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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

As a known villain-enthusiast, I figured I’d write up how I assess them as storytelling devices. Like, whether they’re enjoyable characters is up to taste, but whether they’re good writing requires critical assessment. This is a rather long post, so here is a summary:

Learning how to critique villains is a great way to identify skilled and passionate storytellers. They embody the ideas and decisions that the writer feels are incorrect. While some narrative devices are more subtle (local politics unfolding in the background, color or song cues, scene settings, etc.), villains are dramatic. That is a person designed to be wrong! They intentionally draw the audience’s focus for important steps of the story. When a writer stumbles on that, it reflects poorly on the entire work precisely because of that focus.

This post is going to get into the following key components of an effective villain:

  • They highlight the wrong conclusion about a key issue in the story.
  • They should be a symptom of either a larger issue in the narrative or the one they fixate on.
  • They don’t need to be evil, and, in many cases, that label is a hindrance.
  • As the average age of the target audience and/or the length of the story increases, villains should be more frequently correct in their beliefs and choices.
  • They evoke strong emotion appropriate to the genre.
  • They don’t need to be antagonists, and antagonists don’t need to be villains.
  • They raise the stakes: the world will become worse if they are left unchecked.
  • Their strengths and weaknesses should be directly tied either to the central theme of the story or their opponent’s character arc.
  • Their ending is consistent with the theme of the story.
  • If included, a villain redemption arc must have 4 components: (1) an external stimulus causing (2) a choice to deviate from their plan and (3) a corresponding shift in their worldview, and those result in (4) action that matches the strength of their new conviction.
  • They should not be included in a story if any of the above causes distraction or discordance with the main plot line.

Of course, there’s spoilers to follow, so reader beware.


Keep reading

Pinned Post villains writing this initial post is pretty generic but I’ll probably do some follow up breakdowns of CR and D20 villains maybe other media sources but this blog is mostly those two
revvethasmythh
ariadne-mouse

Here's some postcanon Laudnas trying out different looks!

Digital art of 3 Laudnas standing side by side against a flowery forested background.  The 3 Laudnas are wearing different dresses in tones of red: a deep burgundy italian noblewoman's gown with yellow sleeves and a brighter red underskirt, a creamy white frilly chemise a la reine with red ribbons at the waist and cinching the sleeves, and a tudor-style gown with deep red overgown and lighter red patterned undergown and bodice, with big black velvet puff sleeves at the elbow.  All three Laudnas have the usual scissors on a string or ribbon around her waist, and crowns of flowers.ALT

I chose to leave behind the Delilah purple and the earcaps, and keep the Laudna red and "noble" style, imagining Laudna in a period of experimentation where she is trying to figure out her new self and just wearing whatever strikes her fancy. The dresses are inspired by fashionplates for a 14th century Italian noblewoman, a chemise a la reine, and a 16th century Tudor-style noblewoman.

critical role fanart laudna critical role red suits her! love the third one
captainsparklefingers
prokopetz

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

veteratorianvillainy

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

ibelieveinthelittletreetopper

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

prokopetz

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3
Possible F/M ships: 27
Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

observethewalrus

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

ainedubh

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

slitthelizardking

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

lierdumoa

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

destinationtoast

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

olderthannetfic

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…


And then we will ship an OT3.

kyraneko

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

whetstonefires

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

headspace-hotel

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

totallysilvergirl

ALWAYS reblog.

esuterunokitsune

And then you can compare it to a show that has actually well written female characters and

image

Huh. First three spots are taken by F/F, M/M and F/M in descending order. Afterwards are platonic ships.

Just so we have the stats, what are the top 10 most written characters?

image

Wow. A perfect split, five to five. And the top three are women. (By about 200 fics to Jayce and Viktor, the runner ups, might I add)

image

That’s out of 29,590 works.

So about third of those (very roughly) are CaitVi.

the-haiku-bot

Just so we have the

stats, what are the top 10 most

written characters?

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.