Yorth
Swordman
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2019
- Messages
- 244
- Points
- 133
As I was thinking about the lore of my story and fleshing it out in my mind, I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of recreating nazi Germany with different names. This got me thinking about how popular the trope actually was in fantasy and sci-fi. A frustrated man with racial pride rallies over people with the same sentiment and creates an axis of evil. From Darth Vader of Star Wars to Lord Voldemort of Harry Potter, this villain trope has been a staple of the genre.
So I kept thinking. I didn't want my story to just have as its villain a pale copy of Hitler as that would be very unimaginative, but the more I kept thinking the more I understood that the problem is much deeper than I first thought.
When you want a big baddy in your story, you usually don't just want a plain villain that has no motivation and just want to watch the world burn. You want to play on the reader's emotions. Make them question what is right and what is wrong and show the greyness of your world. So you give your big baddy a noble cause, one that would rally people around him, and then you corrupt that cause. There you go, you created Hitler, in some sense of the word. Now your big baddy could take actions that would have consequences at different scales. He could be a local tyrant or turn into a World dictator. But in essence, it's the same character archetype.
This whole thing made me understand that it's not that authors are just blatantly copying Nazi Germany and changing names, but that it's a problem with the big baddy archetype itself. Unless your story is black and white, your big baddy's motivation will, in a sense, be similar to that of Hitler and his rise to power will be too.
Frankly, I am still thinking about how to make my big baddy more fleshed out, original, and more memorable, and will continue thinking about it for a while to come. In the meantime, I just wanted to share this thought of mine with you guys.
So I kept thinking. I didn't want my story to just have as its villain a pale copy of Hitler as that would be very unimaginative, but the more I kept thinking the more I understood that the problem is much deeper than I first thought.
When you want a big baddy in your story, you usually don't just want a plain villain that has no motivation and just want to watch the world burn. You want to play on the reader's emotions. Make them question what is right and what is wrong and show the greyness of your world. So you give your big baddy a noble cause, one that would rally people around him, and then you corrupt that cause. There you go, you created Hitler, in some sense of the word. Now your big baddy could take actions that would have consequences at different scales. He could be a local tyrant or turn into a World dictator. But in essence, it's the same character archetype.
This whole thing made me understand that it's not that authors are just blatantly copying Nazi Germany and changing names, but that it's a problem with the big baddy archetype itself. Unless your story is black and white, your big baddy's motivation will, in a sense, be similar to that of Hitler and his rise to power will be too.
Frankly, I am still thinking about how to make my big baddy more fleshed out, original, and more memorable, and will continue thinking about it for a while to come. In the meantime, I just wanted to share this thought of mine with you guys.