The Role Archetypes series is focused on presenting archetypal character roles in a way that focuses on their development throughout stories, with a particular eye to games (although most of the examples given will be taken from literature).

Today we're going to talk about the Villain, the seventh of ten roles we'll explore. I've got a lot to say about how the Villain manifests, so I'm going to split it into two parts.

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The Villain in Narrative

The Villain is an incredibly important storytelling archetype, because it touches on the potential of humanity: I discussed the scales of good and evil from an analytical criticism point of view in a recent post, and the Villain represents the second lowest point in human potential.

From a strictly narrative standpoint, however, the Villain is going to directly oppose the hero. They provide the central point of the conflict. There are reasons for this that are quite important:

From a narrative perspective, the Villain is often a metaphorical counterpart to the Hero but also a practical one. If the Hero is to go out and protect the world for the sake of what is right, just, and good (Truth, to use the earlier metaphor), the Villain will menace it on account of a Lie.

The Villain exists as a consequence of the negative sides of reality. If the anti-hero is what happens when we fail to live up to our potential, the Villain is what happens when we live up to our potential but fail to make proper moral judgements.

A Villain will serve to test and challenge the Hero. An incomplete Hero is going to be incapable of changing the world. In Joseph Campbell's monomyth, a map of generally universal story elements, he reaches the conclusion that a story will feature challenges of a variety of formats and types.

For this purpose it is the case that the Villain is a single figure who will serve as the climactic challenge to the Hero. There may be other adversarial characters throughout the course of a story, but they will be secondary and confronting them may prepare the Hero but not fully demonstrate their abilities or improve the world and fulfill the Hero's destiny.

The reason why the opposition of the Hero and Villain is important is that there's a dualistic conflict that takes place within the archetypal Hero and Villain. This is not necessarily a statement about the nature of the universe, however: you have Truth, which is a good that can be approached and contemplated as a way to improve the world (and a universal positive force), and a Lie, which is a counterpart based on the rejection of this good.

The Villain and the Serpent

The Villain is a distinct figure from the Serpent through their nature as a follower rather than a leader. They have the ability to redeem themselves because they are often victim figures, and for this reason they can make compelling tragic figures; indeed, many a Villain is merely an aftermath of a tragic hero. They have, however, consumed the venom of a Serpent (this may be represented by a character or an abstract force of cosmic evil, but it is almost always the former).

Psychologically, this is important because the Villain serves as a figure that causes us to introspect. While it may be hard to look into ourselves and find a point at which we can say that we have definitively chosen evil for the sake of the liberation that leaving behind the framework of truth provides, it is also possible for every person to see within themselves the elements of a Villain in the time of their own moral weakness.

If the Villain is to be compared to the toxic and proactive ideology of destruction which is embodied by the Serpent, who favors a Lie for the sake of the Lie, then it is an automatic necessity that we should draw a distinction between the two. The Villain may still foster a delusion that they make the world a better place–or at least that their role as executioner and brigand would be taken by another in their absence–but they typically do not hold in their hearts a wholesale embrace of evil for their own sake. They may be led astray, or they may simply be restrained by their own flawed personality, but they will rarely choose wickedness over virtue without having some other value that gets in the way.

To risk some minor spoilers for the second season of The Punisher on Netflix, Castle's antagonist, Pilgrim, is driven to his actions by a family that preaches to him moral virtue in the form of will to power, a fascistic ideal that echoes Pilgrim's past as a neo-Nazi (though he has rejected one totalitarian philosophy for another by the time the story unfolds). Pilgrim's motivations are pure (in theory): he wants to make the world a better place. However, his methods of doing so and his failure to perceive the evil that he receives his orders from make him a Villain (and sympathetic, due to the fact that he is no more morally flawed than Castle).

The Villainous Other

What this means is that within the framework of traditional values the Villain is often one that takes on the role of the "other"–an outsider, but not one in the archetypal sense (such an Outsider figure is often aligned with the Hero, and represents the spark of genius that enables the Hero to transcend and improve traditions). They are the product of values that the Hero must confront, the teachings of a false prophet or idol that bears hollow fruit. For this reason the Villain can be portrayed as noble, tragic, or evil, depending on the nature of the conflict that a storyteller decides to broach. They can be unpredictable, and in some cases, like when revolutionary change or extreme reforms are required in order to return the universe to a state which can be endured (within the story, within the storyteller's social reality, or both), even reformed after they are bested by the Hero.

An example of this would be the Christian missionaries who appear at the end of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: from the perspective of Okonkwo they represent the end of his world, the harbingers of a new way of life that abolishes the values he once knew. However, as a tragic figure, he fails to see that the values that he knew were already misaligned with the reality he found himself confronted by: Okonkwo had never actually represented the values of his tribe but rather a hyper-masculine variant (associated with Jung's tyrannical Great Father archetype of order). By providing a mirror to Okonkwo: the missionaries and the European colonialism that follows them are themselves a representative of overbearing order–and one which destroys the indigenous way of life–that manifests the Villain in the form of the other (albeit in a way that is inverted to Western audiences' expectations).

Examples

One of the most tricky villains in literature is probably found in The Lord of the Rings, in part because the Villain is an otherwise pathetic character, Gollum. Gollum is a manifestation of the Villain as other; he is actually different from Frodo only by his nature: Frodo is pure and resists the Ring, and Gollum is corrupt and embraces it. However, for much of the story Frodo and Gollum exist in a sort of cold war, with Gollum protecting Frodo to serve the power that the Ring offers to him (since the Ring being lost would mean that it is lost to someone other than Gollum).

That Gollum is often considered by scholars to be a manifestation of Beowulf's Grendel (who is himself an example of the other as a Villain, in the form of a monster who is secluded from society by his wickedness), is another interesting point and leads to another good example. Grendel is not the source of evil in his world, but he is certainly evil nonetheless, at least from our point of view. An interesting counter-example to this is presented in Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife (affiliate link), a retelling of the story from the perspective of Grendel's mother in which the dangerous other is represented by a Beowulf figure: the role of Hero and Villain is easily reversed when the question of what is Truth can be answered differently.

Another example of a Villain, in this case a Villian as a servant of the Serpent, can be found in Darth Vader, of Star Wars fame. While in the first film he is merely a leader of the Empire, and we don't get to see into his motivations, both in the tragic prelude of Anakin Skywalker and the later parts of the original trilogy we can see him established as a Villain whose motivations are shaped by the Emperor rather than his own will. This surrender of Truth creates a villain who can be capable of both great destruction, but also an ultimate redemption.

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