Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5085906-20130627191357/@comment-1672596-20150724185819

Bluerock wrote: Weedle McHairybug wrote: Yeah, actually, it does. Look at most Disney villains, or most James Bond villains, or heck, even the villains in DC Comics or Resident Evil villains. They followed a pattern and a strict standard. Even in Metal Gear, there were several villains that matched that standard (case in point, the Patriots, Volgin, Coldman, the Winds of Destruction, etc., etc.). And are you going to call Marquis de Sade simplistic then? Because he made clear he was a villain and embraced it. I'm not looking at other characters, as I find it irrelevant. Big Boss's character doesn't have to follow any standards.

I would call Marquis de Sade's description, being viewed by yourself as the only definition of a villain, very simplistic, yes. Also, thanks for introducing me to him, seems like an interesting guy! Marquis de Sade's in fact a real person, living during the 1800s and was a rather infamous figure during the French Revolution (for one thing, he's apparently the reason Bastille Day happened, as he made a makeshift megaphone and yelled that the Bastille was torturing countless prisoners, of which in reality there were only seven prisoners by the time they burst in, as Sade was relocated), being in and out of jail constantly for various tawdry acts. In fact, Sade's the reason why the term sadism exists. He also wrote some rather sick pieces of literature (and not in a good way I'm afraid. There's 120 Nights of Sodom [in fact, there's even evidence according to Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn that the Arras Jacobin leader Joseph LeBon during the French Revolution, alongside his wife, may have actually been inspired by 120 Nights of Sodom when "undressing" and "repositioning" freshly guillotined victims at the Batteries Nationales], Justine, Juliette, and the like). You can read up on him here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/MarquisDeSade; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/MarquisDeSade

And since Sade is actually a real-life figure, that's an example of how a so-called "simplistic" villain is actually all the more horrifying than a "humanized"/complex villain. In fact, the latter characterization if one is to make someone root against them actually has a tendency to backfire horribly on the writer. If you're going to read about him, I strongly suggest you bring along a barf bag or two, because you're definitely going to need it once you're through with him. And as a trivia point, 120 Nights was even adapted into a film by Pasolini, which resulted in his murder on opening day. I kid you not.