Saturday, August 1, 2009

The Perfect Villain

I play City of Heroes quite a bit. Okay, so that's an understatement. I play it a lot. After five years in the game, my addiction runs so deep it's threaded its way through my genetic makeup. You'd be hard-pressed to separate me from it.

I've always had a love of comic books. What's not to love? Sure, they're the domain of geeks, nerds, and all their ilk. But let's face it: who wouldn't love to fly? To have virtually god-like power at their disposal? To have a body so ripped you wouldn't think twice about showing up in public in a spandex body suit?

But one thing has started to really bug me about the villains in my game of choice. Now, I laud the writers for COH. As the game has aged, the stories have grown more compelling, more twisted, more convoluted. Sure, we have some dangling plot threats, gaping plot holes, and all that jazz, but they've fleshed out some of the characters quite nicely. In a world full of super-powered beings, that's frequently no mean feat. It's not easy fleshing out characters in a story about normal humans; try fleshing out a character who can incinerate you with a look, or teleport across vast distances, or summon the dead--and justify their reasons for doing what they do. That's a lot easier said than done.

The budding writer in me understands their desire to do just that. I think that the armchair psychiatrist in all of us would tend to agree that any villain who embarks on a life of crime does so for a reason. Greed, revenge, betrayal, power, lust, all the standard reasons are there.

But I've watched those foundation villains in City of Heroes for some time now, and I've discovered something about them that disturbs me.

They are all too distracted.

Give me any villain from the COH Universe and I can likely show you how that villain is too distracted. They all lack focus. A clear vision of what it is that motivates them. What Paragon City, indeed the COH Universe, needs is a villain who is so absolutely single-minded that he (or she) is utterly unstoppable and incapable of being distracted.

Imagine, if you will, a villain whom you never see. He is adept at keeping his identity and location concealed from everyone, including those with psychic and magical abilities. He does not want money, power, fame, or legions of followers. What he does want is to watch people suffer. He does not care, particularly, how he does it. He just cares that the world is filled with pain, anguish, misery, and death, and that it was his hand that brought it to pass.

He is not a god. He is not inhuman. He is not even super-powered. He is simply intelligent, and possessed of a single-minded determination to bring mass chaos to the world around him. He loathes the other villains because they are weakened by the petty squabbles they engage in between themselves. He will kill heroes, villains and civilians with merciless abandon.

While he has no followers of his own, there are those who have heard of him, and rally to his cause. These copy-cats seek to emulate him. They spread his anarchist agenda with a ruthlessness on par with his own. They could be anyone: civilians, members of known factions, heroes teetering on the brink of villainy. But none of them knows who he is or has ever seen him.

The only reason that anyone knows he exists is because he occasionally forewarns people of upcoming tragedies he will inflict, only to incite more terror. His mastery of indirection will sometimes lead heroes to one site in an attempt to avert disaster, only to realize that his real target was some other heavily populated target.

His targets of choice are always large population centers: hospitals, police departments, large office buildings, schools, and so on. Given any choice where he can inflict damage, he will inflict as much damage as is humanly possible.

Yes, this is the kind of villain that the COH Universe needs. A Black Mask, completely unpredictable, untraceable, never brought to justice, enemy to both hero and villain, and incapable of being distracted from the one thing that he seeks the most: the pain and suffering of others.

I highly doubt that this sort of a villain could be brought to pass and maintain the T for Teen rating that the game enjoys in its current incarnation. But one could dream. And if you're going to dream, dream big.

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