• Mariner
    374
    Disclaimer: The only fantasy world that I claim to be an expert on is the Tolkienian work. There may be lost of errors in what follows, due to my lack of familiarity with the details of the stories mentioned.

    I was thinking about a unifying theme of fictional villains, in modern (pop) works of fiction.

    Harry Potter has Voldemort, the Death Eaters, and the Ministry of Magic (which is surely villainous in its general scope and in its particular actions).

    Hunger Games has the Capitol and attending leaders (the President and helpers).

    The Twilight series has the bad-ass vampires who want to ensure that the (kind of) renegade vampire family to which Edward belongs to is disciplined.

    I had come this far when I considered the Avengers. And here I got into a test case for the underlying hypothesis that the former stories were sustaining. It is a good moment to formulate it explicitly: villains are lawful. If you have a D&D background (as I do), you'll remember that "Lawful Evil" monsters are not as common as the "Chaotic Evil" ones. D&D players usually associate "Lawful" with being a hero; in the old systems, Paladins (a class which, as the name implies, is supposed to be crystal clear in its purity) must always be "Lawful Good", and suffer penalties if they stray from Goodness or lawfulness.

    So, for a D&D player like me, "villains are lawful" is not an intuitive proposition.

    Let's look at the Avengers then. The villains in the movies are Loki, Thanos, and some others which appear in fewer movies (such as Cate Blanchett's Hel). They (with perhaps the exception of Thanos -- but it is not clearcut) do not stray from the theory -- they want to rule, rather than to create chaos (i.e., they are lawful).

    But if we look at what is probably the most interesting of the Avengers movies, Civil War, we have a movie with no clearcut villain. The conflict between Iron Man and Captain America appears to have equally matched sides. Yet, for my sensibility, and I suppose the writers sensibility as well (writers here being referred to movies and comics, as I understand -- perhaps mistakenly -- that the story was not greatly modified by the passage to the screens), there is a right side and a wrong side. Captain America is the right side, and Iron Man is the wrong side. It would be too much to say that Iron Man is a villain in this movie, but I would agree if someone said that Iron Man is a 'villain-in-training" there, and that if the character does not evaluate the result of his choices in the aftermath of the story, he would be moving along the villain track.

    This proposition (villains are lawful) can be taken to real life (after all, all stories are about real life) with little loss. The reason behind their lawfulness is that law is a very powerful instrument for dealing with people, and evil people crave power.

    I'm not saying anything original here, of course. The interplay between power (over other people) and evil is well known. And the circularity of the relationship is also well known: the powerful have strong temptations to become evil; the evil have strong temptations to become powerful. The only thing that can be done about this is to fight power, particularly in its "lawful" incarnation, which is the most encompassing and reaching.

    The D&D system was quite wrong about this. Goodness and Lawfulness is an extremely unstable combination (the game treated it as basically the norm -- an evil conceptualization!), and it will quickly deteriorate into either Evil or Chaos. I guess the bottomline, is that, even if it sounds tautological, it is better to be Good -- therefore, we should prefer Chaos to Law, as a matter of principle (which means, we should not be trying to formulate laws according to what we perceive to be best).

    A roundabout way to think about my anarchic tendencies, but I had fun with it.
  • frank
    14.5k
    Goodness and Lawfulness is an extremely unstable combinationMariner

    I think because it represents the end of the story. If the mind dwells on it for too long, the beginnings of a new story will appear. Manifestations of chaos are sources of imbalance that set events in motion. Sauron is a prime example. As his influence takes shape in the world, a story comes into being. The world wakes up, so to speak. Characters begin quests which will reveal to them and to the world who they really are.

    Chaos is the unanswered question. It's the problem to solve. It's the source of the adventure. It's a servant of life.
  • Mariner
    374
    Sauron and Saruman (to say nothing of Melkor, their mentor) are representatives of Law in this dynamic. Do you remember Saruman's words to Gandalf when he was trying to convince him to join them? "Knowledge, Rule, Order". That is his motto. A lot of good it did him :).

    But this is perhaps a nitpick. I agree that Chaos is the servant of life, and that is one of the main points of this reflection. What I noticed there is that Law:Chaos is a polarity that is often presented as analogous to Good:Evil, but that the evidence of modern pop fiction runs contrary to the analogy, and I agree with the artists behind those conceptions. There are other polarities which are not as stark as they seem at first glance. One of them is War:Peace. I (a pacifist) am confounded by the need that my mind presents, of accepting the Heraclitus quote that "all things are born in War", i.e., that War, taken symbolically, is on the side of Good (and Peace is on the side of Evil! or at least on the side of Death, in the Life:Death polarity). What Heraclitus was pointing at, I suppose, is precisely this Law:Chaos dynamic.
  • frank
    14.5k
    "Knowledge, Rule, Order".Mariner

    That's also what Satan offered Eve and Jesus. Jesus rejects power and dies having been identified as an agent of chaos. Is that how you see Christianity? What is Satan supposed to be?
  • Mariner
    374
    Good question.

    I don't think that Satan is a villain, although his influence (obviously) produces villains. Satan does not want power. He (as I picture him) is more of an evil trickster than a tyrant. As for the interaction between Satan and Jesus in Matthew, I find it closer to an attempt to trip Jesus than an attempt to dominate Him.

    In the "Story of Humanity" as seen by (my) Christian eyes, the villain is Man (influenced by Satan), rather than Satan himself.
  • frank
    14.5k
    In the "Story of Humanity" as seen by (my) Christian eyes, the villain is Man (influenced by Satan), rather than Satan himself.Mariner

    Maybe Satan is there because God needs him for the sake of the story. In Jungian psychology, the villain is the hero's shadow. Like with Batman and the Joker: Batman is an ambiguous character. The Joker is Batman's dark side brought into the light of day. Or something like that.
  • Judaka
    1.7k
    Doesn't Baldur's gate have a lawful evil alignment?

    Anyway, if you want villains who had the law on their side, why bother with fiction?
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    Disclaimer: The only fantasy world that I claim to be an expert on is the Tolkienian work. There may be lost of errors in what follows, due to my lack of familiarity with the details of the stories mentioned.Mariner

    'Lost of errors' seems appropriate. It is surely the mark of a fantasy world that it separates neatly into heroes and villains? Consider this supposedly real debate: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/13/winston-churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-says-john-mcdonnell?CMP=fb_gu&fbclid=IwAR38Zlf2KB9cYnRojSxqfwTDVC7XtNbthDLGc0LEI2TIP9hE-koydyIVge8

    The fantasy is that there is a right and wrong view, as if Eve could-have/should-have eaten the apple of the tree of knowledge of good without evil. As if a law could mandate one thing without forbidding another.
  • Mariner
    374


    Well, I don't know if you are arguing for "Villains do not exist" or for "everybody is a villain". I would agree with both. Which is why fictional examples are best.

    Perhaps you are arguing that what we learn from studying fictionalized villains should not be used in interpreting the non-fictional world... but I don't see any argument supporting that. Sure, in the non-fictional world, no one is pure villain (or pure hero), but does that mean that we should not orient ourselves according to this spectrum of possibilities?
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    Sure, in the non-fictional world, no one is pure villain (or pure hero), but does that mean that we should not orient ourselves according to this spectrum of possibilities?Mariner

    My link is to the purported non-fictional world, I suppose, and folks are orienting themselves according to just the sort of outstanding landmarks that would appear on a mythological map. Churchill - nobody thinks he was pure anything - stands out as extreme, either hero or villain, and people orient themselves in opposing directions. It's not that we should not, but it seems we cannot orient ourselves in this way with any certainty.

    I think my argument, such as it is, is that to orient oneself in reality according to fantasy criteria is to live in fantasy; the world in which Churchill is hero or villain - in which anyone is hero or villain - is a fantasy world, not the non-fictional world people take it for.
  • Mariner
    374
    I think my argument, such as it is, is that to orient oneself in reality according to fantasy criteria is to live in fantasy; the world in which Churchill is hero or villain - in which anyone is hero or villain - is a fantasy world, not the non-fictional world people take it for.unenlightened

    I doubt you consistently follow your own suggestion here. What do you think of Paulo Freire?

    I think we need heroes and villains (role models if you wish to extract the directionality), and fiction is an excellent place to get them -- precisely because "real life" is so ambiguous.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    I doubt you consistently follow your own suggestion here. What do you think of Paulo Freire?Mariner

    My impression is that he follows my suggestion rather better than I do. I think he might say that a hero is a personification of an ideology, and an ideology in practice has victims to whom the hero is a villain; and it is the victims' job to liberate us from our heroes.
  • Mariner
    374
    My impression is that he follows my suggestion rather better than I do.unenlightened

    That makes him a role model, right?

    Hard to escape that one, friend.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    That makes him a role model, right?Mariner

    No. He's following me, I'm not following him. It just looks that way because he's ahead. :razz:
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