Why Are a Lot of Satanic Archetypes So Young? (By Cosmic Being Standards, That Is)

Trigon. Aku. the Crimson King. What these characters have in common is that they're Devil-type characters who are the most powerful forces of evil in their respective universes, yet are incredibly young compared to other cosmic beings.

For example, the Crimson King is merely hundreds of years old, yet is vastly more powerful than IT, who in turn is older than time itself.

Why do you think writers do this? And on a side note, how old do you think should an ultimate evil be?

What most SatanicArchetypes have in common is that they became the way they are through rebellion against the status quo. Their reasons for that vary, some, like Sargeras, became desperate performing the task they were assigned to and started questioning the morals of their superiors, some others, like Morgoth, experienced Creative Differences with the Higher being, but rebellion is always there. They are agents of Chaos, upsetting the established Order. Unfortunately, the order they are upsetting is Good in general, so their actions lead them to become the Ultimate Evil. And there should exist a higher authority for them to rebel against in the first place, so SatanicArchetypes are generally younger than (or, more often, were created by) the Higher being they antagonize.

Or, from Doylist POV, there are also parallels to what every human being experiences in their adolescence: rebellion against their parental figures' authority, in order to provide a common ground with Satanic Archetype, to make them sympathetic. SatanicArchetypes often find themselves wearing leather pants for this very reason. No one likes one-dimensional villains, do they?

edited 31st Mar '18 11:57:13 PM by Millership

Very much what Millership said (well, wrote).

And I'll add to it that generally, the so-called ultimate evil of this kind has to still in some way be within bounds of power accessible to the hero-characters in the story, so as to not completely wreck everything. If they were old and still within those bounds, then that would be either because they simply do not have the potential to get out of those bounds (in which case why are they a threat still?) or they managed to get stuck there due to simply not being good enough characters to develop properly and get better (in which case they are one-dimensional and just no). As such, it is simply easier to make them relatively young, make the fact that they aren't wrecking anything and everything the heroes could roll against them be based on the fact that they are still coming into their power, or that they are busy with the first steps of their plan which they have to tend to, or that they have that sort of naivete that comes with being new to it all even if they are growing out of it.

Certainly, it is possible to write "old evil" that is well-written and not flat and has a reason for being not above it all ... even if close to it (e.g. Mairon, Diablo, some of the Daedra ... I could go on but I don't want to have to resort to browsing the trope's page when three examples is plenty). The key thing is that it requires planning, and can shaft some future plans because they may just happen to not fit the lore you are establishing, so for people who aren't either very into lore-making (Tolkien, as well as TES people) or working on something that starts very small in scope due to the format with no lore really and only expands to fit their lore well later (Blizzard team), it's simply more convenient an option to make the ultimate evil young and teenager-ish.

For what it's worth, personally I like the idea of old evil, and I think I used it in my own works more often than not ... give me a moment ... yup, my tRPG supplement story (which may one day get sequels) has it, my mishap of a contest work kind of has it (even if you don't see it there because it's outside of the scope of the entry), most of my random lore snippets for stuff I may end up creating have it, anything that I wrote for said tRPG (different language, people, so don't ask) because I wrote quite some of the lore has it, it's just my currently-written work and my first work ever (that I never released) that don't. But then again, I do like dabbling with lore, and someone who doesn't may not find the idea too ... tempting, yes.

edited 1st Apr '18 5:05:29 AM by Kazeto

Well, there is a whole genre in which Old Evil takes central stage: Cosmic Horror Story.

The "young Satan" is also useful from the philosophical angle: the default state of the Universe, the tabula rasa is, if not Good, then at least is not outright Evil. The world was corrupted (Arda the Marred) and at least there is hope it can be restored to its original state. People are not malicious by their nature, only doing evil deeds by circumstances or such (with some rare exceptions). Happy Ending is a possibility.

Otherwise, when the Evil is old, we're dealing with the Nietzschean abyss: the Universe was cold, uncaring and cruel from the very beginning. Our time on Earth, when some of our goodness illuminated the darkness is short, soon will be forgotten and pointless, ultimately.

Cosmic Horror (with few exceptions) is not mainstream for a reason.

edited 1st Apr '18 6:04:11 AM by Millership

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for the info!

What would be an ideal origin for a New Evil?

Depends on what fits well with what you have of the lore of your story. Ultimately, what you need is power, motive, and certain personality traits, relation to the divine completely optional. All of them can be basically plucked out of thin air, but people do like it if either the power element or the motive element are i some way tied to the lore because it makes that character fit into it and feel like a somewhat connected part of it rather than just a powerful evil person who's up to some specific evil acts.

While they aren't necessarily satanic archetypes, one of my works has people who are born with magic that originated from gods, and magicless people can, even if it's not very common and has a very very high risk of basically just adding one to the fatality counter, get injected with basically fragments of evil gods' powers, turning them into mages too but making it so that regardless of how good people they are if they aren't strong enough in mind and in soul their new powers will corrupt them, turn them into human-shaped monsters, make them rampage as they lose ability to recognise humans as anything but abominations. It's more tragic than evil, but it's something that you could still call “new evil” as far as that setting is concerned. The sky's the limit, just make sure your sky doesn't look like it's done in crayon.

Some ideas of mine would be a demon born from the union between a demon and a mortal woman, a demon born in an interdimensional netherworld, and an evil entity hailing from the space between dimensions.