The non-representative villain

For Christmas, I got the movie, 'Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.' It's not high art, but it doesn't try to be. It's good entertainment, and that's something that's not easy to make. The people who made it did a good job of crafting a fairly cohesive vampire mythology. It plays a bit loose with the real history, but that's how you make a real story out of reality. As the opening line says, 'History prefers legends to men.'

When you write a story, a cigar is never just a cigar. It probably isn't even really a cigar. It's a symbol of opulence, taste, coarseness, arrogance, toughness, weakness, masculinity, or faux masculinity. It all depends on how it's presented.

In that same light, a good villain is never just a foil for our hero. They are people in their own right, with strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and personalities. They also need color to make them live. A technique sometimes used is to borrow color from some available source. Our villain (and our hero, too) can be a priest, a mailman, a politician, or a shaolin monk, as long as it's something we have a bit of familiarity with. It's important to note that our familiarity does not have to be fact-based. Anyone who watches kung-fu movies will know what a shaolin monk is, though they probably have no idea what the real ones are like.

That's where it gets tricky.

When I finally broke down and saw 'Avatar,' way back when, I kind of liked it. Then little things like the casual way Michelle Rodriguiz character switches sides, and the fact that there was only one 'good' guy in uniform, and no bad guys with blue skin, began to bug me. When you use real organizations, real people connect with them. If your connection makes them feel good about themselves, great. It might mean they want to see your next movie or buy your next book. Or it might 'only' put a smile on their faces, and they go on to judge your work on it's own merits. If you manage to accidentally (Or deliberately) insult them, well, you've just lost a customer. How many do you have that you can afford to do that?

SPOILER ALERT!!

But it's more than that. In my own humble opinion, it smacks of lazy writing. In AL:VH, the villains are vampires who start the Civil War to create a nation for vampires, where they can finally stand tall and be proud of who they are. A lot of the other plot devices are solid, and Rufus Sewell's character makes some good points on the concept of slavery, but the Civil War was started by vampires. Ponder that for a second. Every man and woman who died in it, died fighting in ignorance. Also, these vampires are smart, ancient, powerful, and wealthy. They've survived by staying in the shadows, then they line up to be on the front lines of a war. The writers borrowed Abraham Lincoln, all the people around him, and the Civil War, (borrowing all the people around it) and while I understand they needed to make a story, they used real people. If next week's topic is what I'm planning on, I'll give my thoughts on how that can break the magic spell.

My long-suffering wife is working her way through Roja slowly, and I can't tell you how hard it is to not hover over her shoulder while she reads it. Why don't I? Because she's told me how annoying that is, of course. Also, she owns an ax, a large one.

I'm getting a short set in the Great Dustbowl rewritten, as well as working on a short that's not really horror, but that's been kicking around in my head for a while. So yes, I'm still writing.