Making a villain (Part 1?)

 I'm the bad guy.

I've had villains on the mind recently. I can't really nail the reason down to one recent experience in media because, truth be told, the very concept of villainous characters is just utterly ubiquitous with storytelling in general. Particularly in video games. We yearn to have some sort of foil to overcome, typically a humanoid one with sharp teeth and a scowl, But what are the ingredients that go into making the kinds of villains that we remember and harken back to time and time again, and what are the sorts of villains that end up as duds? Well, it's a topic that stretches back as far back as stories, to and likely beyond that famous Mesopotamian poem: the epic of Gilgamesh, and as such I doubt I'll be able to nail down the exacts in a single introspective blog here and now. But taking some baby steps, I want to talk about recent villainous character that I've experienced to ruminate over the things that work and things that don't. (I'll put spoiler tags at the beginning of each relevant paragraph.)

(Puss in Boots: The Last Wish spoilers) So The Bounty Hunter in Puss in Boots is a great example of a supremely effective villain, even as he shares that role with two others. Though he's not the most present bad guy on screen, he's the instigator, the motivation and ultimately- the closer. All this is achieved very clearly despite the fact his true intentions are cleverly concealed until the third act- and that's because of a very clever framing device. You see, spoilers, The Bounty Hunter is not actually a simple hunter gunning for the price on Puss' head who just happens to be more skilled than him in every way, he's literally Death. Hunting after Puss to to snuff out his last life because, as classical depictions attest, he hates little more than being cheated out of his prize and cats cheat death more than most. (And Puss does it so disrespectfully too.) This isn't a simple bait and switch, it's a switch up and escalation where the magnitude of the trouble the main character is in blossoms exponentially- skyrocketing the stakes. Death is also a fantastically rounded antagonist, making the most of his scenes to spur on the plot, drive at Puss' fear, and then symbolise his overcoming of the narratives conceit with his, particularly poignant, 'stalemate'. He only retreats because Puss has discovered a respect for the one life he has left, thus satisfying Death's clearly stated ethos, as disgruntled as the Wolf is to admit it. As far as villain writing goes, Death must be one of the most efficiently complex in modern storytelling.

(Also, Puss in Boots) Jack Horner, on the otherhand, is delightfully one-note and proud of it. An heir to a pie business he would turn into a empire, 'The Last Wish' is very clear to establish that Jack has absolutely no excuse baked into his backstory to explain his homicidal and utterly loyalty-free being. The man callously chases the last wish for an utterly selfish, and beautifully narrow minded goal- (literally just "I want to control all magic in the world") he spends the entire movie accidentally, but gleefully, murdering his own staff; and by the time his comeuppance comes even he seems unsure as to which one of his laundry list of crimes he should be getting punished for. Jack embodies all the ways that writers are traditionally conditioned not to write a villain, but these writers commit fully to the see-through villain concept in celebration of his utmost transparency. What results is a villain utterly pure in his intention and thus able to be enjoyably villainous- which makes a stark contrast to all recent Disney movies and their running theme villains of "My generation sees the world differently to how your generation does!"  

(Hogwarts Spoilers) If you want an idea of what happens when the Horner route isn't committed to fully, look no further than Hogwarts Legacy's Ranrok. Everything about that goblin is villainous, from his South-end gangster voice to his pointy teeth and evil eyes- but Hogwarts Legacy can't decide on whether they want to make him cartoonishily evil or darkly sympathetic. On one hand, he seems driven by nothing but a vague desire to be more powerful than wizards- which sounds mostly indistinct as far as plans go. On the otherhand, he's lionized a movement based on generations of perceived wizarding oppression, which itself feeds into the natural sympathy of the underdog. Neither angle is delved into significantly, which makes the entire characterisation feel very wafer thin. And wafer thin villains tend to verge towards the forgettable before long.

(FromSoft Soulslike spoilers) Every FromSoftware Souls-Like game pretty much has the same final villain who, naturally, serves as a microcosm of the narrative and/or game world. The biggest commonality in all of the Souls games is that they almost always depict a once grand kingdom that has fallen past it's prime and is, or has, collapsed(ing)- with Dark Souls specifically revolving around the idea of perpetuating the dying kingdom or letting it pass with grace. Which is probably why almost every Souls Games ends with a battle against a frail old man who was, at once, the stately king of that world. Even as his power and skill surges up to be that final game challenge, they always wear on their design the embodiment of their disrepair. Gwyn wears his charred robes and desiccated skin, such that he looks more a walking corpse or hollow than a once proud king. Ishin is reborn young, but we can see it's just a shadow of the broken body which had just a while ago passed on. In the Shura ending, you do fight that old body with it's boney limbs and brittle white hair. Even Nashandra from Dark Souls 2 sheds her healthy body in favour of puppeteering her marionette of bones- a personification of decay itself. In this way, FromSoft turns the tackling of the boss into a higher confrontation against the core conceit of the narrative itself. Higher conceptual ideas indeed.

(Spiderman PS4) Which brings we around to one of my favourite villains in a game I recently played, Otto Octavius from Spiderman. Now anyone with a passing knowledge of the Spiderman mythos knew exactly who Dr Octavius was within the lore; but the Spiderman PS4 reimaging of Peter Parker's world recontextualized the doctor as a brilliant confidant and mentor for the scientist and researcher inside of Peter. The writers devoted quite a lot of attention not just to establishing how indebted to the doctor Peter is, giving him a job when he had nothing, but also how much Peter looks up to the good doctor, as a personification of the underdog who rejects the easy sell-out route in favour of striving to the betterment of mankind. All this backdrop and contextualisation makes the inevitable moment where the doctor goes mad, from pushing too fast on his own experiments, all the more tragic- like a Greek play: you know what's coming and the only question is how high the play will raise the characters before their fall. But there's actually one moment which I think cuts deeper than all else. From the moment things start going wrong, the developers offer a softening olive branch to ease the pain of the doctor's betrayal. "It's his neural chip frying with his brain: this isn't the same man that Peter looked up to!" 

Whilst simultaneously playing both sides by hinting this darker side was always part of Otto, all the chip did was override his reservation and ability to self-mediate. This is that balance between committal and backtracking which I think a lot of writers get stuck within in modern storytelling; presenting ambiguity and confusing it with complexity. Not that there's anything wrong with such a set-up, indeed some of the best confrontations in fiction are the one's where you still can't decide who was in the right 10 hours after you put the book down; (Like with Huey from MGSV) but the greatest hit to the gut will always come from full committal. That's why I rate so much that moment, in the very last encounter of the game, where Spiderman is stopped just a few seconds before the seemingly inevitable 'rip off my mask to show you who I am and appeal to the human inside' trope scene which almost every major Spiderman story attempts at least once. He is stopped by the reveal that, Doc Ock already knew he was Peter. He always knew. And everything he did, brutalising and victimising Spiderman, he was knowingly committing on Peter as well. What a simply fantastic way to crash the worlds of Spiderman and Peter into one, which is again one of the running themes of that game's entire narrative. And a cold break from the expected into the cold truth of the stark and haunting. That moment, in print and in performance, might be one of the most powerful scenes I've personally experienced in Superhero media- all because the writers knew where to commit to really dig the dagger deep and twist the handle!

From this brief glance at some of the most interesting badguys of the past year (at least for me- I know Sekiro and Spiderman reach back quite a bit further) I think one general consensus we can draw is that the most effective villains marry the core conceit and theming of the story into themselves and commit to one extreme or the other. Whilst realism would demand the more mediated two-sided approach, our simple dopamine-craving minds respond much more to that clearly defined, cut between the lines, villain. (With a full stop) There is nuance, of course, for mediums, genres, themes and styles; but the talent of the storyteller is to recognise what works and figure out how to brew that same dish with different, sometimes wacky and bizarre, ingredients. Maybe unravelling these concepts will help enrich us, both in how we consume and conjure stories in the future. And maybe I'll try some similar investigations in the future, depending on how I feel about the topic.

Where does Dark Souls 2 fit into the canon? Seriously.

It's all so wrong but so right!

Yeah, this is another one of those blogs where I'm going to go in on something that only I care about, but that's what my entire online writing persona has been so far, so why change a good thing? So recently I've found myself thinking about Dark Souls, and that's been because it's shown up all over my Youtube recommendations for some reason. (Okay, I know the reason. I looked up Gwyn's theme to listen to it and that apparently opened the floodgates) And when you have a series with the level of complexity, nuance and esoteric context to it that Dark Souls does, when you start the thought train it's easy to derail into a rabbit hole. In fact, things grew so much that I literally redownloaded Dark Souls last night and am currently trying to do a light-armoured pyromancer run. (It's taking some adjusting but I'm getting there.) However, I'm not always thinking about the series in blind reverence of it. Sometimes my mind is grasped with other ponderous thoughts to the tune of "How in the heck does this work" or "Where does this fit in?" 

Of course, the beauty of Dark Souls is that these are the sorts of questions that you can debate about for hours without any resolution. For example; the theory of tracking down where the real Ornstein ended up, after coming to the contentious conclusion that the one who was guarding Gwynevere is apparently an illusion cooked up by her brother. (So her brother created an illusion to guard an illusion? Pretty metal.) One thread that came to my attention said, and bear with me here, Ornstein is actually the Stormdrake that The Nameless King rides into battle against you in Dark Souls 3. (Yeah, that's my reaction to.) Apparently based on the legend that one person managed to actually transform into a dragon a long time ago (something that the Dragon cults have been trying to replicate throughout the entire franchise) somepeople think that Ornstein also pulled it off and that's how his armour can be found discarded at Archdragon Peak and the reason why he became the student of The Nameless King, the reviled Dragon sympathiser that he was. (Like I said, Dark Souls lore gets freaking wild.) 

But if there's one question about Dark Souls in general that I think no amount of item descriptions, Titante slab rune deciphering, or wild half-baked metamorphosis-based theories can come to terms with, it's the question of where in the hell Dark Souls 2 fits in the franchise, because let's be honest, it doesn't. Recently James Davenport for PCGamer, who I assume had the exact same sudden reinterest in this franchise, also wrote a story about the spectacularly creative weirdness of Dark Souls, (Which is rather funny if you're interested; here) and I knew I had to voice my thoughts too. Now whereas he spoke about the thematic differences that Dark Souls 2 has to the franchise, I've been gripped by the narrative differences, but I think with both angles in mind you can really get an idea of what a weird game Dark Souls 2 really is in the grand scheme of things.

Firstly, allow me to hit you all with spoilers as I talk about the franchise as a whole. When you strip it down to it's base essence, Dark Souls is a story about the Age of Fire and its inevitable end. The Age of Ancients which preceded it was burnt away by this coming of the new order, and those who instigated that change are now terrified of the same happening to them and wiping away all that they accomplished. And if you think there's potentially some sort of analogue there, Janus Rose (sick name, by-the-by) of Vice wrote a pretty interesting piece on how Dark Souls can be seen as analogy for living in a modern world with capitalism. (Another recommended read, which you can see here) The first flame, the entity which is responsible for birthing all the powerful souls that give this world it's relevance, is the centre of almost every corner of this story and the question of whether to keep it alive, let it die or help in it's perishing, is the dilemma of the franchise.

Lord Gwyn, god of sunlight, rallied against the dying of the first flame and tried to do all he could to keep it alive. He ended up sacrificing his own brilliant soul to reignite things and keep it going but sometime before then he cursed those descendants of the Dark Soul, humans, with undeath for some unknown purpose. For the first game we are merely driven by legend and rumour about how the quest of the undead is to gather the Lord Souls and feed them to the flames, but by the final game it is the expected duty of the undead. In fact, those creatures of undeath that are condemned in the first game are regarded with honour in Dark Souls 3, because they alone hold the ability to keep the flame burning just that bit longer. So with that established, each Dark Souls story in some way should revolve around the duty of prolonging the flame of existence and what exactly such an act means, right?

Well not Dark Souls 2, apparently. Dark Souls 2 begins with the Bearer of the Curse being fraught with slivers of their life before undeath, visions that they end up chasing through the transitory plane of Things Betwixt. There they go in search of a curious goal when placed up against the rest of Dark Souls; a cure for undeath. Strangely personal of a quest in a franchise that usually tackles much more lofty concepts, huh? Once there, the Bearer is directed to the land of Drangleic to seek their answers, and one might be forgiven in thinking this will be a very straightforward tale of self discovery. For you see, that was just the sales pitch to get you through the door, from there everything goes out the window and the story becomes an insane free-for-all. (Forgive me if I forget some of the finer details, unlike with Davenport, this entire narrative blends into an insane dream to me.)

First of all you get told that you ain't getting into the Drangleic without first dealing with a few bosses that are scattered around the place, normal Dark Souls affair but not really tied with the discovery of a cure. Then once you get into Drangleic you get told, "uh-uh, You wanna be king then you gotta first deal with our Giant problem, because your Soul isn't big enough or something, I dunno." At which point you'll likely think something along the lines of, "No way, I already killed a dude called 'The Last Giant' in order to get here in the first place!" And then suddenly you realise that won't do, and you have to travel back in time and kill that same guy but back when he was strong. Oh, and you have to gather other Giant Souls too. Including one that belongs to a Dragon for some reason. (I guess he was a Giant Dragon, huh.) 

If you have the DLC then you'll find yourself dragged into another wild hunt that is only tangentially linked to whole 'arise to the throne' plot. You find yourself travelling to other kingdoms around Drangleic and find they've all fallen to ruin, not because of the fading of the flame like is the case of all the other stories in this franchise, but because of active sabotage by various Queens in these nations who, if you care enough to dig into it, are revealed to be fragments of Manus, Father of the Abyss, from Dark Souls 1's DLC. (Including the Queen of Drangleic, it should be said, so there's your connection.) So suddenly it's up to the Bearer to finish Artorias and the Chosen Undead's mission from the first Dark Souls and slay Manus for good. Great stuff, so then what happens at the end? Well with the DLC installed you have the choice to either sit upon the throne and await your eventual duty to relight the First Flame one day (That's right; you don't even get to do the one thing the series is all about!) or suddenly slap yourself in the face and realise, "Wait a minute, I came here looking for the cure to Undeath! This whole 'take the throne' garbage was sprung on me out of nowhere, that hag from Things Betwixt swindled me! I'm outta here!" That's right, the entirety of Dark Souls 2 is essentially a side quest.

Now I don't mean to rail on Dark Souls 2, I do still love the game afterall, but I just find it wild how literally nothing you do aides the wider narrative of the franchise at all. The whole plot about killing Manus' fragments merely works to resolve a problem that this story itself invented, Manus was as good as dead by the first game's story. The time-travelling battle with the giants is a strange diatribe in fighting and winning a war for a nation that, in the present day, falls to ruin anyway, so why bother? And the First Flame just feels like such an afterthought that Next Gen remasters of the game had to thrown in a new NPC who butts his way into the story after you slay each main boss in order to ramble about Lord Gwyn for five minutes so you can remember what franchise you're playing. Honestly, if Dark Souls 2 didn't have the name I think you could be forgiven for assuming it was a well done, but unrelated, spin off.

Usually people find themselves debating about whether or not Dark Souls 2 is a prequel or a Sequel to Dark Souls 1 and honestly, with how little it contributes to the overall narrative it doesn't even matter which it is! (Although, narratively it would be cleaner for it to be set afterwards because otherwise it tells the story of some doofus who accidentally gets himself set-up into being the successor to Lord Gwyn but then failed off-screen.) I just find it wild to think that a storyteller who appears as mysterious and meticulous as Miyazaki allowed the hilariously unfocused jaunt into the wild that was Dark Souls 2 to get made. (As that was the one Dark Souls he didn't direct) Although you know what, with how much it makes me smile to talk about, I wouldn't change a single thing about the nonsense plot or the crazy imaginative world. (With a stark exception given to 'Frigid Outskirts' from the Ivory King DLC. Literally the worst designed location in the entire franchise, bitterly hated that place.) I can only hope that future From Software and Miyazaki ventures leave room for the silliness of Dark Souls 2 in the future, it never hurts to go off on one now-and-then.