Now that I’m finally back to answering prompts from that Indie Publishing Maytober thingy, I get to talk about my favorite fictional villain.
Now, the prompt didn’t specify if this is my favorite villain of my own creation or from the entire world of literature, film, and television. I’ll pick one of each. Looking at the villains I’ve come up with, I don’t have a lot of options. Creating villains is definitely not one of my strong suits, and not all of my stories even have villains. I think it would have to be a toss up between two characters from Where I Stand–and if you haven’t read that book yet, you might want to skip the next paragraph because of spoiler reasons.
Ready?
The two characters are Nokkvi and Alva. Nokkvi is only in one or two scenes, but I love him. His father is the elderly Chief Hrodolf of Darsidia, and Nokkvi expects to inherit the chieftainship soon. He’s brash and arrogant and I plan on bringing him back when I write Book Four in the Clouds Aflame series. But he’s mostly just a jerk, hardly a villain. The real villain of the story is Alva. I like her as a villain because she genuinely thinks she’s doing the right thing by protecting St. Anne’s Cleft from another mad chief. Also, she’s just really cool thematically. She’s about four foot eight, super old, and has a pet snake named Vorthmathir. How could you not love that mental image?
Okay, no more spoilers. Who is my favorite fictional villain of all time?
I will start this off by saying that I kind of grew up under a rock. I haven’t seen most popular movies or TV shows. Most of the books I enjoy reading are super old. I didn’t grow up watching a lot of Disney movies. A lot of people enjoy Disney villains, and I agree that characters like Scar and Gaston are great villains that are enjoyable to watch. Most modern animated shows have pretty crappy villains, with the exception of Death from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Death was awesome, but still not my favorite.
Is my favorite villain a book character, then? No. I read a lot of muder mysteries, and while they definitely have bad guys, they’re usually not revealed until the end and therefore not as memorable as non-mystery villains. C.S. Lewis has a couple of good villains. The White Witch from Narnia is perfect and memorable, and Weston from the Space Trilogy has a few very memorable moments in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. But honestly, a lot of the books I don’t read don’t have villains in them.
This might come as a surprise to y’all, but my favorite fictional villain of all time is Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I’m not a huge Trekkie. I haven’t even seen the entirety of TNG. But I absolutely love Q. His portrayal in the first episode wasn’t great, but pilot episodes are always weird so we’ll let that slide. In the rest of the series, Q is an all-powerful, practically divine entity who uses his powers to annoy people for his own amusement. He’s a cosmic goofball, a lighthearted trickster. At one point, he poofs a mariachi band into existence. He causes problems and is generally selfish, but he’s generally only a villain because he’s a pain in the butt. He’s not dangerous. He doesn’t cause me feelings of existential dread like the Borg do, or disgust me the way the pile of talking tar that ate Tasha Yar disgusted me. He makes me laugh.
Maybe Q doesn’t fit some of the stricter definitions of the term “villain.” I don’t care. I like him because he’s funny, and I find the concept of a being who uses their omnipotence to annoy people to be unique. You’ll have to let me know in the comments what you think of my choice, and also who your favorite fictional villain is. (Or you can comment more than one, if you have multiple.)
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