Jaycee Woods

Author Hilary Layne had a video about the problem with evil in contemporary fiction in that evil isn’t expressed but softened and excused on the theme of evil doesn’t really exist.

Personally, I haven’t written a character who is evil. I tried but it never works out. Certainly I have written offensive to respectable middle-class morality. Am I too influenced by contemporary norms that isolate evil to the supernatural and monsters, or just not capable for that job? Could I write evil?

Forty years ago, I had an idea for a fantasy genre story focused on an evil character. Instead of the hero’s journey, it was the perspective of an incumbent evil threatened by the hero’s advance. The idea was to manipulate the reader into identifying with and rooting for the evil character as a mirror held up to the reader. In AD&D alignments, the central character was lawful evil so offered order at a means-are-justified-by-the-ends price.

How would I adapt this story idea based on my lived experience? Instead of fantasy, the evil leader would be a terrorist elevated to political power; likely modeled in part on Stalin rising from bank robber to dictator because he was the evil man willing to initiate force to create the outcomes desired by others.

The story would explain the scaling of evil under the premise that evil is impotent until empowered by the moral sanction of regular non-evil people. It would be a refutation of that old comic strip “There Ought to be a Law,” in which nuisances were used to justify the appeal to government force against others. More broadly it would confront the commonly held pragmatist idea that the initiation of force by 50% plus one through government is a practical way to solve any perceived problem according to the fickle whim of the moment. This would be the source of the evil ruler’s power. It would dramatize an aspect of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s _The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics_ related to how political patronage systems keep evil in power.

So the key takeaway from my effort to portray an evil character is that the choices and actions of regular people empower evil to scale. Their error being that they empowered a politician to use force in a way they never would personally. Worse these people aren’t doing it for material gain but to appear to be good people acting to benefit others…claiming to be a benefactor of the poors while actually crushing the poors into dust because their own appearance is given more weight than reality is given (intent vs. outcomes).

All of this would still be done by centering the evil character to hold him up as a mirror to the reader to potentially see their own reflection. Does the reader identify with the centered villain or the heroes approaching from offstage as agents of retaliatory force and justice?

Is it credible? I am reminded of an Uber driver I had, who was from Venezuela. She had supported the rise of Chavez then fled. She had supported Obama but later voted for Trump as the anti-Obama. There are a large number of people with the responsibility of making choices who have a myopia regarding the consequences of their choices as if they chase promises without understanding cause and effect.