Is the Card-Carrying Villain a Necessarily Bad Type of Villain?

The Card-Carrying Villain is a tropes I admit to having had a lot of fun with. In fact, one could even count it as a strange kind of Author Appeal for me. I think it's a very important kind of evil that's been comletely overlooked in favour of "realistic" (see Knight Templar ) villains in the modern era. Of course, I love a good Knight Templar too. But what I love even more is the dynamic, the constrast between a Well-Intentioned Extremist or Noble Demon and a true, unapologetic Card-Carrying Villain of classical proportions. See the Order Of The Stick - one of the most interesting parts of the comic is the contrast between Big Bad Xykon and his Knight Templar Dragon Redcloak.

Usually, when I write, the character who is a Card-Carrying Villain is either a Sociopath or Narcissist - either way, he lacks empathy and doesn't care where they fall on right and wrong. That's what a Card-Carrying Villain is to me - someone who doesn't care about being morally right or justified. Someone who acknowledges that they are a terrible person whose death would benefit the world, and isn't sad about it. With a definition like that, you'd be genuinely hard pressed to find a functioning, self-acknowledged sociopath who isn't a Card-Carrying Villain.

I'll also bring up the Big Bad of my current story as an example, because I think he's an interesting way to play with the trope. He's a horrific mixture of For the Evulz and For Science! - he wants to learn everything there is to know. He's also on a personal quest to kill all people less intelligent than him. Not because he thinks it'll make a better world, that's only a side bonus. Simply because he hates them and gets twisted pleasure out of watching them burn in a manner in which a smarter man could've avoided (also justifying his Complexity Addiction rather nicely - he needs to demonstrate his intelligence to have fun with killing.) He claims a Well-Intentioned Extremist status in his speeches, but when someone sees through his facade of lies and half-truths, he's quick to admit the truth. After all, his claims were both relatively practical ones for any villain that wants to survive and a test of their intelligence.

So, yeah. I think that the Card-Carrying Villain is a wonderful kind, and one I'd encourage authors to use more and more often. Just a word of advice thought - if said villain has a Freudian Excuse be sure that it just explains their feelings and mindset. Make sure the pre-excuse version of them is just as lacking in empathy or care, even if they refuse to acknowledge it. That's one of my biggest pet peeves about modern fiction - the idea that you can MAKE someone without a pre-existing inclination towards such into a sociopath.

Seems a Card-Carrying Villain could easily invoked a Freudian Excuse upon themselves, if only for laughs

edited 9th May '16 10:54:52 PM by hellomoto

A card carrying villain I remember is Dr Weil from Mega Man Zero.

He is a survivor of a Robot War and it gave him a case of Fantastic Racism to robots. He then tries to enslave the robot race by stealing the hero's body to create an Antichrist and then kills most of humanity and robots in another war. He loses and is punished by surviving humans to wander the wasteland. When he comes back, he takes over the last bastion of humanity and turns it into a hellhole to make everyone as miserable as possible. In the final battle, he outright calls himself the Devil.