Creating Villains People Love To Hate

[Sparki101]

Every story has to have a bad guy. There wouldn't be much conflict for your protagonist to overcome if there was no antagonist to stir the pot.

What do you think makes a great villain in general fanfic? Which is your favourite type of villain? How do you go about creating your villain in the Stargate Universe? Who do you think were particularly effective as a bad guy in Stargate?

Sparki

[ShadowMaat]

I don't write a lot of serious fics, so I tend to stick with the show-established bad guys, but I'll give 'em a twist of my own. I try to make them MORE horrible.

I also managed to turn Daniel into a bit of a villain in my stories about Luke, but that's just for fun. Mostly.

Villains, like heroes, have to be believable. I think that's part of my problem with the handling of the goa'uld in recent seasons. Sure, they'll do bad things, but they also tend to do predictibly bad things and they say stuff that is so tired and cliched I practically expect them to spit cobwebs when they speak. I like Ba'al because I get the sense that he's truly evil... he tortures people and doesn't hold back and he enjoys it. It makes him a little more real to me.

The bad guys also have to have more motivation than "he's a bad guy". I like to see the machinations, I like to know why someone is doing what they're doing. A well-written bad guy should be as strong a character as the good guy, maybe even a bit stronger. And if you can work in some way to humanize your villain, give him/her some non-evil traits, that's even better: Sure, he's leveled cities and tortured people to death, but he also likes kitties and saves them whenever he can.

[Skydiver]

it depends. if it's a 'throw away bad guy'...protagonist that pops up, wreaks havok and leaves, then i don't spend too much time playing with them. I do try to give them a real motivation, a reason why they're bad, but that's about it.

if it's a more involved fic, then the baddie also needs a reason, but sometimes i'll try to give him or her another side.

to me, maybourne was silly as heck and massively cliche...until foothold. then he became intersting. in CR he was conflicted, he was a jerk that also did good. he did the same in desperate measures. it was his fault that sam got kidnapped, he provided the symbiote...but once he found out, he fixed it.
in paradise lost, he was fantastic adn i'd love nothing more than to see him show back up again.

i agree with shadow, most goauld are boring. pops, heru'ur, anubis...cliched bad guys.

but Yu, yu has done good, yu has a sense of honor. ba'al is massively evil, but he's also unpredictible enough to be very interesting

at least to me, for a bad guy to be good, s/he had to be good. they can't be 100% evil, but only90%. there has to always be a doubt about what they'll do. that makes them unpredicitble and interesting to me

[Tok'Ra Hostess]

What do you think makes a great villain in general fanfic? Which is your favourite type of villain? How do you go about creating your villain in the Stargate Universe? Who do you think were particularly effective as a bad guy in Stargate?

Sparki

One thing I appreciate in my bad guys is when they can be appalled at the badness of the so-called good guys. An excellent example of this in Stargate was, I think, Turghan(Emancipation). When Sam, after her attempted escape, was brought before him, he asked her, "What kind of women are you? Do you respect nothing? Care for no one but yourself?"

So it was with Baal; he acted very much the victim in Abyss, a victim that I loved to hate, but nevertheless, I was forced to have a grudging sympathy for his situation. These two guys were believable baddies, IMO.

Gracie

[Mr Prophet]

I tend to write two kinds of antagonist: Villains and monsters.

Monsters are brutal, savage and inhuman; they could be thugs or torturers or anything, but they are defined by a lack of sophisticated motivation. Usually they just like to hurt people. Monsters are scary because they are there and they are dangerous, but that's it; they aren't particularly complicated.

Villains are a different kettle of fish. They have complicated and often understandable motives, inner conflicts, and above all feelings. Monsters are basically impervious to insults, but villains are as psychologically frail as your heroes. For maximum effect, there must be something about them that your heroes can relate to, however much they don't want to.