# Modern Audiences, Modern Villains, and the Death of the Villain Dream tags: #thoughts I keep revisiting this idea, but I think it bears repeating, especially in the context of RPGs. (First the thread, then further discussion as regards RPGs specifically.) ![Of Course, Villains Have Origin Stories](https://x.com/SCShipyards/status/1857114809772421510) I absolutely adore stories about villain protagonists, but I can put my finger directly on the problem with the way that villainy, evil, and even misanthropy are dealt with in the context of the *"modern audience."* (And yes, I fully acknowledge and note that the *"modern audience"* is not an audience at all, but it is a clade of writers who are popular in mass media at this moment. They wish they had an audience. They try to build an audience. They fail.) And here's part of why: because **they only have one story**. Literally only one story with one series of beats, which they find narratively acceptable by way of expression. Bad people can't be bad people because they want to be bad people. They can't be evil because they are inherently evil. They can't want things that are ineffably antagonistic to the society of norms in which the "heroes" live. They can only be misunderstood and thought ill of for traits which are beyond their control. Which makes every single villain boring as bland oatmeal. No one has any personal responsibility. There are no consequences for their choices. There are no regrets on anyone's side. No one can truly make a mistake, no one is responsible for outcomes. For extra juicy nightmare fuel, this also applies to their concept of *heroes*. They experience no consequences. They have no regrets. They have no responsibility for actions or outcomes. There can be no moral quandary because there is no moral texture. This provides a particular problem for we who actually love good villains because they don't write any. Because every story is consequence-free, villains can never make good decisions because they can never make bad decisions. There can never be a real threat on the table to anybody because there are no consequences. If a villain is of a "protected class" you can absolutely guarantee that they will suffer no repercussions from the worst actions, and the writer will spin it as the most moral choice at any given point. This is inherently dull as dishwater. This sucks all the life and all the tension out of every story. Along the way, they have utterly destroyed the idea of the narrative anti-hero and are completely unable to imagine why an anti-villain is interesting because they are cognitively impaired by their own beliefs. ![[Anti-Villain.png]] -- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain (They are literally unable to complete the thought, *"But what if I'm wrong?"*) I've said this before, and I will undoubtedly say it at least once a week for the rest of my life, but the real problem with the *"modern audience"* is that they suffer a critical and fatal failure of imagination. Imagination is *anathema* to them. They cannot conceive of anything that is not themselves. A good villain is either very much yourself, and you know it and revel in it, or very much not yourself, and you treat it as a powerful narrative structure to challenge the protagonist - while reveling in it. ([Sand dan Glokta](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Sand_dan_Glokta) is a fine example of both at the same time. One of my favorite characters in all of literature.)^[And, simultaneously, my favourite example of "representation" of characters whom share my identity-traits without being absolutely suck-ass single-note entities.] > **Sand dan Glokta** was a former champion swordsman and dashing war-hero of the [King's Own](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/King%27s_Own "King's Own"), before being captured and tortured for years by the [Gurkish](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Gurkish "Gurkish"). As a shunned cripple, he turns from tortured to torturer, becoming an Inquisitor in the [King's Inquisition.](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Inquisition "Inquisition") > > He is a major POV character in the *[First Law trilogy](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/The_First_Law_Trilogy "The First Law Trilogy")* and a major supporting character in [_Age of Madness trilogy_](https://firstlaw.fandom.com/wiki/The_Age_of_Madness_Trilogy "The Age of Madness Trilogy"). This sums up quite a lot of the problems with current mass media production and with quite a lot of the punditry on the subject, and in fairness, that criticism of punditry applies to both sides. I can't count the number of critics that I have seen taking on the *"sympathetic villain"* trope by stating absolutes that explain in detail they can't imagine anything but the most [Manichean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism) black and white storytelling. Painting yourself as stupid is no way to get me to take your opinion seriously. I refuse to live in a world in which Eve Forward's book, **[Villains by Necessity](https://www.amazon.com/Villains-Necessity-Eve-Forward/dp/0812522281)**, is not considered one of the greats of the fantasy literary genre. If you haven't read it, get to it. The best example of villain protagonists and hero antagonists set to paper. *"Suddenly, the singing stopped."* ![[Villains by Necessity - Eve Forward (cover).jpg]] --- So let's talk about how this intersects with tabletop RPGs because it may not immediately be obvious… Who am I kidding? *Of course* it's immediately obvious! It's more obvious than the nose on your face, more obvious than the sun rising in the east. It's more obvious than an earthquake in Ohio. See the last Thought, *[[Veilguard and the Obsessive Validation]]*, where I took it up a bit more. The TTRPG space has always been contentious. There was never a time where argument, debate, tribalization, and strict sectarian boundaries were not a part of the hobby. And if anyone tells you differently, they are both a liar and probably younger than 30. They certainly never had any experience of [Usenet in the early '90s, where almost anything could blow up into a tempest in a teapot with absolutely no preparation, but thankfully also no consequence](https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.whitewolf/c/ZLVNWrOIAOM/m/9Sj21YgScp0J).^[I'm proud to say that myself and several other authors who I had the great honour of writing with later were involved in that little imbroglio. Good times, good times.] It was a time of brother against brother and cousin against cousin the likes of which, frankly, I rather miss. Occasionally the conflicts were couched in moral terms, but usually they were over terms of art, technical acumen, or simple methodological and intentional differences. Sometimes a painful sense of morality crept in, as in a lot of the discussion between previously "traditional" gaming and the new more narratively influenced White Wolf [[World of Darkness]] games, which explicitly intended to deal with issues of [[Vampire - the Masquerade|morality, sexuality, rape, violence, and other seamy bits of the human underbelly]] that were generally aggressively avoided by the people who were engaged in the hobby before. It's interesting in retrospect that the WOD is now rightly considered very much *"traditional gaming"* by the majority of the hobby because of its very traditional power distribution structures and mechanical resolution systems. At the time, it seemed like an incredible departure from the norm. Today it stands shoulder to shoulder with **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D 3rd Edition]]** in a shockingly broad number of measures. The mention of **Dungeons and Dragons** in this context is definitely not accidental, as the departure of *5th Edition* and into what is increasingly just referred to as **D&D 2024** brings us back to the *"modern audience"* cadre of writers which infest mass media. Many of the complaints about the game itself, and perhaps more importantly, the setting which it portrays, can be traced directly to the homogenization, the obsession with safety, the incredible desire not to offend any single person who may or may not exist in a game which is very much driven by conflict and demands conflict at the narrative core instead of a sort of grimy medieval heroism hanging about the stories even when they became surprisingly contrasted with that central theme (See: **[Expedition to the Barrier Peaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_to_the_Barrier_Peaks)**), what **D&D** is pitching us these days is overpowered superheroism stripped of meaningful consequence or impact without even the creativity of childlike let's pretend. In an ironic twist of parallels, this mirrors a lot of the discussion about the world of darkness after the first editions, as some suggested it was becoming more and more *["superheroes in trench coats with katanas"](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/382016/katanas-trenchcoats-3rd-edition)* who shot up shopping malls and killed people in the streets rather than moody stories about the struggle of moral and social outcasts to find their own way in a dark world. Again, in retrospect, that is absolutely true. In another parallel, which doesn't necessarily bode well for the hobby in general, after that phase, [the new World of Darkness games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Requiem) come across as bland, homogenized, almost emotionally sterile creations, which go through the motions of making a challenge to traditional morality while aggressively avoiding any of the consequences or responsibilities for characters within the context of the stories for doing so. That failure of imagination is well over 10 years old at this point, and we're still living with the fallout. That's not to say the entirety of the hobby is infested with the *"modern audience."* Quite the opposite. There are large swaths of the gaming space which really don't care anything about it, have leaned hard into the classic idea of the gamer as iconoclastic rebel. It's just that the current state of the iconoclastic rebel is someone who believes in unrestricted free speech, doesn't go out of their way to call someone who disagrees with them on a single point of dogma a fascist, nor do they run off crying to a private room when broader society disagrees with them. The modern rebel in the TTRPG space is far more likely to believe that *"Honor thy father and thy mother"* is a reasonable maxim to judge people by and simultaneously be able to imagine a world in which not only is it not true, it is pointedly unsupported by the rules of the world. Amusingly, this pointedly puts its finger on the blue-haired obsessive activists at the very same time that it notices the screeching moralists of the BROSR are cut from the same authoritarian cloth, just preaching a different message. *So what does this mean in the context of tabletop role-playing games?* We've gone a long way through the weeds to ask this question. It means maybe you should stop trying to court the *"modern audience."* Maybe you should stop trying to represent moral good not through demonstration of characters within the context of a game but within the text of the game itself, or as yourself, as someone who wrote or played a game, or by simple designation of people that you don't like as moral evils and demanding that they not play your game. If you use the word *"fascist"* in any context outside of referring to government-corporate cooperative governance, you've probably already failed this test, and I'm sad to see the fallout. But more powerfully and more directly, lean into *imagination* and use your imagination. Give yourself and other people the freedom to apply that. Imagine people who are unlike you in belief, in understanding, in action who are still worthwhile people. Don't let the idea that you are the only good in the world infect you to the point where you are unable to imagine anything else but yourself. Imagine people who are exactly like yourself, who believe the things that you do, who are terrible people, who bring suffering to others, who are inherently evil. Try and imagine a world in which that is true. The incapacity to do those things doesn't just destroy mass media. It destroys gaming, it destroys your ability to engage with and associate with anyone who is not yourself, and you will learn to find ways to hate yourself as well. You're looking for a safe space when safety is the worst thing you can do for yourself. Don't do that. Imagine something other than yourself and be able to embrace it. Do that in your work. Do that with your friends. Do that with your gaming and you're going to be something far more important than a member of or catering to the *"modern audience."* You're going to actually have an audience. You're going to actually have friends. You're going to actually have a good time. Don't keep yourself from having a good time.