I think one of the problems that happens sometimes with constructing sympathetic villains is balance.
Like, there’s this urge in a lot of storytelling to create big scale conflicts. High stakes issues. It makes the story very dramatic when the hero is trying to save The Whole World. But to get that, you need a villain who is trying to destroy the whole world. Or at least, participating in that.
And these days most people seem to think that a villain needs a sympathetic backstory and some emotional complexity in order to make for a smart or meaningful piece of overall writing. (Obviously three dimensional characters are better than not, but those dimensions don’t always have to rely on sympathetic story beats, or necessarily focus on the villain/antagonist.)
But what this means is that we’ve been seeing lots of villains whose villainy is operating on the scale of, like, planetary genocide, but who have these kind of… standard sympathetic narratives? About, y’know, rough childhoods and being misunderstood and struggling with their personal identity?
It’s like, the best sympathetic villain narratives come out of small-scale stories because those are the more relatable ones to most people, and the best high stakes stories have these big huge conflicts and massive scale, so a lot of writers keep trying to stick them together in an effort to make The Best Story Possible.
But they don’t actually match.
I mean, I can think of examples of sympathetic villains with high-stakes conflicts that I still found very convincing and compelling, so I don’t think this is by any means 100% clear-cut or irrefutable. I do, however, think it’s becoming an increasingly apparent issue with modern storytelling. Rather than building the conflict organically out of the villain’s flaws, or else creating a villain that just suits the conflict, a lot of people are trying to mesh a particular narrative on villainy with a scale of atrocity that basically renders it moot.
The problem with that is that it forces the audience to kind of disregard one half of the villain’s narrative. Either you embrace their sympathetic traits and just kinda… downplay their actual villainy, or you focus on their villainy and just sort of deem their sympathetic qualities pointless. Which means that as a complete narrative experience, it doesn’t work so well.
Again, not saying this is always the case with high-stakes plotlines and sympathetic villains. Or even that it necessarily wrecks a story even when it IS an issue. I do, however, think it’s something that storytellers can start being more cognizant of. Rather than viewing it as a great challenge and test of skill to make, say, a genocidal villain sympathetic, it really just comes off as tasteless in a lot of cases. That’s becoming more widely known. But from a construction end, a problem area is dissonance between the stakes and the sympathetic qualities. What the author needs the villain to do and what they think would make for a sympathetic character, and where those traits fail to align in any compelling fashion.
To me, I think the best way to show a sympathetic villain – regardless of how high the stakes are – is to show him waver. Show what could be, but what was lost, and why. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Gollum. If you’ve never actually read Lord of the Rings, you missed one of the saddest moments in literary history: the moment when Gollum was almost saved:
And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master’s breast. Peace was in both their faces.
Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
But at that touch Frodo stirred and cried out softly in his sleep, and immediately Sam was wide awake. The first thing he saw was Gollum – “pawing at master,” as he thought.
“Hey you!” he said roughly. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing, nothing,” said Gollum softly. “Nice Master!”
“I daresay,” said Sam. “But where have you been to – sneaking off and sneaking back, you old villain?”
Gollum withdrew himself, and a green glint flickered under his heavy lids. Almost spider-like he looked now, crouched back on his bent limbs, with his protruding eyes. The fleeting moment had passed, beyond recall. “Sneaking, sneaking!” he hissed. “Hobbits always so polite, yes. O nic hobbits! Smeagol brings them up secret ways that nobody else could find. Tired he is, thirsty he is, yes thirsty; and he guides them and he searches for paths, and they say sneak, sneak. Very nice friends, O yes my precious, very nice.”
Sam felt a bit remorseful, though not more trustful. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you startled me out of my sleep. And I shouldn’t have been sleeping, and that made me a bit sharp. But Mr. Frodo, he’s that tired, I asked him to have a wink; and well, that’s how it is. Sorry. But where have you been to?”
“Sneaking,” said Gollum, and the green glint did not leave his eyes.
Gollum had just returned from setting up Frodo and Sam’s deaths, and yet at that moment a kind word would have brought him back from the edge. But instead careless suspicion pushed him over it instead, despite an immediate apology.
And in that moment, you pity the villain. You sympathize with him. But at the same time, you know that he is dangerous, he cannot be trusted. He must be stopped.
Okay, but imagine if Tolkien had given a moment like that to Sauron instead.
It could well work within the moment, and explain something about Sauron (or, if inexpertly done, just confuse matters instead). But at the end of the day, no one is holding a gun to Sauron’s giant flaming eyeball and forcing him to be a sadistic warlord. So in terms of the story overall, kind of mismatched.
That’s why Gollum is Gollum and Sauron is just Over There Being Evil, even in a story that actually does take time to think about things like what motivates soldiers to fight and men to become tyrants and so on and so forth. Because Sauron’s not going to change his mind (it isn’t that kind of story), and because his choices are having such profoundly vile consequences on everyone else (Gollum and other villains like Denethor and Saruman included), any efforts to humanize him also run the risk of having bad narrative implications.
So, since they aren’t necessary for the story, and they’d take a lot of work and run high risk and probably only have very small reward, it’s safe to say that the energy and effort are better spent on different narrative elements. Rather than on trying to match up a villain like Sauron with a plot arc like Gollum’s.
Yeah, I was going for describing means more than when it should be done. When it should be done depends very much on the story and the character and what you need to get out of each of those things, but I think the general rule of how still applies if you want to write a sympathetic villain (without making excuses). You’re totally right in your initial point about balance, though: If someone’s screwed up enough to watch the whole world burn, there had better be a proportionately screwed up reason for it. Gollum’s screwed-up thinking is completely self-centred, and thus his malice only reaches so far (except by proxy, because the one item he obsesses over happens to be pretty damn powerful for no reason that he cares about). He just happens to be the first one that broke my little pre-teen heart.
Oh! Fair enough! I just wasn’t sure if there was a misunderstanding of the original post, because it’s pretty much all about figuring out the ‘when’ it should be done, and problems therein.
And your example offered a really good opportunity to try and illustrate the point of how being able to make a scene sympathetic can work on one level but not another. Because Gollum and Sauron are actually really good examples of how to scale your sympathetic narratives along with your villains’ power (actually LotR has lots of good examples, with antagonists that range from ‘Bilbo’s annoying relatives’ to ‘that demigod who wants to burn the world’).
Like, Denethor’s an interesting middle-ground, because he has enough personal power and authority that his transgressions don’t just impact whoever happens to be in stabbing range. Instead they effect an entire kingdom. But he’s still mainly got a story that explains his motivations on a personal level. Even so, most of the sympathy in his segment of the story is oriented more towards Faramir than Denethor himself. But that also works because it’s possible to generate some sympathy for Denethor by empathizing with Faramir. And Faramir himself isn’t condemned for still wishing his father could change or be redeemed.
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