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No More Mr. Bad Guy
June 22, 2010 Authors always treat evil as an incomprehensible, barely-human force waiting to be defeated—but that’s pure fiction. It’s high time we saw villains as people too.
Illustration by Michael Cho
Like any fiction writer, I work hard to get my characters right. Often this means trying to see things from their perspectives. Are they motivated by guilt, or a lie they half-believe? What I discover isn’t always pleasant. It’s worth doing, however, because it deprives me of straw targets. As a result, I never write about villains, because villains aren’t people.
True, no character in fiction is an actual person. Better explanation: villains are characters that don’t act like real people. They’re plot props. They live in fables, westerns and teen …
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ISSUE 43 Tenth Anniversary: Spring 2012
online content:
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Anatomy of an Occupation
What really happened at Occupy Toronto? [full text] -
The Death of Networks
Occupy and the Arab Spring are often glowingly compared to the decentralized, democratic internet. But that very similarity may have doomed these movements from the beginning. [full text] -
Tenth Anniversary Timeline
A decade of Maisonneuve. [full text]
also in this issue:
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Face the Music
How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness. -
The Big Job
As a teenager, Deni Y. Béchard went to Vancouver to live with his father, an ex-con with a penchant for telling tall tales. He met a man desperate to forget the past. -
The Homesickness of Astronauts
"She felt a great sadness. She would remember next to nothing of this, even soon." - [see full issue contents]