How do you write a villain people love to hate?

[BenJepheneT]

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.

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.

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.

 

[DDTStudios]

Hmm, I’m a fan of big money thirsty thots

 

[periodicallymirdered]

Make your villian as campy as possible. Think all disney villians ever- Scar, Jafar, Gaston, Hades, HECk- Cruella de Vil! Her litteral name is 'cruel devil'. And why yes, you were correct in the assumption that I Don't really understand what campy means. And why yes, I did look it up and find it as dergatory history is meaning a gay man, but still! Exagerated, fun to love, pun spueing, evil to core villains are loved for a reason. But it's not exactly the right type of villian for everyone- but I mean.... it worked for the joker....

 

[AkalE]

There are two choices to go with here.

Either you have a tragic villain that has a goal you can agree but with disastrous motivation. This includes characters with a personal history, or tragic circumstances


The second choice is to go the Fyre Festival route. Just a villain that knows what he is doing and it benefits no one but himself. His endgame is basically to benefit himself and is aware about it.

If you need to just pad the word count go the CN way. Cardboard villain...

 

[Fanfictasta1]

A villain personally has a grudge they hang on or something personal that happens to them in life then they have a main goal that they want to accomplish but something always gets in their way. But what you do to make your reader hate the villain is to make them do something off the edge they wouldn't expect and make it seem so horrible and also create it to the point that they follow a motto that they follow that sets them to a certain label.