Complete Monster - Serious threat or Hilariously Over the Top?

When it comes to villains, I think it's safe to say my favorite comes in the form of the Complete Monster. The villain who everyone despises, who brings nightmares to the main characters (And occasionally the reader), the one whose a legit threat, the one who everyone proclaims to the heavens when the SOB finally goes down, bang or whimper, doesn't matter. My story I'm writing (Still in the development stages) has 4 such characters, ranging from the Stoic to the General Ripper archetypes. Basically, I want the evilest bastards to be the biggest threats to my guys.

However, I started thinking: Can I really make these characters this way? In a sense, I don't want people to LIKE these characters. Along the lines of Frollo and Scar, who have fan girls but did NOTHING but despicable, horrible acts their entire lives. I want people to read these actions and think, "Wow, this guy is a scum bag, I don't want him to succeed", not "Oh wow, this guy is hot so he's misunderstood, I'm gonna write SLASH fiction about him!". Which brings me to my conundrum, how can I write a character to be hated by all, but not make him goofy in a sense? How can I make a character despicable in every sense of the word, but keep him from being over the top and taking candy from babies and kicking puppies for shits and giggles.

I guess I can only repeat my above query: Where does the Complete Monster become a legit threat to everything going about it, without being goofy and insanely over the top?

If you want to get rid of most fangirls, just make him ugly. With a raspy, old voice. The more he looks like a potential father of one such girl, the less she will like him.

However, if it's Complete Monster, he may not be a really serious threat. To be successfull, you need to restrain yourself sometimes. Take a step back from a really heinous act because you consider the consequences and think it's just not worth it. Complete monster doesn't have such limitations, so he may do something stupid out of sadism, making him less of a serious threat.

Emperor Palpatine called and said your methodology doesn't really work.

edited 15th Jul '12 6:10:55 PM by Night

To the best of my knowledge, Emperor Palpatine does not have tons of fangirls. He's a popular villain for several reasons, but not in that way.

Well, you and I have had very different experiences on that subject then.

But more seriously the idea that you can reliably influence all readers/viewers to a perception is one you should jettison as fast as you can, because it's not going to happen.

I'm both deeply disturbed and genuinely surprised, given that the Star Wars section at fanfiction.net - one of the places I routinely browse as part of my regimen to remind myself that bad writing does exist - doesn't seem to contain any of this sentiment.

Amen. Fewer things cause more problems for a writer then the desire to have everything in their work perceived identically by everyone.

Going slightly off-topic, I've been seeing a couple of aspiring book writers say the "I don't want any crazy fangirls" line. Two things wrong with this: 1) what makes you think we'll immediately flock to your book anyway? 2) don't you want as many reading as possible?

No - I can honestly say that, were it my choice, I would easily choose to have no fandom rather than a Misaimed Fandom. Realistically, all I can do is avoid catering to them (well, realistically it's most likely that the former will be true), but if given the option I truly would rather have a smaller audience that actually appreciates my work for what it is then a large audience whose primary interests in the work are unintended, incidental, or just plain wrong.

Your first point, of course, stands.

Ohh, I understand that, I just find alienating a demographic before you've even got published a strange idea.

Yeah that did sound kinda douchey of me. Apologies if I offended anyone.

Oh no, I just felt like having someone explain the thinking process to me. No offense here.

...and nrjxll is back to plundering my inmost thoughts. But let's set that aside for a moment and talk about what makes an antagonist truly repugnant. To begin, ask yourself this question: How does your character feel about what they do to other people, and in what capacity?

If you don't want the audience to like them, the best bet would be to keep them largely off-screen and just describe the results of their evil actions. And, when they are on-screen, never reveal their inner-monologue or how they feel about any given thing.

Though I don't get why you'd want to make them unlikable. I mean, if readers hate the character, they're going to hate reading about them, which will make them hate your story (or at least the parts of it that character's in). What's the point of that?

edited 16th Jul '12 12:53:47 AM by RavenWilder

You don't seem familiar with the idea of Love to Hate.

Although on that note, a Complete Monster probably isn't best used as a "hateable" villain, because they're frequently too nasty. The only characters I've ever written that were meant to approximate one were intended to be scary/disturbing - not to be hated.

But Michael Dj 54 doesn't seem to be talking about Love to Hate villains. S/he seems to be talking about villains that everyone, the reader included, hates and fears so much that they just want to see them disappear. And I don't see why s/he'd want to create a villain like that, because the easiest way for a reader to make a character disappear is to just stop reading the story.

edited 16th Jul '12 2:16:43 AM by RavenWilder

Complete monsters are only effective when they are either somewhat out of focus, so you don't need to explain, or they are personalized; not monsters to all, but only to some.

I agree that you will never get rid of all fangirls of that sort, but making them look and behave like an overbearing father is a good way to scare away most of them, if I know anything about teenage girls. Palpatine has more fandom among young males who believe themselves to be magnificient bastards with the unlimited powah.

Getting rid of substantial portions of potential audience might bite you in the ass though indeed. Just like trying to write a complete monster - because they're so bad, it's hard to write realistically their reactions and make them a genuine threat when they're fumbling around and kicking puppies for evulz.

In my personal experience, it's much easier to write villains with human qualities, even if it's just "loves his brother". I have a "Dragon" guy who's dragoning to his younger brother. He's a total bastard, with no respect to anyone, very trigger happy and kills his henchmen for failure. He also looks like he just got up from the grave, because he's shadow-infused from birth, thus being essentially a vampire of the worst kind. But he loves his brother and will do anything for him. If anyone would dig that... er... good for you, I guess. But it's much more interesting to give a character some human value.

Is there some reason a complete monster can't have reasons for their actions? Or some reason why they can't act rationally, if in a completely morally bankrupt, vile way?

Certainly nothing on the trope page suggests that.

Complete monsters certainly do have reasons for their actions, but to make them keep their complete monster image, they have do some really repugnant stuff - and some of it is definitely not a rational move.

I was thinking, perhaps what needs to be done is to make it obvious he has no class. He has to be, deep down, just a thug. Emperor Palpatine is hamtastic, cartoonishly evil space wizard emperor. Draco Malfoy is aristocratic, relatively witty and not too ugly. Both get Evil Is Cool points. Show, once in a while, that under whatever facade he has, the bad guy is a mass of pettiness, one or another neurosis, mental simplicity. So on. That's my look at it, don't know what you will think of that.

^^They've got to do horrible, repugnant things, and not be redeemable: I don't see how that would stop them from being effective villains. I like the approach of their excessive shitfuckery leading to their own downfall.

Look at Macbeth, for example: when he goes off the deep end and kills Macduff's family, that seals his fate by spurring Macduff into action. There's an old version of the king Arthur story where he recieves a prophecy that a child born in a certain month will kill him - and so he rounds up all the babies born that month in his kingdom and has them left to die in a ship - but Mordred survives and... well.

(I am well aware that the king Arthur example is probably based on the king Herod story, but since it has the bastard getting him cumoppance it's a better fit... well... Arthur isn't a 'complete monster' in the narrative, but you get the point I hope).

But anyway. Just because he ultimately fails - and fails due to his own character flaws & impulse to act like a massive asshole - does not stop a complete monster from being an effective villain.

As to the OP question (making the complete monster completely unlikable), I'm going to echo what others have said about making him ugly: also make him petty and crude. Have him torture people in horrible ways for imagined slights. And for G-D's sake, don't tell anything from his point of view!

Now, I can think of pretty repulsive point-of-view characters. But perhaps they can be dismissed as minor thugs, not villains of the whole story.

Oh, it's entirely possible to have horrible point-of-view characters, even villains; but the OP wants to guarantee that this character will not have any fans whatsoever.

Telling from a character generally lets the reader understand that character. I would think that would make it more likely for the character to garner fans - unless you make the character a moo hoo ha ha now I will stamp on this kitten's face-type nutter, which runs the risk of making them cartoonishly over-the-top evil.

Of course, as always, a sufficiently skilled writer can make anything good.

Yeah, the point of view pretty much showed these guys were a thuggish bandit and a deranged wacko. Both come from Robin Cook's medical thrillers, if you're curious. The first one was, well, a criminal not above roughing up a woman if he was paid for it, or raping if he was lucky. And I'd call him the more likable one, at least he was kinda sane. The second was kind of a bodybuilding jerk with somewhat of a Nice Guy's way of thinking about women, and probably too deranged to care that the medicines he poisons are used to kill people. Just so you know, there was nothing in there to show he was a tormented soul or some other kind of Woobie.

So, so much for examples. In these cases the point of view allowed the reader to get into the mindset of the characters, but they had no teary backstory to speak of, no vision to follow or internal moral code to adhere to.

So, I wanted to just show these two, I don't want to argue with anyone. Perhaps, well, with a single point to it: it should be detailed how bad the villain is (through a glimpse into the villain's mindset or elsewhere), if the reader is expected to feel dislike. Obviously, as said before, precautions in this case should be taken.

You can't go too deep into the motives of a Complete Monster because understanding how someone thinks leads to seeing things from their point of view, which leads feeling empathy towards them.