this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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I want my villains to be believable, which means they need to fit both their nature and conditions.
If you write a villain that is clearly human or human-adjacent they need to be nuanced and authentic, or else they're not believable and feel less like a character and more like a caricature. They need to either by oblivious to their evil due to having a warped moral compass or in denial of their evil because they believe what they do is necessary even if they don't agree with it. They especially need to have some kind of 'logic' (for lack of a better term) that allows them to reach this mistaken conclusion and which can survive interrogation & analysis up to a certain point. They don't need to be sympathetic per se but I think when you look at them you need to be able to go "oh yeah, I can see how they reached that conclusion even though it's obviously wrong".
However if you're writing, say, a demon - a creature often depicted as being incapable of things like love or empathy and lacking a soul, only capable of imitating human emotions rather than actually possessing them - then it needs to be pure evil to represent that it isn't human or human-adjacent; to emphasize that this is otherworldly or unnatural. At the very least it needs to be unknowable, like an eldritch god, so that its evil seems pure simply because we can't understand how it thinks and only see the cruelty of its actions detached of any understanding of its intent.
But have you met evil people in real life? They are often privileged white rich cis men, who had a wonderful and caring childhood, feel at home in society, love animals and share the exact mainstream value system that society at large propagates. They need no special logic besides "just doing my job" and being really good at compartmentalizing and having a glaring empathy gap for racialized people.
Real evil is always surprising to people who do feel empathy. It never "makes sense". You never go "Oh, of course, that explains why he got that way". More like:"But why? You have everything! You don't need to do that! Don't you feel anything? How can you look your children in the eyes?" It's always weird and strange, yet normalized. If you want to write realistic villains, they need to be unbelievable.
You don't have to lose empathy to not be naive and to understand why people hurt others.
It's always dialectical, it's always driven by their material conditions. People raised "perfectly" might be even less likely to identify with poor people as poor people themselves are. And not seeing another human being in a person of the other class leads straight to apathy or worse.
Behind those "perfect" families of rich white people often hides a narcissistic abuse that's inherited for generations btw. Such abuse easily makes new abusers.
Mainstream value system that promotes freedom of individual to use their influence against other people also contributes to normalize abusive behavior.
Well said. From what I've heard, a lot of individual members of the Bourgeoisie are in fact extremely damaged human beings. I don't think it's implausible that cycles of abuse do play a role in that.