Turbo from Ralph is good and unexpected villian too and with good subtle hints as well.
Thisthisthisthisthis
You can’t just make a character start being evil with no explanation or foreshadowing or any character hints whatsoever. It makes the viewer feel cheated.
King Candy was already a good villain to begin with, coming off more as a well-intentioned extremist. He gave Ralph what he wanted up front with no strings attached, and then convinced him that doing something bad was indeed for the greater good, then came the twist that he was lying the whole time.
Revealing the fact that he has a secret identity was the icing on the cake.
me turning in a research paper that i wrote in one sitting and didnt even proofread at all bc i procrastinated until the last possible second to write it and turn it in
One thing I learned only recently about designing characters is that their personality DOES NOT lie in the extremes. It’s super fun to think about what pushes them to their limits, and how they express themselves when strained to the utmost… but that’s not how they’ll be acting most of the time.
Their personality is in how they behave under more casual circumstances. Their morning routine, their hobbies, their sense of humor, how they interact with others on the daily… their normal lives and the ranges of emotions they feel day to day.
Beware the temptation to linger on the extremes. Anger, sadness, elation, lovedrunkenness – those are fun extremes to explore, but most people are not at those points 100% of the time, and to spend too much time on them in stories winds up making them lose all emotional significance… because that’s how they ALWAYS are, so it doesn’t feel as extreme as it should.
Remember: the extremes are only interesting BECAUSE they are extreme. To make them the norm makes them no longer interesting.
writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page
I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.
….is that “I came here to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now” but by Oscar Wilde
say what you want about woobifying villains, but i think tragic backstories and redemption via love are staples for good reason. we want to believe that people are fundamentally good, just hardened by a harsh world. that suffering earns you a happy ending. because then it means something, then pain isn’t just senseless and futile.
people don’t ‘excuse’ the actions of villains because they just don’t take those actions seriously. i think it’s a kind of projection – we forgive them because we want to forgive ourselves, and we look for the good in them because we want to see that in the world, even in people who have wronged and hurt us. because earth is a goddamn terrifying place if other humans really are evil, if they’re really monsters.
and idk, i just think it’s kind of beautiful that we all want to believe that the scariest mass-murdering motherfucker alive can be brought down by something as pure and innocent as love. that love is the answer, not violence. i don’t think that’s cheap or ‘problematic’ or a bad influence. i think it’s human, and profoundly optimistic in a way that few people are brave enough to be.
If I didn’t hold the hope that love could make a difference, my world would be cold and bleak.
People who ONLY ever like “pure, cinnamon roll” characters and try to buff away every flaw and every morally grey dimension and reduce stories to pure heroes and pure villains give me the creeps, because it seems to me like those are people who refuse to acknowledge their own capability to do terrible things, the inevitable fact that they have done things that hurt others in the past and will do so again (because that IS inevitable if you interact with other humans), who never question themselves, who think incredibly harsh standards of judgment are just fine because of course THEY would never need forgiveness or mercy.
THOSE are the people who are most likely to stomp on your face with a boot while being utterly convinced they’re doing the right thing and you deserve it. And they will never admit they were wrong and they’ll never apologize, because only bad people do bad things, and of course they’re not a bad person, so if they did it, it must have been good.
Give me friends who are honest about their own capacity to harm, who know where their own darkness lies, and can see it played out in characters good, bad, and – best of all, somewhere in between. Who understand when to rage, when to forgive, and when to just walk away. Who understand that other people, just like them, are ever-changing bundles of contradictions. Those are people I feel I can trust.
^This last comment. I’ve been thinking about this, and it’s not just that “every villain is a hero in their own mind.” I think it’s that act of making oneself into a hero in one’s own mind, of giving up self-criticism and clinging to an identity that’s based being Good, that opens the door for a person to do truly horrible things to other people. I honestly wonder whether philosophies or faiths where good is a thing you ARE rather than a thing you DO are more prone toward instigating violence in the name of said philosophy.
Skipping back up a few points in this discussion: this is the underlying logic of a whole set of medieval saints lives. The prostitute saints (who are usually depicted as promiscuous beyond financial concerns – yeah, you have to accept the premise that sexuality is bad and chastity is good, but a fair chunk of the audience WOULD have). The set of incestuous saints who not only committed incest but a whole smorgasbord of acts of sexual and other violence before being DRAMATICALLY REDEEMED.
The logic here is: look at how depraved and evil St Whosiface was and yet STILL REDEEMED. May St Whosiface bless me because I too am problematic and yet hope for REDEMPTION. Etc. Some of the St Whosifaces started out good and got too cocky in their own virtue, and consequently were brought low. Some of them started out depraved and got worse, or were born to depraved parents, and so on. These stories revel in the evilness of the protagonist but also bathe him or her in pathos, the better to deliver an emotional payoff when they are finally REDEEMED.
You find these tropes bleeding out into non-saints stories, too – Sir Gowther was a very bad knight, a very bad knight indeed, and is consquently cursed to live ass a dog and undergo various humilations until, as a dog, he defends his master and thus is able to ascend to Good Knighthood by the power of Homosocial Bonding. Yes really. That’s a thing.
There’s a psychological thingumy going on here, and it’s not new.
People who want no ugly in their characters don’t necessarily think they’re above doing bad. It could just be they’re tired of ugly and want something clean for once. Plus, you have to have some ugly in order to claim it’s excusable for that particular character.
I can understand the first part of your reply, but what you mean with “plus, you have to have some ugly in order to claim it’s excusable for that particular character.”?
Given that I think “My Immortal” is a troll (with the reason generally being that author Tara references both Marty McFly and TOM BOMBADIL), I just reread it and I’m astounded by the effort put into it.
The spelling and grammar gets steadily worse over the course of the story, messing up simple words and even the main character’s name (variations on Ebony include Enoby, Enony, Eboby, and my favorite Enopby). The author gives frequent shoutouts in the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to someone called Raven, who she considers a friend and apparently functions as a beta. In chapter 16, Tara severs ties with Raven, expels/murders Raven’s character Willow, and changes Ebony’s full name to Ebony Dark’ness Dementia TARA Way. It’s suggested that they fought because Tara stole Raven’s poster of Gerard Way. By chapter 17, they appear to have made up and Willow is brought back with no further explanation.
The plot, of course, is just insane, but the story was obviously being read; Tara begins each chapter furiously ranting about “flamerz” leaving bad reviews, terribly misspelled. At one point, Ebony was referred to as a Mary Sue and she immediately tried to shut that down, citing “Satanism” and “depression” as flaws. She held each new chapter hostage, demanding a certain number (usually 5) good reviews before she would update. Assuming the spelling and grammar mistakes were intentional, the natural progression of them getting worse and worse is incredible. The difference between Tara’s A/Ns and Raven’s edited text is also astounding, although chapter 16, during their supposed rift, is not noticeably more poorly written than the chapters immediately preceding and following it.
The misspellings of character names and general slipups get worse and worse to the point that once, “Enopby” is referred to as “Tara”, and at another point, “TaEnby”, further to emphasize that Ebony is, in fact, the most obvious self insert in the history of literature. The reference to Marty McFly (he appears at the end of chapter 35 to spirit Ebony into the future) confounds me; Tara does not seem like she’d been aware of pop culture enough to have seen “Back to the Future”, given that she describes “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as this serious, depressing, Adult movie. She’s young enough to consider “he put his thingy into my tool” an accurate description of sex. Further, she references Tom Bombadil, a character in “Lord of the Rings” who I believe just shows up and sings for a while and is strongly implied to be God and then disappears, not really relevant to anything. He’s not even in the movies. Would Tara Gilesbie have read “Lord of the Rings” when she admits she’s never read the Harry Potter books?
Read through that lens (that this was an elaborate hoax), can you believe the rest of it was so organically terrible? Even now, 10+ years after the fact, no one can agree on whether this story is a troll, and until anyone finds out who Tara Gilesbie really is, it’s going to be impossible to know for sure. This is just crazy to me.
I have done extensive digging on this subject, and there is a lot more to My Immortal than meets the eye. Read as a troll, this story is a brilliant piece of satire on fan fiction. It incorporates so many cliches of the genre, especially those from the early to mid 2000′s. The obviously self-inserted Mary-Sue (mentioned above) along with unnecessary and unexplained crossovers, nonsensical sex scenes, and allusion to scene culture and pop punk music. Not to mention the story outside the story, Tara and Raven’s falling out, critiquing the culture of A/N’s and reviews. The tropes and cliches are far too obvious and overplayed to be sincere. I am a true believer that Tara was not only a troll, but a genius of satire. After all, if it was truly so bad, it would not have survived mixed in with ten years of equally terrible fan fiction. The legend of this story is so *ehem* immortal it has sparked heated debate in the online community for years, and was even made into a web series. (https://vimeo.com/70381882) Whether you believe it was satire or not, there is something about My Immortal that is inherently fascinating. Even if it was not her intention, Tara has created the bad fan fiction. It is a perfect storm of chaotic, nonsensical drama spiraling around the least original character ever written. Story lines are dropped and picked up again seemingly at random, characters and names are inconsistent to the point of being unintelligible, and there is no consistent overarching plot. In a sense, it is the anti-story, because it so decidedly defies every literary rule in the book. Either we are drawn to My Immortal as one watches a car wreck in awe, or because it satirizes the worst aspects of every story we have ever read. Regardless, the legacy of My Immortal will live on, either as a warning, or a work of pure genius.
Vulgar is a conlang (constructed/fictional language) generator created to help literally generate a language for you. No, really. No tricks, and it’s super simple to use. It’s my favourite tool right now for writing fantasy, even as someone who loves creating his own languages, it’s an amazing starting point.
Want a random conlang, straight away, with no prep or fuss? Just visit http://vulgarlang.com/index.html and click “Generate New Conlang”… and that’s it. Scroll down and through your brand new, generated, completely original conlang.
If you’re a little more advanced in terms of conlanging and want to specify IP phonemes to be used, you can add them too, but even with no knowledge of linguistics you can create a language at the click of your fingers.
This version of Vulgar is completely free, sure…. but! the guy who created it has not only made an amazing thing (which I repeat, is absolutely free at it’s most basic point), but is also planning on updating it more and more!
Under the “Buy” tab on the Vulgar website, he links to his email, where you can offer to pay for the full version of Vulgar, which is a total steal right now at a sale price of only nineteen dollars. Considering professional conlangers and linguists could charge you, like, a metric fuck ton of money for the same data you’re getting here for just nineteen, that’s a major steal.
Not to mention, buying the alpha build now gives you free access to all of it’s updated versions, which I can guarantee are just going to get better and better! I’ve already bought it and I adore it, and this is a tool the likes of which we in the conlang community have never seen in such an awesome way.
Please consider helping Vulgar out, because the creator is a damn genius
PiraticOctopus 