How do you make your villains actually seem... Villainous?

[Kiweevil]

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[nostalgicroxas]

The summary arrow seems to be tied to cache which is really annoying, and like always broken for me. It works during the "preview"

[Zaboem]

I like suggestion by @DiegoPalacios. Mostly, I like it because I was going to suggest something similar, and I'm narcissistic like that. Not every individual in the bad guy races need to actively be bad guys. It might be more interesting if there were some degrees of badness among the Dredge. It could be that the big bad guy's endgame move is to revert the evolved bad races en mass back into their original ferocious state, a scenario which would overwhelm the Tarako. Now if you want an endless supply of nameless loyal baddies, an option is to have this happen to the Dredge early. Destroying an entire race's free will to weaponize that race is pretty darn villainous.

I faced a similar issue in the novella chapter I am currently writing. I know that my antagonist is bad, but how should I communicate that to the reader in a 3rd person limited narration format? By his actions of course -- but I'm writing a tense dialog-heavy meeting, not an action scene. So, I had the antagonist boast about an atrocity he had committed IN THE PAST.

paraphrase: "No, I did not order my spearman to kill those prisoners. I killed them myself with this spear. What are you going to do about it?"

[DualDragons]

In my opinion, villain don't necessarily have quote on quote "evil goals". Some may be quite noble as well. But the way someone executes things to work towards that goal can determine whether they are really villainous or not.

Take for example the goal to rule over a nation. A president who is elected by the majority of civilians to rule over the nation isn't villainous at all (most of the time), while a dictator who slaughters and lies his way to the top is obviously seen as evil. Yet their goals aren't so different, are they? It's in the way their plans are executed imo.

[Puck]

I have 2 questions
What is the goal of your hero?
What is the goal of the villains?

[Legendofgenii]

Try to see your whole story from your antagonists point of view. What do they want? Why do they want it? Are they certain that they actually want it? What will/wouldn't they do to get/achieve it?

You could make a bad guy cheat sheet maybe? Or try a spider diagram and see what ideas pop out.

In my villains eyes he is not the villain at all. If anything he's the protagonist. Everything he is doing, plotting, and initiating is (to his messed up mind) completely justified and necessary for reaching his goal.

I like bad guys that are hard for a hero to kill (morally speaking), because if they are 100% evil the hero can quite happily just kill them and be done with it.

[JWZagst]

One thing to remember is that the terms "hero" and "villain" are entirely dependent on perspective. If you want the Dredge to seem overly villainous to a majority of the readers, but also real and true to themselves, you could give them goals and motivations that seem fine to them, but cruel to outsiders. For instance, maybe within their society, strength is valued above all else and those who are considered weak are exiled from their ranks or outright killed. The ideological differences could be similar to Athens and Sparta in Ancient Greece, for an example.

[jcmraz]

The most dangerous villains are ones the reader and/or the hero might agree with. When it comes down to it the villain is the mover, the bringer of change and the hero is force of the status quo most of the time. What if the status quo is wrong, immoral or unfair/unjust in some way that the villain is trying to fix. Good villains aren't wrong. Good villains just go to extreme lengths to do what we could all agree is the right thing. Good villains just don't see the peaceful or "moral" way working. They're revolutionaries.

This isn't universally true of course. Not by any means and you can have great villains that don't abide by this. But a villain like this is the one I find most dangerous

[Legendofgenii]

That makes me think of a certain someone from Dragon Age Inquisition. Broke my heart that b-stard.

[jcmraz]

I had Magneto in mind lol but there are a lot. Good dystopian fiction writes their villain/society to make sense in a twisted sense of the word. And usually the protagonist loses. Protagonist is still right in the end but it's scary that you can listen to the opposition's reasons and answering questions in a way that makes their cause sound noble but when you double back on it it's a very twisted method of achieving it. Good villains don't think they're wrong. They're the heroes in the story.

"I wasn't supposed to die by the hands of a child-killing psychopath! You're a savage! You're a maniac! You are a bandit AND I AM THE GODDAMN HERO!"

[Legendofgenii]

Ooo yes, that's a great example!

[aqua03]

The goal of the Heroes: Reawaken the dormant Dragon Kings in hopes to use their powers to heal the World Tree from poisoning.

The goal of the villains: find the dormant bodies of the Dragon Kings to use their limitless magical power as a cure for their energy crisis among other things. Also to "Reset the balance" so to speak for SPOILER reasons.

Hope that helps explain things a bit more.

[aqua03]

Funnily enough, I've been meaning to get into the Tales series recently. Looks like something I'd enjoy.

[Puck]

The goal of the villain doesn´t sound very villainous and he can still use the power to heal the world tree when the magical power is limitless. Why doesn´t want the hero cure the energy crisis?

[aqua03]

Yeah, that's the main problem. That's not really a villainous thing for them to do. Sure, they do villainous things to get the dragon king bodies (Stealing, sabotage, and that sort of stuff) among some other stuff (Like hoping they can also resurrect the sealed away evil overlord as well) but apart from that and some spoiler stuff, nothing really is that evil about them other than looking a bit intimidating. Especially compared to the villains of later arcs....

[Philomartina]

I've been debating having the Dredge get mutated back into feral, magic-eating monsters as a result of a disastrous experiment to find a new energy source. So that I could still have the Undertale-esque twist where after finding out about the mutations, the heroes try to find a cure for the Dredge instead of trying to take them out, plus give the protagonists more of a justification to be hostile towards them at the start given that they'd be magic-eating monsters that drain victims of their life force at that point as well, but I still feel I need to sit on that idea and think about it more in that regard.

I quite like this as a start. In my opinion, the heroes could be as misguided as the 'villains'- fighting the Dredges for fightings sake, or because that's what they have been told and then having to reconsider makes an interesting plot, i think. You could balance your heroes with a Dredge character, that makes them see reason.
As for creating an illusion of hostility from the Dredges, i vaguely remember this writers advice: show the smallest piece of the war, the most personal story. Just one scene where the Dredges actually attack someone out of desperation. And maybe, show that the Dredges suffer too.

For myself, i don't really try to make villains look villainous atm. I try to portray them as human as possible, to make their bad choices all the worse. I may go for a more classy villain in a different story though.

[HGohwell]

For a start 700 years is a looooong time. How many of us are still hold a grudge against people we had wars against 700 years ago. How many of us remember who we were actually at war with in the 1300s? (I like in the UK so probably the French, Spanish or ourselves tbh). So, something must have been perpetuating this. If you use something like active prejudice against the Dredge, aka constant reinforcement that they are in fact evil and a friend of a friend told us she was attacked by one ect, you could get away with an even more impactful twist, especially with the then realization that we've been fighting innocent people because of rumors and unsubstantiated facts and then deal with it. A moment of character reflection is always welcome, and it's less outright prejudice because there was something being said about them. Could even be that the state or whoever's in charge is actively trying to get the Dredge wiped out like that, giving you an actual tangible target for the wrong doing your characters might have done.

There's also the alternate theory of the Dredge see them as a threat. One of the best pieces of advice I was given for conflict was to have your characters read off different scripts. The mother who has a son being targeted by a teacher vs a teacher who's trying to tell a mother her son's a brat. Have your villains see the heroes as villains somehow. Maybe they feel attacked and so are hostile. Also, if we're talking 700 years, and the Dredge have become isolationist, perhaps they've fallen into myth and legend and the mere appearance of them again is a sign another war is coming. In the same sense many apocalypse shows would have demons appearing is a sign that it's the end of days, kill them.

Tbh I think you've missed a step in your story creation. You've created your heroes and villains but not how they're connected and conflict. Conflict is the crux of a story, no matter how big or small. You might have to go back to the drawing board or reconcile with the fact that you can have not perfect heroes, especially if the readers are in the same position of realizing how prejudice they've been against the Dredge too.

[aqua03]

Tbh I think you've missed a step in your story creation. You've created your heroes and villains but not how they're connected and conflict. Conflict is the crux of a story, no matter how big or small. You might have to go back to the drawing board or reconcile with the fact that you can have not perfect heroes, especially if the readers are in the same position of realizing how prejudice they've been against the Dredge too.

Yeah, I think you might be right on that end of things now that you mention it. Because I don't really have that problem with future arc villains I have planned because they're more villainous straight from the get go. (The second arc's villain runs an oppressive regime in an attempt to create a perfect utopia for example.)

I do kinda like the shrouded in myth idea you mentioned as well. I might just step back and come back to that a bit later after letting my mind rest for a bit.

[ghostmaya]

woah~! that's my reference too~! I'm glad that you're sharing this one~! it was really helpful~ and even my narrative is improving thanks to that~ ^_^ salute

[RyzaCobalion]

They're always the video i'd always reference to because it helps anyone gain a bigger grasp of what they want to do when they make a villain for their series. And your welcome!