'My Childhood Made Me Do It': Nature, Nurture & Freudian Excuses, Part II
If you are a regular reader of writing advice, I'm sure you've been told to make sure your villain 'isn't one-dimensional' or to 'round them out'. The main point of this-- that villains should be fully developed characters with motives that the audience can understand-- is a laudable one. A well-developed villain will give your protagonist something to struggle against, and a truly sympathetic villain can be a deeply tragic figure. However, there are also a number of ways that good intentions in villain development get derailed. One of these is explaining (and implicitly, excusing) the villain's behaviour by blaming it on a bad childhood (or worse, a single incident in their childhood) or traumatic recent past.
Done with sufficient finesse, this trope can actually work, particularly if the audience is shown how close the villain came to taking a different path, or that external events did profoundly shape their character in a way over which they had little control. Done without finesse or gravitas, it makes the villain seem petty and obsessed with trivial slights. At worst, it comes off as excusing, rather than explaining, the villain's actions, especially if it's framed as the reason we're supposed to sympathise with them (Save Wiyabi Project founder Lauren Chief Elk calls this phenomenon 'abuser coddling'). The 'coddling' aspect can be more grating when this trope is used with antiheroes (or heroes with a 'dark and troubled past') to excuse unheroic behaviour; however, because villains are often doing something intentionally harmful, it's harder to ask the reader to sympathise based on Pavlovian cause-and-effect psychology.
Doing this trope correctly requires the writer to probe the balance between nature-- in this case, the villain's baseline personality, and their personal choices-- and nurture-- the external forces that contributed to those choices. Making a villain a well-developed character doesn't mean we have to feel sympathy for them, we just need their motives to be believable.
Done with sufficient finesse, this trope can actually work, particularly if the audience is shown how close the villain came to taking a different path, or that external events did profoundly shape their character in a way over which they had little control. Done without finesse or gravitas, it makes the villain seem petty and obsessed with trivial slights. At worst, it comes off as excusing, rather than explaining, the villain's actions, especially if it's framed as the reason we're supposed to sympathise with them (Save Wiyabi Project founder Lauren Chief Elk calls this phenomenon 'abuser coddling'). The 'coddling' aspect can be more grating when this trope is used with antiheroes (or heroes with a 'dark and troubled past') to excuse unheroic behaviour; however, because villains are often doing something intentionally harmful, it's harder to ask the reader to sympathise based on Pavlovian cause-and-effect psychology.
Doing this trope correctly requires the writer to probe the balance between nature-- in this case, the villain's baseline personality, and their personal choices-- and nurture-- the external forces that contributed to those choices. Making a villain a well-developed character doesn't mean we have to feel sympathy for them, we just need their motives to be believable.
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