HOW TO ROLEPLAY AS THE BAD GUYS
MONAVIA’S HANDBOOK FOR
ROLEPLAYING VILLAINY
MONAVIA’S HANDBOOK FOR
ROLEPLAYING VILLAINY
CONTENTS
Part One
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Basics of Villainy
- Chapter 2: Creating and Using Evil Characters
- Chapter 3: Evil Writ Large
- Chapter 4: Building an Evil Reputation
- Chapter 5: The Aesthetics of Evil
Part Two [Forthcoming]
- Chapter 6: Roleplaying Corruption
- Chapter 7: Roleplaying Organized Crime
- Chapter 8: Roleplaying Slavery
- Chapter 9: Roleplaying Genocide
- Chapter 10: Roleplaying Terrorism
- Chapter 11: Roleplaying Piracy
- Chapter 12: Roleplaying Oppression
- Chapter 13: Roleplaying Foreign Aggression
- Chapter 14: Suggestions for Further Reading
- Acknowledgements
PREFACE
Over the last two decades, NationStates roleplayers have created a multitude of fictional civilizations and characters that are meant to be regarded as “good” or “evil” or even morally ambiguous, depending on the RP goals they choose. If you are familiar with story-format roleplaying, then you are likely aware that everyone involved has some idea who “The Good Guys” and “The Bad Guys” are and understand how crucial the distinction between them can be. Chances are that you also understand how the tension naturally arising between good and evil—whether between characters and factions and organizations or within them—is usually the main force driving the narrative conflicts that make stories engaging. Anyone can roleplay generic Good Guys passably without having to make difficult efforts, but the villains, whose actions and choices tend to drive conflicts, are usually trickier to roleplay with, especially if you want to make them interesting rather than generic. It is my hope that this handbook will help you become proficient at roleplaying villainy in the context of this game and derive great pleasure from your experience.
This thread is not the first player-created guide to address this subject since other RPers have already written about RPing villainy in general (albeit not at length) or RPing specific types of villainy, such as terrorism and genocide. Nevertheless, most of these older guides only focused on RPing specific aspects of villainy, and up until now, NS has never had a comprehensive how-to manual for RPing villainy in general. In order to fill this knowledge gap, I have tried to make this guide the most comprehensive it can be so that it can serve as a convenient resource for people interested in roleplaying “The Bad Guys” and their activities.
I adopted several authorial conventions for the convenience of my readers, such as relying on sources like TV Tropes to define and explain certain points. I routinely use the shorthand phrase in-universe to mean “within the context of a fictive environment” and use boldface type to introduce critical terminology. Finally, I decided to organize this post into chapters for ease of reference. The first few chapters focus on a series of general topics related to RPing villainy while the rest (save for the final chapter) focus on the nuts and bolts of RPing specific forms of villainous activity that are common in NS RP.
While there is more to learning how to roleplay evil than just reading this thread, it is my hope that it will serve as a useful starting point along your journey. Always remember that roleplaying is a game you get better at playing through consistent practice and paying attention to other NS roleplayers around you. Given the fact that the NS RP community has hosted an abundance of evil civilizations, organizations, and characters over the past two decades, there is no shortage of RPers to look to for inspiration. It is in honor of their achievements, reputations, and legacies that I dedicate this text.
This thread is not the first player-created guide to address this subject since other RPers have already written about RPing villainy in general (albeit not at length) or RPing specific types of villainy, such as terrorism and genocide. Nevertheless, most of these older guides only focused on RPing specific aspects of villainy, and up until now, NS has never had a comprehensive how-to manual for RPing villainy in general. In order to fill this knowledge gap, I have tried to make this guide the most comprehensive it can be so that it can serve as a convenient resource for people interested in roleplaying “The Bad Guys” and their activities.
I adopted several authorial conventions for the convenience of my readers, such as relying on sources like TV Tropes to define and explain certain points. I routinely use the shorthand phrase in-universe to mean “within the context of a fictive environment” and use boldface type to introduce critical terminology. Finally, I decided to organize this post into chapters for ease of reference. The first few chapters focus on a series of general topics related to RPing villainy while the rest (save for the final chapter) focus on the nuts and bolts of RPing specific forms of villainous activity that are common in NS RP.
While there is more to learning how to roleplay evil than just reading this thread, it is my hope that it will serve as a useful starting point along your journey. Always remember that roleplaying is a game you get better at playing through consistent practice and paying attention to other NS roleplayers around you. Given the fact that the NS RP community has hosted an abundance of evil civilizations, organizations, and characters over the past two decades, there is no shortage of RPers to look to for inspiration. It is in honor of their achievements, reputations, and legacies that I dedicate this text.
THE STATE OF MONAVIA
October 2023
October 2023
INTRODUCTION
If you are currently reading this thread—especially if you are reading it for the first time—then it is highly likely you are interested in roleplaying villainous characters or even a villainous country. Regardless of what your reasons might be for wanting to roleplay nations and characters who are entitled to use “The Bad Guys March” as their theme song, it is likely you want other NS roleplayers to take your villains (and their villainous acts) seriously when they RP with you—but in order for them to do that, you need to know how to RP villainy in ways that actually matter in the stories you are trying to tell. RPing villainy well is usually much harder—even for skilled RP writers—than it first seems; if it was typically easy, nobody would need this guide!
Before I take you any further, I want to stop and pose a simple, pithy question that lays the foundation for everything I will cover in the rest of this post: “Why do I want to roleplay as The Bad Guys on Nationstates?” The main answers are:
In some cases, you may want to RP some villainy simply because it serves a particular RP goal (such as adding depth to a thread) rather than to serve some broader purpose (such as nation development). There are, of course, legitimate reasons not to RP as The Bad Guys, such as wanting to use evil characters to flame, troll, or otherwise antagonize other RPers out of character, annoy the Moderators, or establish an OOC reputation as somebody starving for attention from the RP community.
The first five chapters of this guide cover generic stuff that is applicable regardless of what specific approach you want to take when RPing evil stuff. Although they may come across as somewhat dry and abstract, they represent the foundation on which the rest of this guide stands. RPing evil is easier if you know what to make it look and feel like and how best to make use of it. The other chapters explain how to roleplay specific types of evil in varying contexts. Since NS RP is generally part of the political fiction genre, these chapters focus on the types of villainy that are especially common on NS (e.g. piracy, genocide, terrorism) and not on more generic topics like how to RP a character engaging in generic undesirable behaviors.
Before I take you any further, I want to stop and pose a simple, pithy question that lays the foundation for everything I will cover in the rest of this post: “Why do I want to roleplay as The Bad Guys on Nationstates?” The main answers are:
- Roleplaying villainy can be lots of fun, especially if it makes stories more interesting.
- There are times you can get bored with RPing as The Good Guys.
- Some RPs simply cannot function without villains to drive them.
- Having some evil characters to roleplay can add depth to your NS nation and RP canon.
- Sometimes you want to RP as The Bad Guys because they are just plain cool.
In some cases, you may want to RP some villainy simply because it serves a particular RP goal (such as adding depth to a thread) rather than to serve some broader purpose (such as nation development). There are, of course, legitimate reasons not to RP as The Bad Guys, such as wanting to use evil characters to flame, troll, or otherwise antagonize other RPers out of character, annoy the Moderators, or establish an OOC reputation as somebody starving for attention from the RP community.
The first five chapters of this guide cover generic stuff that is applicable regardless of what specific approach you want to take when RPing evil stuff. Although they may come across as somewhat dry and abstract, they represent the foundation on which the rest of this guide stands. RPing evil is easier if you know what to make it look and feel like and how best to make use of it. The other chapters explain how to roleplay specific types of evil in varying contexts. Since NS RP is generally part of the political fiction genre, these chapters focus on the types of villainy that are especially common on NS (e.g. piracy, genocide, terrorism) and not on more generic topics like how to RP a character engaging in generic undesirable behaviors.
CHAPTER 1
The Basics of Villainy
The Basics of Villainy
Villainy Defined and Explained
What does it “mean” to RP your nation(s) and characters as “The Bad Guys” in a NationStates RP thread? There are many possible ways to answer this question, but in my personal opinion, there are two main approaches that work better than all the others. Regardless of which approach you prefer to use at any given moment, your goal should not be to spoon-feed hero and villain designations to your readers, but rather to RP your characters in ways that allow your readers (especially the people RPing with you) to understand who The Bad Guys are on their own. In simpler terms, your goal should be showing your readers who is good and evil instead of telling them who is good and evil.
The first approach defines The Bad Guys as people, creatures, things, and institutions—even entire cultures and civilizations—whose intentions and motivations are generally malevolent, regardless of whether their actions succeed at causing the baleful and dolorous effects they wanted. In other words, this answer defines villains in terms of their ethical character and main story role, which is to produce the conflicts that drive RP threads forward and make them interesting. Their existence is the number one reason stories wind up needing heroes for the same reason that criminals are the number one reason society needs law enforcement (if there are no criminals, the police would have little to do apart from directing traffic).
The second approach is to define The Bad Guys as “anyone who does Bad Guy Things” in-character, but this approach is too vague to help us understand what villainy is unless we know what “Bad Guy Things” are in the first place. To help clear up any possible confusion, I will define “Bad Guy Things” as actions (both in word and deed) that are intrinsically evil because the effects they produce are evil, the motives behind them are evil, or the person or people undertaking them are acting without concern for morality. In the NS RP environment, these actions usually come in the form of corruption, organized crime, slavery, genocide, piracy, terrorism, foreign aggression, and so forth. This is especially true when roleplaying an NS nation as a villain rather than just roleplaying an individual character as a villain.
While there are times when defining who The Bad Guys are can be simple and easy, there are other times when asking your readers “Who are The Bad Guys in this story?” is a surefire way to ignite a nigh-unquenchable flame war that can only be extinguished by a team of moderators armed with thread locks and forum bans. If, in my role as the writer, I frame a story in a way that leaves my readers free to decide who The Bad Guys are for themselves, then the business of defining what evil is and who the evildoers are can get tricky. For example, let us suppose I write a story that revolves around a pair of characters named Bob and Alice. Bob is a corporate executive who relies on slave labor to keep his company running. He is no more nasty or exploitative or cruel than any of his competitors and the national culture, political environment, and economic system his company exists in have all been around a lot longer than he has. He does not view his everyday actions as morally questionable and takes for granted that the way things are is “just the way things are.” Alice, on the other hand, is a foreign spy whose mission is to free slaves and bring criminals like Bob to justice. Alice succeeds in her mission, but she also tortures one of Bob’s henchmen to find out where his headquarters is, then shoots Bob in front of his kids and lights him on fire while he is still alive, all the while streaming footage of his gory death to the entire world to “send a message” to others like him.
Take a moment to think about the preceding example. Ask yourself “Who is the villain?” Is it Bob? Is it Alice? If both of them are evil, is either of them worth rooting for in the end? If you think neither of them are evil, then what would they have to do to qualify as evildoers? The more effort you put into asking yourself questions like these as you write your posts, the more success you will have at making your characters compelling, their actions meaningful, and your stories interesting to readers. In short, the effective use of villainy matters in the RP environment both because of what it is in a story and because of what it does in a story—and most of all because of what it does for a story.
How to Establish Villainy in Character
The first step in making a character villainous is to spend time establishing that character’s evilness in-universe. While there are many creative ways to demonstrate a character’s evilness, there are two particular methods you should avoid using. The first is making characters evil just by stating they are evil (this violates the classic “show, don’t tell” rule). If your readers cannot tell whether a character is evil without you explicitly stating (as the narrator) that that character is evil or “pushing” the reader to regard a character as evil, then you are failing at your job as a writer. You should also strive to avoid making a character spontaneously do evil stuff at random for no apparent reason (all this does is make a villain boring and one-dimensional). Assuming you avoid these twin pitfalls, there are a number of classic techniques that most writers use to establish and highlight a villain’s moral nature, and all of them work because they allow the character’s deeds to speak for themselves.
The simplest—and most common—method for establishing a character as a villain is the “kick the dog” technique, which gets its name from a practice in which a script writer or director has a character encounter a dog and reveal his or her moral nature by interacting with it. A “kick the dog” interaction typically establishes a character as one of The Bad Guys, unless that character is already established as good. In that case, you use a “kick the dog” moment to demonstrate that even good characters can do bad things. On the other hand, a “pet the dog” interaction typically establishes a character as one of The Good Guys, unless that character is already established as evil. In that case, you use a “pet the dog” moment to give a villain extra complexity and dimension.
Of course, the “dog” in a “kick the dog” scenario need not be a literal animal. Sometimes a “kick the dog” moment can take the form of one character mistreating another for any simple reason, like a schoolyard bully getting an emotional “high” out of punching a smaller kid or an abusive supervisor chewing out subordinate employees just to act dominant. In any case, if you make use of “kick the dog” moments to establish the villainous nature of your characters, you must make sure they feel a need to treat the dog that way. Examples include being in a bad mood and looking for a convenient target on which to take out frustrations or having an ingrained habit of animal abuse that is established in-universe.
Another simple method for showing an audience how evil a character is consists of showing that character engaging in malicious behavior, like mugging a stranger, stealing somebody’s mail, pulling cruel pranks, defrauding investors, or committing violent crimes. This technique works pretty effectively so long as you avoid getting bogged down in clichés, since villains named Dick Dastardly who twirl their mustaches while tying damsels to train tracks tend to come across as flat, one-dimensional, and just plain boring. As with the “kick the dog” method, the malicious behavior method needs to make sense in-universe.
A third technique consists of showing characters engaging in behavior that is far from morally ideal but not necessarily malicious—everything from simple rudeness to indulging vices, accepting bribes, telling lies, and the like. This method is much trickier because the behavior in question might not be considered “evil” in-universe or the characters engaging in it might not have any evil intentions. For casual sinfulness to count as villainy, the person engaging in it must be approving of (or just indifferent to) any harm such actions do to other people or their property.
What does it “mean” to RP your nation(s) and characters as “The Bad Guys” in a NationStates RP thread? There are many possible ways to answer this question, but in my personal opinion, there are two main approaches that work better than all the others. Regardless of which approach you prefer to use at any given moment, your goal should not be to spoon-feed hero and villain designations to your readers, but rather to RP your characters in ways that allow your readers (especially the people RPing with you) to understand who The Bad Guys are on their own. In simpler terms, your goal should be showing your readers who is good and evil instead of telling them who is good and evil.
The first approach defines The Bad Guys as people, creatures, things, and institutions—even entire cultures and civilizations—whose intentions and motivations are generally malevolent, regardless of whether their actions succeed at causing the baleful and dolorous effects they wanted. In other words, this answer defines villains in terms of their ethical character and main story role, which is to produce the conflicts that drive RP threads forward and make them interesting. Their existence is the number one reason stories wind up needing heroes for the same reason that criminals are the number one reason society needs law enforcement (if there are no criminals, the police would have little to do apart from directing traffic).
The second approach is to define The Bad Guys as “anyone who does Bad Guy Things” in-character, but this approach is too vague to help us understand what villainy is unless we know what “Bad Guy Things” are in the first place. To help clear up any possible confusion, I will define “Bad Guy Things” as actions (both in word and deed) that are intrinsically evil because the effects they produce are evil, the motives behind them are evil, or the person or people undertaking them are acting without concern for morality. In the NS RP environment, these actions usually come in the form of corruption, organized crime, slavery, genocide, piracy, terrorism, foreign aggression, and so forth. This is especially true when roleplaying an NS nation as a villain rather than just roleplaying an individual character as a villain.
While there are times when defining who The Bad Guys are can be simple and easy, there are other times when asking your readers “Who are The Bad Guys in this story?” is a surefire way to ignite a nigh-unquenchable flame war that can only be extinguished by a team of moderators armed with thread locks and forum bans. If, in my role as the writer, I frame a story in a way that leaves my readers free to decide who The Bad Guys are for themselves, then the business of defining what evil is and who the evildoers are can get tricky. For example, let us suppose I write a story that revolves around a pair of characters named Bob and Alice. Bob is a corporate executive who relies on slave labor to keep his company running. He is no more nasty or exploitative or cruel than any of his competitors and the national culture, political environment, and economic system his company exists in have all been around a lot longer than he has. He does not view his everyday actions as morally questionable and takes for granted that the way things are is “just the way things are.” Alice, on the other hand, is a foreign spy whose mission is to free slaves and bring criminals like Bob to justice. Alice succeeds in her mission, but she also tortures one of Bob’s henchmen to find out where his headquarters is, then shoots Bob in front of his kids and lights him on fire while he is still alive, all the while streaming footage of his gory death to the entire world to “send a message” to others like him.
Take a moment to think about the preceding example. Ask yourself “Who is the villain?” Is it Bob? Is it Alice? If both of them are evil, is either of them worth rooting for in the end? If you think neither of them are evil, then what would they have to do to qualify as evildoers? The more effort you put into asking yourself questions like these as you write your posts, the more success you will have at making your characters compelling, their actions meaningful, and your stories interesting to readers. In short, the effective use of villainy matters in the RP environment both because of what it is in a story and because of what it does in a story—and most of all because of what it does for a story.
How to Establish Villainy in Character
The first step in making a character villainous is to spend time establishing that character’s evilness in-universe. While there are many creative ways to demonstrate a character’s evilness, there are two particular methods you should avoid using. The first is making characters evil just by stating they are evil (this violates the classic “show, don’t tell” rule). If your readers cannot tell whether a character is evil without you explicitly stating (as the narrator) that that character is evil or “pushing” the reader to regard a character as evil, then you are failing at your job as a writer. You should also strive to avoid making a character spontaneously do evil stuff at random for no apparent reason (all this does is make a villain boring and one-dimensional). Assuming you avoid these twin pitfalls, there are a number of classic techniques that most writers use to establish and highlight a villain’s moral nature, and all of them work because they allow the character’s deeds to speak for themselves.
The simplest—and most common—method for establishing a character as a villain is the “kick the dog” technique, which gets its name from a practice in which a script writer or director has a character encounter a dog and reveal his or her moral nature by interacting with it. A “kick the dog” interaction typically establishes a character as one of The Bad Guys, unless that character is already established as good. In that case, you use a “kick the dog” moment to demonstrate that even good characters can do bad things. On the other hand, a “pet the dog” interaction typically establishes a character as one of The Good Guys, unless that character is already established as evil. In that case, you use a “pet the dog” moment to give a villain extra complexity and dimension.
Of course, the “dog” in a “kick the dog” scenario need not be a literal animal. Sometimes a “kick the dog” moment can take the form of one character mistreating another for any simple reason, like a schoolyard bully getting an emotional “high” out of punching a smaller kid or an abusive supervisor chewing out subordinate employees just to act dominant. In any case, if you make use of “kick the dog” moments to establish the villainous nature of your characters, you must make sure they feel a need to treat the dog that way. Examples include being in a bad mood and looking for a convenient target on which to take out frustrations or having an ingrained habit of animal abuse that is established in-universe.
Another simple method for showing an audience how evil a character is consists of showing that character engaging in malicious behavior, like mugging a stranger, stealing somebody’s mail, pulling cruel pranks, defrauding investors, or committing violent crimes. This technique works pretty effectively so long as you avoid getting bogged down in clichés, since villains named Dick Dastardly who twirl their mustaches while tying damsels to train tracks tend to come across as flat, one-dimensional, and just plain boring. As with the “kick the dog” method, the malicious behavior method needs to make sense in-universe.
A third technique consists of showing characters engaging in behavior that is far from morally ideal but not necessarily malicious—everything from simple rudeness to indulging vices, accepting bribes, telling lies, and the like. This method is much trickier because the behavior in question might not be considered “evil” in-universe or the characters engaging in it might not have any evil intentions. For casual sinfulness to count as villainy, the person engaging in it must be approving of (or just indifferent to) any harm such actions do to other people or their property.
CHAPTER 2
Creating and Using Evil Characters
Creating and Using Evil Characters
Villain Archetypes and Roles
Much like the heroes and bystanders with whom they interact, The Bad Guys can come in a multitude of different forms that have their own distinct traits and attributes. If you plan to create an evil character, chances are that you will want to create a specific type of evil character. Put another way, you will likely want to use some sort of general “model” or “template” as a guide for crafting this character’s personality, attributes, and preferred modus operandi for evildoing. The primary archetypes are:
The Bad Guys also tend to fill a number of story roles, such as the Big Bad (the story’s primary villain), the Dragon (the primary villain’s second-in-command), and the mook (a henchperson working for the Big Bad or the Dragon). Each of these three roles has loads and loads of variations you can use to build a story. The important part to keep in mind is that character roles and archetypes—like all other tropes—are tools for building a story, not a substitute for the story itself.
Character Backgrounds and Motives
There are two ways to make characters villainous: create characters who are inherently evil, or have characters become evil. Again, the “show, don’t tell” principle applies to both cases. If you want to show your audience that a specific character is inherently evil, you have to spend some time establishing how and why that character’s moral compass has been twisted in the wrong direction all along. Perhaps the individual in question has always had a nasty personality or was somehow created to do evil from day one. Malicious robots and self-aware computer programs often come from this background, but so do monsters (regardless of whether they were created on purpose or by accident). Evil spirits also tend to fall into this category.
The alternative route, which consists of creating characters who do not start off being evil but instead become evil over time, only works well if you are willing to spend some time focusing on character development. Perhaps your characters became villains because they were raised by other villains, made evil choices in the face of temptation, or simply spent too much time “hanging around the wrong crowd” and got corrupted as a result. Many of the most compelling cases of character evolution in this direction feature evil cultures, societies, incentive structures, and so forth gradually corrupting good characters into becoming villains. The more complex and nuanced a character’s struggle with corruption is, the more compelling that character’s presence becomes within your story.
Either way you prefer to go, your number one objective in RPing an evil character is to show your readers how and why that character is one of The Bad Guys in his or her unique way. With the possible exception of characters who cannot control their own behavior (either as a result of a physical disability or a mental illness), most characters are going to have reasons for doing the things they do. A character’s actions will only make sense to readers if they can understand why that character is doing something, so when characters make choices for no apparent reason, they will not come across as credible or believable enough to be interesting. With this point in mind, let us consider the most common motives that drive The Bad Guys to ply their trade:
There are occasions in which two or more of the motives listed here may come into play at the same time. For example, covetousness for another person’s wealth encompasses both greed and envy. Another example might be a case in which a character wants a romantic relationship with a specific person (lust) and feels entitled to the relationship without regard to the other party’s feelings (pride). Another point to keep in mind is the role an individual’s personality and temperament plays in shaping that individual’s motives for acting. Really modest people are probably not going to be motivated by pride, while hot-blooded are likely to be motivated by anger or zealotry.
Much like the heroes and bystanders with whom they interact, The Bad Guys can come in a multitude of different forms that have their own distinct traits and attributes. If you plan to create an evil character, chances are that you will want to create a specific type of evil character. Put another way, you will likely want to use some sort of general “model” or “template” as a guide for crafting this character’s personality, attributes, and preferred modus operandi for evildoing. The primary archetypes are:
- A classic villain is typically written to serve as a foil to the story’s hero. Consequently, classic villains typically embody whatever vice(s) stand opposite to the hero’s main virtue(s) and their strengths are the hero’s weaknesses. Their evil schemes are usually the main driver of the story’s plot and their inherent flaws are usually the main factor in their downfall. On an aesthetic level, classic villains will look and sound very different from The Good Guys. Per TV Tropes, most Disney villains fall into this category.
- A tragic villain is typically written with the goal of making a character complex and sympathetic on some level or another. Tragic villains tend to perform evil acts they dislike because they think these acts are necessary. Many fallen heroes and anti-villains can wind up as one of these.
- An anti-villain is a villain who is not purely evil. Anti-villains usually have heroic qualities or engage in virtuous behavior. They tend to do Bad Guy Things because they believe that fair ends justify foul means or just happen to be selfish, but on the whole, the defining mark of an anti-villain is a lack of malevolent motivation. Anti-villains will usually be aware that the story’s designated good guys see them and their actions as evil.
- A designated villain is a character who has been shoehorned into a villainous role for plot reasons, usually by drawing him or her into conflict with the protagonist. In most cases, designated villains are not even all that evil; they just happen to be some protagonist’s opponent who the audience is led to dislike based on the way they are framed and presented in the story.
- A card-carrying villain is a character who proudly revels in evildoing and never seems to miss a chance to rack up “kick the dog” moments. One-dimensional cartoon villains usually fall into this bucket.
The Bad Guys also tend to fill a number of story roles, such as the Big Bad (the story’s primary villain), the Dragon (the primary villain’s second-in-command), and the mook (a henchperson working for the Big Bad or the Dragon). Each of these three roles has loads and loads of variations you can use to build a story. The important part to keep in mind is that character roles and archetypes—like all other tropes—are tools for building a story, not a substitute for the story itself.
Character Backgrounds and Motives
There are two ways to make characters villainous: create characters who are inherently evil, or have characters become evil. Again, the “show, don’t tell” principle applies to both cases. If you want to show your audience that a specific character is inherently evil, you have to spend some time establishing how and why that character’s moral compass has been twisted in the wrong direction all along. Perhaps the individual in question has always had a nasty personality or was somehow created to do evil from day one. Malicious robots and self-aware computer programs often come from this background, but so do monsters (regardless of whether they were created on purpose or by accident). Evil spirits also tend to fall into this category.
The alternative route, which consists of creating characters who do not start off being evil but instead become evil over time, only works well if you are willing to spend some time focusing on character development. Perhaps your characters became villains because they were raised by other villains, made evil choices in the face of temptation, or simply spent too much time “hanging around the wrong crowd” and got corrupted as a result. Many of the most compelling cases of character evolution in this direction feature evil cultures, societies, incentive structures, and so forth gradually corrupting good characters into becoming villains. The more complex and nuanced a character’s struggle with corruption is, the more compelling that character’s presence becomes within your story.
Either way you prefer to go, your number one objective in RPing an evil character is to show your readers how and why that character is one of The Bad Guys in his or her unique way. With the possible exception of characters who cannot control their own behavior (either as a result of a physical disability or a mental illness), most characters are going to have reasons for doing the things they do. A character’s actions will only make sense to readers if they can understand why that character is doing something, so when characters make choices for no apparent reason, they will not come across as credible or believable enough to be interesting. With this point in mind, let us consider the most common motives that drive The Bad Guys to ply their trade:
- Perception of necessity: Anything that leads characters to believe that doing evil is necessary to accomplish some practical purpose no matter how much they want to avoid making evil choices.
- Coercion: This includes all cases in which characters are threatened, blackmailed, or tortured into doing evil.
- Zealotry and fanaticism: This category includes anything that might motivate “well-intentioned extremists” to act, such as the belief that an act of evil acts are not all the evil if they achieve a good outcome.
- Greed: This encompasses the desire for power, riches, fame, and the like. Most “take over the world” plots fall into this category.
- Anger: This includes both garden-variety anger and the desire for revenge. The desire to vent bad feelings by abusing others or destroying things usually falls into this category.
- Envy: This includes anything motivated primarily by jealousy. Actions aimed at taking down rivals usually fall into this bucket.
- Lust: This consists of the desire to satisfy carnal wants.
- Sloth: Evil acts stemming from negligence rest beneath this heading.
- Pride: This includes selfish and narcissistic acts that hurt others.
There are occasions in which two or more of the motives listed here may come into play at the same time. For example, covetousness for another person’s wealth encompasses both greed and envy. Another example might be a case in which a character wants a romantic relationship with a specific person (lust) and feels entitled to the relationship without regard to the other party’s feelings (pride). Another point to keep in mind is the role an individual’s personality and temperament plays in shaping that individual’s motives for acting. Really modest people are probably not going to be motivated by pride, while hot-blooded are likely to be motivated by anger or zealotry.
CHAPTER 3
Evil Writ Large
Evil Writ Large
Individual Villainy Versus Collective Villainy
NS RP is hardly limited to character-focused or character-driven enterprises. Maybe you love playing as The Bad Guys so much you cannot resist the urge to roleplay criminal organizations, corrupt political systems, and even entire countries defined by evil from top to bottom. If your interests happen to lie here, consider this chapter a quick crash course on how to get started in this area.
The main difference between roleplaying an evil character and roleplaying an evil institution or country or species is one of scale. I do not mean “scale” in the sense of measuring the significance of a character’s or institution’s “presence” within a story, but “scale” in the sense of a character’s or institution’s “capacity” for making Bad Guy Things happen within a story. In other words, the main difference between RPing an evil character and RPing an evil institution is that the villainy perpetrated by evil institutions tends to be the product of a team effort. A lone gangster might be able to run a protection racket covering a small apartment complex, but if enough of them get together to form an organized citywide syndicate, they can not only perform shakedowns and run speakeasies on every corner, they can also corrupt the entire value system of the society they infested.
One interesting angle that comes with roleplaying evil on a collective scale is the diffusion of moral responsibility among multiple characters. Anytime you RP your NS nation doing the kind of evil that requires a team effort to happen, you have the option of exploring the various ways in which individual characters can function as “cogs in the machine” by describing how (and why) they contribute to an evil institution’s goals. Alternatively, you might also want to RP good characters going through the struggles that come with working within a morally compromised society. Another interesting angle to consider is the driving force behind your NS nation’s evilness. Is your NS nation’s evilness character-driven, or does it arise from systemic causes? Put another way, is your nation evil because, for instance, its government is highly centralized under some malevolent autocrat, or is it evil because its entire society is rotten?
Morality and Ideology
Every society functions within some form of common moral framework, however internally disorganized, self-contradictory, or disjointed it may appear to an outside observer. In many cases, the larger the society is, the more room there is for internal disagreement over basic questions of morality. Your NS nation may be universally opposed to the international slave trade or wars of conquest but have bitter internal divisions over recreational drug use, the “fair” distribution of wealth, or sex-selective abortion. One ideologue’s “liberty” is another’s “degeneracy” and one zealot’s “fairness” is another’s “oppression” once you infuse society’s moral framework with ideological differences. Consider this advice from Evil and Your Nation, an RP guide that The Grand World Order sent me a draft of in December 2012:
Making Your NS Nation Evil
Once you decide you want to RP your NS nation as The Bad Guys, you will need you ask yourself “What kind of Bad Guys am I planning to RP as in this setting?” and make your creative decisions accordingly. Maybe you want your NS nation to be a failed state run by pirates and drug cartels, a banana republic where elections are rigged and officials depend on bribery to make ends meet, or a bigoted society obsessed with enslaving or exterminating their neighbors across the border. Whatever path you decide to follow when RPing as an “evil” NS nation, keep in mind that most RPers—even very talented ones—do not start out with a lot of specific preferences regarding the sort of Bad Guys they want to RP. In fact, it is very likely that your preferences will evolve over time as you come across new sources of inspiration, exchange ideas with other RPers, and receive feedback from your RP partners.
As you go about developing your NS nation concept over time, ask yourself how you can use your nation’s unique background and attributes—characters, history, culture, and so on—to invent your nation’s unique “brand” or “flavor” of villainy. Keep in mind that other RPers are likelier to be interested in RPing with you if you tell them “my NS nation practices slavery in order to enforce a millennia-old caste system rooted in my national religion” than they will be if you tell them “my NS nation practices slavery just because I want to be the regional Bad Guy.” In my experience, the best “evil” NS nations are the ones that have highly-developed in-universe reasons for doing the Bad Guy Things they do and the RPers behind them often take pride in working as much of this background information as they can into their canonical RP threads. This is especially true when you want to RP the operational “nuts and bolts” of your NS nation to give the other RPers an “inside view” of how it operates.
These operational “nuts and bolts” actually matter more than they might seem, because they are precisely the thing that makes “evil” NS nations evil. Every society is imperfect and has to face certain challenges, so just as an individual character’s moral nature is the sum of his or her choices, an NS nation’s degree of goodness or evilness depends on the choices its populace and ruling class make within your canon. A society that cannot phase out slave labor because its economy is too poor to afford modernization is not morally comparable to a rich society that stubbornly maintains a slave trade it does not need simply to line the pockets of a few officials, and an isolationist nation that inherits a culture of casual racism is not the same as a nation that suddenly embraces racism in order to justify attacks on a minority group that it has picked as a scapegoat during times of crisis.
Anytime you want to RP your NS nation doing a particular Bad Guy Thing in order to come across to others as an evil country, ask yourself whether you are having your nation do this thing because it is actually choosing to be evil, rather than just playing the cards it got dealt by the hand of fate. Going with the first option can give your country’s villainy a tragic dimension while going with the second option can make your country’s villainy all the more revolting. If you are especially dedicated to making your NS nation’s evilness as realistic and complex as possible, you might even want to consider RPing your nation’s evil deeds as the products of multiple factors that situate it somewhere on a sliding scale between these two poles. You may also want to consider this advice from A Guide To Doing Evil Right:
Finally, there are two pieces of advice I recommend keeping in mind whenever RPing an “evil” NS nation. The first is to avoid letting tropes turn into clichés (Chapter 5 addresses this item in detail). In brief, nobody wants to spend their time reading RP threads in which two-dimensional cookie-cutter villains perform two-dimensional cookie-cutter acts of villainy. My other bit of advice is to try to RP your villains as characters who do Bad Guy Things in original and creative ways to avoid coming across as excessively “generic” (otherwise their antics are going to get old fast). In other words, if you do not want to invent super original villains to use in your roleplays and stick to RPing basic Bad Guys (tyrants, monsters, terrorists, pirates, etc.), then make a point of following the “Our X are Different” trope, in which X represents a specific category of Bad Guys (e.g. Our Monsters are Different) and make the differences significant enough to stand out.
NS RP is hardly limited to character-focused or character-driven enterprises. Maybe you love playing as The Bad Guys so much you cannot resist the urge to roleplay criminal organizations, corrupt political systems, and even entire countries defined by evil from top to bottom. If your interests happen to lie here, consider this chapter a quick crash course on how to get started in this area.
The main difference between roleplaying an evil character and roleplaying an evil institution or country or species is one of scale. I do not mean “scale” in the sense of measuring the significance of a character’s or institution’s “presence” within a story, but “scale” in the sense of a character’s or institution’s “capacity” for making Bad Guy Things happen within a story. In other words, the main difference between RPing an evil character and RPing an evil institution is that the villainy perpetrated by evil institutions tends to be the product of a team effort. A lone gangster might be able to run a protection racket covering a small apartment complex, but if enough of them get together to form an organized citywide syndicate, they can not only perform shakedowns and run speakeasies on every corner, they can also corrupt the entire value system of the society they infested.
One interesting angle that comes with roleplaying evil on a collective scale is the diffusion of moral responsibility among multiple characters. Anytime you RP your NS nation doing the kind of evil that requires a team effort to happen, you have the option of exploring the various ways in which individual characters can function as “cogs in the machine” by describing how (and why) they contribute to an evil institution’s goals. Alternatively, you might also want to RP good characters going through the struggles that come with working within a morally compromised society. Another interesting angle to consider is the driving force behind your NS nation’s evilness. Is your NS nation’s evilness character-driven, or does it arise from systemic causes? Put another way, is your nation evil because, for instance, its government is highly centralized under some malevolent autocrat, or is it evil because its entire society is rotten?
Morality and Ideology
Every society functions within some form of common moral framework, however internally disorganized, self-contradictory, or disjointed it may appear to an outside observer. In many cases, the larger the society is, the more room there is for internal disagreement over basic questions of morality. Your NS nation may be universally opposed to the international slave trade or wars of conquest but have bitter internal divisions over recreational drug use, the “fair” distribution of wealth, or sex-selective abortion. One ideologue’s “liberty” is another’s “degeneracy” and one zealot’s “fairness” is another’s “oppression” once you infuse society’s moral framework with ideological differences. Consider this advice from Evil and Your Nation, an RP guide that The Grand World Order sent me a draft of in December 2012:
One man’s terrorist is another’s liberator, and different people have different beliefs. Even within a household, morals can vary significantly; once you go overseas, you’ll notice that some cultures do things completely and utterly unacceptable for another. A Hmong man in Fresno once kidnapped a woman from the local college campus and raped her at his cousin’s house. This is acceptable in Hmong culture; they call it zij poj niam, or “marriage by capture.” In the United States, it’s called kidnapping and rape, and is very illegal. In the United States, being a homosexual is becoming more and more accepted. In Iran, you get hanged over the street in front of a crowd of pissed off citizens if you’re found to be gay.
Thus, you can have a society that values mass rape, slavery, and pillaging—and people such as the Romans would be totally cool with you, as long as you didn’t wear pants and spoke Latin or Greek. At the same time, you could have a morally uptight, devout nation that wouldn’t harm a fly—and some cultures would find your country disgusting. Your entire culture could be nothing but self-serving quasi-sociopaths, and they’d still be righteous in the eyes of Objectivists, who are also fundamentally against any moral system (though they’ve made their own, technically).
Thus, you can have a society that values mass rape, slavery, and pillaging—and people such as the Romans would be totally cool with you, as long as you didn’t wear pants and spoke Latin or Greek. At the same time, you could have a morally uptight, devout nation that wouldn’t harm a fly—and some cultures would find your country disgusting. Your entire culture could be nothing but self-serving quasi-sociopaths, and they’d still be righteous in the eyes of Objectivists, who are also fundamentally against any moral system (though they’ve made their own, technically).
Making Your NS Nation Evil
Once you decide you want to RP your NS nation as The Bad Guys, you will need you ask yourself “What kind of Bad Guys am I planning to RP as in this setting?” and make your creative decisions accordingly. Maybe you want your NS nation to be a failed state run by pirates and drug cartels, a banana republic where elections are rigged and officials depend on bribery to make ends meet, or a bigoted society obsessed with enslaving or exterminating their neighbors across the border. Whatever path you decide to follow when RPing as an “evil” NS nation, keep in mind that most RPers—even very talented ones—do not start out with a lot of specific preferences regarding the sort of Bad Guys they want to RP. In fact, it is very likely that your preferences will evolve over time as you come across new sources of inspiration, exchange ideas with other RPers, and receive feedback from your RP partners.
As you go about developing your NS nation concept over time, ask yourself how you can use your nation’s unique background and attributes—characters, history, culture, and so on—to invent your nation’s unique “brand” or “flavor” of villainy. Keep in mind that other RPers are likelier to be interested in RPing with you if you tell them “my NS nation practices slavery in order to enforce a millennia-old caste system rooted in my national religion” than they will be if you tell them “my NS nation practices slavery just because I want to be the regional Bad Guy.” In my experience, the best “evil” NS nations are the ones that have highly-developed in-universe reasons for doing the Bad Guy Things they do and the RPers behind them often take pride in working as much of this background information as they can into their canonical RP threads. This is especially true when you want to RP the operational “nuts and bolts” of your NS nation to give the other RPers an “inside view” of how it operates.
These operational “nuts and bolts” actually matter more than they might seem, because they are precisely the thing that makes “evil” NS nations evil. Every society is imperfect and has to face certain challenges, so just as an individual character’s moral nature is the sum of his or her choices, an NS nation’s degree of goodness or evilness depends on the choices its populace and ruling class make within your canon. A society that cannot phase out slave labor because its economy is too poor to afford modernization is not morally comparable to a rich society that stubbornly maintains a slave trade it does not need simply to line the pockets of a few officials, and an isolationist nation that inherits a culture of casual racism is not the same as a nation that suddenly embraces racism in order to justify attacks on a minority group that it has picked as a scapegoat during times of crisis.
Anytime you want to RP your NS nation doing a particular Bad Guy Thing in order to come across to others as an evil country, ask yourself whether you are having your nation do this thing because it is actually choosing to be evil, rather than just playing the cards it got dealt by the hand of fate. Going with the first option can give your country’s villainy a tragic dimension while going with the second option can make your country’s villainy all the more revolting. If you are especially dedicated to making your NS nation’s evilness as realistic and complex as possible, you might even want to consider RPing your nation’s evil deeds as the products of multiple factors that situate it somewhere on a sliding scale between these two poles. You may also want to consider this advice from A Guide To Doing Evil Right:
You can choose your path from the beginning and play within parameters you set for yourself (i.e. destroy all communists) or you can just wander around until you find your own path. Both options work well. There exists advantages and disadvantages in everything, and while I personally went through the latter, many of my closest allies chose the former.
For me, I evolved into the role I hold today. […] I never truly envisaged Ralkovia becoming evil, instead, I adopted slavery as a way to deal with the Nazis I captured. I adopted “forced impregnation” as a way to humiliate Nazis. I adopted “Decimation of the Male Population” as way to render Nazis unable to ever fight a war again. I adopted “Revision Of History” as a way to steal their free will from them, rewriting their history to fit what I wanted; tying them at my hip forever.
And slowly, I stopped making distinctions between Nazis and [Ralkovia’s] other enemies. As Nietzsche said, “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”
For me, I evolved into the role I hold today. […] I never truly envisaged Ralkovia becoming evil, instead, I adopted slavery as a way to deal with the Nazis I captured. I adopted “forced impregnation” as a way to humiliate Nazis. I adopted “Decimation of the Male Population” as way to render Nazis unable to ever fight a war again. I adopted “Revision Of History” as a way to steal their free will from them, rewriting their history to fit what I wanted; tying them at my hip forever.
And slowly, I stopped making distinctions between Nazis and [Ralkovia’s] other enemies. As Nietzsche said, “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”
Finally, there are two pieces of advice I recommend keeping in mind whenever RPing an “evil” NS nation. The first is to avoid letting tropes turn into clichés (Chapter 5 addresses this item in detail). In brief, nobody wants to spend their time reading RP threads in which two-dimensional cookie-cutter villains perform two-dimensional cookie-cutter acts of villainy. My other bit of advice is to try to RP your villains as characters who do Bad Guy Things in original and creative ways to avoid coming across as excessively “generic” (otherwise their antics are going to get old fast). In other words, if you do not want to invent super original villains to use in your roleplays and stick to RPing basic Bad Guys (tyrants, monsters, terrorists, pirates, etc.), then make a point of following the “Our X are Different” trope, in which X represents a specific category of Bad Guys (e.g. Our Monsters are Different) and make the differences significant enough to stand out.
CHAPTER 4
Building an Evil Reputation
Building an Evil Reputation
Reputation and Recognition
How can you tell when you finally “made it” as an NS RPer? Is “success” at RPing villainy best denoted by how many other NS nations (run by newbies, of course) you stamp out each week, or how many characters your nation kills, or how many WA condemnations you receive? Does you nation lack “iconic” Bad Guy status unless other RPers start ominously counting down the amount of time that passes between your next victim’s appearance on the scene and your easily predictable arrival? While some RPers might think the sort of aggressive “brand building” that leads to these things is the best way to go, chances are that many others do not. In fact, if you try RPing your NS nation acting evilly towards everybody in universe, your NS nation will make lots of enemies, including the kind who are willing to set aside their differences if doing so means removing your NS nation’s ability to threaten them (because your NS nation is really that bad).
If you want to build a reputation for your NS nation as being an “evil” country, the first fact you must recognize is that reputations are earned one post at a time. In my own (rather lengthy) experience, the RPers whose NS nations that had the strongest “reputations” as “bad guy” countries were the ones who consistently made efforts to make their NS nations stand out from the crowd in terms of both RP history (including worldbuilding, canon depth, and character development) and RP style. The most well-known “evil” countries on NS tended to be RPed by players who loved adding depth to their posts and taking time to flesh out the unique personalities and backgrounds of their main characters. Oftentimes, these characters became “iconic” among the most active RP circles because they were sufficiently original and unique to be memorable, not generic cookie-cutter tinpot tyrants and the like. In short, reputation building is a cross-country run, not a hundred-meter sprint.
Another major factor in reputation building is your ability to be someone who others want to RP with in the first place. Building a track record as someone who follows RP etiquette and gets along well with others will make your threads more “approachable” so that you can build up an RP history that people start referring to in discussions. Again, many RPers whose NS nations achieved IC infamy were able to do so on account of being able to attract lots of other RPers to roleplay with them or being willing to jump into open RP threads and acting cooperatively enough not to wear out their welcomes.
Things to Avoid
Having spent considerable time covering that sort of things you should do as a roleplayer whenever you want to RP as The Bad Guys, the time has finally come to cover a few points about the things you should not do. The correct purpose of roleplaying evil is the correct purpose for roleplaying any other thing—to have fun telling a story about things that happen in character within the NS RP environment. There are times, however, when I and countless others have observed people RPing evil for completely inappropriate reasons, oftentimes as a result of failing to recognize or respect certain boundaries that exist to help the RP environment function in a healthy way. Given how poorly the RP community tends to regard these violations, there are some simple rules you can follow to ensure you avoid wearing out your welcome:
How can you tell when you finally “made it” as an NS RPer? Is “success” at RPing villainy best denoted by how many other NS nations (run by newbies, of course) you stamp out each week, or how many characters your nation kills, or how many WA condemnations you receive? Does you nation lack “iconic” Bad Guy status unless other RPers start ominously counting down the amount of time that passes between your next victim’s appearance on the scene and your easily predictable arrival? While some RPers might think the sort of aggressive “brand building” that leads to these things is the best way to go, chances are that many others do not. In fact, if you try RPing your NS nation acting evilly towards everybody in universe, your NS nation will make lots of enemies, including the kind who are willing to set aside their differences if doing so means removing your NS nation’s ability to threaten them (because your NS nation is really that bad).
If you want to build a reputation for your NS nation as being an “evil” country, the first fact you must recognize is that reputations are earned one post at a time. In my own (rather lengthy) experience, the RPers whose NS nations that had the strongest “reputations” as “bad guy” countries were the ones who consistently made efforts to make their NS nations stand out from the crowd in terms of both RP history (including worldbuilding, canon depth, and character development) and RP style. The most well-known “evil” countries on NS tended to be RPed by players who loved adding depth to their posts and taking time to flesh out the unique personalities and backgrounds of their main characters. Oftentimes, these characters became “iconic” among the most active RP circles because they were sufficiently original and unique to be memorable, not generic cookie-cutter tinpot tyrants and the like. In short, reputation building is a cross-country run, not a hundred-meter sprint.
Another major factor in reputation building is your ability to be someone who others want to RP with in the first place. Building a track record as someone who follows RP etiquette and gets along well with others will make your threads more “approachable” so that you can build up an RP history that people start referring to in discussions. Again, many RPers whose NS nations achieved IC infamy were able to do so on account of being able to attract lots of other RPers to roleplay with them or being willing to jump into open RP threads and acting cooperatively enough not to wear out their welcomes.
Things to Avoid
Having spent considerable time covering that sort of things you should do as a roleplayer whenever you want to RP as The Bad Guys, the time has finally come to cover a few points about the things you should not do. The correct purpose of roleplaying evil is the correct purpose for roleplaying any other thing—to have fun telling a story about things that happen in character within the NS RP environment. There are times, however, when I and countless others have observed people RPing evil for completely inappropriate reasons, oftentimes as a result of failing to recognize or respect certain boundaries that exist to help the RP environment function in a healthy way. Given how poorly the RP community tends to regard these violations, there are some simple rules you can follow to ensure you avoid wearing out your welcome:
- First, you should never roleplay your NS nation and characters doing Bad Guy Things for the purposes of trolling or upsetting another roleplayer out of character. Not only is such RP behavior petty, crass, and distasteful, but it also violates site rules regarding the distinction between OOC and IC things. At best, this behavior will damage your reputation; at worst it will put you on a path to disciplinary action courtesy of Moderation.
- Second, you should never roleplay your characters doing Bad Guy Things in a way that is so graphic it violates site rules. Please keep in mind that the minimum age for being allowed on the forums is thirteen, not thirty. The fact that you and your favorite RP partners might be in your twenties or thirties and have plenty of experience developing a high tolerance for intensely unpleasant content is irrelevant. If the way you write about something is graphic enough to leave half-grown teens suffering nightmares, the content you want to post is probably not in compliance with NS site rules for handling gore, torture, and so forth.
- Third, you should never roleplay your NS nation doing Bad Guy Things in order to promote or glorify real-life villainy. This behavior explicitly violates NS site rules and policies because it can be construed as trolling members of the RP community who might take offense at the examples real-life villainy being promoted. If Moderation catches you trying to use NS as a venue for glorifying or promoting real-life activities that also happen to be illegal, then the Mods will shut down your nation account to ensure that you are no longer able to use NS as a venue for planning illegal activities (or encouraging others to do so) and protect the site’s owners from being held liable for any unlawful activities that somebody might perform as a result of being encouraged or inspired by your posts.
- Fourth, you should never roleplay your NS nation doing Bad Guy Things just because you want attention. If you behave like a newbie crying for attention, other people will get annoyed and make a point of ignoring your posts or reporting them for forum rule violations.
- Fifth, you should never roleplay your characters or NS nation doing Bad Guy Things just to fulfill a real-life fantasy. Besides simply being in poor taste, many forms of “wish fulfillment” RP end up being little more than attempts to fetishize unlawful activities that cannot be gotten away with in real life. As with my previous point about not using NS RP to promote, plan, or advocate for illegal activities, if Moderation thinks you are running a “wish fulfillment” RP thread to attract others with similar wants and interests so you can recruit them for future law breaking (even if such does not turn out to be the case), you can expect tough sanctions from the Mods in short order.
CHAPTER 5
The Aesthetics of Evil
The Aesthetics of Evil
The “Appearance” of Villainy
One of the most critical principles all NS RPers need to learn is: evil does not “look like” any particular thing. Yes, you read that correctly. Evil generally does not “look” evil (as if there is such a thing outside children’s cartoons). Villains and their despicable acts can assume countless forms, many of which can seem entirely innocent. Although appearances may hold immense symbolic importance in many cases, evil does not need to look like any particular thing to be evil, because evilness is a matter of substance, not style. To quote some advice I received from The Grand World Order in 2012, “The more true-to-life your society looks, the more believable it is. If it’s sacrificing design and function just to be ‘intimidating,’ it’s not believable.” In fact, if you try too hard to make characters and places “look” evil, you run the risk of making them lack believability (or worse, making them worthy of mockery).
Given all these points I have raised, we are still left asking ourselves the question “How do I RP evil in a way that is credible enough to be taken seriously?” The answer is to have the actions and motivations of your characters speak loudly and clearly for themselves. Again, substance trumps style. Some of the most insidious (and thus memorable) villainy in fiction is the kind that hides in plain sight, oftentimes by masquerading as something good and wholesome. Which is scarier: an escaped serial killer hiding out in the woods, or the next-door neighbor you knew since you were a kid who turns out to be a long-escaped war criminal living under a false identity for decades? Perhaps instead of trying to RP your nation’s leader as Generic Flamboyant Idi Amin Clone #781, try RPing your nation’s leader as The Secret Tyrant Next Door. Maybe your nation’s leader gets away with being tyrannical be keeping everything quiet and low-key by eschewing fancy titles and lavish trappings of office in favor of looking humbly businesslike and efficient.
If you want to RP a specific type of evil—say genocide or organized crime or corruption—but you are only familiar with one or two specific real-life examples from which to draw inspiration, you can do yourself a huge favor by setting aside some time to research other real-life examples you are not familiar with to find other sources of inspiration. You can then “cherry pick” different elements from your sources of inspiration and follow a “mix and match” approach to construct something plausibly novel, if not original. You can also make a point of “subverting expectations” over the course of your RP threads. For instance, perhaps the puppet master behind a global piracy syndicate turns out to be a philanthropic billionaire with excellent publicity, or the secret leader of a terrorist organization turns out to be some ancient widow trying to get revenge against the foreign government that assassinated her husband many years earlier.
Symbolism and Clichés
This particular chapter would be far from complete if it failed to address the issues posed by symbolic clichés, so before we move into the remainder of this guide, I want to throw in the following points of advice:
One of the most critical principles all NS RPers need to learn is: evil does not “look like” any particular thing. Yes, you read that correctly. Evil generally does not “look” evil (as if there is such a thing outside children’s cartoons). Villains and their despicable acts can assume countless forms, many of which can seem entirely innocent. Although appearances may hold immense symbolic importance in many cases, evil does not need to look like any particular thing to be evil, because evilness is a matter of substance, not style. To quote some advice I received from The Grand World Order in 2012, “The more true-to-life your society looks, the more believable it is. If it’s sacrificing design and function just to be ‘intimidating,’ it’s not believable.” In fact, if you try too hard to make characters and places “look” evil, you run the risk of making them lack believability (or worse, making them worthy of mockery).
Given all these points I have raised, we are still left asking ourselves the question “How do I RP evil in a way that is credible enough to be taken seriously?” The answer is to have the actions and motivations of your characters speak loudly and clearly for themselves. Again, substance trumps style. Some of the most insidious (and thus memorable) villainy in fiction is the kind that hides in plain sight, oftentimes by masquerading as something good and wholesome. Which is scarier: an escaped serial killer hiding out in the woods, or the next-door neighbor you knew since you were a kid who turns out to be a long-escaped war criminal living under a false identity for decades? Perhaps instead of trying to RP your nation’s leader as Generic Flamboyant Idi Amin Clone #781, try RPing your nation’s leader as The Secret Tyrant Next Door. Maybe your nation’s leader gets away with being tyrannical be keeping everything quiet and low-key by eschewing fancy titles and lavish trappings of office in favor of looking humbly businesslike and efficient.
If you want to RP a specific type of evil—say genocide or organized crime or corruption—but you are only familiar with one or two specific real-life examples from which to draw inspiration, you can do yourself a huge favor by setting aside some time to research other real-life examples you are not familiar with to find other sources of inspiration. You can then “cherry pick” different elements from your sources of inspiration and follow a “mix and match” approach to construct something plausibly novel, if not original. You can also make a point of “subverting expectations” over the course of your RP threads. For instance, perhaps the puppet master behind a global piracy syndicate turns out to be a philanthropic billionaire with excellent publicity, or the secret leader of a terrorist organization turns out to be some ancient widow trying to get revenge against the foreign government that assassinated her husband many years earlier.
Symbolism and Clichés
This particular chapter would be far from complete if it failed to address the issues posed by symbolic clichés, so before we move into the remainder of this guide, I want to throw in the following points of advice:
- There is a big difference between getting inspired by something and ripping it off. Saying your villainous civilization is based loosely off someone else’s work is one fine, but copying stuff is in poor taste at best, and outright plagiarism at worst. Nobody with a lick of fairness in mind is going to fault you for creating a fictitious country that paints its starships medium gray and calls its soldiers “storm troopers” and outfits them with white armor—but directly copying the Galactic Empire’s stuff from Star Wars is grounds for dismissal as a lazy creative mind at best, and copyright lawsuits at worst. Show some good taste and be original.
- Creative laziness is uninspiring. Stuff like “The Supreme Leader stood on a balcony with his long black overcoat flapping in the breeze as he saluted the ranks of jackbooted storm troopers who goose-stepped down the street while wearing gas masks with glowing red eyepieces” has been done to death countless times. If I may be acidly blunt, I do not think it is all that crass on my part to state that this crap does not impress anyone except zit-infested fourteen-year-olds who only know how to write fanfiction based on a TV show.
- Tropes are tools. Try not to misuse them. There is no rule requiring that certain things be done exactly one particular way or another. For instance, there is no rule requiring your villains to remind the audience who The Bad Guys are by wearing stainless steel “spikes of villainy” spaced so many centimeters apart on a black leather background. Your demons, vampires, drug kingpins, and mad scientists are not just uniform objects rolling off an assembly line. You can, and definitely should, customize them to fit comfortably into whatever in-universe context you want them to inhabit.
- Many of the best villains are designed to “look” as innocent as possible. Sometimes it is better to let a character’s (or a country’s) actions speak for themselves instead of relying purely on aesthetic presentation. Do not allow symbolism to become an excuse to not follow the “show, don’t tell” principle in your writing.
- Finally, treat rank-and-file villains like individuals, not faceless drones. To quote yet another piece of GWO’s wisdom, “In pretty much every first person shooter these days, all of your opponents will have some sort of mask covering their face. Don’t do this. Do not make your soldiers and police into ‘robots.’ Make them human beings capable of independent thought who genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.”
Continued below in Part Two (coming soon).