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The right and wrong way to write a mysterious villain.
a year ago
General
Heya guys, Js here, back with another journal. I'm sure I have already said some important things from my two last journals... Well, that is if you guys even CARED about reading them, but we're going to do something different with this one.
One of the things about villains is that the majority of them tended to be greedy, powerful, manipulative, and, well, evil. But, I haven't seen anybody talking about MYSTERIOUS villains. And when I say mysterious, I mean those with moral ambiguity, or those that make you keep guessing what their real motives are until the end. Making them mysterious and threatening is a great way to do it, especially if you're going to reveal their true identity later on.
But, today, I'm gonna talk about what makes a good mysterious villain vs a bad mysterious villain. So, sit back, and enjoy the read as I show the right and wrong way to write a mysterious villain. Just a reminder, there will be some heavy spoilers for Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth and Lackadaisy, so keep that in mind.
Now, let's start off with the good example of a mysterious villain, starting with Yutaka Yamai from Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.
Yutaka Yamai is a yakuza boss who runs the Yamai Syndicate. He used to be the member of the Tabata Family, led by Shunji Tabata. Yamai and his members would kill and make money for Shunji's wife, Yui Tabata. At some point, Yamai became madly in love with her. One day, at some point around or prior to 1993, twenty-year-old Yamai was spoken to alone by Yui, who stated she was having an affair with his captain. Believing it to be his only chance with her, Yamai agreed to kill Shuji with the promise that she would keep him safe from the police or the family. That night, he accompanied her to Shuji's office and attacked him. As soon as Shuji stopped breathing, Yui ripped her clothes and ran to Shuji's subordinates, claiming Yamai killed him then went after her. Yamai managed to flee to safety.
He would see Yui one more time with her living happily and openly with his captain, and Yamai started having shivers, which he tried to hide by claiming that he was ''cold'' even when in Hawaii. This is why he had a coat covering him, and only had it taken off when he fights against someone.
Around 2017, he took in Eric Tomizawa, a man who owed debt to the Yamai Syndicate, who would become his "errand boy."
Yamai orders Tomizawa, whose taxi was impounded, to track down Ichiban, as Ichiban was responsible for Tomizawa getting arrested. Led to a motel, Yamai, along with Tomizawa and other subordinates, head inside to find Ichiban Kasuga and Eiji Mitamura. Realizing Kasuga doesn't appear wealthy enough to pay for the taxi, he decides to attack him instead. Defeated, he seems to take an interest in Kasuga. At some point, Yamai learns that other criminal organizations are searching for a woman named Akane Kishida, and he begins searching for her to find out why she is so valuable to them.
Yamai and his men head to Akane's house to see if they can find anything pointing to her location, only to reunite with Kasuga alongside a grey-haired man. Upon seeing his face, Yamai recognizes the man as Kazuma Kiryu, a man who he knew was still alive, thanks to his ability to deduce someone's identity by looking at their faces.
Tomizawa was about to kill Yamai, but missed, and Ichiban was able to convince Tomizawa to switch sides. Given this information, you'd think Yamai would seek revenge on Tomizawa for switching sides. But, surprisingly, he doesn't, instead simply looking for a fight with Kiryu. Though Kiryu keeps denying his identity, Yamai doesn't budge and attacks anyways. Despite losing the battle, Yamai says he expected more out of the legend, being unaware of his condition. He leaves, hoping their next fight will be worth it.
Yamai would track the heroes down in a forest, where he would burn it all down. After losing the fight, Kiryu would start to collapse due to his condition, and Yamai took advantage of this by knocking him out. Now, this is where we the audience expect for Yamai to do something terrible to Kiryu. Perhaps he was going to torture him, perhaps he was going to kill him, or something like that. But, once Yamai lose the fight again in his club, one of the ladies admitted that Kiryu was fine, and that Yamai even treated his wounds.
Who exactly was this guy? Well, as it turns out that Yamai was actually kinder than we thought. After he made it to the hospital, he found Yui in the bed, and asked if there's anything he could do for her. Little did he knew, that she was suffering from Alzheimer's, and so, she didn't remember who he was.
Given the situation, you'd think Yamai might take his revenge on her for what she did to him, since she framed him after all. Instead, he gave away his coat to her, and walks away. When Ichiban asks, ''Are you sure about this?'' Yamai replies with ''Yeah... I was too warm anyway.'' The fact that he silently gave away his coat to warm up a lady who framed him for a terrible crime, walks away before saying a few words, and with subtlety to his kindness no doubt, makes him one of the best mysterious characters I have ever seen.
Despite his tough, cold, calculating exterior that he tried to maintain, he's actually a good guy at heart.
Not only that, he was a real threat to the main heroes, as shown when he managed to track the heroes down with no difficulty, and even managed to knock out Kiryu Kazuma with his crowbar.
So, what makes him a great mysterious villain? For one thing, the lack of information about him was what makes him interesting. When he was introduced, he was a ruthless, cold, and creepy villain that we needed to defeat and escape from. Yet, towards the end, we saw that mask shattered once we saw him treat Yui with such kindness. We're also given subtle hints to his character.
One of those hints being that he was cold all the time, given his shivers, which was the result of his trauma, rather than being in a cold environment. Another subtle hint was that he'd rather have a great fight with Kiryu rather than take revenge on Tomizawa, which shows his willingness to let go of grudges, just like in that hospital scene.
Lastly, the subtle hints didn't undermine him as a threat, and he gave the characters and players quite a hard time more than few times.
The fact that everyone in the Yakuza fanbase pretty much loved this character goes to show you how well-written he really is.
The same cannot be said with a bad example of a mysterious villain, Mordecai Heller from Lackadaisy.
Yes, yes, I've already beaten a dead horse already, sue me. But I think with how badly written Mordecai is, and given there's not enough views on my journals, I figured that I might as well give more details about Mordecai being a mysterious villain starting with his backstory.
Mordecai Heller was born on March 28, 1899 in New York City, New York to German-Jewish immigrants, he lived with his 3 siblings. Before starting his education Mordecai suffered from congenital myopia and was forced to wear spectacles, After his father Issac passed from a stroke, Mordecai became very protective of his family and they moved to the east side of Manhattan in terrible living conditions.
At the age of 13 Mordecai begins working as an accountant and bookie for grifters, loan sharks and gambling operations, he finished his primary education and in need of money at the age of 17 extorts money from someone minor in the crime world and later murders them to replace their role and was able to embezzle money from higher-ranks though he is later caught.
In fright Mordecai leaves New York on a getaway train to either Chicago or Detroit, he leaves all the money for his family and meets Atlas May and later leaves with him to St. Louis, Atlas helps Mordecai get out of his former troubles and Mordecai decides to join Lackadaisy as a sharpshooter, though after Atlas’s death in 1926, Mordecai leaves and kneecaps his coworker Viktor, he later gets hired by Asa Sweet in early 1927 to be a triggerman for Marigold.
However, what Asa Sweet didn't know was that Mordecai was actually trying to investigate about who killed Atlas May for his purpose of revenge.
In the animated pilot, we don't know much about his motive, other than the fact that he was still working for Asa Sweet. Due to Rocky's clumsiness, Mordecai's car crashed, and Mordecai would go on a pursuit trying to kill him and Freckles. When that failed, Mordecai went to report the situation to Asa Sweet, and the pilot ended.
Now, on the surface, it looks like he got everything that Yutaka Yamai had, just with a different backstory. Mordecai went through a terrible situation, escaped to safety, lead a family, and kept a cold, calculating persona to hide his true identity. So, what exactly went wrong here?
The whole point about Mordecai is that he is supposed to be a highly accurate sharpshooter with a cunning intellect to boot. Mordecai was supposed to be a foil to Rocky, what with Mordecai being emotionless, cold and calculating and Rocky being the insane, immature, child in an adult's body.
While there's absolute nothing wrong with how Mordecai was written for his backstory, the problem is that Mordecai has got NO personality whatsoever. He is SO freaking boring. And so, I ended up not caring about his journey, or his stakes. In the comic, he was pretty much invincible, with him able to escape to safety with no problem, and being more than one step ahead of everyone at every page that he's in. Mordecai had NO fatal flaws, or anything that made him stand out. Compared that to Yutaka Yamai, who had suffered shivers, and failed to defeat the heroes, yet somehow was a lot more threatening at the same time.
In the animated pilot, Mordecai is a TERRIBLE shooter, and shoots like an inept Stormtrooper from the original Star Wars trilogy. And just when Mordecai had the perfect opportunity to shoot at Ivy, he just sighes and lowers his gun. I don't have a problem with villains or characters doing something that's seemingly out-of-character for the sake of revealing a clue to their backstory. What I DO have a problem with is that this undermines Mordecai as a threat to the main hero.
Yutaka Yamai managed to easily track down the heroes with no difficulty and managed to knock out Kiryu of all people with relative ease. However, his hidden compassion and kindness made him open to attack, thus making him lose a few fights against the heroes.
Even his shivers didn't stop him from taking that perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of the main protagonists. So you CAN make your character do something that seemed to be out-of-character to reveal a clue or hint to their character, to show who they are, but, when you have a villain, who's supposed to be this terrifying threat that the heroes must escape from, and he does nothing but miss his shot again and again, then you have a problem.
This is why it's important that you balance out your character's strengths and weaknesses. It IS tricky, trust me, as a writer, I had to make sure to give Toshineko a fatal flaw that Lucario had to exploit, but, it would make Mordecai a better villain.
You don't have to have Mordecai shoot Ivy in the head or give her a fatal shot. Instead, have him shoot her in the arm or somewhere to make her swerve out of control, and cause the car to crash, and have Mordecai make sure she was alright, while still trying to kill Rocky and Freckles. Or, you know, SHOOT THE FREAKING TIRES!! That way, you have a villain who is threatening and mysterious at the same time.
Hell, George Lucas did that with Darth Vader, as we got to see just how terrifying Darth Vader really was, and even chopped Luke's hand off. However, once we get to see more hints of his character, we see that he couldn't really kill Luke because of the conflict within him, which he tried to deny, due to his compassion toward him, since Luke was indeed his son. Then at the end, Darth Vader decided to throw Palpatine down the reactor shaft when he saw Luke suffering.
That is character, that's how you write a great villain.
This is why Mordecai fails as a character, and as a mysterious villain. Because, not only did the mystery of his character undermined him as a threat, but he also has no personality as a result. Sure, his cold persona was supposed to hide his fear or something, but, we don't get to see him being afraid of anything.
I also really don't like Mordecai in the Lackadaisy Stratgem short, due to him rambling about something that makes no sense. There's also a part of his dialogue that I particularly dislike, and I'll copy and paste it here: ''I mean your strategy. What strategy are you playing? The Pelagatti Attack? The Archizer-Meyer Countergambit? Der Hammerschlag? The Zugzwang Zigzag? The Poached Penguin? The Drunken Tartakower? Some half-cocked variation of the Dizzy Whippet Defense? ...Checkers?''
Now, in writing, there's the concept called brevity, a style of writing that is concise, terse, straight to the point, direct, and professional. Or, to put it more simply ''Less is more''. Let's take an example of Ernest Hemingway's writing style in his novel called: ''The Old Man and The Sea'' There's a part where he uses a short sentence to describe a protagonist's thought: ''I’m clear enough in the head, he thought. Too clear. I am as clear as the stars that are my brothers.'' Short and simple.
Hemingway also uses long sentences sparingly, too, but he also gives them the right sentence length: ''You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.'' Let's count how many phrases Hemingway used in this one. So far, there's five. We get to see how the old man felt in that situation without having it explain it to us like we're kindergarteners.
Now let's count Mordecai's phrases from that dialogue. Well, given the amount of questions, I would say... Eight. That's right, EIGHT!!! I could write a freaking essay shorter than that! Not only that, but the amount of sentences he spews is redundant. ''The Pelagatti Attack? The Archizer-Meyer Countergambit? Der Hammerschlag? The Zugzwang Zigzag? The Poached Penguin? The Drunken Tartakower? Some half-cocked variation of the Dizzy Whippet Defense? ...Checkers?''
Instead of having his feeling described in a few, short simple sentences, we need to hear EIGHT of them just to understand the fact that Mordecai is making a fuss over his BISHOP being taken. It's like the writer wasn't confident that we as the audience would understand that in a few words, so, they had to just spell them out for us.
This is TERRIBLE writing, and I'm surprised how many people enjoyed that scene, considering that it's a scene about nothing.
Sorry for that little rant there. But, yeah, that is my journal about having to write a good mysterious villain.
Writing villains with mysterious motivations takes great skills and talent, and the important thing is, while they can be mysterious, they also have to be, you know, villains as well. Just like writing a mysterious anti-hero takes skill and talent, they also have to remind us that they're villains. Balancing out the evilness and mystery of them is tough, but I've seen talented writers do this, and if the writers at RGG Studios can write a character like that well, then so can the fanfiction writers.
Who knows, we might have a villain who's not a Villain Sue like Mordecai is from the Lackadaisy comic series.
Anyway, that's all I have to say. Tune in next time.
One of the things about villains is that the majority of them tended to be greedy, powerful, manipulative, and, well, evil. But, I haven't seen anybody talking about MYSTERIOUS villains. And when I say mysterious, I mean those with moral ambiguity, or those that make you keep guessing what their real motives are until the end. Making them mysterious and threatening is a great way to do it, especially if you're going to reveal their true identity later on.
But, today, I'm gonna talk about what makes a good mysterious villain vs a bad mysterious villain. So, sit back, and enjoy the read as I show the right and wrong way to write a mysterious villain. Just a reminder, there will be some heavy spoilers for Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth and Lackadaisy, so keep that in mind.
Now, let's start off with the good example of a mysterious villain, starting with Yutaka Yamai from Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.
Yutaka Yamai is a yakuza boss who runs the Yamai Syndicate. He used to be the member of the Tabata Family, led by Shunji Tabata. Yamai and his members would kill and make money for Shunji's wife, Yui Tabata. At some point, Yamai became madly in love with her. One day, at some point around or prior to 1993, twenty-year-old Yamai was spoken to alone by Yui, who stated she was having an affair with his captain. Believing it to be his only chance with her, Yamai agreed to kill Shuji with the promise that she would keep him safe from the police or the family. That night, he accompanied her to Shuji's office and attacked him. As soon as Shuji stopped breathing, Yui ripped her clothes and ran to Shuji's subordinates, claiming Yamai killed him then went after her. Yamai managed to flee to safety.
He would see Yui one more time with her living happily and openly with his captain, and Yamai started having shivers, which he tried to hide by claiming that he was ''cold'' even when in Hawaii. This is why he had a coat covering him, and only had it taken off when he fights against someone.
Around 2017, he took in Eric Tomizawa, a man who owed debt to the Yamai Syndicate, who would become his "errand boy."
Yamai orders Tomizawa, whose taxi was impounded, to track down Ichiban, as Ichiban was responsible for Tomizawa getting arrested. Led to a motel, Yamai, along with Tomizawa and other subordinates, head inside to find Ichiban Kasuga and Eiji Mitamura. Realizing Kasuga doesn't appear wealthy enough to pay for the taxi, he decides to attack him instead. Defeated, he seems to take an interest in Kasuga. At some point, Yamai learns that other criminal organizations are searching for a woman named Akane Kishida, and he begins searching for her to find out why she is so valuable to them.
Yamai and his men head to Akane's house to see if they can find anything pointing to her location, only to reunite with Kasuga alongside a grey-haired man. Upon seeing his face, Yamai recognizes the man as Kazuma Kiryu, a man who he knew was still alive, thanks to his ability to deduce someone's identity by looking at their faces.
Tomizawa was about to kill Yamai, but missed, and Ichiban was able to convince Tomizawa to switch sides. Given this information, you'd think Yamai would seek revenge on Tomizawa for switching sides. But, surprisingly, he doesn't, instead simply looking for a fight with Kiryu. Though Kiryu keeps denying his identity, Yamai doesn't budge and attacks anyways. Despite losing the battle, Yamai says he expected more out of the legend, being unaware of his condition. He leaves, hoping their next fight will be worth it.
Yamai would track the heroes down in a forest, where he would burn it all down. After losing the fight, Kiryu would start to collapse due to his condition, and Yamai took advantage of this by knocking him out. Now, this is where we the audience expect for Yamai to do something terrible to Kiryu. Perhaps he was going to torture him, perhaps he was going to kill him, or something like that. But, once Yamai lose the fight again in his club, one of the ladies admitted that Kiryu was fine, and that Yamai even treated his wounds.
Who exactly was this guy? Well, as it turns out that Yamai was actually kinder than we thought. After he made it to the hospital, he found Yui in the bed, and asked if there's anything he could do for her. Little did he knew, that she was suffering from Alzheimer's, and so, she didn't remember who he was.
Given the situation, you'd think Yamai might take his revenge on her for what she did to him, since she framed him after all. Instead, he gave away his coat to her, and walks away. When Ichiban asks, ''Are you sure about this?'' Yamai replies with ''Yeah... I was too warm anyway.'' The fact that he silently gave away his coat to warm up a lady who framed him for a terrible crime, walks away before saying a few words, and with subtlety to his kindness no doubt, makes him one of the best mysterious characters I have ever seen.
Despite his tough, cold, calculating exterior that he tried to maintain, he's actually a good guy at heart.
Not only that, he was a real threat to the main heroes, as shown when he managed to track the heroes down with no difficulty, and even managed to knock out Kiryu Kazuma with his crowbar.
So, what makes him a great mysterious villain? For one thing, the lack of information about him was what makes him interesting. When he was introduced, he was a ruthless, cold, and creepy villain that we needed to defeat and escape from. Yet, towards the end, we saw that mask shattered once we saw him treat Yui with such kindness. We're also given subtle hints to his character.
One of those hints being that he was cold all the time, given his shivers, which was the result of his trauma, rather than being in a cold environment. Another subtle hint was that he'd rather have a great fight with Kiryu rather than take revenge on Tomizawa, which shows his willingness to let go of grudges, just like in that hospital scene.
Lastly, the subtle hints didn't undermine him as a threat, and he gave the characters and players quite a hard time more than few times.
The fact that everyone in the Yakuza fanbase pretty much loved this character goes to show you how well-written he really is.
The same cannot be said with a bad example of a mysterious villain, Mordecai Heller from Lackadaisy.
Yes, yes, I've already beaten a dead horse already, sue me. But I think with how badly written Mordecai is, and given there's not enough views on my journals, I figured that I might as well give more details about Mordecai being a mysterious villain starting with his backstory.
Mordecai Heller was born on March 28, 1899 in New York City, New York to German-Jewish immigrants, he lived with his 3 siblings. Before starting his education Mordecai suffered from congenital myopia and was forced to wear spectacles, After his father Issac passed from a stroke, Mordecai became very protective of his family and they moved to the east side of Manhattan in terrible living conditions.
At the age of 13 Mordecai begins working as an accountant and bookie for grifters, loan sharks and gambling operations, he finished his primary education and in need of money at the age of 17 extorts money from someone minor in the crime world and later murders them to replace their role and was able to embezzle money from higher-ranks though he is later caught.
In fright Mordecai leaves New York on a getaway train to either Chicago or Detroit, he leaves all the money for his family and meets Atlas May and later leaves with him to St. Louis, Atlas helps Mordecai get out of his former troubles and Mordecai decides to join Lackadaisy as a sharpshooter, though after Atlas’s death in 1926, Mordecai leaves and kneecaps his coworker Viktor, he later gets hired by Asa Sweet in early 1927 to be a triggerman for Marigold.
However, what Asa Sweet didn't know was that Mordecai was actually trying to investigate about who killed Atlas May for his purpose of revenge.
In the animated pilot, we don't know much about his motive, other than the fact that he was still working for Asa Sweet. Due to Rocky's clumsiness, Mordecai's car crashed, and Mordecai would go on a pursuit trying to kill him and Freckles. When that failed, Mordecai went to report the situation to Asa Sweet, and the pilot ended.
Now, on the surface, it looks like he got everything that Yutaka Yamai had, just with a different backstory. Mordecai went through a terrible situation, escaped to safety, lead a family, and kept a cold, calculating persona to hide his true identity. So, what exactly went wrong here?
The whole point about Mordecai is that he is supposed to be a highly accurate sharpshooter with a cunning intellect to boot. Mordecai was supposed to be a foil to Rocky, what with Mordecai being emotionless, cold and calculating and Rocky being the insane, immature, child in an adult's body.
While there's absolute nothing wrong with how Mordecai was written for his backstory, the problem is that Mordecai has got NO personality whatsoever. He is SO freaking boring. And so, I ended up not caring about his journey, or his stakes. In the comic, he was pretty much invincible, with him able to escape to safety with no problem, and being more than one step ahead of everyone at every page that he's in. Mordecai had NO fatal flaws, or anything that made him stand out. Compared that to Yutaka Yamai, who had suffered shivers, and failed to defeat the heroes, yet somehow was a lot more threatening at the same time.
In the animated pilot, Mordecai is a TERRIBLE shooter, and shoots like an inept Stormtrooper from the original Star Wars trilogy. And just when Mordecai had the perfect opportunity to shoot at Ivy, he just sighes and lowers his gun. I don't have a problem with villains or characters doing something that's seemingly out-of-character for the sake of revealing a clue to their backstory. What I DO have a problem with is that this undermines Mordecai as a threat to the main hero.
Yutaka Yamai managed to easily track down the heroes with no difficulty and managed to knock out Kiryu of all people with relative ease. However, his hidden compassion and kindness made him open to attack, thus making him lose a few fights against the heroes.
Even his shivers didn't stop him from taking that perfect opportunity to take advantage of one of the main protagonists. So you CAN make your character do something that seemed to be out-of-character to reveal a clue or hint to their character, to show who they are, but, when you have a villain, who's supposed to be this terrifying threat that the heroes must escape from, and he does nothing but miss his shot again and again, then you have a problem.
This is why it's important that you balance out your character's strengths and weaknesses. It IS tricky, trust me, as a writer, I had to make sure to give Toshineko a fatal flaw that Lucario had to exploit, but, it would make Mordecai a better villain.
You don't have to have Mordecai shoot Ivy in the head or give her a fatal shot. Instead, have him shoot her in the arm or somewhere to make her swerve out of control, and cause the car to crash, and have Mordecai make sure she was alright, while still trying to kill Rocky and Freckles. Or, you know, SHOOT THE FREAKING TIRES!! That way, you have a villain who is threatening and mysterious at the same time.
Hell, George Lucas did that with Darth Vader, as we got to see just how terrifying Darth Vader really was, and even chopped Luke's hand off. However, once we get to see more hints of his character, we see that he couldn't really kill Luke because of the conflict within him, which he tried to deny, due to his compassion toward him, since Luke was indeed his son. Then at the end, Darth Vader decided to throw Palpatine down the reactor shaft when he saw Luke suffering.
That is character, that's how you write a great villain.
This is why Mordecai fails as a character, and as a mysterious villain. Because, not only did the mystery of his character undermined him as a threat, but he also has no personality as a result. Sure, his cold persona was supposed to hide his fear or something, but, we don't get to see him being afraid of anything.
I also really don't like Mordecai in the Lackadaisy Stratgem short, due to him rambling about something that makes no sense. There's also a part of his dialogue that I particularly dislike, and I'll copy and paste it here: ''I mean your strategy. What strategy are you playing? The Pelagatti Attack? The Archizer-Meyer Countergambit? Der Hammerschlag? The Zugzwang Zigzag? The Poached Penguin? The Drunken Tartakower? Some half-cocked variation of the Dizzy Whippet Defense? ...Checkers?''
Now, in writing, there's the concept called brevity, a style of writing that is concise, terse, straight to the point, direct, and professional. Or, to put it more simply ''Less is more''. Let's take an example of Ernest Hemingway's writing style in his novel called: ''The Old Man and The Sea'' There's a part where he uses a short sentence to describe a protagonist's thought: ''I’m clear enough in the head, he thought. Too clear. I am as clear as the stars that are my brothers.'' Short and simple.
Hemingway also uses long sentences sparingly, too, but he also gives them the right sentence length: ''You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.'' Let's count how many phrases Hemingway used in this one. So far, there's five. We get to see how the old man felt in that situation without having it explain it to us like we're kindergarteners.
Now let's count Mordecai's phrases from that dialogue. Well, given the amount of questions, I would say... Eight. That's right, EIGHT!!! I could write a freaking essay shorter than that! Not only that, but the amount of sentences he spews is redundant. ''The Pelagatti Attack? The Archizer-Meyer Countergambit? Der Hammerschlag? The Zugzwang Zigzag? The Poached Penguin? The Drunken Tartakower? Some half-cocked variation of the Dizzy Whippet Defense? ...Checkers?''
Instead of having his feeling described in a few, short simple sentences, we need to hear EIGHT of them just to understand the fact that Mordecai is making a fuss over his BISHOP being taken. It's like the writer wasn't confident that we as the audience would understand that in a few words, so, they had to just spell them out for us.
This is TERRIBLE writing, and I'm surprised how many people enjoyed that scene, considering that it's a scene about nothing.
Sorry for that little rant there. But, yeah, that is my journal about having to write a good mysterious villain.
Writing villains with mysterious motivations takes great skills and talent, and the important thing is, while they can be mysterious, they also have to be, you know, villains as well. Just like writing a mysterious anti-hero takes skill and talent, they also have to remind us that they're villains. Balancing out the evilness and mystery of them is tough, but I've seen talented writers do this, and if the writers at RGG Studios can write a character like that well, then so can the fanfiction writers.
Who knows, we might have a villain who's not a Villain Sue like Mordecai is from the Lackadaisy comic series.
Anyway, that's all I have to say. Tune in next time.
