Making the Villain's Downfall Count
As I've said before, there is no villainous downfall so satisfying as a well-aimed karmic death. Due to our nature as intelligent, social mammals*, we're hard-wired to feel satisfaction when someone is punished for harming the rest of the group, particularly when their actions directly cause their demise.
With that in mind, there are a few guidelines to making a karmic defeat meaningful in the story. First, the punishment needs to scale to the most heinous crime the villain has committed. If they've committed the trifecta of murder, arson and jaywalking, we're not going to be satisfied with a traffic ticket.
Second, the punishment has to be directly related to the worst evil deed. The one exception to this is when the seemingly minor consequence of a smaller offense triggers a chain reaction. For example, one episode of My Name is Earl featured a fast-food restaurant manager who mistreats his employees, cheats on his wife, and embezzles from the company. When Earl punches him after a fairly minor bit of jerkass behaviour involving a balloon animal, he ends up in the hospital...where the wife and the girlfriend meet each other, the wife finds out about his shady financial dealings when she files for divorce...and everything falls down around his ears. However, a key component is still causality-- had the manager been felled by a random event rather than a result of his selfish behaviour, it wouldn't be particularly satisfying.
One of the reasons I got so, so annoyed with the ending of In The Flesh was that it violates the proximity expectation. As soon as the villain kills Rick-- his own son-- we need to see him punished as a consequence of that shocking act. Instead, he is bumped off by a minor character as revenge for killing that character's zombified wife, and there are absolutely no consequences for murdering Rick except that the main character yells at him**.
Again, there must be a causal link-- on both a practical and a moral level-- to the villain's downfall to make it a truly satisfying moment of fictional justice.
*Other social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys, have an acute sense of justice and will act quickly and forcefully to punish anti-social behaviour.
**There is a massive homophobic thread to the whole thing, which is it's own rant.
With that in mind, there are a few guidelines to making a karmic defeat meaningful in the story. First, the punishment needs to scale to the most heinous crime the villain has committed. If they've committed the trifecta of murder, arson and jaywalking, we're not going to be satisfied with a traffic ticket.
Second, the punishment has to be directly related to the worst evil deed. The one exception to this is when the seemingly minor consequence of a smaller offense triggers a chain reaction. For example, one episode of My Name is Earl featured a fast-food restaurant manager who mistreats his employees, cheats on his wife, and embezzles from the company. When Earl punches him after a fairly minor bit of jerkass behaviour involving a balloon animal, he ends up in the hospital...where the wife and the girlfriend meet each other, the wife finds out about his shady financial dealings when she files for divorce...and everything falls down around his ears. However, a key component is still causality-- had the manager been felled by a random event rather than a result of his selfish behaviour, it wouldn't be particularly satisfying.
One of the reasons I got so, so annoyed with the ending of In The Flesh was that it violates the proximity expectation. As soon as the villain kills Rick-- his own son-- we need to see him punished as a consequence of that shocking act. Instead, he is bumped off by a minor character as revenge for killing that character's zombified wife, and there are absolutely no consequences for murdering Rick except that the main character yells at him**.
Again, there must be a causal link-- on both a practical and a moral level-- to the villain's downfall to make it a truly satisfying moment of fictional justice.
*Other social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys, have an acute sense of justice and will act quickly and forcefully to punish anti-social behaviour.
**There is a massive homophobic thread to the whole thing, which is it's own rant.
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