Bad Guys Must Die

Readers have firm opinions, as we all know. They tell us how much they love or hate our characters. They insist that two certain people should be in a relationship. Sometimes they even dress up as our characters. (That last one would be pretty cool, honestly.) But one of the most resolute opinions is the one stated above: the bad guy has to die in the end.

This has been in my mind since last month when I saw The Rise of Skywalker. I’ve been holding off on commenting because it isn’t fair to give spoilers, and even now I’ll try not to be too blatant. But one of my issues with the tale is that a certain character sacrificed their life to save another character’s life… but then later that second character died anyway.

I felt like this was terrible storytelling, because the first character’s death became meaningless. However, my husband said that the screenwriters really had to kill that second character off. “He was a bad guy. He had to die.”

Star Wars has a tradition of villains being redeemed by the Force. Han Solo would be an example of a sketchy character who rose to a higher ideal. And then there’s Darth Vader, who was restored by his son, Luke, in Return of the Jedi. But however, he had already been fatally wounded and died immediately afterward. As both a writer and a viewer, I feel like the creators of Star Wars want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want the optimistic lesson of a villain coming back to the light, but at the same time they still want the bad guys to be killed in the end.

I’ve been feeling like a rebel lately, some of you may have noticed, and this assumption really sticks in my craw. WHY does the bad guy “have to” die? It comes back to the weird, judgmental thing that many readers do. They insist that every villain must pay for their crimes with their lives.

To me, as a writer, that outcome is really predictable and boring. I would find it much more interesting if a “bad guy” admits their error and survives. Think of the memories they carry. The shame and guilt. How can a reformed bad guy ever make amends for their previous actions?

What do you think? Should the bad guy always die?

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