Writing bad guys has never been a strong suit of mine, especially the kind that make readers want to scream in outrage at the book (i.e. Professor Deloris Umbridge from Harry Potter, or Jack from Outlander, etc…). I want my villain to be HATED, not just disliked, but HATED. Any tips, or experienced tricks, on how to accomplish that, and create a well-rounded bad-guy? Thanks in advance! :)
Make them relatable to the bad guy in a reader's life. We all hate Umbridge because we all have an authority figure like that in real life, someone who doesn't listen to you, belittles you, etc.
Sorry, I don't know how to help… My villains will probably not even be disliked ^^' Even the word "villain" is kinda exagerated…
But I think Luna's suggestion makes all sense!
To have your villain be evil is obvious, but what would make me hate them as a reader would be how they foil your main characters. Are they subtle? If so is it clever? Try not to be overly cliché.
If your villain were to be extravagant would it actually work? You don't want something like Scooby-doo where it ends the same way every time.
Manipulativness, cunning, and surprise all work for a villain, especially if they say something that most people like, for example: All humans are ridiculously deluded and foolhardy, there is not a single good person on this planet." etc etc. (Poor example but you get the idea)
I think one of the reasons Delroris Umbridge is so effective is that there's that condescension that makes you want to slap her face off but then there's also the infuriating powerlessness to do so.
If you want your villain to be out in the open and not hidden away or secret or possibly in a satanic temple on top of Mount Everest, then maybe use that approach: make the readers hate the villain for what they do, but hate them even more because the characters are powerless to do anything about it.
Or your villain could be hidden away or secret or whatever but still be pulling the strings from elsewhere and that could be infuriating because the protagonists are unable to stop whatever bad things they're doing because they don't know who's doing it or where they are.
There are other ways to make readers hate the villain in your story, but there's my two cents. :)
Make them a human, like everybody, they have strengths and weaknesses, greatnesses and flaws. It's all perspective.
Make them likable. All of a sudden, they go insane and evil (later explained).
but the thing with the post above is giving them any humanity can lead to sympathy which is probably not what you want.
My advice is find a person that you feel EVERYONE will dislike. give them power over the protagonist which they rub in the protag's face at every opportunity, make them hurt people unrelated to what ever drama is happening with the protag, people completely innocent. Make them sickly sweet or mockingly nice to keep a 'facade' around certain people, this will make the reader want to slap the look off of their face. make the protag see them over and over again consistently, giving time for the reader to build up hate. Make them a figure people outside of the protag's group hates, even their own peers.
One of the things that made umbrage so detestable was the fact that she was not only evil, but she enjoyed being evil. Her actions weren’t just a means to an ends, but something she takes pleasure in.
If you think about it, umbrage was pretty normal: she over dosed on pink, had a cat obsession, and was extremely condescending, not uncommon at all. But mixed in with the daily details of her life was a sinister cruelty, an undertone of giggling, bubbling pleasure at the sorrow of others.
It’s the underlying tones of evil, the cruelty you can’t see but know is there, that play a great role in inciting hatred toward a person. Mix daily living with villainy, a dash of cruelty without cause, and let it fester in old wounds and you’ve got the makings for Detestable Devils.
The thing that makes me hate villains, is their stupidity that makes me want to slap them. like the child king joffrey from game of thrones, he thinks he owns the world, just because he is king, and keep needing to say "I am the king" to remind people that he`s better than everyone, and that he can do what he want, even though he cant.
I think something that makes villains detestable is their inability to accept the righteous path even when they're faced with the realization that what they're doing is wrong (or, alternatively, when they enjoy being evil). Having a "character being evil for the sake of evil" is often looked down on by some, but making a character evil without motivation isn't the same as having a character be evil because they enjoy inflicting harm upon others.
Having a character with flawed morals or who notes that their victims are innocent and still enjoys inflicting pain upon them is something that frequently brings emotions to the surface. Many times villains will blame the innocent for problems, but a villain that doesn't BLAME them for anything and still enjoys watching them suffer? Pure evil.
About a comment that was made earlier, a little humanity Is ok, as long as you know how to make your villain so detestable and vile that the reader thinks to themselves "How could a human do this" and play on real human flaws, just amped up to the maximum evil. I don't know, just an idea
yes! don't make them sympathetic with their humanity, make them pitiable.
I think it depends on the genre that you're writing. If it's romance: break up the OTP. If it's fantasy: make them transform the world into a dystopia. If it's realistic fiction: think if your worst enemy when you were in middle school and base your villain around them. The key to having a great villain, no matter what the genre is, is to not make them extravagant. Make them realistic (at least a little bit), give them flaws, but make sure that they never stop coming back. I find that frustration is the key to making readers hate a character.
You cannot go wrong by blowing the villans flaws out of the water. Do they eat dogs? Do they have major prejucices? Are they horrible to work with? Make their flaws the driving force of their problems. For example: Hitler. He was horribly prejudiced, but persuasive enough to become a stong leader, even though his veiws were extreme an generally wrong.
The trick to making a villain despicable is to have them do awful things to characters we actually care about.
One thing authors tend to do when writing their villain is have them do as much evil as possible, to the point they become ridiculous. They have their villains murder thousands of nameless characters, for no reason. Rather, have your villain hurt or kill a character the readers will care about; a character they've seen fight and live and change. That's one of the reasons why Umbrage is so despicable. Many times during the series, she hurts or bellitles major characters, like Harry.
I hope this helps!
Every story should have 2 types of villains: the Umbridge and the Voldemort. The Umbridge is the one that you detest, and for good reasons, and the Voldy is the one you have enough development on to make their reasons ‘justifiable’ I use that word loosely) by themselves and by their minions, although not with the audience.
First, you need to have a main character that is really relatable and likeable. Then, you need your side characters that are not as strong as the main character, but the readers can still have sympathy for them and still like them. Then you take your villain, and you make that villain crush all of your characters hopes and dreams so that your characters have to struggle to find an ounce of happiness when that sadistic son of a bitch is still around/alive. Make your villain inflict pain and grief on nearly ALL of your characters, not just one. Make that pain relatable to the readers so that it really hits home and sparks hate in the people who are reading your book.
Make your villain really hurt the character that’s the sweetest, do no harm kind of person. Hurt the cinnamon roll. For example, I HATE governor Pryce from SWR because she hurts Hera and Kanan.
Usually in media, when I really hate a villain, they have an unfair advantage over the protagonists, they don’t hesitate about using it, and they hurt/kill a beloved side character. They don’t normally think twice about this character.
1 Make the villain take away the protagonist's most treasured item
2 Make the villain have witty and smart words
3 Give the villain power
4 Make the villain seem to have "miracles"
Umbridge was absolutely foul for one main reason, we all had a teacher like her. She was built on mundane things, but there are dark horrific things there, such as the quill or the Dementor attack. We all know someone who assumes we're lying all the time, someone who takes away things that makes life fun, but she's so despicable, that she harmed Harry, and made him okay with being suspended from the first real home he ever knew, as well as the fact most people reading had experienced mundane things similar to what Harry experienced, just made her more revolting. She tortures characters we love in a mental, cunning way at first, slowly turning into something purely wicked.
Make your villain seemingly mundane, the type the reader has already met and hated in real life.
I think one of the things that makes me personally hate a character is when they convince people that the main character isn’t telling the truth, maybe about an important threat, message or event in their life. Maybe an adult will say that someone younger is in shock, or say they’re trying to get attention. Another thing is when the villain makes the main character feel useless but no one believes they could do any wrong because of how great the they seem. Especially when the villain has something to offer that makes the main character seem less useful, and feel like no one needs them anymore. Pretty much when the villain can get away with whatever they want in an easily annoying way, when we, the readers, know the truth, and how important it is.
An easy way to just straight-out make people hate someone is to openly show them crossing the moral event horizon. This is a kind of thing that can only be shown in more adult novels (ie Game of Thrones). Here's a link to TVTropes explanation of this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoralEventHorizon
But the simple idea is that the person does something so irredeemably evil that they are no longer allowed to come back to anything less evil. This only happens in more mature novels because you really have to turn a reader's stomach to cross this. And that means you have to go in depth as to their depravity.
(spoilers ahead)
Take Ramsey from Game of Thrones. Even if you hated him from the beginning, he, at several times, crossed the moral event horizon. He actively killed Rickon, not to mention his stepmother and brother. And he raped Sansa. It's at that point that you don't care. You don't care that his daddy didn't love him. You didn't care that his childhood was screwed up. All that watchers wanted was for Jon, or Sansa, or anyone, to rip him to pieces.
The same goes for Joffrey. After killing Ros, making Sansa look at her father's head, and having his men beat her, you just didn't care. You actively wanted a child to die.
Another example is the Kite Runner. After THAT scene, you really just wanted the offender to be tortured in every way known to man, and then for them to suffer a violent death.
You want your readers to give up on any salvation for your villain.
The problem with this is that NO ONE wants to write these. And NO ONE wants to read them. So, if you're writing a book for young adults or younger, I would avoid this and just go with any of the other strategies above.
Some villains that I hate are the ones that don’t hesitate to harm beloved characters or do things that psychologically impact the reader and the characters. Like Governor Pryce ordering to fire on the fuel tank while Kanan and Hera were reunited and kissing, or Umbridge stealing Mad Eye Moody’s eye and sticking it in her door as a trophy. Or villains like Tarkin, Levana, or Krennic that go out of their way to be despicable, like Tarkin destroying Scarif and Alderaan, Levana making Thorne stab Cress, hurting Wolf, poisoning Winter, making Winter scar her face, forcing Kai to marry her, and everything else she did, and Krennic killing those engineers even after Galen confessed to sabotaging the Death Star.
Just the overdramatic and unnecessary things villains do to be petty or malicious.