Villains

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.