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A Story is Only as Good as its Villain
I think, in many ways, a villain makes or breaks a story.
Having a hero is all well and dandy but, alas, heroes can be boring. They always represent the good — morality, compassion, ethics, all those lovely things which prevent society from breaking into outright anarchy, but ultimately the hero can be kinda boring. They’re constrained by the expectations of the ‘good’, by what is right and by the values upheld by society.
The villain, on the other hand, is not constrained by rules nearly as stringent — they have freer reign — they can play with what’s acceptable and what isn’t, which ultimately makes them far more interesting.
After all, we humans do have a dread fascination with the darker side of the our psyches — with those dark thoughts we have but we know we should never share, even those ones we know we shouldn’t even think, because they would never be accepted by civilised society.
Villains personify the dark side of humanity, some represent the dread we find in ourselves. In a story the antoganist sets the difficulty level. The benchmark. Hence my belief that a story is only as good as its villain, and there are two fictional villains I measure all other villains against.
