What makes a good villain? 15 writers weigh in.

March 6, 2025, 11:42am

Putting together our bracket to determine the best villain in literature brought up a lot of existential questions about villains: What makes a good one? Can a character be villainous without being an antagonist? What even is a villain?

I dipped into the Lit Hub archives for some answers.

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Why do we even like bad characters? Alex Lake writes about why villains are so fascinating.

Think Satan in Paradise Lost: Smart, sinuous, seductive. Sexy, even. Yes, he is the personification of evil, but he is so much more interesting than any of the other characters.

This creates a problem. We need to sympathize with the main character. We need to want them to win. If we like the villain too much, the novel will lose its narrative power, which, in many cases rests on the triumph of good over evil.

From The Pros and Cons of Getting Inside a Villain’s Mind

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Minrose Gwin writes about how villains are compelling, and maybe a bit revealing.

When it comes to creating villains, though, I must confess to writing with more fury than love. Villains make trouble, and trouble makes for a good story.

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In short, fictive villains need to raise the discomfiting possibility of villainy and victimhood in us all—as Faulkner would say, “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

From Minrose Gwin on Creating Complex Villains

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Emily Temple takes a deep-dive into one of our top-seed villains: Tom Ripley.

But Tom is not a normal person. My memory was wrong: in the book, he plans to murder Dickie, almost offhandedly, an idea on the train, and then a few pages later, he just does it. There is no handwringing. There is no remorse.

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This is not a novel about one man impersonating another. It’s about one man becoming another—the man he always hoped to be. The fact that he had to kill someone else to make space for himself in that role is just what makes it fun.

From A Close-Reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley as Coming of Age Story

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What about queer-coded villains? Edward Underhill examined the phenomenon that dates back to the early days of Hollywood.

In movies, this queer-coding can be linked back to the Hays Code, an industry guideline imposed in the 1930s that advised against portraying “perverse subjects,” such as homosexuality, in any way that an audience could find sympathetic. Queer-coded villains were built from pieces society saw as other…and therefore threatening.

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And as a storyteller—someone with experience building characters—this is exactly how you make villains. Look at any good villain (except, maybe, the current billionaires) and you’ll find someone who couldn’t meet the standards of society, who was cast out for something they desired or the way they looked, who was told they were a monster so often that eventually, that’s exactly what they became.

From In Defense of the Messy Queers: Why “Good” Representation Isn”t Enough

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John Copenhaver writes on a similar topic: how much does writing a villainous character need to be in conversation with social preconceptions?

Writing morally flawed, complicated, or even bad queer characters emerges from an instinct to humanize, which counters the directive that queer writers need to perform virtue in our fiction (and our lives) for the sake of acceptance or even access to power.

From Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories

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In a longer conversation on decency, James Traub, Margot Livesey, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Whitney Terrell discussed the relationship between villains and morals.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I wonder if we need to define this term that I think I was throwing around while reading the news: “The morally weak!” But in terms of literature, a morally weak character isn’t the same as a villain. I mean Ahab is a villain, but he’s not morally weak. A character like the narrator of The Good Soldier knows the difference between good and evil, and would like to do good, but fails to act on that knowledge. So I wonder what you think the definition of being morally weak even is. Is there some other way we should be thinking about it? Is it cowardice or paranoia or…?

From James Traub and Margot Livesey: Decency vs. Moral Weakness

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Some of the great villains in literature are con men and grifters. Greg Wands and Elizabeth McCullough Keenan dug into the archetype.

In short, con artists have a knack for appealing to both our basest and our most aspirational instincts. After all, each and every one of us possess the capacity for deception. … The grifter is the ultimate American figure in many senses, embodying the nation’s fascination with reinvention, ambition, and audacity. … At their core, confidence men tap into universal themes: the fragility of human trust, the ease with which appearances deceive, and the razor edge of good and evil.

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Depth like this makes a villain more than a foil—it makes them a mirror, reflecting the flaws of your protagonists and intensifying the stakes. A villain’s humanity is what makes them unforgettable. Give them layers, let them surprise you, and they’ll become the driving force that propels your story forward.

From Con Men & Masterminds: Crafting the Perfect Antagonist in Thrillers

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Not all villains strike with a knife — some come at you with a rose. Jodi McAlister wrote about villains on The Bachelor:

A villain, however—like Lily in my book, or Courtney Robertson, whose autobiography has a similar title—is “not here to make friends”. They are uninterested in peaceful coexistence with the other contestants: rather, their sole focus is on their relationship with the lead.

From The Making of a Reality Show Villain

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Sometimes accidental villains, who never intend to be villainous, are the most interesting, says Lauren Nossett.

The unintentional villain, on the other hand, is wicked by accident. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time…Because the unintentional villain never intended to act so murderously, the unintentional villain complicates questions of guilt and innocence. On the sliding scale of good and evil, it’s easy to place serial killers at the wicked end, but where do we position the hit-and-run driver, the heavy-handed drink-pourer, the staircase pusher, and short-tempered friend? Do we judge a person less harshly if they meant to hurt their victim, but not kill them? If they acted without thinking? If they killed to protect someone else? … unintentional villains force us to ask hard questions about right and wrong.

From An Argument for the Unintentional Villain

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Similarly, what about a character that’s just, well, bad? Nathan Oates recommends some novels in the “bad seed” canon.

My Matthew is part of a long literary tradition of what are known as bad seeds, children who seem not just troublesome in the normal, run-of-the-mill sort of way, but who are, possibly, truly evil. There’s something irresistible about this for me as a reader, and as a writer: What if evil were innate, a person’s truest self? How would that person fit into the world, or fail to fit in? How would the people around them, especially family, who love this problematic, possibly-evil child, respond? How would you deal with evil if you found it nested in the heart of your family?

From Bad Seed Novels: A Deeply Unsettling Literary Tradition

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And speaking of bad seeds, James Byrne thinks that the moneyed oligarchs current blitzkrieging through our government and civil society make for great book villains.

Simply put: the ultra-rich make for good villains. The high-tech world is, for most of us, so opaque that Silicon Valley techno-mages are shovel-ready antagonists. And in real life, babbling billionaire buffoons keep showing us absolute power ain’t nothing compared to absolute wealth when it comes to corrupting absolutely.

Need a template for a bad guy in your next novel? Have you been on Twitter lately?

From High Tech in Low Places: The Makings of the Tech Bro Villain

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Emily Urquhart unpacks the villain/helper trope in a small town.

In traditional fairy tales, the type that Propp analyzed for his Morphology, we don’t tend to learn the villain’s backstory. They appear fully formed and they have only one role to play. In the coves, though, I wondered, couldn’t the villain be protecting what they loved? Curiously, once the house was successfully purchased, the villain almost always morphed into the role of helper.

From When Awe Meets Narrative: On Chasing Local Folklore at the Edge of the Ocean

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Morgan Talty recognizes that for his short story collection, the villain is often a system and not a person.

In a larger, overarching sense, I feel like the main villain is colonialism. What has wreaked havoc on—I don’t want to say this community because [the book] only focuses on one family. But colonialism has created the systemic violence that exists not just in indigenous communities but in any community that’s been colonized. So while the characters themselves have villainous aspects to them, the true villain that we have to take down is colonialism.

From Morgan Talty on Indigenous Literature, Penobscot Culture, and the Villain of Colonialism

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Jess Zimmerman on finding the monstrous in writing.

In fact, these two phenomena—rejecting the idea that it’s fundamentally monstrous to overstep unjust constraints, and being captivated by people who blithely steamroll social and moral norms—are probably connected. Though the monsters of literature are sometimes beholden, even prisoner, to their own idiosyncratic rules, they are—or at any rate, they seem to be—utterly free of the manners and mores that keep the rest of us locked within limits. Spend enough time in their company, and you see that this freedom is illusory.

But to watch someone flout the rules is to imagine, however briefly, that rules are not immutable: that they were made for reasons, and that the reasons may not be pure.

From What Do We Mean When We Call a Character a “Monster”?

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Villains let us indulge bad behavior, something Jennifer Lucy Allan articulates in her essay about her “feral shelf.”

[“]Stuff that gets you out of your comfort zone is thrilling, but perhaps it’s also a comfort to see that other people have mad ideas, or horrid stuff rattling about in their brain and don’t feel afraid to get it down on paper.”

She articulates something I’d been struggling to understand – that no amount of wellness and self-care can eliminate the badness rattling around in one’s brain or the world around us, although some messaging seems to suggest this is possible. I’m interested in embracing the reality of this rather than eliminating it, and I want to read about it too, articulated with wit, sarcasm, and mastery, because there is too much ‘should’ in the world, that trickles down into the day to day. We should get 8hrs sleep; we should turn our screens off; we should exercise; should curb our unhealthy appetites in pursuit of this promised happiness under strict self-control. But what if our appetites are the engine of life? What if keeping them in balance is the ride?

From My Feral Shelf: On Building a Personal Library of Bad Behavior