There are a lot of other issues in that relationship to play with too, such as promotion to parent and always someone better, but I’ll save those for another Tuesday.

Trope Tuesday: Knight Templar

For this one, I’m going to pull the description straight from tvtropes itself, since the whole page is pretty good:

Sometimes, the Forces of Light and Goodness get too hardcore. In a deadly combination of Well-Intentioned Extremist, The Fundamentalist and, generally speaking, not so differ ent, they get blinded by themselves and their ideals, and this extreme becomes tyrannical sociopathy.

Usually, the Knight Templar’s primary step (or objective) to his perceived “utopia” is to get rid of that pesky “free will” thing that is the cause of crime and evil. Many Knight Templar types are utterly merciless in dealing with those whom they consider evil, and are prone to consider all crimes to be equal. The lightest offenses are met with Draconian punishments such as full imprisonment, death, brainwashing, or eternal torture.

It’s important to note that despite being villains/villainous within the context of the story, Knights Templar believe fully that they are on the side of righteousness and draw strength from that, and that their opponents are not. Trying to reason with one isn’t much good either, because many Knight Templar types believe that if you’re not with them, you’re against them. Invoking actual goodness and decency will have no effect, save for making Knights Templar demonize your cause as the work of the Devil. After all, they are certain that their own cause is just and noble, and anyone who stands in the way is a deluded fool at best.

Basically, this is what happens when the villain not only believes that he is the hero of the story, but a heroic hero. It’s not himself he’s fighting for, but his cause–and because the righteousness of his cause is unassailable, anything that stands in the way of achieving it must be destroyed.

The name of the trope comes from the Knights Templar, the medieval military order established during the Crusades to maintain European dominance in the Middle East. They were an elite fighting force that became associated with many of the atrocities of the Crusades. When Saladin conquered the Kingdom of Jerusalem, he was careful to avoid civilian casualties but took no prisoners among the Templars and Hospitaliers.

Of all the story tropes I’ve studied, this one reflects reality more accurately than most. When people believe unquestioningly that they’re right, they tend to stop listening to anyone who disagrees with them. They turn the space around them into an echo chamber, like a one-sided Facebook feed or a narrow message board community. When their beliefs reach a certain degree of fervency, they start to become angry not only with those who disagree, but with those who fail to agree with or support them. Once their cause compels them to action, it doesn’t take long for the ends to justify the means. Give them a little power, and you’ve got yourself a real life Knight Templar.

It’s precisely because this trope so closely reflects reality that it’s one of the better ways to create motivations for the villain. It’s not enough to want to take over the world, you’ve got to have some reason to take it over–and what better reason than a cause you firmly believe in? Assuming, of course, that the cause is believable–it’s still quite easy to botch things in the execution.

This is precisely the sort of thing Gandalf was trying to avoid when he refused to take the ring:

Understand. I would use this ring out of a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine!

Galadriel and Faramir refused the ring for similar reasons. Boromir succumbed to the temptation, but repented for it by giving his life to defend the hobbits against the attack of Saruman’s Uruk-Hai.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, this is also a recurring trope. It’s the main motivation behind Razalgul in Batman Begins, and describes Harvey Dent’s face-heel turn as he transforms from Gotham’s white knight into Two Face. Come to think of it, it seems that the superhero genre in general is teeming with this trope.

There aren’t very many true Knights Templar in my own books, but I’m writing a fantasy series that should feature a few of them. In The Sword Keeper, a brotherhood of sentient swords has passed on the fighting skills of generations of warriors, enabling their bearers to unite the world into a peaceful empire. Then, one by one, the swords go insane, driving their bearers insane with them. It all starts when one of them goes Templar, and ends when all the swords are lost or destroyed … all, that is, except the one whom the hero of prophecy will take up to save the world. And that hero happens to be a backwoods tavern wench who isn’t even strong enough to lift it, much less wield it in battle.

So yeah, even though this isn’t a trope that I’ve played with much, it’s one that really irks me in real life, so that probably means you’ll be seeing it soon my own fiction. If you have any other thoughts or examples to share, please be sure to drop a comment. I’d be very much interested to hear your thoughts on this one.

Image source: Templar Knight in Battle Dress

Trope Tuesday: Worthy Opponent

Sometimes, it’s not the Big Bad the heroes are fighting against, so much as an almost friendly opponent who is not so different from them after all. That’s what this trope is all about.

The Worthy Opponent is no mere redshirt or mook–quite often, in fact, he’s the Dragon of the opposing side–but unlike the Big Bad or the Evil Chancellor, he won’t stab his enemies in the back or willfully break the rules of war. He keeps his word, fights like a gentleman, and may even have a soft spot for the hero. He’ll duel to the death, but will hand the hero back his sword rather than hit him when he’s down. If he’s in a position of command, he’ll most likely be a father to his men, and sorely regret the loss of life that he is forced to oversee. When defeated, it’s not unusual to hear him say that it has been an honor.

This trope has been on my mind recently because I’ve been on something of a Civil War trip, watching and rewatching the movie Gettysburg. It’s a fascinating movie, not the least because there are no clear bad guys. In the battle of ideologies, I side solidly with the Union, but in the battle of men, I don’t know who to side for.

General Lee is one of my favorite characters, and certainly the commander for whom I have the most respect. When General Longstreet is forced to order his men on the suicidal charge on the third day, I can’t help but cringe. And perhaps the most touching moment of the whole movie is when the wounded General Armistead asks to see his old friend, General Hancock, only to learn that he has been shot as well:

BG Armistead: I would like … to see General Hancock. Can you tell me … where General Hancock may be found?

Lt. Chamberlain: I’m sorry, sir. The general’s down, he’s been hit.

BG Armistead: No! Not … both of us! Not … all of us! Please, God!

The main appeal to me of this movie, and in a more general sense of this entire trope, is the roll that honor plays in the characters’ interactions with each other. Yes, they may be bitter enemies, and they may not hesitate to kill each other, but they aren’t fighting because they hate each other–they’re fighting because honor demands it. And just like how the Fettered gains great strength through strict obedience to his personal code, so too does the Worthy Opponent gain both strength and respect by being a man of honor.

Obviously, this sort of antagonist makes it almost impossible to tell a story with black and white morality. But with this trope, that’s kind of the point. It exists to tell us that the enemy is not so different from us, and that not every bad guy is completely evil. It doesn’t have to be used to set up an Aesop, though–when done well (as it was in Gettysburg), it’s satisfying enough on its own.

I played a lot with this trope in Stars of Blood and Glory. In that book, Abaqa, a young Hameji warrior trying to build a name for himself, falls prisoner to Danica and her band of Tajji mercenaries, who he has been taught all his life to hate. Gradually, though, they come to respect each other, to the point where … well, I won’t spoil it for you. But it was definitely fun to write. 😀

I haven’t played a lot with this trope yet in other stories, but I definitely hope to in the future. I’ve got another novel I’d like to write from Danica’s point of view, sort of a prequel novel to explore her and Roman’s origins, as well as the other Tajji mercenaries. And then there’s Heart of the Nebula, which needs a major rewrite but has some elements of this trope in it. So yeah, you can definitely expect to see more of this sort of thing from me in the future.

K is for Klingon

Ah, the proud warrior race. Where would science fiction be without it? From Klingons to Ur-Quans, Wookies to Sangheilis, Mri to Green Martians to Vor Lords, warrior races have been a staple of space opera and space-centered science fiction pretty much since the genre was invented.

The concept behind this trope is the same as the one behind blood knight: honor is more valuable than life, and the best way to win or defend honor is through combat. It’s not necessarily death that these guys live for, so much as glory and a chance to prove their prowess. Unlike the always chaotic evil races, these guys usually follow a strict code of honor, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

When taken too far, of course, you get a planet of hats, where everyone has exactly the same values without any kind of depth or diversity. Fridge logic leads to Klingon Scientists Get No Respect. After all, how did the Klingons build starships and discover space travel if they’re all constantly fighting each other?

Fortunately, we have plenty of real-world examples for how this sort of thing works. Lots of human cultures have placed a high value on warrior qualities, including the Spartans, the Samurai, the Vikings, and the Mongols, just to name a few. Of course, relying on stereotypes may lead to some unfortunate implications, so it’s not a good idea not to have too narrow or ethnocentric a reading of history. Still, there’s a lot from history that we can glean.

In fact, you could make a valid argument that humans are the quintessential warrior race. After all, we developed the technology to annihilate our own species before we put a man in space. Even today, the amount of resources we spend on war and security far outstrips the amount of resources we dedicate to just about any other pursuit. From the earliest ages, we engage in competitive physical sporting activities that mimic warfare and video games that outright simulate actual combat. Our everyday language is full of violent terms like “on target,” “wiped out,” and “having a blast,” to the point where most of them are invisible. Indeed, if we ever make contact with an alien race, we may very well find that we are the Klingons.

In that respect, this trope is just another way that science fiction acts as a mirror through which we can better see ourselves. The proud warrior race fascinates us because we have so much in common with them. Klingons are not just faceless orcs for the good guys to slay by the dozen–in many sci-fi universes, they (or individual members) actually become good guys. Just think of Worf from Star Trek, or The Arbiter from Halo, or Aral Vorkosigan from Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. While on the surface, these guys seem absolutely crazy, when you start to explore them you frequently find a lot of depth.

I am fascinated by the concept of a warrior race. I’ve played with it quite a bit in my own work, especially with the Hameji in Bringing Stella Home, Sholpan, and Stars of Blood and Glory. The Hameji are an entirely spacefaring society that lives on the outer fringes of space, beyond any terraformed planets. Because they live entirely on spaceships, they must capture and repurpose new spaceships just to have enough living space to expand their families. Since their battleships also house their families, they make no distinction between military and civilian, and live by an extremely rigid social hierarchy with the patriarchal captain at the top and everyone else under his command. Life is a privilege, not a right, and disobedience is strictly punished since it has the potential to put everyone’s life at risk.

As a result of all this, the Hameji are extremely vicious and warlike, living by a moral/ethical code that runs completely counter to our modern sensibilities but makes perfect sense to them. They think nothing of slagging entire worlds and killing billions of people because to them, a world is a giant starship, and all those billions of people are so many enemy warriors. They look down at the planetborn as weak because of their lack of discipline and obedience, and think nothing of enslaving them due to their strict social hierarchy. In fact, because resources are limited and life is a privilege granted by the ship’s captain, the Hameji prefer to space their prisoners rather than keep them alive.

Man, those books were fun to write. 😀 Brutal, but fun. Because the weird thing is, as much as you abhor a culture whose values contradict your own, when you really understand them, you can’t help but feel something of a connection. You might not love them, but you respect them, and in a strange sort of way sympathize with them. I’m not sure if that’s the experience with the Hameji that my readers have had, but that’s definitely been my experience in writing them.

So yeah, I’m definitely a big fan of the proud warrior race. Expect to see me play with it many more times in the future.

Trope Tuesday: Wicked Cultured

nemo — What Captain Nemo does in his spare time, when he isn’t terrorizing the world of maritime shipping.

This week’s Trope Tuesday series post is by request from a reader.

Evil villains aren’t always grotesque, brutish, foaming-at-the-mouth barbarians. Quite often, they are wealthy and aristocratic, with exquisitely refined tastes and an extraordinary degree of eloquence. It isn’t just that evil is cool (though it may overlap with this), or that the barbarians have finally developed a fashion sense–it’s that the more refined and cultured a character is, the more evil they are as well.

This happens a lot more often than you might think. Magneto (X-men), Lucius Malfoy (Harry Potter), Hannibal Lector (Silence of the Lambs), Ganondorf (Zelda), Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), the Godfather (the Godfather), Kane (Command & Conquer), President Shinra (Final Fantasy VII), the Merovingian (The Matrix Reloaded), Grand Admiral Thrawn (Star Wars: Heir to the Empire and The Thrawn Trilogy), Khan (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), Vetinari (Discworld), Captain Hook (Peter Pan), the Phantom (Phantom of the Opera) and every James Bond villain ever all fall squarely into this trope.

So why does this happen? I can think of a few reasons, though I’m sure there are others.

First, it hearkens back to the age-old romanticism vs. enlightenment debate. This is especially true of the fantasy genre, which tends to hearken back to a medieval golden age before the modern, industrial world, when life was simpler and people tended to live in picturesque rural villages instead of dense urban cities. If your hero is a farmboy in a world of knights and wizards, or a barbarian hero who strikes first and asks questions never, chances are that anyone with a sense of refinement or culture is going to find themselves on the wrong side of the story.

Second, it hearkens back to the mad scientist and the cautionary tale of science gone horribly wrong. As you might expect, this is much more common in science fiction, especially the classic dystopian stuff. The more scientific and enlightened a character, the more cultured they tend to be as well. In stories where science is bad, then, it should come as no surprise that these characters are also evil.

Another good reason to use this trope is to indicate that the villains are members of the Empire. Culture tends to happen when people of diverse talents and backgrounds are brought together, and the best way to bring them together is through conquest. Just look at the Romans. Almost every empire throughout history, no matter how brutal, has always produced an increase in some degree of culture. Even the Mongols gave way to Kublai Khan and the Silk Road. So in stories where the Evil Empire comes into play, having your villains be cultured can be a good way to show that.

The biggest reason for this trope, though, is that it makes the villains more complex and interesting. If being evil always meant living in a cave and eating raw meat, then every story would read like a badly written RPG, where the heroes keep grinding until all their stats are at 9999 or higher. And honestly, you have to admit that there’s something a little bit eerie about that guy who gets totally absorbed when playing the organ.

I haven’t played with this trope in a major way yet, but it does come into play a bit in Desert Stars, though only in a minor way. In Bringing Stella Home and Heart of the Nebula (forthcoming), Lars is pretty much the opposite of this (the Gentleman and a Scholar trope, though he did drop out of college). Probably the best example would be Heloise from Star Wanderers: Fidelity (Part II). She’s wealthy, fashionable, and decorates her apartment with wallscreen monitors that cycle through artistic photographs of deep space nebulae. She’s also one of the more dangerous female characters I think I’ve written. Who knows–maybe she’ll show up in another story before too long.

Trope Tuesday: The Vamp

Also known as the temptress or the seductress, the vamp is one of the more dangerous characters the hero meets on his journey. A devastating beauty who is as evil as she is sexy, she uses her feminine wiles to exploit men’s flaws to her own advantage. If the hero falls for her, he will be destroyed.

Unlike the femme fatale, her more neutral counterpart, she is completely evil and cannot be redeemed. This is because her role in the story demands it. She generally makes her first appearance in the initiation phase of the hero’s journey, after the hero sets out on the adventure but before he masters the unfamiliar world. In many cases, she represents a leave your quest test or a secret test of character.

Joseph Campbell thought this character was so important that he dedicated an entire phase of the monomyth to her:

When it suddenly dawns on us…that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond (the woman), surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.

As such, the vamp represents the more carnal elements of the hero’s nature, which he must reject or overcome in order to be transformed. Confronting her is an important part of the story because it gives him an opportunity to recognize his flaws and master them. It isn’t easy, though–the vamp is an extremely deceptive character, and often plays tricks like the wounded gazelle gambit to confuse the hero and gain his sympathy.

While often a female character, there are a few male examples of this character. Mr. Wickham from Pride and Prejudice is one of the more obvious ones. Basically, the vamp can be of any gender, so long as s/he is someone the main character finds sexually enticing. Because of the traditionally male-centric nature of the hero’s journey, however, she’s almost always female.

Also, I think it’s important to add that it’s not just the vamp’s sexiness that makes her evil, it’s the way that she uses it to manipulate and undermine the hero. If she starts out evil but has a heel-face turn later in the story, she doesn’t fulfill this trope. Likewise, if falling for her wouldn’t make the hero fail, then she doesn’t fulfill the trope either.

I’ve played with this trope a little bit in my own work, but not in a big way yet. Heloise from Star Wanderers: Fidelity (Part II) probably fits this trope the best, though her appearance is fairly brief. Tamu from Bringing Stella Home might appear superficially to be one, but she’s actually more of a fair weather mentor for Stella (and has good reasons for choosing the life of a Hameji consort). And of course, Mira from Desert Stars doesn’t fit this trope at all, seeing how much she changes by the end.

Trope Tuesday: Hoist By His Own Petard

One of the most satisfying ways to defeat the villain is to have his own nefarious scheme bring about his downfall. In Hamlet, Shakespeare described this as “hoist by his own petard,” or blown up by his own bomb. Basically, it’s a self-deposing villain whose evil plans have gone horribly right.

Not only is this a delicious form of death by irony, it’s also a satisfying way to show cosmic justice in action while allowing the heroes to keep their hands clean. When done best, the villain keeps the tension notched up to eleven and only commits his fatal mistake after the heroes have made their last stand. Bonus points if the petard takes the form of a minion who decides to switch sides.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you’ll often find this trope in stories geared towards a younger audience, which generally try to avoid messy endings and shades of gray. In some ways, it almost resembles a Disney Villain Death, in that the heroes often come out with clean hands and an unambiguously clear conscience.

However, this isn’t always the case–sometimes, it’s precisely because of the shades of gray that the villain’s plans become self-defeating. Case in point, Pride and Kimblee from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. You’d think that both characters are totally evil–and perhaps they are–but that doesn’t stop the one from undermining the other at just the right moment.

When done right, this is an incredibly satisfying way to defeat a bad guy. When done poorly, however, it undermines the villain altogether, or turns the story into just another Aesop. As always, your mileage may vary, so when writing one of these stories it’s important to keep your audience in mind.

In my own books, it’s probably more common for this to happen to the heroes, which probably makes it a form of Two Rights Make A Wrong or Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. I do enjoy hoisting the villains as well, though, and will almost certainly use this trope in the future.