Do We Need More Iconic Villains in Media? (mini essay-ish)
Oct 7, 2017 6:15:01 GMT -5
Malibu Stacy likes this
Post by HMARK Center on Oct 7, 2017 6:15:01 GMT -5
Not every villain needs to be sympathetic, but vilains should have a motive for their villainy instead of being evil just because(unless it's a parody). Even something simple as "he wants to rule the world because he's spoiled and used to getting his way" or "he's evil because doing evil things is fun and it's all just a game to him" works for me.
Oh yeah, I think we can all agree on that, though I'll carve out a partial exception for villains who are evil "just because" if it's to serve the purpose of intentionally keeping their past and their motivations mysterious. Again, in an example like, say, the 1931 Universal Dracula, we know Dracula needs to drink blood, so that's a motivation, but a lot about what might be motivating him beyond that (e.g. his implied past as Vlad Tepes) is kept unclear because a lot of the horror surrounding him as a character is that he's more a force of nature (un-nature?) than anything else. Coppola emphasized his motivations more in the '92 movie, and while the early scenes with Oldman are pretty iconic it ends up kind of losing the plot by the end.
I do wonder if that's another factor at play, especially with villains from older franchises: time goes on, and a lot of these franchises start diving more into their own mythologies, lore, etc., and it takes what might have once been a simple concept for a villain and tries to explain everything about him/her. The Terminator movies began as chase films, one with horror/suspense undertones and the other a straight up action blockbuster, where you did get explanations of where the T-800 and T-1000 came from and what their mission was but didn't get lost in the minutiae of backstories and origin mythos. Once a franchise starts to kind of get up its own ass a bit, we start getting whole films or books or whatever that strip away a lot of the mystery of a villainous character, e.g. the latest Terminator actually making Skynet itself into a character.