The Bad Guys in White, Part I (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

(This post will contain spoilers for The Unfinished Song, so if you haven’t read up to the end of Book 6, you might want to come back to it later.)

I love thoughtful email from fans. I hope one of my correspondents won’t mind if I use her email comments as the inspiration for my post today. After an insightful analysis of The Unfinished Song epic so far—and some rather startlingly accurate predictions about where the heroes would go next—she noted that Xerpen is far too evil to be, as he is, technically, on the same side as Dindi and the good Aelfae. In fact, since Xerpen has started using Death Magic, allying with him against Lady Death may be a huge mistake.

I cannot argue with that. Yet Dindi may still have to try…

Interestingly, there was no Xerpen in the earliest versions of the story. He arose because I realized such a power would always arise in such a situation. Look across history and you’ll notice that whenever a great trouble or problem comes up, one of the reasons it’s so hard to solve rationally is that some people fixate on an irrational solution that’s even worse than the problem. Or they are so fanatic and excessive in their zeal to destroy evildoers that they become evildoers themselves, though they are blind to their own faults.

Edward Cote, a writer friend of mine (I was also the cover artist for his book Violet Skies; if you would like to hire me for cover art, contact me to find out about availability) described these guys as “the Bad Guys in White.”

In the Wheel of Time, they were called the Children of the Light.  In Sword of Truth, they were the Blood of the Fold.  They show up in even the otherwise refreshing Ice and Fire, as the Sparrows.  

This trope is perhaps even more standard in fantasy gaming, where a villainous organization is doubly useful as an implacable foe for the player characters.  The Iron Kingdoms has the Protectorate of Menoth.  World of Warcraft has the Scarlet Crusade.  The Eberron D&D setting has both the Church of the Silver Flame and the Blood of Vol, either of which could arguably fit the description.  Several faction based games have an almost generic “Crusaders” type faction.

Even the trappings of the Bad Guys in White are quite constant.  They usually literally wear white, often along with red or gold.  They always make a loud show of piety and hatred for anything they consider heretical or evil, which almost always includes any kind of magic, even what the good guys use.  They typically have a military structure, complete with rank, heraldry, weapons and armor.  There is sometimes an order of Inquisitors within the larger organization.  They almost always practice hypocrisy, murder, theft, and torture, sometimes even genocide.

He points out that in this incarnation, they’ve become a bit of tired cliché. Let’s give the Spanish Inquisition a rest.

I understand where he’s coming from—no one wants to read  or write cliché— but I can’t agree that the Inquisition or Templars should be deemed exhausted sources of inspiration. (In fact, one of the book I am recommending this month is Henry Charles Lea’s oeuvre A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages.) 

I quite like the category “Bad Guys in White”; I don’t think we should try to avoid those kinds of characters. Just…as with any villains… take them one step deeper than the cliche, make them new and real and frightening again.

One way to do that is to study history. Fiction characters who are modeled on other fiction characters tend to be weary shadows, stereotypes. Fiction characters who are modeled on our own deepest experiences, or upon historical people, tend to have much more heft and originality.

When I thought about what motivated a person like Xerpen, I wondered, first of all, how much backstory I should even delve into. Vashti Valant argues in her guest post later this month that it isn’t always necessary to know the backstory of a villain. Sometimes, indeed, the inscrutability of the villain’s motives makes him all the more frightening. The unknown is so much scarier than the known.

But I realized that since Xerpen was an Aelfae, and at one time the companion and lover of Vessia, it would reflect poorly on her if he had been a crazed, genocidal psychopath the whole time she knew him and somehow she never noticed. Therefore, I did want to show a series of experiences befell him that changed him from the man she knew into a very different creature. I also realized that his core values never changed. He believed in a good world, in a better world, in a perfect world. The world, he reasoned, had been perfect without humans, and so only without humans could it be perfect again. He is, in short, a True Believer, and like other true believers, he combines the best of motives with the worst of methods.

I drew inspiration for Xerpen’s rise to power as the War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth from the Cattle Killing movement of the Xhosa. The Xhosa were desperate because their way of life was being threatened by British colonists. Then a young prophetess and her uncle, a prophet in his own right as well as her interpreter, arose promising to cast out the British. If only they would heed the prophecy, they could restore their way of life and restore their dead to life. Could the Xhosa be blamed for thinking that prophet was one of the Good Guys, there to save them from the villains, the British imperialists?

And yet, the fanatics lead their people to destruction more swiftly than the British could have contrived.

The Aelfae are in a similar position vis-a-vis Humanity. In fact, in some ways, the Aelfae are even worse off. For they once were immortal, not only in their dreams, but in their real lives. And now they are all but extinct. But of course, in Faearth, where magic is real, there is no question but that a real Resurrection of the Aelfae may be possible. The question is how is it to come about and at what price?

For Dindi, the other challenge is how to offer her own help to the Aelfae as a viable alternative to Xerpen. Or… even worse…  as Lady Death becomes more ruthless and gathers more allies, Dindi may find that she must accept Xerpen as a temporary ally, even knowing that he will betray her at the first opportunity.

Also read The Bad Guys in White, Part II.

7 Most Underrated Villains (Guest Post by Jack P.)

7. Dr. Tolian Soran (Star Trek)

Number 1 – he killed Captain Kirk. Number 2 – see number one. Think about it, Kirk has faced open war with the Klingon Empire and everything the galaxy has to throw at him and won. This is the guy who finally ended him.

6. Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg. And bonus, his gun. (5th Element)

Zorg is evil for the sake of evil. He works for Mister Shadow, the Ultimate Evil, and is willing to destroy all life on Earth to prove a philosophical point. Oh, and that hairstyle? Pure evil.

5. Jabba the Hutt (Star Wars)

Jabba always gets left off Greatest Villain lists because he got strangulated by Princess Leia and died, but think about it. This is a gangster who’s criminal empire was so powerful, even the Empire wouldn’t mess with it. When Darth Vader considers you a threat, hey, you’re kind of a big deal. Even people who aren’t sci-fi fans know exactly what you mean when you say Jabba the Hutt.

4. Nudar (Futurama)

Nudar is the leader of the alien nudist scammers on Futurama. They were so good at using tiny tidbits of personal information and tricking people into giving them, they took over the entire planet. Their organ the ‘sprunjer’ engorges in the presence of valuable information. That right there is one powerful nude villain.

3. Bugger Queen (Ender’s Game)

The Bugger Queen is underrated b/c she is unknown throughout most of the novel. Ender’s Game focuses on Ender, and his fight to defeat the bugger race, the Formics. She controls her entire species telepathically, overriding their own individual wills. While she is not overly antagonistic against other races, she is willing to kill anyone and everything in order for her species to survive, even some of her own kind.

2. Tash (Narnia)

Tash is the Devil to Aslan’s Jesus. Though the Narnia movie series ended after the 3^rd installment, here’s hoping the Final Battle ever makes it to the big screen, so Tash can be seen in all his unholy glory. He has 4 arms, a beak, and the head of a horse. He steals the souls of the magical creatures and humans alike, and has an entire civilization of people who worship him and basically leads to the complete destruction of Narnia.

1. Captain Hook (Peter Pan/Hook)

Everyone thinks of Captain Hook as the bumbling, one-handed, crocophobe, but no one considers who he really is. This is a pirate who has no compunctions about waging war on innocent children. Tiny little children. He has a sword AND a hook hand. At one point, even in the original play, he attempts to kill Peter Pan by poison. In Hook, he goes ahead and even kills a child on screen (Ru-Fi-OOOOO). Bangarang to that, Captain.

The Villains in a Cozy Mystery Series (Guest Post by Mathiya Adams)

Three classic villains types from the Noir Detective genre: the Master Criminal in the posh suit, the weasel minion, and the femme fatale. (From the Maltese Falcon)

When Is An Anti-Hero TOO Anti? (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

I’m all in favored of the tortured, haunted, even monstrous, hero. Let him have a bloody past, terrible urges, even a streak of demon. But I do have a limit how dark I can tolerate my Dark Heroes.

Occasionally, I come across a hero or heroine that simply crosses the line from sexy wicked to ewww-yuck-wicked.

For example, I read a Paranormal Romance with the premise of a Romeo and Juliet story about a werewolf woman in love with a vampire hottie. Awesome. Right?!

Opening scene: she hunts and kills a human. No remorse, no particular effort to explain if this was normal for her or not, certainly no guilt or debate about, you know, killing and eating a person. The vampire then captures her and uses his vampire powers of “persuasion” to “seduce” her into bedding him. Excuse me, how is that not rape? A few chapters later, the vampire goes out and kills a couple, because this is how he makes a living. He doesn’t seem to know or care why his employer wants the couple dead… and guess what, neither does the author. We never learn. He also drains their blood, because, you know… vampire. At this point I was mostly skimming, but I gathered that the werewolf serial killer and the vampire rapist-assassin eventually realized that even though they come from different tribes of monster, they loved each other, and they lived happily ever after.

Uh… wtf?!

I couldn’t believe I was supposed to cheer that two monsters were now bonded through mind-rape and the power of a mutual appetite for amoral killing. I mean, sure, maybe if werewolves and vampires were real, and had the appetites that they are supposed to have, this is exactly how they would behave. But the dirty secret of the monsters in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance is they are not really supposed to be monsters. Not on the inside, not in their code of honor, in their moral conduct. They are actually supposed to be heroic.

I’ll be the first to confess that this is a matter of taste and maybe personal ethics. Some writers genuinely want to challenge our traditional ideals of good and evil. Some writers have different ideals of good and evil. Some writers simply want to explore a wide range of human existence and their protagonists are not even meant to be heroic. Some writers despise heroes, and let it show.

If you want to start a debate in a Fantasy fan group, bring up Lord Foul’s Bane. Some readers love it. Others hate it. I’m in the hated it group. Sorry, that rapist anti-hero crossed the line for me, and I wouldn’t read further. On the other hand, I was enthralled by the gorgeous strangeness of The Birthgrave, and devoured it in one sitting, unable to put it down. At the end, though, I felt a disquiet that billowed into dysphoria, because it struck me that the heroine had begun and ended the story completely amoral. The cruelty underlying her conduct and her entire world didn’t sit well with me. Tanith Lee is a fantastic author, but I approach her works with caution. My tastes simply run along clearer streams.

At least, however, it was clear that both Tanith Lee and Stephen R. Donaldson knew exactly what they were doing when they chose the anti-heroes they wrote about. They wrote the stories they set out to write. They weren’t under the illusion that they were writing about likable, honorable heroes in the traditional mold, but about twisted, tortured souls.

Too often, lately, I have read books (yes, usually by indie authors; let’s be honest) that exhibit no such self-control or self-awareness. It’s as if the writer expected you to react to her vampire hero as if he were Edward or Angel, a redeemable, even shining, hero, unaware that she had failed to give her hero any redeemable or shiny qualities whatsoever.

If you choose to write a truly amoral character or very dark protagonist, that’s one thing. But if you are striving to keep most readers on board and not create an anti-hero who is no better than a villain, you should keep in mind certain rules of thumb for Likable Anti-Heroes. Here’s a checklist:

Does he/she exhibit any awareness of being a terrible person/monster?

Does he/she feel any guilt for terrible actions?

Does he/she start out one way (more brutal) but gradually learn a different way (less so)?

Is the hero/heroine pitted against a villain whose actions are even more heinous?

Is the hero/heroine forced by some outside threat or master to do terrible things–and does he/she rebel eventually?

Is the hero/heroine driven by some internal curse/affliction/addiction to do terrible things–and does he/she overcome it eventually?

Recommended for Writers: Writing Monsters by Philip Athans

What are monsters? Why do we write about them, instead of about more “realistic” villains? And how can we write well about these terrible creatures?

This book helps authors grapple with these questions. Writing Monsters gives examples from books and films; at archetypes of mythical monsters; at the “real” monsters of our world; at cryptids; and finally at cursed and dangerous things which, though inanimate, can be so threatening or personified that they play the role of monsters in our stories.

The book also includes a Monster Creation Form to help the writer create his or her own unique horrors.

Find out more about Writing Monsters by Philip Athans.

What’s the Appeal of Flawed Heroes? (Guest Post by Rayne Hall)

(Note: British English.)

I like characters with weaknesses, because they’re like real people, and their flaws make the story vivid. What would Charles Dicken’s tale ‘A Christmas Carol’ be without the sour stinginess of Scrooge, or Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ without Mr Darcy’s boorish arrogance?

Unlike those dull characters who are already perfect at the novel’s start, flawed heroes need to learn lessons, often difficult and painful ones. They have to wrestle their weaknesses, make harrowing choices, adapt and mature. The selfish person learns consideration, the hard-hearted one compassion, the coward courage and the miser generosity. I can grow with them, without suffering the actual anguish and embarrassment, from the comfort of my armchair.

Many novels feature the main character’s journey of growth, sometimes between the lines, sometimes as the main plot. This journey fascinates me. The character cannot begin to change until he acknowledges his weakness. When he changes, he is tested, often to the extreme.

The classic novel ‘Four Feathers‘   by A.E.W. Mason is the story of a coward growing and redeeming himself. Henry Feversham (spelled “Faversham” in some movie versions) is afraid of fighting in a war, and also frightened to admit to his father that he doesn’t want to follow the family tradition of becoming an army officer. About to be sent into battle, he resigns his commission. Shunned for cowardice by his family, his friends and his fiancée, he redeems himself with acts of courage in the face of dangers and hardships far greater than those he had sought to avoid.

‘The Kite Runner‘ is also the story of a coward who grows and redeems himself. As a young boy, Amir failed his friend, witnessing him being raped rather than coming to his aid. Shamed by his cowardice, he frames his friend for a crime, so he would not constantly be reminded of his shameful cowardice. When he realises the full extent of his betrayal and seeks to make amends, it’s too late: Hassan is dead. Then a situation opens up which replicates what had happened in childhood, but on a much larger scale. The danger and suffering he must undergo to rescue Hassan’s son from the clutches of a Taliban paedophile are so great that few humans could bear them, but he is determined to do what it takes. As readers, we root for him that this time he’ll get it right.

The character needs to find the will to change within himself, but another person’s love and trust is often the catalyst. Especially rewarding are the stories in which the love of a good woman gives a flawed man the courage to change. In real life, bad men seldom change, and they often drag the good woman down with them. But in fiction, we can see it happen. We root for those characters and cheer for them.

In ‘Storm Dancer’ I matched two flawed characters, Dahoud and Merida, each with their own growth journey and lessons to learn.

Dahoud is a troubled hero with a dark past. As a siege commander, he once razed, raped and killed… and he enjoyed it. Now he needs to atone. He has sacrificed everything to build a new identity and a life of peace, and he devotes himself to protecting women from harm. But Dahoud is not alone. Inside him lives a devious demon, a djinn that demands he subdue women with force. It torments him with pains and tempts him with forbidden desires. How much of it is the demon, and how much is the dark psyche? How can he learn to control the evil inside him? How far must he go to redeem himself?

Merida lives by firm principles, values and rules, and seeks to convert others. Imprisoned in a sadistic ruler’s harem, where her definitions of right and wrong no longer apply, she needs to rethink her values. Which principles will she hold on to, and which ones will she sacrifice?

Their fates intertwine in a tight knot, their partnership is not a love match but an alliance for survival. They need to learn to trust each other… and more importantly, they need to learn to trust themselves. At the end of Storm Dancer, each has completed a journey through the darkness of their own soul and grown.

Do you like to read about flawed heroes? If yes, what attracts you to them? Who is your favourite flawed hero in fiction?

Leave a comment, and I’ll reply.