The Banal Art of Villainy

I wrote a chapter yesterday 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." After all, this person committed awful acts in The Royal Rogue.

But on the other hand, it's hard not to feel a twinge of pity when a spark of decency starts to show. In book two, we see a better side of him, and that's intentional. It forces the reader to acknowledge that there's at least a sliver of good in the characters they learn to hate.

Because the truth is that human nature isn't black-and-white, but rather an uncomfortable shade of gray. There's a phrase for the kind of villainy that arises in The Rogue Trilogy. It was coined in 1961 by philosopher Hannah Arendt: "the banality of evil."

Arendt pointed out that "evil" acts rarely come from the villainous caricatures we imagine in books, movies, and films. Instead, they're committed by everyday people. 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 have a backstory that might explain why they became the monster of other people's stories. Maybe in their eyes, our hero's tragedies are "just desserts" as well. Or perhaps they're blinded by an ideology that frames their cruel, inhumane acts as righteous.

When I write antagonists into my story, I aim for this kind of villainy because, at the end of the day, none of these characters were born to be the villain. Some of them could have even been heroes had their cards been played a little differently.