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Worlds of Design: "Your Character Wouldn't Do That"
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7832848" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Possibly. And the BBEG is often also the boss monster as well, so sometimes using the term interchangeably is fine.</p><p></p><p>The truth is though most of us happy to use the term are happy with how the other people using the term in the thread are using it. The agreement we have over what the term means is much larger than the differences we may or may not have in our understanding of it.</p><p></p><p>More to the point, pretty much all of your complaints could be made against the term "villain" as well. The only stories where the term "villain" is unambiguous are stories that have a particular implied structure. In the more complex universe of stories, the term villain becomes ambiguous enough that different consumers of the story will disagree over whether the story has a villain or who the villain is.</p><p></p><p>Take a story like "Whale Rider". Is the Grandfather Koro the villain of the story? Well on one level maybe, in that Koro's decisions are in many ways driving the conflict in the story, and in particular the story is largely about the conflict between Koro and Paikea. But how do you reconcile a claim that he is with the protagonists great respect and affection for him? In fact, the protagonist is trying very hard to be more like Koro. This defies easy characterization. So is the villain here the son who has abandoned Paikea and the rest of his responsibilities and is spending his life in selfish self-expression? Is the villain the members of the tribe that are engaged in drug use and indolent behavior? Or is the villain a system that both Koro and Paikea are in their own way fighting against, and if that is the case what does it mean to call something that isn't tangible much less personified a "villain".</p><p></p><p>When you start looking at the universe of story villains, you start realizing that "villain" is an inadequate word and that you need more language to describe all the different types of bad guys, antagonists, and villains that can populate a story. Yes, it is true that these terms will imply a certain story structure, because a villain drives the conflict and thus the story. But the fact that we can label the sorts of villains that appear in different story structures doesn't negate the utility of those terms.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7832848, member: 4937"] Possibly. And the BBEG is often also the boss monster as well, so sometimes using the term interchangeably is fine. The truth is though most of us happy to use the term are happy with how the other people using the term in the thread are using it. The agreement we have over what the term means is much larger than the differences we may or may not have in our understanding of it. More to the point, pretty much all of your complaints could be made against the term "villain" as well. The only stories where the term "villain" is unambiguous are stories that have a particular implied structure. In the more complex universe of stories, the term villain becomes ambiguous enough that different consumers of the story will disagree over whether the story has a villain or who the villain is. Take a story like "Whale Rider". Is the Grandfather Koro the villain of the story? Well on one level maybe, in that Koro's decisions are in many ways driving the conflict in the story, and in particular the story is largely about the conflict between Koro and Paikea. But how do you reconcile a claim that he is with the protagonists great respect and affection for him? In fact, the protagonist is trying very hard to be more like Koro. This defies easy characterization. So is the villain here the son who has abandoned Paikea and the rest of his responsibilities and is spending his life in selfish self-expression? Is the villain the members of the tribe that are engaged in drug use and indolent behavior? Or is the villain a system that both Koro and Paikea are in their own way fighting against, and if that is the case what does it mean to call something that isn't tangible much less personified a "villain". When you start looking at the universe of story villains, you start realizing that "villain" is an inadequate word and that you need more language to describe all the different types of bad guys, antagonists, and villains that can populate a story. Yes, it is true that these terms will imply a certain story structure, because a villain drives the conflict and thus the story. But the fact that we can label the sorts of villains that appear in different story structures doesn't negate the utility of those terms. [/QUOTE]
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