The Darkness Grows
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Oh, my. I don't exactly know how to feel about Lonnie. He's done terrible things, but how responsible he is for them is questionable, especially as he doesn't want to do them. It does sound interesting that a town's so small, he's grown to be such a figure that everything is blamed on him. It's all kind of Stephen King-ish.
One thing, I would recommend doing research (if you haven't already) on schizophrenia, since you've chosen to name his illness. My own knowledge of it, even with knowing paranoid schizophrenics, is shaky, but it doesn't seem bad. I'd just check on it.
Name: Dr. Franklin Jacobs
Age: 62
Personality: Oh, dear. The man is a pathological lier, Boomerang Bigot to an amazing degree, and an utter fanatic to his country. But he can be very charming and gain most people's trust with a few words on his good days. He's fond of mind games, be it pitting one Transhuman against another, or simply manipulating people.
Abilities: Dr. Jacobs is a very skilled telepath, able to implant suggestions, memories, and weave thoughts into people's minds well enough to make it hard to tell where their own mind ends and his tinkering begins. When he's operating at high capacity, as a psychiatrist he can talk people into things with his words alone. These two abilities are often confused for one another, serving to further blur the line between therapy and mind control.
Weaknesses: His days aren't always good ones. It cannot be stressed enough that he is not sane, with a strong and unchecked hatred for Transhumans always just beneath the surface. This hatred inevitably rises. Luckily, he can erase the evidence afterwards and even if he's caught, he's completely loyal to the US and his outbursts are few and far between.
Role in the story: The Corrupter; offhand, he ruined about fifty people's lives firsthand and dozens more by proxy.
Motivation: To him, Transhumans are not just dangerous, they're criminals waiting to happen. Someone has to keep them in line and under control. As a telepath, who could be better at it than him?
Goal: There's no real end goal for Dr. Jacobs. He plans to monitor and reign in any and all Transhumans under his "care" until he dies.
Backstory: Shelley Gardner wasn't the first to be born from a government experiment. During the late 1940s, the US government enacted called Project Atom, but with considerably less success and only telepaths. Few made it to term and most of the subjects died shortly after being born, leaving Jacobs among the ten out of fifty who survived. They were trained to read the minds of government workers and find those who were spies, traitors in other capacities, or considering being disloyal. Transhumans, who had just begun to work with the government in WWII, were to be thought of as potential traitors as a general rule. Jacobs took this to heart and was catching spies and communists by the time he was eight (children were considered better judges because they were less likely to lie about political affiliations, unless ordered to by their handlers; which is why they reported weekly on them as well).
He did this, ruining many lives in the process, until he was in his late teens when there was less of an immediate issue. Given new free time, he asked to be put to work with Transhumans, as he felt they were a growing threat both as communist agents (shapeshifters, telepaths, etc.) and as people who could live outside the law. The government did need telepaths in that area, but they had to make them more approachable; the so-called "children of Atom" were the most well known telepaths and deeply feared. So they made him a deal, he could watch them if he was willing to become a psychiatrist. He was and built a decent reputation in the Transhuman community.
That all fell apart after an... incident with two Transhuman girls named Gardner and Savage was witnessed by a telepath who refused to cover up for him. He was pulled from active service and his usefulness had taken a serious blow in the eyes of those who knew what he did; after all, he hadn't been ordered to do it. Though he was re-instated, he was only allowed to work non-confidential cases for the first few years, blaming Gardner and Savage all the while. Eventually, they did need him again, with him being one of the best at keeping Transhuman spec ops under control, perfectly wiping or altering memories of the most difficult minds and weeding out would-be defectors, some of whom were going to an organization known as the Renascence.
He would later find out that those two girls were among the Renascence's highest-ranking members and seek out a way to kill them both. Said way happened to be an unstable Air Force sergeant.
During the war, he was made the director in charge of creating the Agents, a six-man black-ops team totally mind wiped of their past lives who's powers ranged from Make Me Wanna Shout to Walking Wasteland and lived only to kill the officers of the Renascence. It didn't end well.
Relevant tropes:
- Boomerang Bigot: Jacobs knows some of the things he does are wrong, but he thinks they're the right kind of wrong, as it were. He doesn't work for the military because of the Transhumans, they're everywhere; he works for the government because it's the only thing even beginning to hold him back.
- The Corrupter: So very many times. He's mentored about three dozen telepaths over the years, as well as patients who seemed "promising". There have been only three he unintentionally taught who made some sort of impact, Shelley Gardner who he taught to fear all things government, April Savage who he taught to hate telepaths, and Isabella Tachibana, who he taught to manipulate rather than use force. Yet, the unintentional ones still tend to be saner when they get their brains/morality back.
- Deadpan Snarker: It only really comes out when he's working with his telepath underlings, particularly Isabella Tachibana, but it is there.
- Disappeared Dad: His father was a telepath. There are no further records of him, but it's implied that he was a traitor of some sort.
- Evil Old Folks: He's possible worse than he was as a child.
- Fantastic Racism: No one likes a telepath. To be fair, in the military he's one of the reasons why.
- Foil: To the heroes' medic, Isabella Tachibana. He's what would happen if she went off the rails.
- Freudian Excuse: Averted. Nine other children were in the same boat (though three had living parents that they were never allowed to see) and only two of them turned out with his level of fanaticism.
- The Fundamentalist
- Gone Horribly Right: Project Atom was meant to create insanely loyal mind-readers who would do anything to protect the American people. Well, it worked.
- Karma Houdini: He manages to not get killed during a bloody eight year civil war and slip off to parts unknown in the aftermath.
- Internalized Categorism: Unsurprisingly. This causes him to embrace the less moral parts of telepathy on the grounds that he'd be doing it anyway, but this way he helps people.
- Manipulative Bastard: On the few occasions that he's called out on his actions, he tends to screw around with that person's mind and end up negotiating things in his favor, even as the person thinks they've finally come out with the upper hand. For example, when he tortured two children for his own research, he was still able to convince a board that he should be the one to head a top secret anti-terrorist project where he'd have to use his powers; he did this while being under a power-suppressing drug.
- Mind Rape: His other specialty. He can be delicate when it's required, such as wiping a spy's mission or adding in a subtle thought in a funding committee member's mind. However, in cases like interrogation or his own research, he doesn't have to be careful, so he isn't. He thinks they deserve it.
- Missing Mom: She was a telepath and telekinetic. Nothing else about her is known. It's likely that she was killed for being too powerful for her time.
- Paranoia Fuel: In-universe, to everyone to some degree. See, there's no real way to prove a mind's been tampered with, other than another telepath saying so and they might be lying. There's also no learned way to block telepathy, either it's something their mutation caused or their one of the literally one-in-a-million who are born that way, meaning anything a person remembers from an encounter with the doctor is more than likely because he let them.
- Psycho Psychologist: He's one of the reasons telepaths can't go any higher than major in military rank, have to have their work verified no less than six times (which gets people killed), and are automatically disqualified for civilian government service. They let him play in people's heads.
- Red Scare: His childhood environment.
- Revenge by Proxy: He knew Savage could survive without Gardner, that Savage would merely get angry and fight that much harder for her dead friend. But Gardner would fall apart without Savage, that with her anchor to reality gone, Gardner would die, most likely from simple starvation. So he had the suggestion subconsciously planted in one of his patients and voila, Savage was dead. The plan went pear-shaped from there, but he took some consolation in the fact that one of them was gone.
- Telepath: One of the best in the country; as in top ten best.
- Token Evil Teammate: Of the government's side, more or less. He's certainly one of the worst (named) people there.
edited 29th Aug '14 12:24:28 AM by UmLovely
RISE
If you're not sure how to feel about Lonnie, I've done my job. I want him to be a fairly controversial character, in-universe and out. On the one hand, he is a literal madman who gunned down twenty-seven people at fifteen and has gotten more violent and more dangerous since then. On the other hand, he's mentally ill and has never been given the help he needed. The school ignored the abuse until he snapped. The jury threw him in jail, where his mind unraveled further. When he's released in Season 1 he's hounded by the media, harassed by the police, threatened by local criminals, and attacked by outraged citizens (and that's not even getting into the corrupt mayor, who tries to manipulate him into being her new attack dog), none of whom are sorry about what happened to him or his sister. When he's finally sent to a mental institution to get treatment in Seasons 2-3, a group of vigilantes, convinced that psychiatric facilities are a cop out, and that he should have gotten the death penalty, break him out intending to kill him. Lonnie never had a chance, and I'm intending for him to be something of an indictment of people's attitudes towards the mentally ill (for the record, I also have a non-violent mentally ill character in the story, to help further sell that point).
As far as his diagnosis goes, paranoid schizophrenia on top of an already antisocial personality seems to fit my requirements, though if the show was actually going to be made, I'd hire a shrink to make sure I've got it right.
Here's Sheila and Riley
in the other thread if anyone is interested.
Now as to your villain, I'm not quite sure what to think. He's certainly got the potential to be interesting and complex, but he's also got the potential to be a self-serving asshat who uses his loyalty to the government as an excuse for what he does. Which is it? Or is it both (compartmentalization is a great thing)? Is the state going to eventually break with him? How exactly do you vision his storyline playing out? Also when you talk about him being insane on his bad days, just how insane are we talking about? Typical villain Axe-Crazy, or are we talking full-on psychotic break?
edited 29th Aug '14 9:46:25 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
The Darkness Grows
Ah, I see. Well, I'd certainly watch your show with Lonnie as a rather sympathetic, but still dangerous villain. And I'm glad there's a nonviolent character with serious issues as well; too many times, it's pans out as "the mentally ill are all violent criminals".
To answer your questions on Dr. Jacobs, in order: he's both. Kind of. He often thinks he's doing good while doing the most horrible things. Like with Gardner and Savage, he saw it as testing a Transhuman-agumented mind against a Transhuman-agumented body to see which was stronger, not traumatizing two children. I think I need to add Lack of Empathy for him, but only towards Transhumans, he has problems seeing them as equal to humans. No, as long as he remains useful to the state, they'll keep him on. They don't know he messes around in their minds sometimes and he isn't self-serving, so much as self-preservative. The second the cons outweigh the pros, they'll shoot him in the head because he knows far too much.
Finally, his storyline doesn't really go anywhere, Shelley Gardner wants to send him to jail, which the government won't let happen, and the one of the Agents (Sound-Wave, as she's it's codenamed) tries to kill him for , but she it never succeeds. I've seen him more as a catalyst for a whole bunch of other characters being put where they are in the story.
edited 29th Aug '14 9:47:22 PM by UmLovely
RISE
Yeah, I was trying to avert the whole "the mentally ill are all dangerous" thing. The other character with issues is Sheila, the county sheriff and main character. There's a link to her entry in the hero critique thread contained in my previous post if you're interested.
So Jacobs manages to Karma Houdini his way out? Looking over the trope list associated with him, I don't have a problem believing he'd pull it off, but I'm not sure if I'm happy about that or not. I suppose the more important question is, how do you want the audience to feel like that? Are you hoping we'll be upset about it, and that it'll add a dose of realism to the story? Are you trying to go the Magnificent Bastard route, hoping the audience will be pulling for him to do so? I'm actually curious as to what response you're aiming for.
The Darkness Grows
I'm definitely trying to go the realism route and make people hate him, much as I enjoy getting to go nuts writing a character devoid of sympathy. I don't think I could bring myself to make him into a Magnificent Bastard with the level of damage he's done.
My only advice then is to be careful. It's all well and good to have realism but don't make him so bad and do so much damage that the audience can't be satisfied with an ending where he walks away.
Serocco
Yeah, I think Jacobs going Karma Houdini is a bit much. If he isn't supposed to be a Magnificent Bastard, then he probably shouldn't survive. He's good as a depraved asshole, though.
In Eclipse, I have Eighinn Stossuhl.
- Appearance: A towering Cyborg, Stossuhl wore an ovular silver helmet with three horizontal, V-shaped slots, each containing a maroon eye. The lower edge of the helmet had a gutter-like rim which engages with a flange running around the upper edge of the gorget. A black circular set of cloth covered his neck. A steel collar covered his neck, sternum, and part of the clavicles. The rest of his torso was covered by a bevor, which covered all but his neck area above. Leather straps, known as lames, decorated the plate armor on his arms like laces on a shoe. Sabaton covered his feet, extending all the way to his thighs. Stossuhl's left hand was modeled after a cannon; but curved upward.
- Personality: An unrelenting, uncompromising Insane Admiral, who willingly and deliberately disrupts the Balance of Power in his pursuit of the main character. Boorish, Trigger-Happy, and arrogant ("I am irreplaceable!"), his default reaction is to provide excessive force over minor things. He firmly believes that Might Makes Right - in his own words, "Might is the answer; I forgot the question," and bases everything on that philosophy.
- Abilities: An Arm Cannon. Originally, it was a cannon that unleashed exploding spheres that killed people when the spheres illuminate. He switched it for an Arm Cannon that instead unleashed reddish black magma that morphs people into dry, ashy, organic rock. His status as a cyborg means that he cannot feel pain (unless it's through his three eyes), but he is not especially durable. Stossuhl just happens to ignore all of it and continue moving forward.
- Role: He is the founder of Skuurnur, a paramilitary corps composed of Cullivers, who are Anti-Aura in both power and attitude. He embodies unbridled extremism, even as it causes problems for his faction.
- Goal: Despite being the founder of an Anti-Aura organization, he is not a Culliver; just a cyborg. He is more specifically anti-main character; he likens Aura as a "tumor" with the main character as the "cancer." As his colleagues observed, Stossuhl is not really concerned about Skuurnur's cause, or Skuurnur itself; he just wants the main character dead, as she "wronged" him sometime in his past.
- Backstory: He was the leader of a private military company in his youth. He heard from Aura shamans about how the main character's existence as a Humanoid Abomination prompted the creation of Aura. He took that to mean she could force people to materialize their Aura (which is not true). When he encountered the main character, her very presence gave him a migraine. Proclaiming that "I will never be like you," he replaced his mortal body with soulless machinery, and sought about eradicating the "cancer."
- Relevant tropes:
- Arm Cannon: The entirety of his left arm is modeled after a bazooka (at first), then Caulhyr changes it so he can switch back to a hand every once in a while.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: He's technically the same rank as the other five Freiherren, but he's best qualified for it since he's the founder of Skuurnur and the architect of its pseudo-laws (titled Skuurnur's Crest)
- Badass Creed: Combined with a Badass Boast in the end. As he's saying it, he's pushing his body through the length of Ramona's stakes without using his hands. "I am the vanguard of Skuurnur's Crest. I am the sword that carves through flesh. I am the arrow that pins arms to shields. I am the bullet that fractures steel. I am the Freiherr, AND I NEVER LOSE!"
- Bad Boss: He's very indiscriminate regarding his soldiers. He destroyed an entire platoon when they were taking too long to get through a maze; crushed the neck of one of his injured troops; obliterated the torso of another injured marine for grabbing his ankle and stopping him from running to the Dreyvor family compound; choked a messenger for telling him bad news while ordering him to speak up; pushed the skull of a soldier offering help because "Real men never disarm themselves"; and personally slaughtered at least a dozen of his own bodyguards while performing a Public Execution.
- Cyborg: Apart from (presumably) his brainwaves, his eyes are the only organic pieces remaining on his body. He eventually loses those eyes in a fight.
- Disproportionate Retribution: His default reaction is to provide excessive force over pretty minor things. In his first appearance, he threatened to attack a country if they didn't hand over the main character. Once said main character leaves peacefully, he attacks them anyway, in a battle that destroyed its infrastructure and killed 86,492 people. In that same battle, when he gets hit by a sniper, Stossuhl responds by destroying an entire building; he admitted that the sniper probably wasn't there anyway. His way of firing a warning shot includes destroying an entire building filled with people, and burning them into a mesh of dry, organic rock.
- Eye Scream: Draldoch succeeds in exploding all three of his eyes in chapter 22.
- Hate Sink: Unlike his more pragmatic colleagues, Stossuhl is Stupid Evil through and through. He really only exists to piss the characters off while he disrupts the Balance of Power needlessly.
- Implacable Man: His inability to feel pain allows him to tank horrifying levels of damage and continue fighting through it.
- Insane Admiral: As the head of Skuurnur's navy and marine corps, Stossuhl's fanatical Anti-Aura sentiment, ceaseless arrogance, and relentless belief in force being the best answer all continuously disrupt the ever-fragile Balance of Power in Eclipse.
- Insane Troll Logic: When a soldier reported that the Dreyvor family escaped, he chokes said soldier and demands to know where they went... while he's still choking the soldier.
- He deliberately imposed an incredibly harsh, even impossible schedule for one of Skuurnur's collaborators - Escou Draldoch. As part of the deal, Draldoch would apprehend 100 Aura Users every week and send them to Skuurnur; other communities in Draldoch's continent would do the same, as Draldoch is a well-known Aura shaman. Draldoch, knowing he could never follow the schedule, deliberately sent only one sect of Aura Users (those who use Empathic Weapon) and ignored the other sects. As a shaman, community leader, bouncer, and bartender, he had no way of finding that much time for the schedule, but Stossuhl claims "it is a fair schedule," and attacked Draldoch's entire village anyway.
- Jerkass: He's the most thoroughly unlikable son of a bitch (so far) among Skuurnur.
- Make an Example of Them: As a warning to all those who help the main character, Stossuhl publicly executed close to a hundred prisoners of war (and his own bodyguards) by unleashing a stream of magma that morphed them into a mesh of dry, organic rock.
- Magma Man: His (second) Arm Cannon utilizes reddish black magma that morphs people into dry, ashy, organic rock.
- Might Makes Right: In his own words, "Might is the answer; I forgot the question."
- Public Execution: Eighty two prisoners (and his own bodyguards) were killed by this man, in front of international television, and on the same balcony that he and his fellow Freiherren were standing on.
- Rage Quit: When he's told that his targets left Cessair, he responds by ordering the complete decimation of Cessair. When Siggueir calls him out on it, Stossuhl continues the shelling out of spite.
- When all three of his eyes were, uhm, removed from usage, he responds by firing his Arm Cannon wildly at Draldoch's village, annihilating what was left.
- Suddenly Shouting: Very frequently. It can be rather jarring to see a normally stoic soldier just go fuckin' bonkers with no warning.
- Stupid Evil: Many of his more vicious acts are not only incredibly counterproductive, they're also incredibly stupid because of how much he harms Skuurnur's public relations (not that it was ever popular per se, but it wasn't until Stossuhl began his dick-wagging that the Aura Users started discussing open war).
- Token Evil Teammate: While the other Freiherren are far from pleasant figures, Stossuhl is easily the most destructive of the bunch.
- Trigger-Happy: The reason he causes so many problems in the story. He tries to justify it by claiming force is the only thing people listen to.
edited 30th Aug '14 9:05:23 PM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
The Darkness Grows
He's not the worst person in the series by a long shot, and kind of fades into the background by the end. I think the audience wold be more focused on the hero dying and the hopefully bittersweet ending than him. Dr. Jacobs is more of an example of how corrupt the system's become and a device to push a few characters around the board than a main villain, so I don't think many people would be pushing for him to get some comeuppance.
edited 29th Aug '14 10:32:32 PM by UmLovely
RISE
Stossuhl's definitely scary, but there's got to be a reason none of the other Freiherren haven't pulled off a Uriah Gambit on his Stupid Evil self.
Name: Ragna "Rose" Arnevna
Age: 63
Personality: She's a (properly) paranoid control-freak with no problem killing others/having them killed.
Abilities: Inspiring loyalty. Commanding the Antonine Guard (see backstory). Trained for seduction, but doesn't enjoy it very much anymore after all the problems it caused her. Decent fighter but not one of the best.
Weaknesses: She has very powerful enemies and an inability to trust others.
Goals:
1) Stay alive.
2) Get more power/money to help with goal #1.
3) Set up a system where she doesn't have to actively worry about goal #1 as much.
4) Relax as much as safe.
Motivation: The (former) Queen personally threatened her, tried to weaken her influence, and trash-talked her to others in the royal family.
Role in the story: Mentor for Magda (the protagonist) in a strange new world, eventually leading to a Broken Pedestal moment. Protagonist of the backstory/Start of Darkness.
Backstory: Ragna was born to a slave family in the city of Livia. She has an older brother Arne Arnevitch (5 years older). She was bought at the age of 8 by Courtesan Training Inc. because of her size, beauty, and demeanor, and sold with the name "Rose" at 15 to the Royal harem for a large profit. By the age of 20, she had become the favorite of King Michael IV Livius (age 58). Queen Joan Iulian Livia became jealous of Rose for being consulted more than her, especially after Rose arrogantly (from the newfound attention) refused to promote Joan's ideas. She brought in a new, younger courtesan who was willing to be loyal to her (Laila "Lily" Alvna, age 14) to draw Michael's interest away from Rose.
At age 21, the Patran coup in Cassia started the Cassian civil war. In response, King Michael sent the ethnically-Patran Royal Guard to {Province Name} and temporarily replaced them with Larians from the Livian Guard., unhappily since Larians could be more easily prone to politicking. Seeing Lily pulling her favor with the King away from her and knowing that her life was at risk once the King no longer cared for her, Rose proposed to create and lead a new Royal Guard made up of Antonine slaves, who couldn't hope to inherit anything and would therefore be more loyal. The King accepted the plan and she started building her new bodyguard from the slave markets. She was freed soon after so she could build the guard herself (the merchants wouldn't sell to a slave).
While Livia interfered in the Cassian civil war and the Livian city guard was temporarily weakened, her brother tried to recruit her to help with a planned slave revolt. Knowing from the strategic planning meetings she attended that any revolt is hopeless and would only serve to weaken her already weak position by painting Antonine slaves as unreliable, she attempted to persuade him otherwise, but failed. She then reported him to the Captain of the Guard, and watched as he and the other slave leaders are sentenced to die by tidal drowning. She didn't interfere because that would jeopardize her position, which is finally more or less secure. Since then, she's continued to grow her bodyguard, loose some of her looks, and gain some weight.
Relevant Tropes:
Angst? What Angst?: She reported her own brother to the Livian Guard to prevent a slave revolt and secure her own position. She doesn't feel guilty about it.
The Corrupter: She wins loyalty through personal presence, use of psychoactive drugs, and painful initiation (branding). Even the guards she's pimped for visiting generals, princes, the king, etc… generally tend to be very loyal to her.
Lady of War: Ragna
Amazon Brigade: Antonine Guard
Praetorian Guard: Patran Guard and Antonine Guard
A Mother to Her Women: Invoked and subverted. She'll treat the guards well as long as their first loyalty is to her, personally. To anyone else, including the King like the actual job description? Dispose of them through sale or murder.
Karma Houdini: She dies peacefully in her sleep at the age of 85.
Properly Paranoid: There are assassins out to get her personally and she has many very powerful enemies, including almost 1/2 the Royal Family.
Pragmatic Villainy: One of her guards disobeys her? No need to kill them; selling them to a whorehouse gives her a better return. From Nobody to Nightmare: She goes from a slave in a family of slaves to one of the most powerful people in the kingdom.
I Was Quite a Looker: She was selected for her beauty.
Broken Pedestal: To Magda, as she goes from the benevolent mother of a new family in a strange land to one of the strongest defenders of a dictatorship invading her homeland.
Neutral Evil: She sees the purpose of following her own rules to maintain loyalty, but she'll disregard them if she feels like it.
Affably Evil: She doesn't want to make enemies if she can help it.
Waif-Fu: When she ever needs to fight, she uses this.
edited 30th Aug '14 4:39:42 AM by Livius
Serocco
He's in charge of their navy, so they can't kill him off or pull an Uriah Gambit without taking into consideration that they can't find anyone to replace him.
Well, initially, at least. In the latest chapter, they've all confronted him about his extremism and they've disowned him. Hence his "I am irreplaceable!" comment.
I think Ragna shouldn't be a Karma Houdini. She's not as bad as some of the others here, but it kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth that she dies of old age. Maybe, since she was selected for her former beauty, someone should kill her because of how she isn't beautiful now?
edited 30th Aug '14 9:43:14 AM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
RE: Ragna
With that backstory, I should have some sympathy for this character, but I've got to say that I don't. Maybe it's just from reading the trope list associated with her, but her apparent sociopathy kills any ability I have to empathise. Also, going off the rest of the description you've provided, she's not Affably Evil. Affably Evil means that you are a genuinely nice person, apart from the murdering thing. Ragna here seems like she'd be a bitch whenever she isn't acting, and according to your own description, she treats her men/women terribly.
RE: Stosshul
I have to agree with previous criticism—Stosshul doesn't seem especially sustainable as a villain, particularly if he's surrounded by and/or working for/with more capable, sane people. However useful he might be to them, he probably isn't indispensable, and eventually, your audience is going to ask itself how he still has a job.
Now it's not all negative. Stosshul sounds like he'd be fun to watch, and some of the dialogue you've posted is great Large Ham material. I suspect your audience will enjoy his scenes, provided you don't overuse him.
I'm reminded somewhat of Visser Three of Animorphs infamy: a physically powerful, but unstable and unsubtle general who treats the troops like garbage, and keeps his position more through politics than ability. There's nothing especially wrong with that; just make sure that the Stupid Evil never overshadows the threat.
RE: Jacobs
It sounds like you know what you're doing then.
Serocco
Yeah, I concur with Ambar; Ragna comes across as too much of a bitch. She treats just about everyone terribly despite having what should be a sympathetic backstory. Which is totally fine, actually, but if she's gonna be a Karma Houdini, it'll leave a bad taste in my mouth.
As for Stossuhl, he's actually meant to be a Complete Monster (and he's even officially listed as one). What do you think of his backstory? It wasn't intended to make him sympathetic.
I think it's appropriate for me to write up his colleagues so you can get a feel for who he's working with. Yuehni Siggueir, Skuurnur's top diplomat and organizer; Oroesius Caulhyr, the Gun Nut and manufacturer of Skuurnur's war machine; Ayew Brogguhn, the Acrofatic machismo who's their chief of security; Eraldo Supryor, an amoral Mad Scientist and Mad Doctor; and Beyniph Osciteck, their top strategist and intelligence director.
They all had an issue with it (apart from Eraldo, since he ultimately only wants to experiment For Science!), but nothing could be done since Osciteck, their de facto leader, initially supported Stossuhl's extremism. This was due to his belief that capturing public enemy number one (the main character), Skuurnur would receive a huge burst in credibility among the public. It was the Public Execution on the balcony that really made Osciteck fully turn on him. He had to wrack his brain, deciding who would serve best as Stossuhl's replacement, before Caulhyr went up and basically said "focus on what's happening now, and throw his ass out."
In their most recent scene, it turns out that, after killing Draldoch, Stossuhl's men found a portal that would lead them straight to the current location of the main character. In response, Stossuhl mobilized Skuurnur's entire war machine, thereby forcing the other Freiherren to help him unless they want to risk losing their entire military.
edited 30th Aug '14 9:08:48 PM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Gonna second Ambar's words on the above here. Ragna isn't the type I'd find sympathetic. She has a nasty backstory, but what she does with her brother. Her being a Karma Houdini compounds that injustice. Still, life isn't always fair.
edited 3rd Sep '14 7:41:01 PM by Lightysnake
PARTY PARTY PARTY I WANNA HAVE A PARTY
So I have this villain who is, by all rights, perhaps one of the vilest I've ever written. Him inspiring hate was expected, perhaps even the point. Which is why I'm wondering if I should leave out his backstory. I want people to hate him, but I also don't want to write a completely flat character with no depth or reason beyond "I'm the bad guy". I'm afraid, however, that the backstory I've given him will be interpreted as a bid for sympathy or an attempt to make a Tragic Monster, and I want neither of those things. That was never the point of giving him a backstory. So can anyone tell me what they think about this little conundrum?
- Name: Mickey Donahue
- Age: 29
- Personality: Sadistic, foul, and cruel. Mickey is not the kind of villain you root for. He has no principles of any kind, and will unflinchingly pursue any avenue to success he can find regardless of the cost to others. Other people exist for his own perverse entertainment and he holds no value in the lives of his men, often ending them on a whim. He's hedonistic, and highly, highly irrational, an unpredictable man controlled by raw emotion and a lust for power. He instinctively grasps how to manipulate others, and commits atrocities just for fun, or if he's bored. Having been wronged himself, he sees no reason not to wrong others, and uses violence and a veneer of vulgar arrogance to mask deep-seated feelings of inferiority and self-loathing.
- Abilities: Commands a living Attack Reflector that has no choice but to obey him, has a shrewd mind that allows him to manipulate and control others instinctively, possesses a small armory of chemical weapons that only he can access
- Weaknesses: He hates it when people look down on him or try to tell him he's not good enough to do something, and it causes him to lose his cool and not think properly. Reminding him of his childhood has a similar effect, and mentioning his mother will send him into a blind rage. Suffers from alcoholism and severe drug addiction, which inspires fear rather than confidence in his men, and his familiar/living shield absolutely detests him, and will take the first opportunity given to them to betray him
- Role in the story: Minor arc villain who threatens the five families of New York with a city-wide terrorist attack using twenty tons of unspent WW 1 era chemical weapons. The (eventually former) master of the homunculus and human superweapon Theo, who becomes a major recurring character after Mickey's arc.
- Motivation: Wants revenge on the five families for always using him and putting him down whenever he tried to join their organizations. Considers them "snobs with gats" who should be punished for their arrogance and hypocrisy
- Goal: Destroy the five major mafia families of New York, the Pescatorres, Capellos, Allesandris, Vitalis, and Sartinis.
- Backstory: The son of a WW 1 factory worker, Mickey spent most of his childhood as a target of abuse from his alcoholic mother, who regularly beat and sexually abused him while his father was away at work. His father was rarely home to begin with, working as much as he could to escape having to spend time at the house with his wife whom he now feared, and his son who he felt guilty for abandoning. Eventually, his father's conscience got the better of him, and he finally decided to stand up for his son. Coming home to find his wife trying to rape their son, he hit her across the head with a baseball bat, incapacitating her. To his surprise, Mickey got up, picked up the bat, and began beating his mother's head in until there was no chance for recovery. Then he turned it on his shocked father and killed him too, purely out of spite. After that, he left his home behind, founding a gang of small- time criminals named the Bulging Broncos and living on the streets as a common criminal and habitual drug addict until he found Theo, a homunculus designed to be a human superweapon. Witnessing her beauty and power, Mickey conspired to steal her from her creator and eventually succeeded in doing so, making Theo his personal Sex Slave and human shield, as well as a weapon in his vendetta against the five families. The rest is current events.
- Relevant Tropes:
edited 31st Aug '14 12:43:35 AM by KSPAM
I've got new mythological machinery, and very handsome supernatural scenery. Goodfae: a mafia web serial
You know it's general procedure to comment on a previous entry before posting your own, right?
PARTY PARTY PARTY I WANNA HAVE A PARTY
Oh, sorry. No I didn't know that 
Serocco
Since you have a Complete Monster type, maybe you should add a comment at the top of your post about Ragna or Stossuhl.
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Ill comment on his soon and just repost mine after. I wouldn't mind some feedback.
RE: Ragna
@Karmi Houdini: She's a Karma Houdini because her one real goal is to stay alive, and she's reasonably competent. It wouldn't be hard for her to be killed early on (early-mid 30's) before she's really entrenched herself, but the other timeframes of the story require that she is in her command position for at least 40-ish years (longer is better), and after surviving that long considering her enemies, she's definitely not going down without major societal upheaval.
@Not Sympathetic: She's not supposed to be really sympathetic after she comes into her own as an independent force. Its a mix of Stalin, Himmler, and the historical Praetorian Guard.
@Serocco:
@Ambar
edited 31st Aug '14 11:12:01 PM by Livius
The fact that it's designed to build loyalty or whatnot doesn't make her sympathetic. It might explain why the other guards stay loyal to her, but it doesn't make the audience like her anymore. You state flatout in her description that she's only out for herself. That pretty much removes any claim to antivillainly or Affably Evil status that she might have.
Serocco
Yeah, if the point is to make her smart, then have her as a practitioner of Pragmatic Villainy. That way, her dying peacefully could be chalked up to Magnificent Bastard.
As for Michael Donahue, that's a pretty good way to make a Complete Monster. Is he a Villain Protagonist?
Now, then, I've recently introduced a new villain in Eclipse. He is Llundus Carrington.
- Appearance: Carrington wears a dark blue hussar jacket, with red and white trimmings on the ribbon-straps. He has eleven-inch fingers, ten grey dots surrounding both of his pupils, Prussian blue trousers, and a V-shaped hat.
- Personality: A power-hungry, narcissistic Glory Hound, Carrington is a flamboyant and ceaselessly arrogant Attention Whore, often disparaging people while claiming they are the real narcissists. He sees the Exarchs, warlords who propped up a puppet government in his homeland, as undeserving of their power, but he cares nothing for the common citizen. A cunning mind, he often employs the Batman Gambit as a way to manipulate public opinion in favor of himself and against his enemies. In one example, he lapsed into Evil Gloating while The Political Officer was having all of his attacks repelled. Said Evil Gloating allowed the Political Officer to sink his spiked baton onto his chest... only for Carrington to grab hold of the baton, wrestle it away from his enemy, and finish him off with it. When his two hitment, who assassinated the government under his orders, approached him, Carrington slammed the baton through the head of one hitman, grabbed a gun, and Boom, Headshot! the other hitman. When a staffer showed up and asked what happened, Carrington claimed that he killed hitmen who assassinated the government. He then took to a public parade, waving his hand at the citizens, while deliberately keeping his bloodied jacket on in order to generate public sympathy and awe at his survival.
- Abilities: He is an Eversor, meaning he uses his Battle Aura in the form of a Guardian Entity. He manifests this via Blowing You Away. When his Guardian Entity is visible, that's when he's in his Super Mode. His two most powerful abilities are when he paralyzes people with it (think Spiritual Pressure in Bleach) and when he can suffocate people by bending the wind out of their lungs.
- Goal: Become the Administrator of the Commonwealth (head of government of The Federation) and eliminate all of his rivals, including the warlords who formed the Commonwealth.
- Backstory: He was once the Chief of Staff to Administrator Eschemi Hasidic. He had the power to determine who saw the Administrator, when they saw the Administrator, for how long they can see the Administrator, why they see the Administrator - he got to frame everything, and it was his first taste of power. He was sacked when it became clear that he was too power-hungry (he was said to Troll the Administrator by keeping meetings as short as possible). He later joined the Navy, and expressed annoyance at how long it took for him to become Vice Admiral (despite the fact that it was all of one year before he received the promotion). While his superiors and their deputies discussed politics with the media, Carrington used his Guardian Entity to assassinate everyone in the secluded room. Drenched in blood, he stumbled out of the door, making him appear to be the only survivor of a freak accident (nobody knew of his powers, and wind isn't exactly incriminating evidence). With every one of his superiors dead, he was given a Field Promotion as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth (although he preferred to be called Admiral).
- Role: He takes over as Administrator of the Commonwealth after Hasidic went missing. He proceeds to murder the political officers aligned with Hasidic (two were off-screen, one was on-screen), assassinated the Quorum (a collective committee that manages government in place of the Exarchs), took out the hitmen who killed the Quorum, replaced all of the portraits of previous Administrators with photos of just himself, and publicly challenged all seven of the Exarchs to a fight. His overarching influence comes from the sheer depths he will sink due to his being an Attention Whore and a Glory Hound. (This next section has yet to be implemented, but is planned). His two most horrific acts were when he attacked a neighboring, allied nation in order to provoke a war after throwing a hissy fit that the people weren't paying enough attention to him (and completely ignoring that the reason the people ignored him was because the resident Hero Killer showed up unexpectedly). The second was when he decided to order total bombardment of his own country when he began to lose a fight, as a way to kill his opponents and eradicate anyone who saw him struggle in the fight. This caused the flattening of his country, the eradication of said formerly allied nation, the self-destruction of his mini-empire in the military, and a huge sea change in the Balance of Power. While bragging about how he is smarter, stronger, faster than the Exarchs (the egotistical warlords who created the Commonwealth), the citizens asked "Then how are you better?" He responded by massacring all of the citizens in the area, yet by this time, he was already heavily crippled by the fight. Soon, his body was unable to handle the strain, and he would die (rather savagely) from a power overdose as the remaining citizens refused to acknowledge him.
edited 3rd Sep '14 5:01:03 PM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Isn't one supposed to comment on previous entries before introducing new ones?
Serocco
I already did. <.<
edited 2nd Sep '14 12:50:12 PM by Serocco
In RWBY, every girl is Best Girl.
Well, at least two entries have gone without comment, and that seemed more just a conversation of one that was already ongoing.
As to your character, god forbid a thoroughly evil female character who isn't motivated by some man screwing her over. You just made my day. Normally I'm not a huge fan with For the Evulz/Psycho for Hire types, but that's because the male version has been done to death. A female take on the character is something of a novelty; this story now has my attention. If you really want to make her unique by the way, just do this one thing—don't sexualize her. Don't have her screw around. Don't have her turned on by the violence. Don't have her flirt with the hero. Write her the exact same way that male characters of this type are normally written, and this story will have my loyalty.
Here's another character, from another television concept I'm kicking around. The show's called Breakdown and the villain is Lonnie Tanner, the character responsible for making the setting the way it is.
Name: Lonnie Tanner
Age: Thirty-five
Personality: Unstable. Lonnie's a paranoid schizophrenic with developing antisocial tendencies that have only gotten worse since he landed in prison. He's subject to intense mood swings, holds grudges over slights real and imagined, and alternates between wanting to do the right thing and hating literally everybody around him. He knows violence is wrong and that he shouldn't hurt people, but his fear, coupled with his absolute loathing of Scarsdale County, means that even he doesn't know what he's going to do from one second to the next. Physically he looks like a wreck, complete with full body twitch, and tattoos of Vladimir Lenin on his hands. On the positive side, he's got a soft spot for bullied kids, and anybody else who is getting pushed around.
Abilities: Lonnie used to be that scrawny kid who got kicked around a lot. Twenty years in prison has changed him though, leaving him tougher, faster, and stronger than just about anyone he'll come across in rural Scarsdale, and that's when he's not in a homicidal rage. Even when he's less than lucid he can still be quite calculating (his delusions are fairly focused, which helps with this), and when he's medicated—or partially medicated—he's downright brilliant. As far as weaponry goes he's good with a knife, and while not a crack shot is a) better than most, and b) fond of automatic weapons to begin with.
Weaknesses: Lonnie is insane. He was never treated properly for it, and years of jail time, when he should have been instituionalized, has not helped at all. The longer he spends off his medication (and since the only medication he's taking in season one is that which he chooses to take himself, he's off it pretty quickly) the more disorganized he becomes, and the more he retreats into the past, hallucinating that he's back in high school getting shaken down for lunch money. The fact that on a deeper level he does not want to be this way can work against him too, as his better impulses and self-hatred war with whatever criminal activity he's engaged in at the time.
Goals: Lonnie's goal in the first season is to stay out of prison and find the people who hurt his sister (more on that below). After he's sent to a mental institution in Season 2, his goal is to get better—right up until a gang of vigilantes break him out, intending to kill him, after which point his goal is making sure none of them can do that again. In Season 4 he is again, out to get well.
Motivation: Lonnie's madness is at the core of a lot of his motivation. He's constantly reliving his past, and lashing out at the people he holds responsible. He wants revenge for his sister, and he also, on some level, wants to get well. These conflicting impulses are a part of what make him as unstable as he is.
Role in story: Lonnie is the local bogeyman. Ever since his rampage, people in Scarsdale have blamed everything on him. The rate of drug abuse is up? It's because people were traumatized by what he did. Crime is up? There was no evil in Scarsdale before Lonnie. While his actions did traumatize the community, the truth of course, is that the area was crooked as hell before him, and will be crooked again long after he's gone; regardless, protagonist Sheriff Sheila Evans spends a lot of time trying to excise Lonnie's ghost from Scarsdale. Anytime he is out in society (Seasons 1 and 3) the action centres on him, as the town panics, and Sheila tries to end things without anybody—including Lonnie—ending up in the morgue. In the first season, Lonnie tries to look into what happened to his sister, while staying away from the law and the local gangs. In the end it fails and, after knifing the mayor (who I may do a write-up on later) he goes on another rampage. In Season 3, after being broken out by a group that's looking to kill him, he allies with several other escapees and goes on a calculated killing spree in defense of his own life. In between and afterwards (I've got four seasons planned out) he's never far from Sheila's mind, and she regularly checks up on him in the psychiatric ward.
Backstory: Lonnie's father was a schizoprhenic who shot himself. His mother was a disorganized prescription drug addict and alcoholic who alternated between ignoring her children and stubbing cigarettes out on them. The abuse continued at school, where the weird kid who talked to himself was fair game for every jackass in the building—right up until the day he walked through the front door with a submachine gun and killed twenty-seven people (twenty-four students and three teachers), and injured far more, including supporting character Riley O'Neil who was left crippled from the waist down; this isn't getting into the people like Sheila who were left with PTSD. Lonnie wore a mask and ditched the weapons and in the end all they got him on was resisting arrest (by trying to run the police over), for which he did twenty years. While he was in prison, his sister Amy, was shoved into traffic by a group of kids who held her responsible for what he'd done; she's still in a coma when the story starts.
Relevant tropes: Axe-Crazy, The Mentally Ill, Axes at School, Bully Hunter, Even Evil Has Loved Ones, Archenemy (to both Sheila and Scarsdale), Evil Counterpart (to Sheila again; I may do a write-up for her in the hero thread), Heel–Face Turn (in Season 4, when he's finally given proper treatment, and allowed to recover), The Dreaded, Hero Killer, Tragic Monster, The Dragon (briefly plays this role to the mayor in Season 1), The Big Bad (one of the chief contenders for the title in Season 3).
edited 29th Aug '14 9:54:09 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar