Bad to the Bone: Social Determinants of Literary Bad guys

I am not good at evil.

My bad guys are not bad enough.

Not only are they not born bad enough, I do not make them bad enough.

But as I age, I get darker. Many writers can go truly dark and explore the monster within but the good ones stop short of evil and make the bad guy bad.

We hear words like “evil” and “monster” and “animal” from politicians who like to paint opponents, especially those driven to extreme forms of protest or even violence, in the simplest and most negative terms. The podium thumpers then signal their own virtue, as a representative of civility and decency, and put together the angry mob that will by means either of legislation or torches and pitchforks snuff out the bad guys.

Literary bad guys must be different, though. They must believe in themselves. They must be convincing characters. They have to have backstories that give us some insight into them even as we root for the protagonists.

Biological bad guys, monsters who simply obey their nature, don’t interest me.

So, if we’re making a bad guy, not simply accepting that evil exists, where do we start? Here’s a few places.

Childhood trauma. That’s a big one, as it opens the doors to all manner of compromised people who have been victimized by parents, siblings, friends, institutions, and of course, random strangers. Disney likes to kill the mothers of their characters. That’s sure to traumatize most of us, but, for some reason, Disney characters don’t become bad guys when that happens to them. It’s probably more traumatic to have a mother who hates you than one who has passed away, and it’s sure to create a better bad guy.

Adult trauma. The environment strikes again, but is more difficult to craft in a satisfying way because we have far less empathy for adults than for children. People seem to choose to be bad, which they might actually be doing, but which is not as much a challenge as character development. I also intensely dislike the characterization of anti-heroes as people who have just had an exceptionally bad day and go off an emotional cliff. It’s dull.

Desire. The root of all unhappiness is desire, we are told. It’s a good point. Desire is also the root of a lot of backstabbing, megalomania, gaslighting, and car chases. Money, Sex. Power. Powerful motivators all, but are they interesting? Mixed with some other character traits, positive and negative, and with some good backstory they can be. But they’ve been done a lot.

Individualism and collectivism. Both these ideas drive antagonists. The absurd idea that freedom is being able to do whatever you want to whenever you want to do it, and the cult of individuality that goes along with it, makes a simple canvas on which we can paint many characters. Its opposite, the equally absurd notion that the essence of goodness is to obey, to sacrifice everything for the common good, to remove individuality entirely in pursuit of the social or religious or political truth, is also an easy place to start.

Privilege. This is one of the more interesting places to go as it leads naturally to an antagonist who is convinced of their own rightness. It is no longer fashionable to say that one is privileged, but it used to be all the rage. In the days of hereditary privilege, the very point of social endeavor was to exercise privilege. Later, when privilege could be earned through the accumulation of wealth or actual achievement, it indicated the pinnacle of success, of social validation. The beauty of privilege in all its historical and contemporary forms is that it not only motivates an antagonist, it blinds them to the consequences of their actions. History is full of odious people who merely let the chips fall where they may. And let there be no doubt, they ARE bad guys.

Other social determinants, like education and income, have interesting relationships with the bad guy personality. The obscenely rich and the impossibly erudite often have little empathy for others, but lower levels of wealth and education are also relevant. Ignorance has long been the root of hatred. Poverty, and the need to overcome it, motivates a great deal of both pro and anti-social behaviour. The mad scientist (a relative rarity) is over-represented in fiction, especially movie fiction. The already-rich greedy investor (so prevalent as to appear normal) has been done to death.

And these days, social media makes everyone evil. That has to be added to the list.

So, if adding up these characteristics might make my evil characters better, I guess I should develop a new character, a bad guy for 2027, which is the earliest I might finish another novel. Here we go. Consider a biotechnology/AI research scientist, stripped of laboratory privileges because he (it has to be a man because I don’t much like men) won’t follow someone else’s rules. He’s had to go it on his own because his mother hates him (and always has) because he reminds her of his father, long dead and gone. He marries into an aristocratic family and gaslights his wife until she signs the ancient estate over to him for safe-keeping. He starts a Facebook group for white supremacists and gives them land to organize a militia. And on the way to the hospital to sign the papers committing his wife to involuntary care, he trips on the stairs, some poor kid having left a skateboard in the way. A really bad day. Boy, does he get mad.

Next stop, a plot to eliminate all the teenagers in the world by spreading a biological virus through Snapchat. And he’s just getting started.

There. A bad guy is born. 

Made, really.