Classic mustache twirlers were based on villains from silent films.
Mythcreants has discussed many common problems with villains, but much of that coverage has focused on popular stories. When we review unpublished works, one problem is by far the most common: the villain is twirling their mustache. And often, this problem does indeed make it into print, such as in Eragon, The Mortal Instruments, I Am Number Four, and Tiger’s Curse.
What Is a Mustache-Twirling Villain?
This doesn’t mean literally twirling their mustache, though that’s been done. Instead, the villain might be:
- Laughing evilly
- Playing with knives or other weapons
- Inflicting pain for the joy of it
- Murdering their minions after the first failure
Or perhaps they’re doing none of those things, but they are constantly mistreating others, or constantly sticking their nose in the air, or constantly glaring menacingly and baring their sharp teeth. They might spend all of their spare time gloating over their big evil plan, or they might work cold, cutting remarks into every conversation.
If you’re wondering whether your villain fits the bill, consider: What positive traits does your villain have?
If that question gives you a moment of cognitive dissonance followed by a hurried search to identify what’s positive about your villain, they’re probably a mustache twirler. That’s because these villains aren’t designed to be well-rounded characters; they are merely caricatures of what we dislike in others.
It’s not impossible for mustache twirlers to work for a story. However, they usually have to be either a) distant and mysterious, so readers imagine how scary they are instead of seeing how goofy they are, or b) unique enough to dig themselves out of the cliché hole they’re in. But the villains of many stories aren’t meant to be Sauron or the Joker; they’re the controlling parent, or the arrogant billionaire, or the old friend gone down a dark road.
To succeed as the big bad, they need to stop twirling their mustache.
Why Villains Don’t Need to Do Evil Evilly
Before we can cover how to correct this problem, you need to know what actually makes a villain villainous. We’ve all consumed countless stories where villains were over the top, so it’s natural to believe that cackling and cruelty is what makes a villain effective. But this isn’t true, and understanding what actually makes villains work can help you break free of the caricatures you’ve seen and craft the best villain for your own story.
The purpose of the villain is to oppose your hero in solving the problems of the story. Perhaps the villain opposes the hero because they are causing those problems as part of their big evil plan, but it could also be because the villain happens to benefit from the problems, because the villain wants to solve the problems in a different way, or even because the villain wants to be the heroic savior themself.
What matters is that:
- The audience wants the hero, not the villain, to triumph
- The villain appears likely to win
That’s it. No knives required. No murder required. No eating puppies required.
In fact, pointless cruelty will make your villain less intimidating because they’ll look incompetent. If they mistreat their employees, no one will want to work for them, and then they’ll be less likely to win. If they’re mean to everyone, no one will like them, and they can’t use those social connections to help them win. Effective villains don’t lash out because they’re angry; they act strategically.
Cruelty can occasionally be useful for ensuring the audience wants the hero, not the villain, to win. This comes in handy for minor villains, like a jerkass rival on Team Good. It also matters for lower-stakes stories centered on relationship arcs. However, if you’re relying on cruelty to get the audience to root against the big bad in a high-stakes story, that suggests something else is wrong.
If the stakes are more than personal, the main villain should have a goal worth opposing regardless of their personality. They could be a nice person with the best of intentions, but they’re still going to turn crucial habitats into parking lots, imprison people who are actually innocent, or provoke a war. That is, unless the hero stops it.
If you do want your villain to be the scary type, I have another article on that. But the bottom line is that the more your villain is featured as a character in the story, the more work you’ll need to do to ensure they feel like a person and not a cartoon.
How to Make Your Villain More Nuanced
What needs to be done varies from villain to villain, but in most cases, checking these issues will go a long way.
Motivation
Your villain needs a motivation that at least makes sense. Without that, you’ll have trouble slipping into their shoes or developing them at a deeper level.
- Are their goals something a real person might have? If they will materially benefit by accomplishing their goals, that works. If they’re getting revenge, did their target wrong them even a little bit?
- Will their actions accomplish their goals? Or if not, do they have an understandable reason for thinking they will?
- Is there an easier way to accomplish their goals that would be obvious to someone with time to think about it?
Think through what you would do to achieve their ends if you were in their position. If you’re not sure, ask a friend. Put together a focus group even. Your villain will be both more believable and more intimidating if they are operating based on logic.
Social Skills
Please give your villain some social skills besides being mean. Keeping other people from stopping them is usually essential for a villain, so how does their social behavior help them do that?
- Do they endear themself to those in power?
- Do they put on a goofy act so no one takes them seriously?
- Do they convince the hero to trust them?
Being rude to everyone is rarely a winning strategy. While simply threatening to kill people if they cross the villain can work on occasion, most villains can’t be watching everyone all the time. If it doesn’t look like the villain can make good on their threats, they will feel ineffectual. A villain that succeeds through politeness will look much more competent.
Unique Traits
Give your villain at least one notable characteristic that isn’t associated with villains. This will add novelty and further round out their character.
- Do they sing gentle lullabies as they play the harp?
- Do they give generously to charity?
- Do they have a long history of heroic deeds?
While choosing traits associated with heroes will create nice contrast and add novelty, you don’t have to go that far. What’s important is that being a villain doesn’t entirely define them.
Humanizing Emotion
Occasionally show your villain expressing emotions that aren’t arrogance, smugness, coldness, disappointment, or anger.
- Do they feel any guilt over what they’re doing or what they’ve done in the past?
- Are they grieving someone or something they lost?
- Is there someone or something they genuinely love or care about?
Use new emotions to show a different side to your villain. Don’t let them take over the villain’s personality, or you’ll end up with another caricature.
For more ideas on making your villain feel nuanced, see Five Steps for Adding Character Complexity.
These days, readers are bored with one-note villains. But once you make your villain more interesting, they’re also pretty easy to please.
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A very useful article!
I recently read “The Wisteria Society for Lady Scoundrels” which is a parody of a Gothic romance novel. The villain in this one is actually written well – he is threatening, he is effective, he knows what he does, but he also comes across as a bit over the top (which doesn’t hurt him, as this is a parody and not a serious story).
I myself have a series where, essentially, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are switched. Isadora, my main character, is a villain (she’s part of the Villain’s Cabal, an organisation for villains, and works as a freelancer who renders support through reanimated corpses and avenging spirits). Her nemesis is her brother Connor who, like all of the family, is a hero. Connor chose her as his nemesis and is constantly bending the rules of engagement in the first book.
In my story, the whole hero-villain circus is heavily codified and also a big part of entertainment and media. Especially the heroes have to rely heavily on PR and are rated less for what they do and more for how popular they are. Isadora herself is more of an anti-hero than of a real villain, but her morals are quite flexible.
Seems though that the way people use “villain” and “hero” in-universe in this story, doesn’t map on to who’s the villain and who’s the hero in storytelling terms. Seems from your brief description that Connor is still the villain of the story, and Isadora the hero.
There is such a thing has having the villain-in-storytelling-terms as the main character, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s going on with Isadora.
No, it’s not, of course. Isadora is my main character and, in many ways, an anti-hero rather than a villain. Connor, too, is a hero ‘in name only’ (unlike Witch Hunter, a colleague of his whom I’m introducing in the second set of stories, who is more on the pragmatic side of the spectrum, like Isadora).
There are villains who really do bad things. There are heroes who do – or are prepared to do – bad things, too. On the other hand, there’s also villains doing nice things every now and then. The whole series is to make a point about the way superhero stories work with their characters. Isadora was meant to become a professional damsel and became a villain instead, choosing her own path. Connor mostly chose her as his nemesis because it makes for a good narrative – he’s in now way, shape, or form suited to be her nemesis.
This comes in handy, because I’m writing, for the first time, a main villain who’s human. I’ve only had demon main villains before. The latter are, so to speak, 100 % evil and destructive, but one of their important features is that they’re inhuman and alien and you can’t really understand their motivations. Now I’m writing a human main antagonist and I really want her to be charming and fun to hang out with. Only she’s got this plan – which involves seriously harming the MC – in order to gain the power to control and command demons. In a world where humanity has always lived under the threat of destructive demons, always struggled to deal with this, gaining control over them would be a pretty great thing. The plan, in reality, has no chance of succeeding, but she’s got her reasons for thinking it will.
I’ll do some more work on this story and probably flesh out her plan and motivation a bit more, but it makes sense to me that someone would want this (and harming the MC is really just a means to the end here).
My main villain is just my hero turned wrong (it helps that my hero is more an anti-hero) and in the end my hero can be labeled as a villain by some.
My current problem is with my villains plan, as there is a secret objective that the hero doesn’t know, and i don’t know how to foreshadow it.
I have the inverse problem, which is that I am incapable of writing a villain. My heroes end up having to battle volcanoes because all my human characters just keep resolving their problems by talking nicely and reasonably with each other…
But stories of nice humans vs the environment can be great! :-D If you don’t want to write villains it’s probably better not to.
Possibly what you need are problems that can’t be resolved by reasonable discussion. For instance, some resource or item that is essential for two different people or groups.
If there is, for example, only one good water source in the area, and your villain decides he needs to control it to provide water for his cattle herd, the village crops will fail for lack of irrigation. Their isn’t enough water to share, so no compromise is possible.
Or there’s a time limit for how long the water’s available, like a short rain season where the shared pond dries up in six weeks and hoarding the water is more understandable.
Personally, that was the main draw of The Martian for me (the movie, can’t comment on the book). Literally all the characters were so nice.
It’s also the appeal of what I call the whole “Climate wish-fulfillment genre” where humans set aside their differences and work together to avert an existential threat. Considering how many environmental problems we have in the real world rn, there is definitely a place for such stories.
I have the same issue. When I was a GM of a superhero campaign, the street gang leader had the strategy to be the middle fish in a big pond, big enough to avoid being eaten but not so big to attract too much attention. They provided information to the PCs for favors but also set up the other gangs to attack the PCs.
Then I had a ninja group that murdered and stole, but it was all in the name of protecting the Earth against dangerous eldritch artifacts. Those they murdered were already corrupted and would become a threat. It was a unique situation for the players since the ninjas weren’t “evil” but were ruthless out of necessity.
When I write, I often get stuck when it comes time to do the antagonist. I hate conflict but know it’s necessary for the story. My way around it may be to not have the antagonist be evil, just to have an agenda that runs counter to the protagonist.
There’re also Evil Virtues like persistence, determination, physical courage etc. that are necessary for a villain to be threatening at all, but don’t, by themselves, make a villain less moustache-twirling, unless explicitly noted by the narrative.
Essentially, they’re also virtues for the hero. The villain becomes a villain by their actions, not by their looks or virtues.
I’ve come across at least one book where the protagonist is only a ‘hero’ because the author says he is; looked at from a slightly different viewpoint, he’d be the villain.
I’m a big fan of a couple of stories about a guy whom even the author doesn’t call a hero – because that would be a lie. He’s so far on the ‘anti-hero’ spectrum that he can touch villainy without stretching out his arm. Still, he’s a fun guy to read about.
Please give your villain some social skills besides being mean.
… or die.
(Oh come on, don’t pretend you weren’t hoping someone would go through the article looking for something to add that to).
Add “… or die” to something… or die.
More seriously, this is a great article. I have a big weakness in this area.
My villain is a wholly unrepentant, awful human being and people have loved it. Every time I thought … nah she wouldn’t … she doubles down on vile and readers have gushed.
I think it might be because of her gender. Female villains often come off as apologetic for what they want or how they act; they never really own who they are. The ambition is for someone else (i.e. der childrens). The manipulation and murder is self-preservation in an unfair system, yadda yadda. There’s always an excuse. Even Circe from GoT falls into “but she loves her children. Mother Bear” trope.
As the second most powerful person in a country that is both matriarchal and matrilineal, there’s not a lot for her to want other than to become the most powerful person in the country. She just has to kill her equally well-resourced and intelligent (much nicer, low bar, I know) sister to do it.
She has the resources, she’s incredibly clever, competent and well-educated, completely self-aware that she is vindictive and cruel, treats grudges like most people treat their wedding rings, and doesn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. The worst crime a person can commit is to impugn her own good opinion of herself, and Goddess help you if you embarrass her publicly. She was groomed into sexually sadistic tastes by her right hand man (not a hard sell. She was a natural), has enslaved the father of her oldest children in a horribly abusive relationship he capitulates to to keep her away from their son (who’s away being raised by Gran. Sadly that doesn’t stick.). She’s a rapist, a murderess, a ruthless manipulator, and a child abuser in the body of a Disney Princess and a hell of a lot of fun to write.
Her arrogance does bring her down, and is the major source of her miscalculations, but it’s also very believable that it would be. It’s not stupidity, but a blind spot. She has SO much control, SO many resources, it really IS impossible for her to imagine failure.
The most entertaining question I offer the reader is WHICH character is going to have the pleasure of disposing of her, and they get to imagine all the ways it would be oh-so satisfying until it happens.
Current leader: feet-first into a hand-crank woodchipper.
What can I say? It makes my writerly heart giddy.
“It’s not impossible for mustache twirlers to work for a story.”
I find this interesting because Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions once discussed mustache twirlers in her Trope Talk on Pure Evil, concluding that they work as long as they are sufficiently charismatic.
This puts me between a rock and a hard place. So, so many of my favorite villains are in the Pure Evil category, but they are hard to emulate. It’s kind of the same problem as with mastermind protagonists. Where are these charismatic actors in prose?
Well, guess I’ll have to rely on mystery and novelty then. But while they’re difficult to get right, I think those Pure Evil villains can have their advantages. For one, they’re less unpleasant to read about than more “realistic” types of villains (like abusive parents or corrupt authority figures) and their simple characterization allows a writer to put more focus on other things (they’re kinda like monsters and natural disasters in that regard; though, if the story allows it, it’s in probably better to use these instead).
I think a first step would be to make them enjoy being evil. That doesn’t mean they must eat puppies, but they should be aware of their evilness and enjoy it. No ‘I’m doing this for the good of mankind’ – just a ‘yes, I’m only doing this for my own benefit and I enjoy closing down that orphanage just for the fun of it.’ I think that adds to their charisma. Also, despite being mustache-twirling evil, a character can have great people skills. The best villains are those who can effortlessly drop from ‘welcome to my home’ to ‘now I’m going to throw you out of this airplane without parachute.’
Great article! It’s so good to find solutions to writing problems. Definitely going to try to implement this in my own writing.
The book I’m reading now is one of many political intrigue fantasies I’ve read lately that has this mustache-twirling villain problem. It really ruins the “morally grey” dilemmas that I’m looking for in the genre, and the whodunnit mystery becomes pointless. I think mustache-twirling villains work better in classic good vs. evil fantasy. At least then I don’t feel cheated.
One likely contributing factor in recent years is that right now, many of the US’s most numerous villains look like pure mustache-twirlers.
They claim to follow a religion but do exactly the opposite of what its prophet actually says. They believe people’s circumstances are proof that their faulty interpretation is right rather than being the consequences of a combination of their own actions and those of successful greedy sociopaths, and go out of their way to create conspiracy theories to explain away those cases where their actions don’t go their way.
They think people’s physical shape and color determines who they are on the inside, the exact bounds of their potential, and how they are and aren’t capable of or allowed to act. They also think these physical traits determine everybody’s place in a hierarchy that they believe is natural but isn’t, and that the higher up in this hierarchy you are the fewer negative consequences you “should” face for any action. Worse, they believe people are miserable because they’re “resisting the natural order” and pursuing rights they don’t “really” want… and that following from that, punishing people for this is an “act of love”.
And to top it all off, these villains think everyone else is deliberately crafting a false religion to oppose them with, held together through nothing but peer pressure, and the “everybody knows” that the “facts” are actually on said villains’ side.
At least, that’s my best estimation of their mindset… and it’s hard not to interpret that as just “pure evil” and call it a day.