The Endless Road

How sympathetic should you make your villains?

Let me be the first to acknowledge that this is a difficult question. Unless your villain is a world-destroying demon, or some other personification of evil, most "enemy" characters are likely to be humans - with their own hangups, motivations, and ideologies. Given this, it's terribly easy for one man's villain to be another man's cool anti-hero - witness the idolatry of a certain obnoxious young Harry Potter character by some sections of that particular fandom.

This becomes all the more difficult when you're telling a story of history and politics, where realism is important, and your characters can't be cardboard cutouts. If I were to ask you if, say, Margaret Thatcher or Mikhail Gorbachev was a "villain", your answer would depend largely on your own culture, belief system and nationality.

So how does one create a Thatcher or a Gorbachev in a fictional world?

It's not easy, but I'm trying. At the end of the day, though some of my characters behave in reprehensible ways, none of them are irredeemably evil, and it is possible to feel some sympathy for any of them. What you feel (or fail to feel) depends not only on them, but on you and me. Take Victor Otranto, a political leader in my story. He has good motives, but he also is party to some horrendous deeds (though how horrendous you consider them depends on your position on the political spectrum). Is he a villain? I wouldn't go so far as saying that, but neither do I want him idolized and seen as "a nice guy who's just misunderstood".

In the meantime, if you're in the mood to kill several hours, here's my first full-length work of fiction in over 16 years. It's a crossover pile-up between The Way, Romancing Walker and Love and War, but it's set largely in the latter universe, and having played LAW will certainly enhance your enjoyment thereof. It's missing a few chapters, but I'm putting it out there before it gathers too much dust on my laptop.

rpgmaker.net/users/Professor_Q/locker/The_Romance_of_the_Way__Complete.pdf

Next update: how the intro to The Year of the Cat took shape.