Befriend, Betray, Repeat: Villain Edition
Come on in, bestie. Welcome to Storypod where we do the doing of story development together. Brought to you by Creative BFF. Hello. Thank you for joining me.
Ashley:This is the story pod podcast for creative BFF, your creative BFF. If you need help with stories. I am Ashley. And today, we are doing one of my favorite things, which is to answer a story question. And if you have a story question, please feel free to contact me at whatever the contact information is below where you're watching this.
Ashley:I would love to help. And of course, it's just based on my opinion. But if I can help you, I would love to do so. So until I hear from you, we are doing a post from the r slash character development Reddit by King of Comics 2, and they need help on their villain. And they write, so I'm struggling on a villain for my book series.
Ashley:So far my ideas are, first off, this world is filled with superhuman or as they're called in my verse, the evolved, killing monsters named Sapiens. So to understand that sentence, I had to read a couple of times. Basically, there are superhuman creatures that are able to kill, superpowered beings. Okay. Killing monsters named sapiens who have been terrorizing the world's superpowered beings and eliminating them.
Ashley:And all of a sudden, the monsters become less mindless and reckless, growing smarter and more strategic. And a teen named Nathan, who's just graduating high school gained the ability to become a sapient, but had control of the form. It would randomly activate depending on his emotions. Later, Nathan gets approached and recruited by a team of superheroes known as the Rejects. Basically, what you need to know is the world has very strict rules for being heroes, no killing unless necessary, colleges to learn abilities and get a degree, You have to go to superhero high school to get into the colleges, and you have to work under the government rules.
Ashley:So rejects are either people who couldn't get into the colleges or didn't have a home. It's led by Eric who has a dark past, but is on a path of redemption, and he helps these children control their abilities. But they don't fight crime because they would be arrested and said to be outside the law and its orders. They recruit Nathan thinking he's the cause for the smarter, I guess, the smarter sapiens, but he had no clue. Maybe someone else was behind it, or maybe it's him doing it after all, and he just didn't know it yet.
Ashley:What I was thinking was Nathan is the cause for their change in emotion, but the villain manipulates the hero by getting him to trust him as a friend so he can get control over him and every everyone he loves and control of the sapiens. Or the villain could have the same ability Nathan does but with more experience. And I'm struggling on the lore of that and how he could connect, but I think him being a manipulator is a key factor to what I want the character to be personality wise. I also think it would be cool if Nathan gets so obsessed with taking the villain down that he starts pushing away people he loves and loses his social life and focuses completely on taking the villain down. But I don't know the origin or the context behind how he can get close to Nathan or what his actual motivation is.
Ashley:That's what I'm struggling with. If y'all could help, it'd be much appreciated. Okay. So where I would start with this, it's going to really depend, I think, a lot on the world building that you're setting up and the goal for the story that you're setting up because that can often, at least for me, inform how the villain is basically created, how they interact. Because there's so many ways that you can get this villain into the character's life that it can be kind of challenging without more information about where you're taking the story, about the characters, the main character's backstory.
Ashley:That it's, I forgot how I started that sentence so I don't really remember how to continue it so I'm just gonna move on to another sentence. So there are so many ways that you can handle introducing the villain into Nathan's life. And so the main core of this interaction is that you want the main aspect of the character's personality, the villain's personality is to be manipulation. That he's a manipulator which what I can say is that it does seem to follow for someone who has the ability to control the sapience. If you decide to set that up for this character which I'm not sure if that would make sense story wise depending on the truth of how the Sapiens get, basically become sentient.
Ashley:Right? They're not just mindless tools and it's also honestly gonna depend on how these creatures even came to to be. It wouldn't it wouldn't necessarily be something that you have to go deeply into the history of, but for you to know how did these creatures come into existence, where were they created as a fail safe by humans to kind of keep the superhumans in check, which I think could be a very cool, a very cool possibility where if at some time in the past, you had regular humans and you had superhumans, and the regular humans were, basically afraid and mistrustful of the superhumans because it would be very easy for the superhumans to overpower them, such and so forth. And so the best human scientists of their day perhaps got together and this could either actually it could either be science and technology based or it could be supernaturally based, but whichever way that goes, if you want to be supernatural or science slash tech, whoever has the ability, they all come together and they create this creature that is able to destroy superhumans and perhaps it was maybe something secret that so it looks kinda just like natural selection type vibes so that there's not a body of people who can be incriminated and things like that.
Ashley:So they're like, oh, random death of this superhuman. But anyway, so they create this perhaps at a time before they have safeguards and things in place the way you have it set up with, like, the governmental controls and the schools and all of that kind of stuff. But perhaps this was a previous generation's way of protecting the regular human population from superhumans because it seems as though they specifically target superhuman beings. And we know that this world has to have regular humans because if everybody's super, then nobody is. Right?
Ashley:So, that could be the origin of these creatures. And perhaps at some point in the history of the world, control was lost of these creatures. They don't know, maybe they lost the knowledge of how they were created, how to keep even the creatures in check, things like that or perhaps this is still a governmental program that's going on secretly which could be very interesting to reveal later on. Because they have like a whole little X men type of setup here, a a little DC Marvel type setup here with your comic, which is cool. So that could be the history of that.
Ashley:And then your your villain could tie in to that history. Perhaps the villain knows that it's this governmental what is it called, like population control of superhumans that either existed and they lost control of it or they are still in control of it. So he has that knowledge. And so it's very important for superhumans to gain the ability to control these creatures. Perhaps Nathan and this villain, if you wanna have the villain have the same ability, perhaps they were if we're having it be in a generation prior, it wouldn't necessarily be that they were created at that time to be a control fail safe for these creatures, but perhaps in their lineage there is that and perhaps it had to be a human that controlled it, so this is a thing.
Ashley:But I may I think I might be getting a little off track because you're saying that Nathan potentially actually made the beasts more sentient and less mind mindless. So not necessarily so perhaps that's part of how control was lost. These beasts become and this this would be a restructuring of your story and the timeline. But if the beasts become more sentient, but Nathan has the ability to control them even in their sentience which makes Nathan a very important character with an important ability. Now Nathan actually having caused them to become more sentient recently, is not an impossible thing.
Ashley:It's not something that I'm saying don't do but it's just without more information. It's like well how and why would that be the case? Not necessary I'm not suggesting that Nathan knows and he did it purposefully, but what causes that and how is he able to affect the whole population of these sentient sapiens that destroy. Because I'm assuming it's more than just 1 or 2 at a time, right? It sounds like there are multiples and it's another essentially another population that exists in this world, maybe not as many in the population as like humans and superhumans but enough to do damage.
Ashley:Unless you're setting it up that there's like 1 or 2 at a time, which you know, would be a logical fail safe. Perhaps that's how it was when this when they were originally created, to only be a couple so that it didn't get out of control, but perhaps as they started gaining sentience, then they started reproducing on their own. And so now the population of these creatures is a little bit out of control. So the superhuman population has a very real need and stake in being able to control and kill or take out these sapiens, and then there could be another antagonist who doesn't want that to happen. Let me think for a moment.
Ashley:Let me think and refer back to the original question. So getting back to how the villain enters Nathan's life, it can really be in any way. It could be just a friend from school, it could be the leader of the rejects, or a kid in the rejects, or somebody who's connected to this group so there's automatically a built in trust. Like, it could be a twist that Eric is a janky guy and he's, you know, doing all this specifically to get Nathan. It would make sense, but that might be too easy, that might be too cliche, that might be too easy to predict as a consumer of your story.
Ashley:It could be a love interest person like the villain, could be someone that Nathan is interested in romantically or attracted to romantically. It could be a mentor figure. Maybe it was someone who entered Nathan's life when he was a child and so there's automatically the built in trust. The person was always loving and wonderful and all this kind of stuff. And then maybe later on this person realizes that Nathan has this ability that he's been looking for all along or the reason that the guy even became involved with Nathan, could be because at a young age, he realized or was able to tell that Nathan was going to have this ability or did already have this ability in basically a seed villain character enters Nathan's life does require more information about Nathan's backstory, the relationships that he has, things like that.
Ashley:Right? The world itself because that's going to tell us where the villain can most effectively interact with Nathan. And it has to be logical. Like, how did the villain even come to know that Nathan has these abilities? So that might eliminate certain possibilities of how this character can enter Nathan's life if he somehow knows, he or she somehow knows that Nathan has these abilities.
Ashley:Well, does that automatically mean that, okay, this is a somebody who has ties to the government or has the technology to be able to see this, or the ability to do a worldwide search for people who have this ability. And that brings up another question. I'm going on a little bit of a tangent. If the care if the villain also has the same ability but he's more advanced at it, then I don't see any need for him to seek out Nathan because he should just be able to do whatever he wants to do with the ability. So I don't I wouldn't necessarily put it that they have the same ability unless it's an ability that goes away, and so he's lost the ability or he's losing the ability and he needs somebody else who has it so he could continue with continue with whatever his plan is, his or her plan is for the world.
Ashley:And that's also gonna determine that can that not maybe not determine but it can also give us a clue as to how this villain even begins interacting with Nathan in the first place is what is the villain's goal? What do they wanna do with this ability? Do they want to destroy all the superhumans? Do they want to turn these sapient creatures on the regular humans and on the government to take them down and make it like a superhuman run world, basically? Like flip the balance of power?
Ashley:What's the goal here for the villain? And that may help figure out a way that this person would would organically and naturally be able to enter into, oops, sorry if you heard me bump my little mic, enter into Nathan's life. So I can't give a any this is the answer, this is the best answer, without knowing those kind of things but that's this is just some general stuff that you can think of as you're trying to figure out the back story for the villain and how they even come to be in each other's lives, right? So refer back to your world building, refer back to you know the Nathan's life and the things like that, his back story and you'll be able to I think identify a place to slot to drop the villain in, as he attempts to manipulate Nathan for whatever reason and figure out why he would need Nathan. I think that's very important.
Ashley:It can't just be not it not that it can't, but it would be stronger if there was a compelling reason for him to actually need Nathan beyond just a sense of greed and gluttony, right? Of like, oh, I could do it myself but let me also take Nathan for whatever reason because he has the ability to. And why would why would he not see Nathan as a competitor as opposed to, you know, trying to get Nathan for whatever reason? So I think setting up a compelling need for Nathan would be important for the villain as well as as you're developing more about his personality, his or her personality, their backstory, their goal, what they're trying to do, why they want this power to control the sapience. And maybe this person, this character, depending on how you set up aging and technology and things like that, perhaps this person is from that time where these creatures were first created.
Ashley:If you're taking that direction, you may not even have that as an option for your story. You probably have a totally different setup for where the Sapiens even came from, but that would be those would be my thoughts. I hope they weren't all over the place. Because when I start thinking about story, I can kind of go, like, down a roller coaster in a loop de loop and all this kind of stuff because now my brain is starting to come up with other possible ideas and maybe losing the main point. But with that being said, what do you think, bestie?
Ashley:How would you answer this question? Can you bring some, clarity to my potentially rambling answer. I don't think it was rambling rambling, but, like, you never know. Yeah. So I would love to see your comments and what you think and how you would answer this question.
Ashley:Bye.