Ooooh I hates them, precious!

By that I mean O’Brian and Thomas on Downton Abbey.

I recently became hooked and hooked hard on Downton Abbey this past weekend and as each show progressed I hated, hated, HATED O’Brian (Lady Grantham’s ladies maid) and Thomas (Footman, aspiring to be valet).

They conspired. They had nothing pleasant to say. They were sneaky and down-right mean, but damn were they ever fascinating.

They are characters I love to hate. They’re also characters I want to know more about.

Especially now Season 2 is over.

Season 2 had me pitying Thomas. He was stuck in the trenches of WWI as a medic, trembling in fear because he was at the mouth of Hell. I didn’t envy him and his fear made him all the more real. His desperate action to get out of the war was cowardly, but again I don’t blame him for his moment of cowardice that got him discharged (I don’t want to say because I don’t want to give out any spoilers, but I was cringing when it happened). World War 1 was horrific and sad as any war is.

It gave another layer to Thomas and as much as he was still a bastard as Season 2 went on there were moments where I loved him as well. I found him more interesting than the “hero” of the servants Mr. Bates.

O’Brian was the same for Season 2. She did something horrible in Season 1 and she was so pinched faced and nasty I really, really loathed her. From the author stand point I couldn’t help but wonder what made her tick.

She never has anything nice to say about any one. Nor is she particularly loyal, maybe loyalish to Thomas, but that’s about it.

Until a certain Mr. Lang came to Downton suffering from PTSD. She was the only one who had any feeling for him. The only one who comforted him because her brother suffered from it and he was sent back before he should’ve been and was killed.

O’Brian’s past had been a bit of mystery up until that point.

As for her dreadful deed in Season 1, when her ladyship was on her deathbed she tearfully apologized, which surprised me. Again emotion so different from the cold fish, deadpan we received in Season 1.

I want to know more and more about them and I hope we see learn more about them as Season 3 progresses.

They’re truly fascinating and interesting villains. I think if they left, it wouldn’t be as interesting. These two have moved up the list on villains I love to hate.

Villians -- the best we love to hate

There are a lot of really great villains out there, in books and in TV and movies. There are a few things that make a villain a good antagonist (and they're not always the same, BTW), but I tell newer writers when they ask me that they have to remember a few things about villains.

1) Make the villain sympathetic. At least a little bit. Now that sounds weird, I know, and I'll explain in a minute. We shouldn't like him right away, of course, because we have to grow to love our protagonist and dislike our villain, but at some point we have to understand at least a little bit of why he's doing what he's doing. There are exceptions, and because they ARE exceptions, they can be insanely scary. But if your villain is just a mustache-twirling guy doing something mean for the sole purpose of being mean, well, he'll probably come across as one-dimensional and not very good.

2) One thing you must remember, the most important thing when writing a villain/antagonist:

They think they are right.

They are the hero in their own story. The story you're reading, the story the author wrote, is from the protagonist's POV. But if you were to write it from the antagonist's POV, you'd have to turn it on its head and make that villain the hero. Which is why I usually give my antagonist some kind of backstory, even if it's only in my head, because that will color everything he does. This also can help with the sympathetic bit, if the villain's backstory is kind of sad.

My top-five villains:

1) Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty): She is deliciously bad, but again, she has a reason for doing it. Revenge is a really great motivation for kicking some butt. And she turns into a dragon. Which is just awesome.

2) Voledmort: how can you not love to hate old Voldy? It takes five books to discover his back story, but it's SO GOOD. By the very end, you do feel a little bit bad for him, because he's had a bad life-- orphaned (like Harry), rejected by his birth father who was a Muggle. Who wouldn't be a little bitter against Muggles after that? He wanted to conquer death, and well, things got a little out of control. By the end of the series he's a little more pathetic than frightening, and you still want Harry to win but you still feel a little bad. Voldemort's had a sad kind of life.

3) The Master (Doctor Who): Many people have played The Master over the 50 years the series has been on the air, but the latest reincarnation--oops, I mean regeneration-- was by far the best. I loved to hate that guy! He was bad, evil, mean, and just plain silly. He was a little bit psychotic, but he was driven mad by looking into the Time Vortex when he was a boy. Hey, it happens. And all he wanted was a planet to call his own, since Gallifrey went teets-up. Who doesn't want that? His humor made all the killing and Earth taking-overing just seem a little more fun.

4) The Joker (Heath Ledger version): this is the exception to the rule of the sympathetic villain. You never really know The Joker's backstory, not really. There's no motivation for his behavior that we ever know. And this is why he's so great, so terrifying, because he's one of the very few villains who just wants to watch the world burn.

5) You tell me. Who do you think should fill this spot, and why? What villains do you love to hate?

On Villains

I've started writing a new book, and so far I love it. Except for one bit, which I hated and already rewrote. Which is usually the way it goes - I have book-love/book-hate. The problem was that I just sat down and wrote, which is okay, but all this backstory came out. Long block of narrative. So I figured out a way to weave it into some character-revealing action and I like it better.

Anyway, not what I wanted to talk about. This book that I'm writing is a Cinderella retelling set in 19th c. Philadelphia. I have all the characters in my head, if not yet on paper, and I was thinking about my villain. It's no secret who the villain will be - the step-mother- but the other day I was considering something that came up in my course on Narration. About the depth of characters. Characters have depth, or dimension, when you 'round' them out. What the heck does that mean? In the case of villains, it means that they can't be all bad. If they're all bad, they become the moustache-twirling cartoon villains that tie girls to railroad tracks. Melodramatic, and flat.

A good villain has personality. Maybe he's got witty comebacks, or does things with unusual flair. The point is that you see him as a person and not just 'the antagonist', or 'the bad guy'. There are reasons for what he or she does, and the reader needs to understand them, even if they don't agree. I don't mean that villains need to be sympathetic, although they certainly can be - that's another issue altogether. But the best villains are those that the reader can look at and say, 'yes, I get it'. There can't just be random meanness. Villains have feelings too, you know.

In most fairy tales, the villain is a little flat, though not always. Snow White's stepmother was jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty. Vain, yes, but it was a reason and one most can relate with, although we would never go to such extremes in order to see our vanity fulfilled. The Sea Witch in the Little Mermaid was a business woman. She wasn't evil, per se, but making a transaction with a tough contract.

You see where I'm going. A good writer will try and see the villain's POV and make is come through. You don't have to like the bad guy, but unless you want the readers to laugh at them, they need to have dimension and substance. Even Voldemort. I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last week, and re-read the book. This was the book where we learned more about Voldy, whom up to that point was just a big meany. But when we find out he was an orphan, and get a glimpse into his life before he turned into Voldemort, well, I don't necessarily feel bad for him, but I can finally kind of get where he was coming from. It didn't play well in the movie, they skipped most of it. So much more the shame for those who haven't read the books, because Voldy is a great villain, even better when you know where he came from.

Back to my WIP. Cinderella's stepmother sometimes gets a bad rap, but I see her POV. She, like Snow White's stepmom, was jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty, but not for herself. She wanted her own daughters to get ahead. To marry the prince. No matter that they were all horrible people, it was a mother's love. I thought about it for awhile, and my stepmother has a whole other backstory that involves 19th c. society, property laws, and all this other stuff. You won't like her, but you will get her. Because I had to in order to make her more than just another cardboard villain. (the stepsister is a whole other story, I've got glorious good plot twists in store for her!)

So, think about the best villains you've ever read, and see if you can't figure out why you like them so much, or rather, like to hate them.

Christine Norris
www.christine-norris.com