Did my bad guy have a fantastic motivation, character arc, and belief system that led him to his bad actions? Absolutely. And could I fix him? By golly, you betcha I could.
But redeeming your bad guys, and helping people "see the error of their ways" all the times does not necessarily make for a fantastic, cathartic end or story. Is it the way I personally try to view human beings? Yes. But it's not great for a fantasy piece.
I have a very hard time with bad guys.
First, absolutely, yes, embrace that thought you had - I AM attracted to the bad guys. Unimportant, however. ...Okay, maybe a little important, says my inner therapist, but I'm going to deal with that another day.
I love my bad guys. I love them. They make sense to me. For me, your classic "bad guy" has the most interesting story - the most powerful "tale of woe." They are the characters who move mountains single-handedly, and stay truest to themselves.
Javier will always be more important to me than that 24601 fellow. Javier is the one who does NOT give up on what he believes in, and when finally confronted with the evidence that he was wrong, the man can't even stand to live with himself. Javier is a man of absolutes, and boy, do I like a man who knows his own mind. Bless us both.
But bad guys, are, ultimately wrong. They're not mentally "healthy." They're unwell. Hardcore, awesome, oh so motivated, and yes, wrong. They're making mistakes. As someone who has also had a history of being mentally unhealthy, oh so motivated, AND wrong, I love them. And I like the idea of redeeming them.
Anyway. My writing woes. Don't get me started. I thought I knew where I could take that storyline, and I've now lost interest in it as a current project, because I have no idea how to end it. (Fernand CAN change, if he recognizes that he is the parallel of the myth of Iias in the story, not Umnir.)
It's fine. It's fine. I'm just a mom, now, trying to start writing again after... nine years? Yeah, this doesn't suck at all. (My youngest is currently at my elbow begging me to play the 'baby banana song' on the computer. This isn't difficult at all.)
Anyway. It got me thinking about books and bad guys.
The best bad guys are the bad guys you don't recognize at first. They're the ones who pretend to be someone they're not.
While "real life" is not a work of fiction, certainly, I have found, personally, that I can fall for that error in reading in the same way. Sometimes it's HARD to recognize what's "bad" or "wrong" in a written piece - especially news reports or history. Recognizing the essential need to see BOTH sides of the story has helped me significantly in slowing down and assessing entire situations before taking a side with "my team" and, often, inadvertently, condoning something wrong.
*trigger warning* *ex-Mormonism*
I read The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy and stayed in the church for another four years.
I read the CES Letter and continued attending meetings for over another year. (During a pandemic, so I wasn't being rushed, or anything, which was nice.)
I read Mormon Enigma, and stayed.
I had a very time recognizing the bad guy in these stories.
Hindsight is 20/20, and now that I'm the newer, more improved version of me (*high sarcasm*) it feels obvious. It feels obvious that you could read about a man who serially cheated on his wife, had a history of conning people, run-ins with the law MULTIPLE times about conning people, affairs of sleeping with teens that he groomed and manipulated into polygamy... How many bad evidences do you have to add before you recognize the bad guy? There's more. I mean, I could continue.
But I somehow didn't recognize him. Or at least, fully appreciate the common denominator of all of this bad.
Anyway, this made me think about pigs.
There were three little pigs, and they were happy. Until a wolf came and ate two of them, and the third barely escaped with his life.
We don't tell the story like that. No, we somehow have to blame the pigs. The poor stupid pigs, one of whom thought they could protect themselves with a STRAW house? Oh, bless his heart.
They deserved what they got, then... did they?
How can you read a story and not see the bad guy for who he is? It's the one killing people, not the ones who failed to protect themselves from him.
It's the groom of the wedding feast, taking WAY TOO LONG to show up to the party, so that half of his guests run out of oil, and then he gets to blame them for not being prepared for his dalliances, casting them out of his life FOREVER because HE took too long.
They would have had enough for anybody else's wedding. These guests WANTED to go to the wedding. They'd surely been to weddings in similar fashion before. Stands reason to believe that they thought they had enough oil in their lamps. But no, it's THEIR fault that they weren't prepared for the perfectly avoidable extenuating circumstances they were subjected to. Maybe these women weren't in the wrong at all.
It's like torturing someone then getting mad when they give up and tell you everything. The outcome of your actions was intended to break them and make them fail. You could have treated them better, and you chose not to. Then you blamed them.
Being tired doesn't make you a bad guy. Being stupid doesn't make you a bad guy. Sure, these things can mean that wrongs happen, but it doesn't make you a "bad guy." It makes you human, with all its strengths and weaknesses.
Being the victim does not mean you did anything wrong, and any group or system that would encourage you to see yourself as a bad guy for not being "perfect" IS THE BAD GUY.
Perfection is not going to happen - not for anybody. Some pigs are rushed and make their houses out of straw, and they die. Some pigs use bricks and live - but why not concrete? Why didn't that last pig make his house out of reinforced steel? It would have been better, wouldn't it? He was less of a fool than the harried stick-house pig, who was slightly smarter than the straw-house pig, but he was still dumber than reinforced steel pig, or cut through the river and immediately climb a tree-house pig, who could have hidden and avoided the whole situation.
You are enough, whether your mind churns out straw or sticks or mud. You are enough, and I don't care who's writing the story - you're not in the wrong for being attacked by a wolf.
The wolf was wrong the whole time. Everything else is a distraction.
(Except, wolves are, in fact, carnivorous, and they've got to eat SOMEBODY, so really, I think I could redeem that wolf as well...)
