Do Villains NEED Sympathetic Motives?

So let me preface this by saying that I very much enjoy villains when they have a point. People committing traditionally immoral acts for more or less understandable reasons gives depth to a setting.

However, it also seems as though that’s been regurgitated over and over again as “the” villain writing advice. Making every antagonist this way I feel would diminish the impact of the character since you could find many different characters like that within the same setting. It also comes down to the fact that I personally really enjoy villains that FEEL like true blue villains. The reprehensible scumbags of the world who just wanna fiddle while Rome burns can be great fun to write in themselves.

So dear TV Tropes forum users, do you believe that not giving your villains sympathetic reasoning detracts from their depth?

I personally don't, no. I like my stories to be varied, with some sympathetic villains, and others that are just despicable monsters working for personal gain, and others that get darker over time due to corruption...

Personally, the more sympathetic a villain is the more I lose interest in them (as a villain, at least). If it reaches a point where the work expects me to feel bad for the person murdering everyone, I just can't find it in me to care, unless it's written well or is intentionally ambiguous. I need a balance. Either make a sympathetic Anti-Villain or make someone evil, don't try and do both and expect me to feel something.

It's a trope that works in some cases, but overuse just makes the story generally less interesting, unless the point is that every character is morally gray and nobody is evil. It's having those unrepentant scumbags that make the sympathetic villains stand out. Not every villain can be a Mr. Freeze- sometimes we just need a Joker.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 3rd 2022 at 12:57:16 PM

It really depends what you want to do. People have said they really like my intensely petty villain character with no real motive beyond "cool whatever going to do this thing now". They've also said they like the one who genuinely believes nearly everyone else is some combination of wrong, dangerous, willfully ignorant, or controlled by prejudice, and is actively fighting that war at all times.

So certainly both can be interesting.

Me, I wonder if folks confuse understandable with sympathetic sometimes. One of my villains is a politician who is a) a hardcore homophobe because the island he represents in parliament is very socially conservative, and b) used his political influence to deny rescue operations to another country that was about to be hit by a deadly hurricane because the places hit by the hurricane had been a consistent hinderance in climate change mitigation efforts by electing climate change deniers. Does this count as "sympathetic" or just as "understandable" or neither?

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Feb 4th 2022 at 11:19:08 AM

It's obviously subjective, and also related to how the work portrays him; but just from the blurb I'd personally say it's "understandable" only on the level of "I can see why he exists".

Personally I think "sympathetic villain" has been overcooked in recent media. People love villains to begin with, but now seem to feel the need to justify liking them. Stories will then bend over backwards to accommodate that need (they are, after all, following the trends), until the villain is just a hero with a different coat of paint.

The only fully sympathetic villain I've ever enjoyed is General Hummel from The Rock. Beyond that, I like seeing the sonsabitches get what's coming to them. I understand the principle of "every villain is convinced they're right," but the narrative doesn't need to support that.

Edited by Jadabunz on Feb 4th 2022 at 1:50:36 AM

For me what grinds my gears more than a sympathetic motive is a sympathetic backstory. Freudian Excuse is one of the most poorly handled tropes in media. If done well it's fascinating and tragic, but I almost never see it done well. I see villains who are retroactively made sympathetic because everyone else around them was a one dimensional monster. It doesn't make me care about them, it turns me away because I find it emotionally manipulative. Not to mention hypocritical- if the point is that evil is made, then what about the other characters?

I like having some villains who have a point, and others who...really don't. Or even some who honestly believe they have an undeniable point, but it's just them.

Spoilers;

The villains of Shadows of Sandfield include Kellon Nyczus, a villain very much in the latter category. He's blatantly out for self aggrandizement, and not all his public persona of the greedy televangelist was a lie. He just sees those his cult stands to take advantage of as "dupes" that deserved it purely for believing anyone without assuming more about them.

Corpheus Scyllo on the other hand makes the point that the economy is stagnant, the wealthy guarantee inequality to preserve their edge, upper mobility is nigh impossible, the wealthy get away with their crimes on the regular, and the police preserve the status quo despite the need for a change. He believes that the violent, sudden Umbral Horde uprising is the only thing capable of changing the system at this point. Nobody can deny he has very good points about equality, stagnation and the rich screwing the rules, but his solutions basically are "lets just have an army of demons and monsters ransack the status quo and rebuild from there!"

Edited by NickTheSwing on Feb 5th 2022 at 12:16:39 PM

The Joker needs no sympathetic motive or backstory and he is considered one of the greatest and most memorable villains of all time.

Just as one example.

Well, there's nothing that can justify something like rape in my opinion (barring very unusual Fuck Or Die scenarios).

And I hate the idea that villain backstories are somehow obligatory or should be clumsily inserted into a finale. I don't want Evil Mc Genocide to be changed by magic protagonist hugs or portrayed as more of a victim than the people he hurt, and that's what a lot of bad writers do when they hear "make the villain realistic".

I bullied people in elementary school, and I can assure you there was no Freudian Excuse or misunderstanding there.

Edited by Argon2 on Feb 5th 2022 at 12:19:03 PM

I think that, between the two extremes of the villain who does evil for evil's sake, and the vilain with freudian excuses, there is room for people with rational, yet selfish reasons for their acts. As Septimus Heap wrote, 'understandable' doesn't mean automatically 'sympathetic'.

Like the drug lord who sees their trade as a high-risk, high-gain activity and behaves like the CEO of an industry which just happens to sell drugs, for example. I don't see the necessity to make every criminal either a barely functioning sociopath who can't restrain their istinct or a tragic villain with a sad backstory.

(Then The Sopranos managed to create a main character which is all of these three thing combined, and yet it sounds plausible).

I think that it's perhaps worth noting here that there's a difference between someone being sympathetic and someone being justified.

See for example Sauron from The Lord of the Rings—or, more accurately, Sauron from The Silmarillion.

The character is presented there (if I recall correctly) as loving order and efficiency above all else. (Somewhat fitting for a being who was originally a craftsman-spirit.) Looking at the world around, he saw waste and disorder everywhere. His original motives, then, were aimed at putting the world to order and efficiency. (Much of that motive was lost over the millennia, but that's where it came from, as I recall.)

And while I may not share Sauron's proclivities there, I can see where one might feel that way, and can sympathise with how he seems to have found the world.

But that doesn't mean that I ''agree' him, let along with his actions. Nor does it mean that I find them justified, or, indeed, non-abhorent.

To give my answer to the question in the original post: No, they don't. As we've seen in this thread, different audience-members like different things.

Speaking for myself, I like both types of villain, I think.

I firmly believe that if you want to take a (supposedly) tired old cliche like "a mustache-twirling villain," you can totally do that and still make them "sympathetic."

"A guy who's been burned by the world and just wants to sow as much chaos as possible" is in itself a sympathetic motivation. Would I like a person who does that? No. That's kind of the point. But does that kind of person exist in the real world? Absolutely.

The true measure of a sympathetic character — villain or otherwise — should be as simple as "this personality could totally exist." Too many writers don't give that idea the breadth it deserves.

TL;DR — Go ham.

This is basically Doofenshmirtz. His backstory is hilariously awful, and so are his schemes to rule the ENTIRE TRI-STATE AREA!

No, not every villain needs sympathetic motives, some people are evil for entirely self-serving reasons.

If I can add my two cents, I don't think villains need sympathetic reasons per se, as much as they need well thought out reasons. The typical mustache-twirling bad guy is perfectly fine of course, but I am not particularly fond of those types and if they are present in a work, I prefer to see them relegated to a smaller role such as a particularly vile minion of a much more balanced antagonist.

But to continue, a villain doesn't need sympathetic motives exactly. Picture a thief. In my opinion a criminal mastermind who plans a multimillion dollar theft for the sake of ensuring his sick child is taken care of is just as valid as one who plans the same heist for the sake of greed and a desire to "make his mark" on the criminal underworld.

One obviously draws the audience's sympathy more than the other, but both can be captivating and interesting characters, and the actions those two characters take during the course of carrying out their plans also has a great impact on their perception.

The sympathetic criminal who just wants to help his kid can coldly kill anyone in his way and lose the sympathy the audience originally had for them while the unrepentant greedy criminal can go out of the way to ensure no unnecessary casualties and earn some audience respect for that.

Right, a motivation doesn't need to be a sympathetic one. A particularly cruel sociopath might just want to torment someone because it amuses them, and that to is a motive that is at least defined and understandable. What we don't need are villains with no defined motive or purpose at all, not for no unsympathetic villains.

No, but it still needs to make sense.

Ie. not the ""tHey'rE jUst cRazY lOl sO rAndOm!!"" thing superhero stories in particular seem married to. Even if the person is crazy, there's still a reason for what they're doing and it makes sense to them, even if it is crazy to everybody else. Humans don't do things without some kind of a reason, and "crazy" isn't a good excuse for opting out of such basic writing thing.

Villains don't need one per se. They just need to make sense or fulfill a narrative purpose in satisfactory fashion.