When exactly did the "fictional characters shouldn't just be evil by default" meme start?

Balance is important. Sure, you need to make players think about their decisions, but at some point you've gotta let them wail on some baddies.
Some people are just fucking dicks and deserve to have their shit shoved in until it comes out the other end.

When people tried to put the same into fantasy the LToR was based on rejection of. Fully rounding out the 'why' of a villain only makes sense if you are having parts of the story from their point of view ( works in novel, not so much in TTRPGs) or if there is a discovery story arch. Most of the time when war happens only the leaders know the fine points of the 'why' with the rest just knowing 'what sounded good in a speech aimed at making the other side look bad' and bits of gossip. That goes double if you are fighting a pre-modern war.

For the first go around of it...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

>When exactly did the "fictional characters shouldn't just be evil by default" meme start?
Phrased like that?
Two days ago, apparently.
Care to phrase it in a way that makes more sense?
Are you referring to a whole race described as evil, like your pic would imply?
Or are you referring to some practice of not having any characters be "evil" that you believe to be a meme?
Please clarify.

Tolkien himself started down that path in some of his later letters. He wasn't fully comfortable with the implications of an always-evil race.

Damn Catholics

>archetypical character
[ellipses intensify]

Because
>wah wah there's no such thing as absolute evil

To which i always answer "explain mudslimes, niggers and kikes, then".
Shuts them up and hurts their feefees every time.

Sounds like you're the evil one that deserves to die.

>t. liberacuck

Unlike you i actually don't want my race being overrun by smelly goblins.

when people looked at stories as actual art and not just what your group DM puts together in a weekend

Because evil races tend to be very prone to proactive extermination from other races that are concerned with their own survival. Then again being an explosive reproducer can make up for being a universally despised menace.

I get the reference you're making. I don't like it, I don't like you for making it, but I will acknowledge that I get it.

>everything must be the same forever
>but if anyone rips off tolkien I will lambaste them

why is Veeky Forums so outwardly retarded lately?

I'm sure you're a fine specimen of the master race and not projecting your insecurities/latent homosexuality at all.

Well, I'd be inclined to assume the people who hate things not being standard pseudo-tolkienian fantasy and the people who hate standard pseudo-tolkienian fantasy are separate people who just happen to both be posting anonymously on the same board, but I could be wrong.

Cause "They do it cause their evil lol" is a pretty lazy writing motivation.

Even mudslimes, niggers, and kikes have motivations. Mudslimes live in the hot sand and want to bang 72 virgins in their after lives are willing to murder innocent people for it. Niggers want gold chains and big wheels but don't want to do honest, hardwork for it. So they rob, steal, and ask for government assistance. Kikes uhhh... I dunno, they're greedy and want to rule the world?

Point is, it's fine to have the race of rape, pillage, kill but you have to give them understandable motivations for their actions.

A not /pol/ level example I can give is the Hive from Destiny. They're one of those royal backstabby societies where everyone is constantly trying to kill each other for power. Their fundamental belief is basically super Darwinism, by constantly testing each other they serve to make themselves stronger. So attempts at regicide and what not are not seen as acts of aggression but acts of love (helps that those higher on the totem pole have some sort of immortality, in 40k terms they Daemon Princes who can only banished to the Warp. Though for the Hive, you can theoretically go to their banished dimension and kill them for real there)

I don't know, but I hate it. I want my villains to just be bad guys again.

What's weird is that I'm saying this even as I hate the "all orcs are evil" meme. I like the idea of good or "average" orcs or hobgoblins or whatever who are just trying to get by the only way they know how.

But I want VILLAINS again. Not bad guys, not antagonists, not opponents. VILLAINS.

It's not lazy it's pure and inspiring.

If anything it forces the writer to be as imaginative as possible in order to explore the ramifications of such an unrealistic character motivation. It forces you as a writer to question the absolute nature of evil beyond subjective interpretations. It makes the character alien to human concerns, and therefore more impressive as an antagonist.

Rationalizing evil by subordinating it to relatable motivations only weakens it. It makes the villain too rational to be properly villainous and brings him back down to the rank of mere threat. It sabotages any attempt to explore metaphysical notions in a poetic way.

"How do I write a character who is unquestionably, unarguably, objectively evil" is a far more challenging and thought-provoking question than "Why is the antagonist being a dick?"

Choice. 9001 orcs pillaging because they live in shitholistan where nothing grows is fine. An orc warlord deciding his enemies don't need faces or eyes is fine. 9001 orcs simultaneously deciding their enemies don't need faces or eyes smacks of either oversimplification, fetish, or latent racism.

Or maybe I just want an entire country populated by Black Metal stereotypes because it's cool.

>is a far more challenging and thought-provoking question
It really isn't. The answer is often the same and it's often boring.

It might not be lazy, since you can put a lot of effort into pretty much anything, but it's most definitely boring.

What is the answer then?

I mean the correct answer, not the lazy answer.

Nothing is as entertaining as imagining displays of evil intent. Trying to come up with character motivations for an antagonist is both piss-easy and dull.

Nah, having an unquestionably evil antagonist leads to basically the same story every time. Nobody needs to think, heroes get up to beat people up without feeling bad about it, bad guy dies, good guy wins, everybody goes home happy. No buildup, no tension, no pay-off.

It's incredibly dull, after you've seen one you've seen them all.

And the best part is that it doesn't even matter. Nobody cares how an evil character like that is written, it's just another obstacle to overcome on the road to a "happy ending." All the edgy displays of torture, all the massacres and madness and all the evil monologues can't make up for a shallow premise.

a premise is only as good as its execution, and a purely evil villain allows for WAY more creative stuff to happen than a villain who's constrained by realistic motivations.

It's so obvious.

You're thinking purely in terms of "but how am I going to shoehorn muh moral dilemmas into the story if I can't guilt-trip the heroes into sparing the bad guy?" well it's easy; make it so that the heroes have to hurt good guys in order to defeat the bad guy. it's exactly what a really evil bad guy would force the heroes to do anyway.

You can't really pretend that antagonists with pathos don't all have fundamentally the same story as well:

>"Something something bad childhood, something something needs of my people, something something missed opportunities, something something the lesser of two evils, something something and that's why I need to kill all the Jews."

Every damn time. I'm sick of rants and justifications. I want to hear a villain pleasantly talk about how great it is to be evil again.

By your definition, a mass murderer secretly tanking economies to justify ethnic cleansing to attain godhood isn't good enough because they have a motivation.

By your definition, the best villain would be a giant rock floating in space, covered with giant magical space snakes which happens to head toward a planet simply because for some reason it's attracted to planets with large amount sentient life.

Either that or the Joker.

Actually, those both things that could be pretty interesting antagonists in a story. Hmmm, I'll concede that to you.

I dunno, personally, the moment something becomes so hell bent in causing destruction and suffering for it's own sake that it has no motivation, not even simple sadistic pleasure in causing harm, in my eyes it stops being a force that can be categorized as evil and more of an event that is happening.

Precisely

that's why there's a challenge in writing an evil character who doesn't merely seek self-gratification

Irrelevant. All we know is that shit needs to get dialed back a bit.

>constrained by realistic motivations.

Who said anything about the motivations having to be realistic? A delusional person with autism performing seemingly random acts of terror simply because it fits within some complex mathematical pattern they perceive in society would just be as cool.

A narcissist serial killer who murders simply to achieve some perverted sense of immortality in the media is a motivation.

I don't need to pretend because it's true.

Not my fault that the only stories you read and play are boring carbon copies.

The archetypical evil by default concept is the demon.

The mythological concept of demonic entities originates in the ideas of natural forces such as disease or famine which must be placated by ritual means to ward them off.

In that perspective then the meme is obvious. The developed world has become divorced from and insulated from mass disease and death. They no longer fear the natural world and so a story of a struggle versus natural forces is no longer appealing to them.

If we want to tell a story about natural forces that scare people in the developed world then we should use symbols that reflect modern fears and problems. I identify as chief among these: obesity, drug addiction, depression, child abduction and loneliness.

So making a modern monster that is scarier to modern audiences:

- They are fat.
- They are addicted to magic.
- They live in hovels and rarely venture outside.
- They rape little children.

Fair enough, interesting concept you got there. Can't say I can grasp the whole of it with my feeble mind but it does intrigue me.

Well, if it's any help to your writing endeavors, personally I've always found unfinished towers under construction to be interesting symbol of evil so vast and absolute as to be almost unknowable.

The final goal or outcome being something so horrific, that even being unfinished it remains an icon of fear.

Isn't committing an evil act for the sole pleasure of it technically a motivation or justification?

Maybe, there is a problem with protagonists of the story? If the "good guys" are just weak, amorph slime of a character and don't even take anything seriously, how can you hope of a villain with strong character and pure evil ideology behind him.

I don't know how many times I've explained this on this board by now. It's a cycle. It didn't start anywhere. One generation grows up with black-and-white stories about heroic heroes fighting villanous villains, and when it becomes time for them to tell their own stories they decide that it would be more refreshing if the heroes weren't entirely in the right and if the villains were a little more relateable and sympathetic. And so we get a new generation that grows up with grey-and-grey stories about anti-heroes and misunderstood villains, and when it becomes time for them to tell their own stories they decide that it would be more refreshing to tell simpler adventure stories about dashing heroes and monstrous villains. And so the cycle continues.

conservatives in the bible belt literally believe this though

It didn't start, you just grew older and outgrew the stories where such villains belong - tales for children.

Care to share examples of this cycle? Because I couldn't think of examples for this. When there was a time of grey villans en masse, tortured by society, nature and so on?

>When you make your main villian a real God of Evil without any real justification.

Well, look, here's how it goes:
If the antagonist represents some aspect of human life, one that brings suffering, such as natural disasters, or unrestricted violence, they can have no redeeming qualities. There's no good side to everybody in your village drowning in a flash flood.

However, as our societies become insulated from most natural threats, you know, people can still die in a hurricane, but cities aren't wiped out, tribes don't disappear because of a few bad harvests, etc, we look elsewhere to see the source of our suffering.
And, naturally, we look to each other.
In our stories, the villain is overrun by his dark side, his primal urges and he doesn't check them. The hero, meanwhile, is the man in a state of balance, someone who could fuck your shit up, but doesn't, and who rises against tyrants and madmen.
The wise hero overthrows the tyrant king and takes his place, becoming a good king under which his people flourish, that kind of deal.
Now, not all stories are about this, especially not religious stories.
Our stories have always divided the line between good and evil pretty clearly in how one uses their power.

I think the cultural turning point for this is in the aftermath of WW2. We saw that people, regular people, are capable of monumental evil. Moreover, we saw that we can work with our mortal enemies against other mortal enemies who present a greater threat.
There's also the case to be made that some of our ambivalence towards moral absolutes comes from sympathizers of that evil, or those who would claim moral relativism, which is a fairly new phenomenon.

So...just a number? It begins in the '60s, subtly, but only takes off in the 70s and the 80s and 90s are the most obvious results.

Blatantly evil cultists that just want to destroy the world or something like that are fun.

Mostly evil but have a logical or relatable reason for doing what they do is also good. Like Teyrn Loghain.

It's important to mix them up from time to time, and to remember that variety is the spice of life.

Monsters have to cause suffering, like in your point №4, and not suffer themselves like in others. Better luck with baits next time.

I'm lovin the Hunter entering the Hunter's Dream just to have the Doll land a DDT on his ass.

Byronic (anti)heroes and gothic genre in XIX century, then black and white of golden age/pulp era fiction for working masses.

People who view fiction as black vs white morality plays are incredibly boring, sheltered people who have fallen so hard for the "just world" fallacy they're bordering on proposing. Having different cultures have different, alien values is interesting, but every culture has a core of "good" that they try to propegate. Leaving a deformed baby to die in the woods is horrific to a human, but orcs would find it unthinkable to let a child grow up deformed, knowing they may never be able to contribute to the tribe.

Morality isn't an objective thing. It's not even a real thing, it's a collective social construct.

Aren't Byronic heroes are pretty much just charismatic villains?
The whole shtick is that they know they're bad guys and don't care.

I mean, I assume OP wanted an antagonist who did evil things for what he believed to be good reason. Not shitty things just because he could and thought the world should fuck off.

10/10 this triggered me hard

I never liked moral grays. I think even villains should have some depth, but I think they should be evil, I don't need relateable but it's good if they're understandable. Wanna know the man I'm killing, but I still want to kill him y'know?

say what

>but tyrone and schlomo brought all the snacks today

And they're right.

...

>Hi! I'm an asshole
Jump off bridge plz

I'm a firm believer in a time and place for everything. However I do agree the most garbage villains are the "DID NOTHING WRONG" ones.

I've been loving Fist of the North Star for just that reason. You get to know some of the villains but at the end of the day they are still shitbags who don't even know they are dead.

>t. liberacucks

Well I think there is more characters beside protagonist, antagonist and their immediate supporters. Unlike main characters, this extras usually have no story arc to explain their behavior beside it being "factory default", thus problem lies in "always evil" descriptions of sentient beings and thoughtless murderhobo behavior of so called good guys.

I'm an Aries thank you very much.

>characters beside protagonist, antagonist and their immediate supporters

There is literally not.

Well, technically you would change "immediate supporters" to "supporting characters" and that is all the characters in a story.

What is evil anyway? You kill others not for being evil, but for being hostile combatants resisting your agenda.

...

>Well, technically you would change "immediate supporters" to "supporting characters" and that is all the characters in a story.
But that changes the whole meaning of the statement. "Immediate supporters" means characters who offer support to the protagonist or the antagonist in their endeavors to achieve their respective goals. "Supporting characters" by your definition refers to any character who doesn't fall into the first two categories in the list, which means it tautologically covers everything.

The answer is: it's boring. Oh the walking exp dispensers are doing their cliche March for world domination again. I wonder what thrilling character stories we can enjoy when our characters meet them? Maybe we will attack them with our weapons, or maybe they will attack us with their weapons. Such depth.

Yeah, I thought your statement was pointless.

So I changed it to something remotely useful.

> March for world domination again

Again? No wonder this adventure sounds boring, several factions have already marched for world domination.

Honestly it's kind of interesting. Especially if the GM has good world building skills or at least a cool story why none of them succeed.

>It's actually not boring if I put in a bunch of stuff personally to make it sound more interesting

IF YOU KILL HIM YOU WILL BE JUST LIKE HIM

If you kill your enemies, they win.

omg this logic is the most triggering thing I have ever seen.

Like, when I first saw it the story put in character reasons talking about it and exploring it. The concept had weight and made sense for the character.

Now it's like I see it and people just assume it's a big deal cuz "lul he iz gud guy"

>when you are against liberty
how about you have a democratic vote for a dictatorship?

It's always been a vacuous statement.
It assumes good and heroism come from innocence or naivete.
It does not.
Sheepdogs are descended from wolves, they have the same capacity for violence. Shit, I've seen two sheepdogs run off a bear.
Point is, a hero is someone who could be a villain, but chooses not to be. By doing the right thing.
Which, incidentally, means killing the bad guys in societies where incarceration isn't possible.
Sometimes killing them even then, if they're too dangerous to live.

Yeah, like I do think that we need to have thought about how actually hard it is to get a person to kill anther person, but at the same time saying "lul no killiez" is dumb as fuck.

Do you mean individual characters or whole races?

I think the latter happens mostly when writers expand the fluff of a fantasy setting and try to answer questions like "how do those orcs/gnolls/whatever live when they're not fighting?", "how do they procure food and tools?", "how do they manage to not kill each other off even though they're bloodthirsty and evil?". So the writers give them some form of social organization with a language, a crude economy or barter system, females and child-rearing practices, laws and customs, etc. After a while they look less and less like a swarm of vermin to be exterminated and more like sentient beings who fight and raid because it's in their culture rather than because they're innately evil.

Not saying that it happens every time but it's quite common. Orcs seem particularly susceptible to it (muh noble savage, muh shaman).

Well they wouldn't be left if they're conservatives.

> writers expand the fluff of a fantasy setting and fuck up answering questions like

ftfy

>depth at the expense of archetypal character strength is lame
This is particularly amusing when read as:
>depth at the expense of archetypal character strength is lamé

...

>latent racism
You're one of those people who think that zombie fiction is all an excuse for people to fantasize about genociding minorities, I'll bet.

Welp, since we can't decide, I'll address both questions.

The idea that a specific fictional character shouldn't just be evil by default is dumb.
Sometimes, people are just evil for no clear, apparent reason and whether that's because there is no reason or because the reason is too subtle for us to discern is effectively the same.
Plus, evil robots are a thing.

The idea that a specific fictional character shouldn't just be evil by default is understandable, but not necessarily true.
Like another user pointed out, demons are a thing.
But they would be necessarily foreign and alien to human life.
Describing more human-like races like orcs as "just evil" is often lazy and shallow.
Personally, I describe my race of not!orcs as having their own perspective, morality, culture, and beliefs, all of which include eating your face.
The PCs are not free to kill them on sight because they are Evil, but because they will likely eat their faces.

>but because they likely eat faces
Which makes them evil.

It's not even a point of view thing.
They actively flay and consume human flesh.
They're not just inhuman, which often means they're incompatible, they actively hurt humans.
What did you think Evil meant?

>What did you think Evil meant?
Apparently you think it means "they actively hurt humans", which makes humans evil.

If a dragon eats a human, does that make it evil, or hungry?
What if it was a starving lion?

It boils down to whether or not "killing humans for food" is an Evil act for any race that does it.
Which depends.

A lion is not evil, a lion has no conception of anything other than eating for food and fighting for territory.
A sated lion is pretty chill.

A dragon, however, *does* have a conception of self and others. It understands it has the capacity to cause suffering.
If it does so anyway, it is evil, like a human.
If it doesn't, then it simply has the capacity for evil, like a human.

If your not!orcs just act in ways that cause suffering, and understand that other beings exist and feel pain, they're evil. It doesn't much matter why they do it.

That's the exact opposite of what you did. You changed a statement that references specific types of characters into a useless statement that includes all possible character types through "X or not-X" logic.

If a lord feasts while the peasants who till his land and produce his food starve, is he evil?

Heroism requires self-sacrifice. If a hero goes against the laws and customs to kill a villain, he should then surrender himself and face the penalty for murder. Otherwise he's just an opportunist murderer. Ends do not justify the means, if you don't believe that you are no hero.

>Having a conception of self and others, understanding it has the capacity to cause suffering, and choosing to do so anyway is Evil.
Fair enough.
By this definition, my not!orcs have an Evil culture.
Technically, they could change their way of life so they do not need to eat other races for food, but change is hard, faces taste good, and why fix what isn't broken when it's easier to justify eating those outside your tribe as being fine?

But they are still not Evil as a racial trait.
Any one individual not!orc is perfectly capable of not being Evil, but is not very likely to be.

>If a lord feasts while the peasants who till his land and produce his food starve, is he evil?
Well, that's an evil act anyway.
Committing evil acts doesn't necessarily make you automatically evil.

This really depends on the law of the place in question.
I mean, where I'm from, defending yourself "with excessive means" is illegal. This means that if a dude breaks into my house, I gotta fisticuffs him unless he pulls a knife, and then I can't use too big of a stick or I go to prison.
In the US, you can shoot a burglar.

We're departing from the moral dilemma to one of legalism.
Let me ask you this:
Is the Joker not clearly guilty beyond redemption?
In any semi-realistic world, would he not be executed?
The cops in Gotham surely shoot live bullets, right? They're empowered to kill, because they're accountable.
Batman *isn't* accountable, which is why he doesn't kill.
It's not about self-sacrifice, it's about not enforcing personal judgements in a society that has sophisticated means of judging others.
Although, really, a couple of Arkham guards should just bite the bullet and execute 90% of the population.

Capeshit has very little to do with moral dilemmas. Most of the characters and plots barely have any internal logic and you should just take them at face value - man children like to look at their favorite men-in-tights get into "like totally cool fights bro" and the creators of the comics provide.

Why is it an evil act? The lord is a proper owner of the land and all its splendor, the peasants just occupy it.

If a prince ends up in a succession war with another contender, is it an evil act for him to send men to die in his name?

>Why is it an evil act?
He has a conception of himself and others, he understands that he has the capacity to cause suffering, and chooses to do so anyway.
It is Evil.

>If a prince ends up in a succession war with another contender, is it an evil act for him to send men to die in his name?
War is so full of evil acts that war itself might be considered an evil act.
War is also sometimes a necessary act.
Such is life.

As I pointed out in the self defense example, the law isn't the arbiter of good. It's the arbiter of order.

Robin Hood was the good guy because he fought against a tyrannical ruler.
30 years ago, it was a crime to own Jeans in my country.
Before '89, you could go to prison for saying the wrong thing.
40 years ago, you could be sent away and nobody would hear from you ever again.
A prince with a legal claim pursues it using the accepted tools of his time. Which is usually violence.
The Lord of a land is also responsible for his serfs. If he's got a surplus, he's expected to help alleviate the famine.
Unless you mean he's just wealthy and the peasants are poor. That's kind of the way things were. We could say it was a less just society than ours, but it was the best one at the time.