Villainy is a banal art

I wrote a chapter recently that was from the perspective of one of the "bad guys" in my trilogy. He's riddled with regret for the choices he made. On the one hand, his misery is a "just dessert." This person committed awful acts in The Royal Rogue, and what he's experiencing now are the consequences of those actions.

But on the other hand, he is trying to do the right thing. Book two shows a better side of him, and that's intentional. I want my readers to acknowledge that there's at least a sliver of good in the characters they've learned to hate.

Why? Because it makes them feel real. In reality, "evil" isn't always black-and-white. Most of the time, it assumes an uncomfortable shade of gray. There's a phrase for this kind of villainy. It was coined in 1961 by philosopher Hannah Arendt: "the banality of evil."

Live long enough, and you will undoubtedly run into people like this. They're the ones who engage in cruel behavior and/or become complicit through their silence. But they often don't see themselves as the villains.

Some of them may have histories that explain why they became the monsters of other people's stories. Maybe in their eyes, our heroes' tragedies are "just desserts" as well. Or perhaps they're blinded by an ideology that frames cruel, inhumane acts as righteous.

But at the end of the day, none of my characters were born to be the villain. Some of them could have been heroes had the events in their lives played a little differently, which adds a layer of tragedy to their stories.