Can A Villain Want To Be Evil? Case study: LaCroix

Maybe the first rule we hear about writing villains is “No villain believes he’s a villain.” That is, in a story or in real life, even the people who do the most evil believe either that they’re doing right or that “good and evil” simply don’t matter. I’ve always agreed with that, but (this being the Unified Theory and all) I can’t help trying to test it a bit. Say, with one of the most “deliberately evil” villains I know: Forever Knight’s master vampire LaCroix.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Forever Knight was a vampire TV series that came out a bit (sorry) before the current crazes, and it focused squarely on its reluctant vampire’s reluctance and guilts that he faced while working as a police detective. Meanwhile the vampire that created Nick Knight, Lucien LaCroix, was…

Well, LaCroix went beyond killing people; he reveled in the idea of killing, and loved to point out human failings and lecture Nick that treating people as prey was the great pleasure of immortality. He’d attack the very notion of love, mercy, justice, anything that was part of Nick’s trying to “repay society for his sins.” –Picture all the melodramatic lines that bad villains use to announce that nobody wrote them a motivation, then strip them down so they actually sound believable, and give them to a completely committed actor. That’s Nigel Bennett as LaCroix.

(Or just consider: this is a vampire who named himself “the cross,” after all. [In fact, the full name is “Light of the Cross,” as Mona’s comment below points out.] And yes, Forever Knight vampires do have a problem with crosses, and no, the “cross” half of it wasn’t from our General Lucius’s birth name. Nasty.)

So does it mean anything that this villain actually likes evil for its own sake, that he doesn’t just “want your __” as the Theory’s analysis of villains covers?

One explanation for LaCroix is that he “doth protest too much” about having no softness in himself, in that he’s been actively crushing it out of his soul over the centuries until it’s become a reflex. After all, a vampire isn’t like a terrorist who believes God needs murders or a serial killer who simply wants to kill. A vampire, unless he makes serious sacrifices like Nick did, needs to kill humans just to stay alive, not to mention playing cat and mouse with them to keep his secret and then watching any humans he may still connect with age away and die. The core of existing as a vampire is dealing with the killing and isolation… and likely LaCroix has been working very hard to keep any regrets in line for a very long time.

That’s a powerful lesson for us writers. Yes, we love to justify villains and less extreme kinds of conflict by crafting situations where someone really would start doing the Troublesome Things the plot needs—especially if we can establish his character to show that he still had a choice to refuse the darkness, and he’s just not someone who would. But it makes him seem even more determined and also more believable (and tragic) if we show that he came to that place through a journey, through making that choice more than once, and how those choices and their effects changed him over time.

Or of course, to start pushing a hero down that same path…

And there’s another point about LaCroix: how exactly he matches his hero’s struggle. We all know the villain has to threaten something the hero cares about, but consider how much we can zero in on that exact point.

Because LaCroix isn’t trying to control a city or running around killing—or rather, the show leaves it as a given that Nick could never stop his feedings if he dared try. And LaCroix’s real goal isn’t exactly to be evil: it’s to keep human weakness from spoiling his eternity, and especially for his favorite creation, Nick, to give up trying to become human. As a motive, it’s not so different from the classic Dracula trying to seduce or carry off a woman into vampirism, or from any tale with a controlling father who refuses to let his son go.

“Every parent wants something in return. Love? loyalty? nothing is free… What did your father promise you? did he promise to take care of you? Did he keep his promise?”

–LaCroix to a crowd (and Nick), “Father’s Day”

In fact, most often LaCroix isn’t sabotaging the pieces of Nick’s human life. Instead he challenges him purely on that moral level, by pointing out all the flaws in human beings and in Nick’s struggle to join them, because he seems to believe our hero needs no more than that to bring him around sooner or later. And by refining just what the villain strikes at, the show prevents “so the hero fights the vampire” from distracting us from the focus it really wants, how each human crime gives Nick another challenge to his determination to be mortal.

Yes, you could argue that LaCroix isn’t actually used as a villain or other true opposition, more a symbol of the temptations the hero faces from whatever the story is. But a story can do great things with a tempter like this if it can capture that the hero really might be drawn into the dark each time, probably by letting him sometimes give in and having to face the consequences. (And okay, LaCroix does mix in episodes where he acts directly to interfere with Nick; a little uncertainty adds tension to those staredowns.) The real point is keeping LaCroix as representing the “shadow self” to Nick, that whether or not he’s the big tangible threat he shows how our hero might become the threat himself.

It’s worth trying, for any writer. Know just what your hero is struggling with, and define some villain or foil to challenge that as specifically as you can. And/ or, find the path that brings the villain (or the hero, or both) right to being willing to do that… even if it’s by way of how times he’s refused to turn back.

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