I am going to go ahead and answer Veronica’s alternate question, because, well, what the heck.  All I have is time.

Who is my favorite fictional villian?

I guess the short answer is that I don’t have one.  But lest you think this is a cop-out, I will explain why.

I think villians, in the world of popular literature anyway, are given short shrift.  With few exceptions, the bulk of complex character development is spent on the protagonist.  Not surprising, the hero is the person we are supposed to be identifying with, and character flaws and weaknesses partner with the overall “goodness” of the hero to only bring us closer.   These are characters with meat on their bones.

But villians are simply villianous.  We are generally given enough information to know they are bad.  Really bad.  We aren’t supposed to be sympathizing with the villian, and in general authors don’t spend a lot of time agonizing about why the villian is bad.  It is enough that he just is.  Consequently, one-dimensional representations of evil are by and large prevalent.  Fun to hate, no doubt, but not particularly interesting to spend a lot of time pondering.

Now – everything I just said above is, obviously, gross generalization.  There are a few really well-developed, multi-dimensional villians out there.   As much as I struggled and plodded (at my husband’s urging) to make it through Game of Thrones, I have to hand it to George R.R. Martin.  The man can write some villians. 

See, but there’s the catch.  When you spend a lot of time fleshing out villians, they start to transcend villiany.  Well-written villians become almost likeable in a twisted kind of way.  They cease being villians and they attain antihero status.  Hannibal Lecter is a really good example of how this transition can happen.  Evil?  Most certainly.  But also darkly attractive.  Even enticing.  Anne Rice’s Lestat comes full circle from villian to anti-hero to hero as her stories progress.  It’s a slippery slope.

Stronger arguments can be made when you start looking at more complex “classic” literature, but at that point the hero-villian paradigm becomes harder to assign.   You start to fall more into the more general “protagonist-antagonist” structure where the situation is less of an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil and more good old human conflict that your average family therapist would pronounce that there “are no sides, only points of view”.

Okay.  It’s a copout. 

But at least it’s a well-thought-out copout.