Categorization

What qualifies a villain to be discussed here?  Lots of things.   The simplistic dictionary definition of a villain is someone who is the antagonist of a story or doing immoral deeds.  It’s that shifty guy up to no good.  The term connotes a certain amount of power.  It’s the guy in charge who’s orchestrating everything, rather than the henchmen army.  Although there are instances where a henchmen or a minor villain is the more interesting character than the big bad at the top of the pyramid. 

The villain can be the protagonist.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  Assigning blame and righteousness is a murky undertaking.  No one thinks they are the villain.  Everyone justifies their own wants and actions in their head, no matte how deluded those reasons seem to other people.   A recent trend in fiction is to examine a story from that antagonist’s perspective and look at a new side of the story, like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, or Joss Whedon’s “Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”

There’s debatable territory with anti-heroes.  I will stay away from those, since they have the dreaded h-word in the name.  Villains also imply control and intelligence, so beast-like monster shouldn’t be included in this category either.   They will probably end up in here anyway, because I have seen far too many b-movies in my life not to talk about them. 

The villain generally has to be a single identifiable character or organization, be they human, alien, animal or vegetable.  Larger forces like nature and society are too vague for my purposes.   Anti-heroes aside, a character can be their own worst enemy and struggle against the dark side of their own personality like in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

With that out of the way, let’s observe some bad guys!