Freudian Excuse

Hello ! I write it here because I have, yet again, another question. How would people react if I made a story with villains who lack Freudian Excuses. Has it, they can be funny/affably evil/whimsical (from the most part, some are pure evil tho) but say that these guys have no reasons to go out and do crimes ? Or weird ones ("my kitten was killed when I was eight" for an instance).

I will try to avoid one-dimensional characters who do some bad things and die after a moment but can I try to use such a thing to make the villains somewhat more sinister ? As if, they murder people and destroy things for no reasons, doing it just because its fun or for petty reasons ?

Then again, not all of them will be like dis. So, do you think that a lack of such a Freudian Excuse mean one-dimensional villains, or will it succeeds and make them creepier ? Or even, for more dissonance, have them lying to receive the pity of the heroes ?

edited 29th Apr '15 9:11:25 AM by Bolded1

Lack of a Freudian Excuse doesn't mean lack of motivation. The Freudian Excuse is all too often used as a crutch in lieu of actually exploring someone's motivation, and "everything about the character can be boiled down to this point long ago" is not only very questionable psychology, but also usually unsatisfying.

I'd encourage you to go one step further, in fact. Have someone who commits hideous deeds not because it's petty or because it's fun, but because it makes rational sense for them to do so in pursuit of a goal. That's the kind of powerful villain that people follow—and what is power but the ability to get people to do what you want them to?

Pretty much what Sabre's Edge had said.

The so-called "freudian excuse" isn't intrinsically bad, but for something that pretty much amounts to "oh noez, woes was me, so now I get to do whatever I want because woe was me"—because that's what it actually is at its very core, though writing it well means this fact won't be noticeable—it gets overused, often being used in lieu of a motivation that would actually make the character interesting.

And even then, if we decide to actually use that for the character, we have to remember that it is a part of what makes the character the way they are, rather than "the one and only reason". Someone who had a traumatic past likely will change because of it, yes, but the traumatic event does not make them do things; rather, what sort of person they are makes them do things, and the event is one of the things that shapes what they are.


I have a word for people whose entire selves are defined by traumatic event. It's not "villain", nor "antagonist", nor "evil".

This word is "broken"; for that is what they are, broken people.


That being said, I can honestly say that out of anyone who is either a villain or otherwise antagonistic in the story I'm writing, none of them are like this because of stuff like that. If anyone has a freudian excuse there, it's one of the people in the protagonist's party, and even then not only is it merely a part of what was of him rather than everything there was to him (in fact, he'd snapped out of it because it was nothing more than just a part of him) but everything he's done because of it was nothing more than selfish or stubborn (rather than "evil" or things like that) and pretty much just a way of coping. Heck, the only reason the event is something that bothered him is because it essentially made him a Muggle Born of Mages via DePowering, in a place where being the local equivalent of a "mage" is actually quite important, with the event only happening because of someone else in his family doing something morally questionable ... okay, fine, outright immoral for what they'd thought was a good cause (human sacrifice to give muggles magic, to put it in simple words), and they didn't think it possible to stop that person from continuing without having a political hostage of that kind.

edited 29th Apr '15 2:09:41 PM by Kazeto

I concur with no Freudian Excuse not being the same as no motivation or a flat character. The motivation or impetus can be a more recent event, or the pursuit of a goal, or a philosophy or value that would be agreeable if these villainous deeds had not been the means to that end.

It depends too on what you have the villain doing. The stranger or more aberrant the behaviour, the more we may need a psychological explanation for why they do what they do. Someone who is robbing banks may require no explanation beyond being down on his luck and needing the cash, while somebody who kidnaps school children to torture to death in her cellar, might require a little more exploration.

Thanks for your advices

Terrorists out to destroy a city. All of them do try to explain why they're doing it, but just two have any real "excuse" (and no excuse is good enough to do such a thing in the first place) and the first is incredibly petty, with the second one being fake, since the other dude is a Complete Monster.

edited 30th Apr '15 9:51:26 AM by Bolded1

Okay, seriously worth reading in that scenario: Strategy and the Supervillain Problem, by Adam Elkus. It's fine and good to have one or two people acting to indulge their own psychoses, but that is not enough to motivate a group to act.

Money quote.

Thanks for the quote :o

The boss does have a reason for such violence though, and a way to led these people :O

Okay. Since he has a cause that's attractive enough to get people to follow him, it shouldn't be a problem to have characters rationally decide to do so, without needing some distant childhood trauma to justify everything.

This doesn't preclude them from having personal motivations, of course, but it also removes the necessity of implying that "they're party to such obviously horrific deeds, hence they must be crazy/traumatized/damaged in some way", which just isn't true.

Yes, pretty much that.

Although one could argue that, in the end, everyone is crazy in their own way because they aren't statistically average. But that's a moot point and it's not the same sort of "crazy" that people think about.

And if you are following anyone, conviction that this person is right, for whatever reason you have that conviction, is enough; no other reason is necessary for the basic act of following someone. And then we have tradition, which is something that makes conviction less necessary or even obsolete; after all, it's the thing to do, it doesn't matter if we think it right or not. Heck, sometimes social pressure is enough for that, and as far as motivation that is actually relevant to what it is about goes, we know that social pressure is equivalent to not having any motivation. And then comes the primal emotions and other such stuff: fear (joining because the alternative is worse), anger (joining to spite those on the other side), desire (joining because we think it'll make it easier to get what we want), sloth (joining because not doing that seemingly would have taken more effort), attachment (joining because someone we want to be close to had joined).

If you want an example for the above, take a look at the merry band of Tom Riddle from the Harry Potter series. The very first ones had joined him because of conviction, the next ones once the word got out had joined because of tradition, the ones after that had joined because of social pressure. And then some occasional snowflake joined because of some other reason (Pettigrew out of fear, for example). And I don't think there's a single one of them that actually has a freudian excuse that is at least presented to people (and if it's not, it stands to reason they don't care about it themselves and thus it's no freudian excuse), outside of Riddle himself who might have counted ... if not for the fact that there were kids just like him—with the exception of magic—in the orphanage and they didn't turn out like him so it's clear that he became the way he was because he simply got drunk on power.

edited 30th Apr '15 2:37:52 PM by Kazeto

Keep in mind this—everyone has a reason for being what they are, but that reason isn't always a single traumatic incident. For some it might be a series of traumas. For others, it's simply that their life experience as a whole has been pointing them in this direction.

For instance, one guy might join a revolutionary terror movement because his father was blown up by the government. Another might join because of a succession of bad experiences with said government. Another may simply have grown up poor and see this as his best chance for social advancement. A fourth has never actually suffered herself but has (or thinks she has) a strong sense of social justice, and joins up accordingly. Still more can join through peer pressure, wanting to exploit the movement for their own ends, or in same cases, just having nothing better to do with their lives.