The Backstory

Funnily enough I was thinking about this yesterday. I passed a charity shop and in the window was a puzzle featuring Disney villains. It took me back to the days when a villain was bad, it was as simple as that. Although I hate Westerns, having been forced to watch them endlessly as a child, the heroes and villains were clearly differentiated and the villains did bad things because they were bad people, not because they were mistreated as children or they had some sort of trauma. I don’t want to understand villains in books, movies or real life, I want to see them defeated and punished for their crimes.

In The Aristocats, for example, Edgar the Butler was greedy and was horrified that his employer was going to leave everything to her cats and then to him once the cats were gone. Now, fair enough, I would have been very annoyed as well if my employer just overlooked all my services and given her money to someone undeserving in my eyes. (Actually, that’s what happens anyway if I am the employee and the actual cats are replaced by Fat Cats but that’s a blog for another day!) However, we didn’t need a long involved backstory with Edgar as a child struggling with poverty or as a young man being thrown out of his house because he couldn’t pay the rent. He was bad, he did bad things, no further explanation necessary.

In the Narnia books, Jadis the White Witch was a truly evil character. She destroyed her own world and everything in it to get the better of her sister. She found her way into Narnia and started using dark magic and killing, or turning to stone, those who defied her. She did this because she was an evil person, no other reason. If it turned out she was badly treated by the rest of the Charn Royal Family that would have diluted her evil and made it commonplace. The fact that she was irredeemably evil gives the narrative its power.

So, stop explaining villains. Writers think it makes their stories multi layered and interesting. It doesn’t, it just makes them dull and far less effective. Bad things are done by bad people. Let’s go back to those days so we can just enjoy their comeuppance.