BenJepheneT
Light Up Gold - Parquet Courts
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
- Messages
- 5,344
- Points
- 233
You could write characters like these to make them easy to hate but remember to not overdo it. You want a real villain with an empathetic motivation. Not sympathetic; empathetic. A motivation you can't understand emotionally but contextually according to the villain's personality read from the story. Don't simply come up and present us a cardboard cutout with Literally Hitler scrawled over it. Even Hitler had understandable motivations behind his war crimes if you look at it from an extremely skewed pair of lens.A good villain to hate is different. They're played up as completely and utterly dislikable and the reader's feel no sympathy for them. They are designed to be a punching bag for the dislike of the readers. Try to make them as surface level as possible, as anything too deep can make people sympathize with them. Make them rude, stupid, and maybe racist/sexist if you really want to hate them. Have them act like the asshole they truly are. Then, set things up for a throw down where they get the shit kicked out of them so that your readers can have a good time.
Dmitri Raskolov from GTA IV is a good example. Guy lived his whole life as a backstabbing rat in order to survive in a criminal underworld. You understand what he did and why, and you don't like him for it. A bad example will be Zakhaev from the first Modern Warfare. He's a cookie-cutter Russian terrorist with motivations as thin as a ceiling tile. Granted, the highlight of Call of Duty games aren't their stories but still, he's a great example of what not to do. Make sure you properly introduce your characters instead of laying them out in an exposition piece like you're doing a mission briefing. Don't just point at the guy and say bad because he/she did e.g. Show us why and how.