Sorry about my part in the subjctdrift. I’m fan of uncle Karl and had to comment. I was smiling while writing though...
Nature of villainry IS part of writing fantasy and especially writing fantasy following the footsteps of Tolkien.
You can make interresting and great stories of basically good charachters whose means, motives, goals and interpretations of society are so different that they end up in conflict. Magneto and X-men are perhaps a story of this order. I love such stories.
But for writing epic fantasy saga one needs a villain so far beyond any redemption that he is someone who eats ones second cousins cooked in vinegar for dinner, enjoys bedtime torture sessions instead of warm milk and announces ones precence by making the walls cry blood. It is tremendously difficult to create such charachter believably. Fantasy is made of black and white because reality is shades of grey.
Methods of trying to create such Evils vary. Howard does not explain why his sorcerers are evil, they just are (and hence thin charachters). Tolkien made it somehow by making it all part of a mystic cosmic order, where the evils are higher beings, trying to acchieve exellence in their own way. For them mastery of darkness is the goal while to others it is mastery of goodness.
In a yet unplayed roleplaying saga, that will perhaps one day be published instead, I made it all into a natural balance thing between personified natural forces of life-death/bounty-desolation/continuance-end of history.
In the world we have plenty of historical charachters with few scruples and lots of bloodthirst. They just do not suffice for the needs of epic fantasy. They may be evil... at least from some pespective... they just are not The Evil. Once one realises this, one sets to create such deserving and demanding fellows more imaginatively... I for one would be interrested to hear how and if others have solved this problem of Evil, and also to hear perceptions of how it has been solved by authors of epic saga before.
Perhaps my provoking post failed to move the discussion towards this. Sorry.
Janne Harju
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