Archive for Books

Books

A Fresh Start

The last book I read hit so many of my buttons that it might as well have been written just for me, with a favorite trope executed in just the way I like. I checked it out of the library, but I bought the e-book before I was even done reading it so I could have a copy to keep. I suspect this will become a comfort read, something to turn to when I need to feel good.

The book is Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis. A man wakes in what’s clearly a dark wizard’s workroom in the aftermath of a spell gone wrong, with no memory of who he is, how he got there, or what happened. At first, he’s afraid of what the dark wizard will do to him, but then he comes to realize that he’s the dark wizard. The more he learns, the more disturbed he is by the kind of person he apparently is. He’s got a princess in his dungeon, his staff is terrified of him, and he’s part of some ritual being planned by another dark wizard. He’s not sure how he’s going to get out of it without his memories, but he also isn’t sure he even wants to be himself anymore, and he can’t rely on what he thinks he knows because nothing is as it seems.

I’m a total sucker for the plot trope I call “who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?” It’s a subset of the amnesia plot. The standard amnesia plot usually focuses on the character trying to find out who they are, but in this one the character learns fairly quickly who they are, and they don’t want to be that person. Minus the memories and baggage, they try to make a fresh start, but they still have to deal with the consequences of past actions that they don’t remember. That’s exactly what this story is about, with the character horrified of who he apparently used to be, trying to set things right, but still having to deal with the fallout from what he’s done. It reminds me a lot of the Moist von Lipwig books in the Discworld series, with a reforming rogue who’s developed a conscience.

There’s also an element of found family here, as he bonds with the castle’s staff, who are oddly loyal, considering how he seems to have treated them in the past, and then there are the villagers, who seem proud of their local dark wizard, even though he must have menaced them. Dealing with the other dark wizards requires putting together a wacky coalition of people he hurt in the past, and all the while he’s trying to figure out what kind of man he really is and what kind of man he wants to be.

The book is funny at times, but also gets serious and emotional. I ended up loving all the characters, and the ending was so satisfying. This seems to be a standalone novel (her next one is entirely unrelated), but it looks like there’s room to follow some of the characters as they have further adventures. They just wouldn’t be adventures related to this core conflict, so maybe it’s best to leave them alone to go on with their lives. I do want to know what happens to them, though.

I think my readers would enjoy this story because it’s fairly humorous fantasy with fun characters you enjoy spending time with. I guess you could even say there’s an adorkable wizard.

Books

Rewriting Dickens, With Bonus Magic

A few weeks ago when I was wondering if anyone had used Dickens as a foundation for fantasy books the way people use Shakespeare, the book A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry was recommended both here and on Blue Sky. I read it last week, and it was so good.

This book is a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, told from Sydney Carton’s perspective, with the premise that Charles Darnay was his changeling. Carton was abducted by fairies as a small child, with Darnay left as his changeling, then Carton was returned to the mortal world and given a new identity, but he’s still under the command of the fairies as a mortal servant. Mortal servants aren’t ever supposed to meet their changelings, but a court case brings them together, and Carton starts to suspect that there’s something going on in the fairy realm. When the French Revolution happens, Carton finds himself dealing with a family history he’s just started to discover, multiple factions of fairies and their own conflicts, plus the effects of the fairies interfering in the mortal world, along with the woes of the mortal world.

I haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities since I was in high school, so I don’t know if this meshes perfectly enough with it that you could read A Tale of Two Cities and imagine that this is what’s going on in the background and behind the scenes, but that’s the feeling I get from it, that the two books would mesh pretty well, with this one explaining things in A Tale of Two Cities, like two entirely unrelated people being so identical that they can pass for each other. I was the weird kid in high school who actually enjoyed reading A Tale of Two Cities. We were assigned a certain number of chapters a day, but I ended up just reading through the whole thing, and I remember crying at the end. Now I want to re-read it with this book in mind. I was on team Charles Darnay because I tend to like the nice guys rather than the bad boys, and the drunk wastrel of a lawyer held no appeal for me. This book explains why Carton’s a drunk — the fairies have a harder time finding him and knowing what he’s up to when he’s drunk or when alcohol’s around. I also now have a very different view of Carton based on this new backstory.

I found this book to be utterly engrossing. Even though I knew how it would end (unless it somehow changed the ending), I kept turning pages to see what happened. The depiction of the fairy Realm was interesting (and somewhat reminded me of my version from my Fairy Tale series — we seem to have used some of the same folklore source materials, though I never got into changelings and related topics and I took it in a very different direction). Really, the whole thing is a clever and fresh kind of fantasy.

Though I still think it would be interesting to take the plot of something like Bleak House and put it in a fantasy world. It might also be interesting to see what this author could do with Our Mutual Friend, set in this same universe, since that one also involves unrelated people who are identical enough to be mistaken for each other. That one might be a bit more challenging, though, since the double who’s not the book’s main character gets killed early in the book, so it would have to be a prequel leading up to the events of the book to give much of his point of view.

Books

Adorkable Wizard Romance

I seem to have overcome my reading slump. I’ve read several books since I started doing more pleasure reading a couple of weeks ago. Some weren’t the best, but were easy, fun reads. I did bail on a couple because I could tell I wasn’t going to enjoy them, for reasons related more to me than to the books themselves. One I really enjoyed sits right at the intersection of fantasy and romance, being both a good fantasy and a good romance. This book is Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis.

It’s the story of a young archduke who’s been under the control of his “advisors” since he took the throne as a child. Even as an adult, he’s essentially a prisoner and a puppet ruler with things done in his name that he would actually oppose. His only hope is to escape and throw himself on the mercy of the queen of a neighboring kingdom, a powerful witch. But there’s a bit of a mix-up when he arrives at her castle because she’s expecting a new librarian to come organize her library for her. He can do that, so he settles in. She really likes the new librarian, who’s sweet and a bit geeky, but good at what he does, and he finds that a lot of the stories about the dreaded witch queen are exaggerated, other than the extent of her power. There’s just the problem that she’s sworn to kill the archduke she believes is a threat to her kingdom, and then there are internal threats she’s battling, as well, as she tries to secure her throne after taking it back from a usurper. And his “advisors” who really run his land are gearing up for a terrible war.

This is more of an intimate fantasy than an epic fantasy, as it focuses mostly on a few characters and one location, but it digs deep into those characters. I loved the hero of this book. He’s exactly my “adorkable wizard” type. It’s so nice to read a romantic hero who’s kind, smart, and gentle, not a blustering jerk. The relationship developed not just based on physical attraction but also because these two people had common goals and values at heart, and they both had overcome trauma in their pasts.

There are fun little touches of humor, especially in the interactions with the sidekicks. It’s not quite a romantic comedy, but there are elements of that, and it’s not too dark. This really is the perfect book for a relaxing weekend when you want to escape to a magical world.

Books

The Rightful Heir

A few weeks ago, one of the things going around social media was discussion on the terrible novel you wrote when you were fourteen.

I didn’t really write a novel at fourteen. I scribbled a lot in spiral notebooks, but it was more story ideas and character development, with very little actual writing. Most of what I worked on during my teens was an epic fantasy novel a long-distance friend and I were “writing” together. Again, there was little actual writing. We made and mailed each other cassette tapes (talking into a tape recorder like we were talking to each other) brainstorming characters, situations, and scenarios, but I don’t think we actually wrote very much. I guess you could say it was kind of like a roleplaying game, but without the rules and dice. The main characters were two princesses forced to flee the palace for some reason (I’m now fuzzy on the details). She had her character and I had mine, and they split up to have separate adventures, so it ended up being basically two books that might weave in and out with each other. I came up with ideas for my character’s adventures and she came up with her character’s adventures.

The only thing I really remember about my part of the story was that my fugitive princess ended up in the woods (I guess I’ve always had a thing for forests) where she ran into a mysterious young man who took her home to where he lived with his mother, who was a kind of sorceress who lived in a cottage in the forest. Somewhere along the way we learned that he was actually the twin brother of the enemy king. The mother had been worried what her husband would do with a twin who might complicate the succession, so she had one of her advisors, a sorceress, smuggle him out of the palace and raise him in hiding. He was basically a male Briar Rose (from Sleeping Beauty), only there was still a prince at the palace. I think part of the resolution of the plot involved this princess marrying him, and it ended the war when he took his place as king (maybe they got rid of the other king and he pretended to be his brother?). I don’t know that we ever got as far as figuring out the actual ending because I didn’t learn how to plot a book until years later. I’d come up with characters, situations, and maybe an inciting incident and some scenes, but then it all fell apart.

But thinking about this long-abandoned story during the week in which we in America celebrate our break from being ruled by a king made me think about how royalist the old-school fantasy that influenced and inspired this story idea was. Fantasy authors seemed to take the concept of the divine right of kings and the belief that there was actually something different and special about royalty to extremes, making kings somehow magically ordained for their position so that having the rightful king would fix everything. That’s where we got all those farmboy who turns out to be the rightful heir stories, and it was better for a farmboy who had no experience in running a kingdom to be on the throne if he had the right bloodline than for someone without the bloodline but who was experienced in administration. The villains were often the viziers or royal advisors who seized power, then everything fell apart because they weren’t the rightful heirs, but the kingdom could be healed if the guy with the right bloodline showed up, even if he had no clue what he was doing.

Some of that might come down to the idea that anyone who actually wants power isn’t suited to have it, so the power-grabbing vizier is bad but the innocent farmboy who’d have been content herding pigs is good, but it still has to be the right farmboy who has the magical bloodline. They can’t just grab a clerk who knows how the kingdom is run but who doesn’t want to be in charge and make him king.

I suspect some of this comes from fairy tales, where there’s often something magical that sets royalty apart, like The Princess and the Pea, where only a true princess would be so delicate that she’d feel the pea under piles of mattresses. There’s also the Authurian mythology, where only the rightful king can pull the sword out of the stone. The British class system probably also plays a role. There seemed to really be a belief that the upper class was actually physically different from the lower classes. Even writers who were progressive for their time have hints of that showing up. In a couple of her books, Charlotte Bronte has her teacher heroine be surprised that the coarse peasant girls she teaches are actually capable of learning (instead of realizing that peasants were only ignorant because they were denied the kind of education the upper classes got and had to spend their days working in order to survive, so didn’t have time to sit around reading poetry and history and translating things from French and Latin).

Tolkien gets into the rightful king story with Aragorn, and how things are going to be better now that he’s shown up and the right bloodline is on the throne, and I suspect that was a huge influence on the fantasy of the 70s and 80s that influenced my teenaged self. In the very early 80s there was also the big royal wedding and Princess Di, so royalty was on the brain. Americans may have broken away from having a king but a lot of Americans are still fascinated with royalty and bloodlines, so it found its way into even American-written fantasy. Maybe there’s some fantasy to the idea that instead of having messy elections, there would be a way to know for certain that someone was the proper leader who could make everything better.

I think more recent fantasy has veered away from the idea of the rightful king who makes everything better because he’s meant to be on the throne. If there is a ruler who makes things better, it’s because he’s a good person who makes good policy (like The Goblin Emperor). Terry Pratchett had fun with the trope by having the rightful king who has all the usual signs not want to be king, and the people who could put him in power don’t want a king. He just steps up when there’s a crisis and provides leadership, then goes back to being a member of the guards. Still more recent fantasy focuses on people away from the throne. It’s ordinary people or people who have trained for a role having adventures, and the goal isn’t about putting the right king on the throne. Writers are also exploring forms of government other than monarchies in fantasy worlds.

I have to admit that there’s still something fun about the idea that the person nobody would notice is actually the person destined for greatness. That’s where a lot of the story my friend and I worked on as teenagers came from. In fact, it started as a portal fantasy in which her character was whisked away from her high school to a fantasy world where it turned out she was a princess, and only as we worked more on the story did we remove that part of it. When you’re feeling overlooked and outcast in high school, it’s fun to pretend that you’re royalty and no one knows about it.

This realization has made me think about my own fantasy worlds. The more history I read, the more it seems like European royalty was actually genetically inferior rather than superior. There was way too much inbreeding going on.

Books

Dickens With Magic?

Due to a random chain of events, I ended up rewatching the Bleak House miniseries over the last couple of weeks. There was an article in the paper about a man who learned that his ancestors were involved in one of the legal cases that inspired the book. Meanwhile I was reading a Star Wars book set nearly 20 years after Return of the Jedi, in which Wedge Antilles was a major character, and it occurred to me that the actor who played Wedge had one of the leading roles in Bleak House, though I think he’s older in that than Wedge was in the book. Anyway, I was in the mood for that sort of thing and it made for good background noise while I measured and pinned up some curtains I’m hemming.

But watching that made me wonder if anyone has used the works of Dickens as an inspiration or basis for a fantasy novel. There are a number of fantasy retellings based on the works of Shakespeare, whether directly and obviously or more subtly. For instance, Rachel Caine’s Prince of Shadows is Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters, giving background info that doesn’t appear in the play, like the fact that Romeo and Juliet were under the influence of a love spell (which would explain a lot). On the other hand, the Kingfountain series by Jeff Wheeler draws upon some Shakespeare plays, but set in a fantasy world. I don’t think he hides the inspiration, but it’s not too obvious. I remember reading one, getting midway through it and going, “Oh, he’s doing Richard III.”

But has the same thing been done with Dickens? It would seem particularly suited for epic fantasy, given that his books often cover long stretches of time and have large casts of characters. The setting is so much a part of the story that it’s practically a character, so it has tons of worldbuilding (even if the books were set in the real world, the details chosen to convey that world so that it’s vivid even to people who never saw that setting require the same sort of effort as portraying an imaginary world). The plots would translate easily into court intrigue. There are several of his books that fit the “farmboy with destiny” type trope of fantasy, with obscure young men who rise in the world and turn out to have some kind of inheritance. Fantasy might even make some of his plots make more sense, like his fondness for entirely unrelated people who look so much alike that people mistake them for each other.

I’ve learned that a fantasy retelling of A Tale of Two Cities has just come out, which uses changelings as the explanation for the two unrelated people who look the same. I’ll have to find that one. But is there a fantasy Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend? I could have fun figuring out how to put Our Mutual Friend in a fantasy world, with the inheritance being a crown instead of the proceeds from a dust heap. Bleak House is just made for a gothic retelling with sorcery.

And now I want to rewatch the miniseries of Our Mutual Friend. I don’t think I’m going to try to delve into reading Dickens right now. I’ve managed to ease my way out of my reading slump by reading shorter, more straightforward books without a lot of subplots. Trying to read Dickens right now would probably be a lost cause. That may be my winter project.

Books

Reading Slump

I’ve been in a weird reading slump since I started the moving process. I’ve only read about two novels (I’m almost done with the second) since I started packing back in early April, and that’s slow for me. I might manage to read a few pages at night before I go to sleep, but if I sit down to just read, I get distracted and restless and end up getting up to do something.

I checked a bunch of books on gardening out of the library, but I couldn’t even focus on those other than flipping through and looking at the pictures. I realized I’m nowhere near being ready for that, and what I need now isn’t a book that tells me what to plant but rather a book that tells me what to kill. I gave up and returned them all to the library.

Now that I’m finishing that second novel, I need to find something new to read. I have plenty of books on the to-be-read shelf, but if it’s languishing there, I’m probably not super interested in it. I need to make a library trip to find something that makes me want to sit down and just read.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to be in the kind of slump where I’m not interested in any books. It’s mostly been a distraction issue. But I probably need something that really captivates me and that isn’t too complicated to get over the distraction. Summer tends to be my chick lit/romcom phase, and I can usually tear through one of those pretty quickly. That might make a good thing to get for a starter book for getting back in reading mode. I have a few more curtains to hang and a piece of furniture to put together, and then there’s that crazy yard, but otherwise I’m getting to a point where I should be able to allow myself to sit and read and relax on a Sunday afternoon instead of working around the house.

I don’t think I have anything particular on the schedule for the weekend unless my next-door neighbors throw another spontaneous party like they did last weekend, other than church Sunday morning and an outing Sunday evening, so I think I’ll hit the library on Friday when I go out to run errands and then plan to spend some time during the weekend just sitting and reading and see if I can get back into the swing of things.

Books

Regency Magic

Before my life became consumed with moving and getting my house set up, I read a book that was a fun mix of two things I like, the Regency/Victorian house party comedy of manners and fantasy. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is what you get if you love Jane Austen type books but think they could use more magic.

An evil sorceress whose previous benefactor has proven unsatisfactory is on the hunt for a husband, and she settles on a wealthy squire, contriving a situation that gets her and her browbeaten teenage daughter invited to come stay with him and his spinster sister. The daughter, experiencing the kindness of good people for perhaps the first time in her life, can’t bear to let her mother hurt these people, and she joins forces with the squire’s sister to try to thwart her mother. And part of the scheme is a house party, as the sister invites her friends to come meet their new friends (and have backup).

The book reminds me of the movie Love and Friendship, which was (loosely) based on some of Jane Austen’s short fiction that wasn’t published in her lifetime. In fact, I kept picturing the villain as Lady Susan from that movie, as played by Kate Beckinsale. Just give that bitchy, manipulative woman magical powers that allow her to control others, and you have a similar situation.

A lot of the Regency romance tropes are present, including the awkward teen with the marriage-minded mother, the handsome old flame of the older woman, and lots of drawing room intrigue, but all with the awareness of magic at work and non-magical people having to figure out how they can stand against powerful magic. The book was both fun (and funny) and scary, and it was rather moving at times. It held my interest at a time when my brain was beginning to spiral with distraction.

I haven’t been able to read much since then because I get very easily sidetracked by things I feel like I should do, or else I get an idea for solving a problem in the house and get lost in online research to see if the products I need exist. I try to read a little bit before bed, but I fall asleep within a few pages. It seems that a day full of physical activity is good for your sleep.

I have my downstairs great room (kitchen, living/dining room) more or less set up, though there are some things in there that will need to be put away elsewhere when I have the way cleared for them. My new office furniture is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, so I can get my office set up. Then next week I’m going to make a road trip to the D.C. suburbs to hit Ikea and see if the loveseat I like online will actually work, plus I’ll pick up some organizing and storage stuff for my clothes and some pantry shelving. That will make it easier to finish unpacking. I’m hoping once everything is more or less where it belongs and there aren’t piles and boxes everywhere it’ll be easier for me to focus on both reading and writing.

writing, Books

Tired of Tropes?

One of the hot topics in the writing world lately has been tropes. These are familiar story elements that you see in many works. They’re the sort of thing you look at as a reader and say, “Oh, I like that.”

Some examples include things like friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, marriage of convenience, grump/sunshine (in which one member of the couple is kind of a grouch and the other is more sunny, often bringing about emotional healing for the grump).

Most of the more common examples come from the romance world, but some fantasy ones I can think of include the Chosen One (the hero is the subject of some sort of destiny or prophecy), the Lost Heir (the farmboy/kitchen assistant who’s the rightful heir to the throne, sometimes also a Chosen One), the Unlikely Hero (ordinary person is in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to carry out some heroic task), You’re a Wizard! (person discovers they have magical powers), and Portal to a Magical World (people from our world visit a fantasy world — think Narnia).

There’s been a lot of discourse among writers about whether this emphasis on tropes is good or bad. They’re a big part of “writing to market,” in which you find out what things are popular and write that, and in marketing. Letting readers know that the things they like are in your books helps them know what books they might want. Tropes are a big element in what’s hot on TikTok, but book graphics showing the tropes in a book have been popular all over social media, like this one I did for Tea and Empathy:

Shows book cover for Tea and Empathy on the screen of an e-reader being held by hands. Text around it with arrows pointing to book reads "Amnesia, Found Family, Mysterious Village, Grump/Sunshine"

On the other hand, there are starting to be complaints about books that feel like they’re basically a bunch of tropes stuck together without any depth and about readers who treat the trope list as a checklist, so they only read the books with their chosen trope. There are writers who focus their writing one one popular trope, since that’s what their readers want.

I like the idea of getting information to help me find books that have things in them that I like, but the things I’d look for tend to be a lot more complicated than you can get in one of those trope graphics. For instance:

  • The road trip/quest adventure in which characters gradually become friends or fall in love as they face adversity together.A
  • December-set romantic comedy that’s not explicitly a Christmas book, but that just happens to have some of those vibes as a backdrop to the story.
  • The Worst/Best Thing — the worst thing that can happen in a person’s life may also be the best because they wouldn’t have reached their full potential otherwise (think the movie Titanic. Being on the Titanic was probably the worst thing that could happen to Rose, but if it hadn’t happened, her life would have been very different)
  • In Another Time/Place — people meet in different timelines/realities and are always drawn to each other, though in some of these there are complications (this isn’t the same as Fated Mates because it’s not really about fate or destiny in which they have no choice about being together, but rather that they’re so perfectly suited for each other that no matter when or where they meet, they’ll fall in love)
  • So Bad at It That They’re Actually Good — when someone who seems like a failure at something (usually magic) turns out to actually be really good at some related thing, and they were only failing because they were trying to do something that didn’t fit their abilities. In fantasy, it’s usually the failed student wizard who turns out to be able to do a rare kind of magic no one else can do that uses a different kind of power and skill than regular magic.

Try fitting those into a hashtag!

I don’t think there’s any harm in fitting things you and readers love into your books, in letting readers know about the elements that are in your books, or in looking for elements you love when choosing what to read. I just worry about readers who only want to read one thing or writers who feel constrained into writing only one thing because that’s what their readers want. I can barely write one subgenre for more than a few books without going stir crazy. That may be why I’m only moderately successful rather than making the big bucks. Of course, people are free to read what they want to read, but it seems weird to me to not only limit yourself to one genre, but to one kind of story in one genre. That would be like reading the same book over and over again. I’m also not fond of the idea of boiling a whole story down to one element. I have a list of things I look for and get excited about when I find them (sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise when they come up in a book and I wasn’t expecting them), but that’s not all I read.

Books

Tea and Fortunes

I recently read a book that was absolutely warm and delightful, perfect for if you need something that makes you feel good and believe that humanity may be worthwhile after all. I think a lot of my readers might want to check out The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong.

The book is about an immigrant fortuneteller who travels with her mule and wagon, telling only small fortunes—not major events or big futures, but little things that might affect individuals in small ways. She’s been fine being alone, but then she finds herself traveling with others as they join up with her. There’s a former thief and his former warrior friend who’s searching for his lost daughter, then later an aspiring baker seeking adventure. They all team up to travel in search of the lost child, but then the fortuneteller catches the attention of the mages, who believe anyone with any power has to work for them.

This book has a lot of things I love in a story. There are great arcs for all the characters. There’s a lovely sense of found family, with strangers coming to form bonds and look after each other. People make good decisions. The ending is so satisfying. I got this from the library, but I think I’ll be buying a keeper copy because this is very much a comfort read kind of book. There is some tension, but it’s not uncomfortably stressful.

You may want to have baked goods and tea handy for reading, though. All the talk about the tea the fortuneteller serves and all the talk about baked goods will make you hungry for tea and rolls. You find yourself wanting to drink tea, eat baked goods, and hang out with these people.

This is essentially a standalone novel. Everything is wrapped up for these characters, but it looks like there’s another book set in this world coming later in the year. I’ll definitely be looking out for that.

writing, Books, TV, movies

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.