This is great advice. You have to treat both heroes and villains as something beyond the stereotypes associated with both roles to make them believable.
I think first and foremost, a villain must present an obstacle to the heroes in a compelling way. Everything else is a matter of taste, whether it be the villain being likable or competent or anything else.
I love the villains. I like to make them as likeable as I can, as long as they're flawed. The more understanding they are towards their goal, and the easier they are to like, the better it is when they do the bad stuff. Sometimes, you can understand their motives and actually agree with them--until they cross the line and do the unthinkable...like kill someone. Love me a good bad guy!
I remember reading long ago that actors playing villains in soap operas got far more fan mail than anyone else on the shows. I also remembered how horrified JK Rowling was over the amount of fan fiction that portrayed Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter as drawn to each other romantically. That's a pretty improbable pairing, even if they had compatible sexual preferences, but those fans obviously saw Draco as having some redemptive qualities.
It's worth noting that Iago, the villain in Othello, is a much better character from an acting standpoint than Othello, despite the fact that Othello is incontrovertibly the tragic hero. Iago is brave, intelligent, and is given some logical grievances, but beyond that, it's hard to find any redeeming qualities. Yet he is not, as a guest speaker in one of my college courses, an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company, pointed out, a cardboard cutoff. When I was teaching Othello at the high school level and using in-class readings to help students get into the play, I always did Iago. He has a surprising emotional range, and his sheer delight in manipulating people is fun to play.
Epic fantasy (or even contemporary fantasy on an epic scale) may be a partial exception to the general rules you state. It's pretty hard to portray Sauron as having redemptive qualities, at least in his current manifestation. The same is true of Lord Voldemort, who has parted company with his humanity. And if the villain is Satan, same problem, though Milton pulled that off for the recently fallen Satan in Paradise Lost. But aside from such genre-specific exceptions, your points would fit most villains.
This is great advice. You have to treat both heroes and villains as something beyond the stereotypes associated with both roles to make them believable.
I think first and foremost, a villain must present an obstacle to the heroes in a compelling way. Everything else is a matter of taste, whether it be the villain being likable or competent or anything else.
The obstacle part is a given. Crafting the rest is very important to readers.
I love the villains. I like to make them as likeable as I can, as long as they're flawed. The more understanding they are towards their goal, and the easier they are to like, the better it is when they do the bad stuff. Sometimes, you can understand their motives and actually agree with them--until they cross the line and do the unthinkable...like kill someone. Love me a good bad guy!
Food for thought!
I remember reading long ago that actors playing villains in soap operas got far more fan mail than anyone else on the shows. I also remembered how horrified JK Rowling was over the amount of fan fiction that portrayed Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter as drawn to each other romantically. That's a pretty improbable pairing, even if they had compatible sexual preferences, but those fans obviously saw Draco as having some redemptive qualities.
It's worth noting that Iago, the villain in Othello, is a much better character from an acting standpoint than Othello, despite the fact that Othello is incontrovertibly the tragic hero. Iago is brave, intelligent, and is given some logical grievances, but beyond that, it's hard to find any redeeming qualities. Yet he is not, as a guest speaker in one of my college courses, an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company, pointed out, a cardboard cutoff. When I was teaching Othello at the high school level and using in-class readings to help students get into the play, I always did Iago. He has a surprising emotional range, and his sheer delight in manipulating people is fun to play.
Epic fantasy (or even contemporary fantasy on an epic scale) may be a partial exception to the general rules you state. It's pretty hard to portray Sauron as having redemptive qualities, at least in his current manifestation. The same is true of Lord Voldemort, who has parted company with his humanity. And if the villain is Satan, same problem, though Milton pulled that off for the recently fallen Satan in Paradise Lost. But aside from such genre-specific exceptions, your points would fit most villains.