Getting inside the Villain’s Head

A post at Writer Unboxed: Do You Really Want to Get to Know the Villain?

The author of this post, Natalie Hart, describes the plot of a book I emphatically do not plan to read. Then she says this:

I had such a visceral reaction to that [the author thinking of giving the most awful villain of the story pov scenes]: I did not want know Pappy or spend even one second inside his head. Because that would mean that I’d probably develop sympathy and understanding for him. And I just wanted to hate him.

Then she asks: Do we always develop sympathy for POV characters?

And the rest of the post is about this question, but I paused right here, because I’m somewhat flummoxed by this question. I mean, I too have a visceral reaction to the idea of being forced into the villain’s point of view: I recoil in revulsion. But this isn’t remotely because I would “probably develop sympathy” for the villain. The chance I would develop sympathy for someone this unpleasant is quite low. I don’t really care if his mom was mean to him when he was a child, or someone killed his puppy, or whatever his backstory might comprise. I don’t care what his motivations might be right now in story-present either. They’re ugly motivations or he wouldn’t be this kind of villain.

I guess I should add that as always, I’m talking about villains, not antagonists. I’m fine with knowing more about the backstory and motivations of an antagonist who is not really a villain. BUT, if the villain is self-righteously torturing innocent people to death, I don’t care about his hard life or his twisted moral sense or how he got that way. NO, we most certainly do NOT “always develop sympathy” for POV characters, and I can’t believe you’re actually asking this question.

So, The Invisible Ring by Anne Bishop. This author of the linked post doesn’t mention it; I simply thought of it in this context. This book offers (a) one of the most obvious “plot twists” in the history of literature, plus a protagonist who is so dense he does not catch on to this ridiculously obvious thing for an astoundingly long time. But, bonus, this book also offers (b) POV sections where we get to watch a reasonably normal young man decide to become loyal servant of evil and a torturer and then stick with that decision through thick and thin.

Possibly the reader is supposed to find this character sympathetic. The reader is certainly provided with the backstory and motivations that lead to this character becoming evil. I don’t know, it’s conceivable, I suppose, that SOME readers did find this character sympathetic. I bet you can guess that I am not among those readers. I skimmed those sections lightly.

BY THE WAY, it is silly, generally, to put the reader into the head of the villain, reveal the complete nefarious plot to the reader, and thus utterly destroy any surprise about what’s going to happen. I’m not sure why Anne Bishop thought ANY of this was a good idea, but, well, I’ll just say I don’t understand these decisions and let it go at that.

My point is, no, obviously we don’t “always develop sympathy for POV characters,” and I’m still totally flummoxed anybody would think that would happen.

The author of the linked post then describes her own book, where she says she found that as the author, she sympathized more with her villain than her hero. She’s describing a classic tragedy, where the villain is destroying himself but can’t stop. I could actually sympathize with that character, to some extent, depending on whether he was trying to stop. But I would not like an author who prevented him from getting out of a downward spiral and I probably wouldn’t read any more books by this author.

However, I do feel that if the author of the linked post thinks that just making any villain a POV character automatically leads to reader sympathy, then she’s buying into the idea that understanding always leads to sympathy, and no, it doesn’t. I bet if she thought for a few seconds, she would manage to come up with both fictional and real-world villains where, if you knew every single moment of their whole lives, you still wouldn’t feel any sympathy to speak of for the person they are now.

People aren’t robots that get programmed to be villains at the factory prior to purchase. That character, Pappy, in the story she described, made the choices that put him where he is, torturing an innocent person to death. (I’m guessing from the vague description.) (But it has to have been something like that.) By the time we see that character in story-present, it’s too late for him to get me to be sympathetic to him and forcing me into his head would only have one result: DNF.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Getting inside the Villain’s Head appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.