RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Verad · **03-21-2015, 12:54 PM**

(03-20-2015, 08:12 AM)Gegenji Wrote: That's the thing for me, though. I find some of the best villains to be the ones where you can actually see the reasons for what they do. You hate them for doing it, but it makes... sense in some twisted sort of way. From their point of view, they're perfectly in the right and justified in their actions - even if it seems evil and crazy to everyone else. Qhora's mentioning of the Batman villains works well, and to use a more recent example - Senator Armstrong from Revengeance.

Not to say crazy evil doesn't have its place - my favorite Final Fantasy villain is still Kefka, after all.

And yet people enjoy the works of Lovecraft, and the appeal of those monsters are based largely on the inability of the human mind to understand what they are and their motivations. Madness comes not from the creatures, which are probably perfectly well-adjusted manifestations of the color Z, but from the protagonists as they struggle with the revelation of their own cosmic insignificance and their failure to comprehend.

And if we move from the realm of the inhuman to the more personal, raise your hand if Othello's Iago is your favorite Shakespeare villain. And Iago has no motive. He says "I hate the Moor" and all, but the more you read his soliloquies on that subject, the more you realize he's kinda making up the hatred as he goes along - sometimes he's bitter that Othello got the promotion, sometimes he loves Desdemona, sometimes he thinks Othello slept with his wife, it goes on. In Coleridge's essays on Shakespeare, he praises Iago for his "motiveless malignity," and it seems an apt way to put it. There's nothing understandable because there's nothing to understand - Iago's doing what he's doing for its own sake, and all the justifications are after-the-fact.

A bit like what's going on in the Mary Sue thread with the idea of power fantasies, we're seeing a collision here between contemporary tastes in the portrayal of villainy and the needs of RP as a medium, and getting "This is the right way to play a villain" conflated with "This is the right way to writeÂ a villain." There may be a correct way for the former, but there really isn't one for the latter.

Edit: Also, a note on players engaging in the trappings of villainy for sex, since that's OP's problem. It's not really to my tastes, first because it's a very conservative form of villainy - only villains do nasty things like sex - and second because of the all-too common problems with the portrayal of rape in roleplay. I try to skip it as a primary goal.

Poll: Do you have a character(s) who are Villains/Evil? You do not have permission to vote in this poll.
Yes.	67.39%	31	67.39%
No.	32.61%	15	32.61%
Total		46 vote(s)	100%

The Tropes of Playing a Villain in FFXIV

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes