The Regime

[image error] "Furthermore, I think that Carthage must be destroyed."
Cato the Elder

I have a horrible memory. Everything blurs together after awhile when your mind is travelling at breakneck speed through half a dozen time periods and as many stories at once... I'm sure you know the feeling. It must have been somewhere between watching the Harry Potter films and some of the recent Marvel productions (real high-brow entertainment, I know, I know) when it dawned on me the wastefulness of these villains. If you insist on barking "Avada Kedavra" left and right, or smashing up whole sections of a town (and the people in the town), when the day is over...who will be left for you to rule over? It suddenly seemed stupid. If you kill a whole people you won't have a people to rule over - and isn't that what you want? Power, recognition, control, fame, the heights of worldly aspirations? But when chanticleer has killed all the other roosters with his spurs, there is no one to applaud him when he stands on the top of the dung-heap. There seemed to be no good point in killing so many people. Even such magnificent works as The Lord of the Rings bothered me with this apparent lack of purpose.

Puzzled, bewildered, I put the question to my husband. Now, my husband can bluff like the devil and I can be as gullible as a child who was born yesterday. I complained that it made sense to decimate a conquered people to teach them who was boss, but you didn't just wholesale slaughter them unless they had proven really stiff-necked (see Cato). He told me this was because these recent stories are built off the Nazi regime and the fixation, not just on world domination (that's an old one) but on the wholesale slaughter of otherwise innocent people groups.

Let's not kid ourselves. Politics until a fairly recent era has always been full of back-stabbing, double-crossing, cloaks and daggers, smoke and mirrors. Politics still has all that, but in our country, at the very least, you are unlikely to find an appointed member of government communally stabbed to death beneath a statue of one of our founding patrons. But what about politics on an economic and inter-provincial scale? We are going to assume that the reason for invasion of a people is for conquest, not for an escape from a depleted farmland or displacement by other moving peoples. We are going to assume that the sword is being used to gain greater power for the hand that wields it.

In general, if I were to invade a people in a large, lush river valley, do you think it would be expedient for me to slaughter them all because, well, they aren't of my people and I want the land for myself? It might be. I might wipe them out and plant my own soldiers there. But I need my soldiers and they aren't time-expired from the army yet, so what do I do? Leave a contingent to hold the peace and let the natives continue farming, harvesting, breeding and slaughtering, and make them pay with the fruit of their land (my land) as tribute. Ta da! National income.

I'm addressing this to fantasy writers because historical fiction often has a lot of parameters laid out already. When you make a villain, and you want to go on the war-path, you have to ask yourself: "Why? And how?" Is this for world domination and rule, or a psychopath's need to kill everything that doesn't say "Yes, sir"? (These are not always mutually exclusive.) Does your villain have a god-complex, or an ego the size of Anatolia, which makes him think that he is the best thing that has ever happened to his country and that he, and he alone, will bring it ultimate glory? Remember, it is unlikely that anyone will act passionately thinking that what he is doing is wrong. I am not going to kill Caesar thinking that killing Caesar will damage the Republic. I am going to kill Caesar because I believe in my heart of hearts that Caesar is a menace to the Republic and that he must be put away. (I might do it for money, though.) I'm not going to secede because I want to break up the Union, I'm going to secede because I think the Union is unfair and oppressive. I'm not going to hunt down and kill the Scarlet Pimpernel because I hate Englishmen, I'm going to hunt down and kill the Scarlet Pimpernel because I believe the aristocracy is a plague upon France (and because I'm French and I've always hated the English). I may be dead wrong, but by golly I'm going to think I'm right. So half the trouble is making your villain reasonable, making him more than a mere power-hungry killing machine, making him more than the poster-child of the Regime. Villains are more than people out to kill everyone else.

Rationality, purpose, a political and economic arena. The regime that stories like The Lord of the Rings were inspired by wielded the sword with purpose too, and it had a reason for what it was doing, a reason it thought was right. But we have to go back and make our reasons in our stories; we can't just hang our stories upon the horror of a massive steam-rolling villain trundling across the landscape, leaving needless and brainless desolation in its wake. And the stronger the validity of the villain's reason, the stronger the villain himself. He may be wrong, he may be unjust, he may be completely blinded by his false ideals, but at least he is more than a marching killing machine. If he wants to be king, he needs people to rule; if he wants his way, he must fight with ideas. He can be a complete devil, but even the devil knows how to be cunning.

" 'Bout fifty percent of the human race is middle man, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."