Frenzied Scripting: The Many Villains of Unbound

I mentioned the other day how I have five villains floating around my script. Some of them have large roles, some of them are barely cameos, but they're in the work because each of them has an important role to play in the script that no other character can perform. That's because these villains aren't just Generic Thug #3, they're fleshed out characters in their own right, who are serving important thematic purposes. I had a bit of an advantage when coming up with them because, if you'll recall, the original concept for Unbound began with as a story bible for one of my abortive attempts at a webcomic (Which is weird since that's how I got my idea for my NaNo novel as well. Go figure.). I was hoping to make something like Sluggy Freelance or Errant Story. Heavy on the plot but still with a bit of humor so things never got too bogged down in the melodrama – you know, a case of Cerebus Syndrome although I would be going for that mix right away. But to do so, I figured I needed a healthy stable of villains. More importantly, recurring villains. Antagonists who could hold their own against the heroes for a storyarc or two while weaving their way in and out of the plot. Several of them made the transition into my current script. Some radically changed, some not. A few others didn't quite make the cut, much to my sorrow, because aside from the characters there's not a whole lot that I've kept from the original plans.

That's why the villains made the jump to the screenplay, too, by the way. Characterization. Because not only were they fairly well fleshed out, each was also consciously designed to not only oppose a certain hero but to reflect them – the villains that didn't do that are the ones I've left behind. And by that I mean that the villains are set up to be thematically similar to the heroes. There's a hero who's a swordsman, for example, so there's a villain who also uses a sword as her chief weapon. But while the first is a knight in bulky armor, a dirty, gritty, pragmatic fighter, the villainous one is a lithe, graceful engine of destruction. If the hero is talkative, the villains quiet. There are similarities but there are also degrees of difference as each antagonist serves to highlight certain facets of the protagonists character. Hopefully, anyway. Even as each serves to exemplify a certain kind of villainy. I've tried to avoid some cliches while playing against each other but each villain is based on a template for the kind of behavior, the kind of person, who'd turn to evil.

I should say, though, that I'm not the sort of person who really buys into the whole good and evil dichotomy. Don't believe in cosmic forces for right and wrong. There are explanations, justifications that lead one down the rabbit hole and away from such simple minded clarity as “good guy” and “bad guy”. As someone once told me, part of my problem is that I'm a binary personality trying to view the world in shades of gray. I have two settings – on and off, fully committed or fully apathetic – and that makes it hard to deal with subtle gradations of morality and conscience. But if I had to put my admittedly nebulous concept of right and wrong into words, I'd say that there are no bad people, just bad actions. The results of the choices we make, their ramifications, are what determine the morality of our actions, not the other way around. My villains, then, aren't creatures spawned from the very depths of some dark, hellish place. My heroes, for that matter, aren't perfect either. Both have flaws, but they both have redeeming qualities, and it's the balance of those and what they do with them in service of the plot that determines where on my grayscale of morality they fall.

Here's a table I've whipped up to help me deal with it all:

Name	Thematic Role	Archetype	Opposes
Governor	Ruler	Authority	Princess
Bladedancer	Menace	Unknown	Soldier
Dollmage	Child	Impulse	Mage
Captain	Worker	Impersonal	Cavalier
Baron	Official	Opportunist	None

The names there are placeholders, by the way, as I find it saves me the trouble of coming up with names right from the start. The Baron is the only villain to lack a real counterpart among the whitehats but he's also the one who gets the smallest role, story wise. He needs to be there, I think, but he's there to kick things into action and muddy the waters, not to actually come into direct conflict. If anything, he's the opposite of the Mage's parents who are another pair of characters who've fallen away as I've pruned the script.

Anyhow, in case you don't remember, my script is set in a fantasy/midevil-type kingdom, called Fresk, which was conquered, a few years ago, by a large, exotic, and more advanced empire, called the Huan. The Huan have set up shop in Fresk, appointing a territorial governor and crowning a puppet king. The people don't exactly like it but they also don't like being executed for treason. Besides, the technological, magical advances the Huan has brought along with them do make things a lot easier for the average citizen. The story kicks off when a mage escapes from her training at a magical Academy and goes on the run from the authorities.

The Baron, is the person in charge of that Academy. He's a fat, chubby, effete little foreign person who looks like nothing so much as a Friar in a Las Vegas review. As I noted above, he's evil stemming from opportunism. Of the bad that arises from institutions, left to run unchecked. He's not evil in and of himself but he is working for a corrupt, evil system and he's taking full advantage of it. The Mage Academy is a plum position since mages are a key part of the economy and the Baron is using his important position to get nice and rich. As you might expect, he's not exactly pleased when one of his prize mages runs off, and his role in the story is to set the authorities chasing after the Mage.

The Captain is the leader of the group that's chasing after the Mage, head of the guards at the Academy. He's a gruff, no nonsense mercenary, one who probably fought on both sides of the war to conquer the kingdom, depending on who looked like they were winning. He's determined to recapture her at all costs. And to that end he's been given some mystically enhanced hounds by the Baron. They can “smell” magic and they're to help him track down the Mage. He and his crack group of handpicked guards chase after the Mage and those with her for the first half of the movie or so before fading in importance as the almighty plot overcomes all. And, as noted, they're not a bad sort. Another hero – the Soldier – was originally part of them. But they're evil the way torturers are. Torturers, after all, are people to. They have lives, homes, families that they go home to every day. They might even have a “World's Greatest Parent” mug, help out the neighbors with their yardwork, and go to church faithfully. They're normal. They just happen to get up every morning and go to work which just happens to involve breaking a human's body and spirit into tiny pieces. They can do that because it's just their job. It's nothing personal. They're just one small cog in a larger machine and they just put their head down and get on with it.

The Dollmage opposes the Mage and she does so because she's wild where the Mage is all kinds of repressed and pent up. You see, in my little world becoming a mage isn't a walk in the park. It's a long, slow process that involves breaking down the will of someone with some magical talent and turning them, essentially, autistic before enslaving them to an owner who'll be able to order them around. That's just the kind of nasty the Huan are, of course. But it's not the only route to magical power. Those with magical talent who don't get training are called hedge wizards and are, technically, illegal. Partly because the Huan want a monopoly on magical power but partly because they're very dangerous. Knowing the arcane secrets that allow one to reshape reality makes a person insane, basically. And hedge wizards are a random, irrational lot that can cause a lot of trouble. And that's what the Dollmage is. And that's what the Dollmage does. She's chaos personified. There in the story to act as a third faction and stir up all kinds of complications. She's also, a young child. One with an enormous amount of magical power at her fingertips. One who's always gotten her way because no one's ever dared to scold her. Her evil comes from her rashness, her impulsiveness. She's the kind of person who'd break a piece of glass just to hear what it sounded like. She's called the Dollmage, by the way, because her big magic trick (Most hedge wizards have only one or two magical powers but they tend to be very good at it.) is animating objects. She can cause an inanimate lump of clay or stone or wood to come to life and control it like a puppet. Or a doll.

If the Dollmage is all about a lack of control, then the Bladedancer is the opposite. She's all about polish and grace. Economy of motion and emotion. She works as a bodyguard for the Governor, who we'll get to in a bit, and she's as big a physical threat as the Dollmage is a magical one – she's deadly with a blade. Bladedancers are, along with mages, one of the secrets of the Huan's success. They're highly trained, highly skilled fighters. They work in the shadows. As assassins, as spies, as special forces who can devastate an entire squad of enemy soldiers (They're not, I repeat, not ninjas. Really. Close, though.). And they get their name because when they're in action, when they're whirling and swirling around with their weapons, it's like some kind of beautiful, macabre dance. I've purposely avoided giving this Bladedancer, specifically, a name because I want her to be mysterious and exotic. An unknown. A force. As I noted above, she's evil as a menace. As the threat you can't understand, the one that leaves you panicking, in fear, as it works for your destruction. That's the role of the Bladedancer, she's a force of nature. She doesn't say much or, really, do much – I think of all the “major” characters she has the fewest lines and shows up in the fewest scenes – but when she does land in the story, she has a big impact.

The final villain is the Governor. He's in charge of the occupation of the kingdom which is far removed from the empire's core, giving him a pretty free hand. For all intents and purposes, he runs the country. In the story, he's set to marry the Princess, who's a minor member of the royal family a few steps removed from the throne. It's a common practice among newly conquered territory with the Huan as it solidifies their control. The Governor is a slick, cultured man. Intelligent, hard working, who's been steadily improving the condition of the kingdom. Of course, he's doing so because it's basically his personal property. And that's why the Governor is evil as it comes from authority. He's in charge, he's the leader, and without any check on his nearly limitless powers he can do just about anything he wants. Regardless of whether it's right or not. By the standards of the day, he's probably a very good ruler, but from our modern vantage point we can see that he's harsh and overly brutal.

The story, after all, is set up to be a carefully concealed morality play. As I've mentioned before, I've tried to avoid some of the trappings of the fantasy genre but only because I want to get at the heart of the themes, the concepts, of good fantasy. The point of Tolkein writing the Lord of the Rings wasn't to tell a story about an epic roleplaying campaign. He had a point, a purpose, and, to me, that was to explore certain themes and concepts, especially moral ones, while playing around with the whole World War II framework. The question of good versus evil isn't very interesting to me, since I think it's overly reductive. But it's that kind of moral interplay that I want to work with, at least as a subtext. That requires heroes with the proper moral fiber who'll rise to the occasion. But it also means I need some good villains, with the right characteristics, to interact with them.