More about bad guys

[beccaelizabeth]

Is having a horde of chaos twisted mutants substantially different from having a horde of orcs?
They're not descended from evil or born evil, they were messed up.
... yeah, it's different, but it switches it from racism to ablism.

How about a horde of undead? Nobody likes dead dudes that don't stay dead. They aren't born evil, they just got that way from being greedy. Or stubborn. Or, well, persistently trying to stay alive.
Staying alive is not evil.

Nobody is evil, they only does evil. If they have a mind, that mind can be changed.
Otherwise it's just lies.


So still there's a problem writing something like Mordor to have a forever war with, because it's still full of people who could change their minds.

Even Skynet can be reprogrammed.

If something is mindless enough it can't change its mind then it's just humans vs nature, like getting in a war with the weather. And that's not a popular genre, on the whole, though science fiction does go there sometimes.



So, I'm fine with inventing kingdoms and lost royalty and all that, I just get stuck on who they're fighting.
Every time.

Comments

[baronjanus]

Maybe groups that aren't based on species, but on voluntary participation and unpleasant agendas. Not "group of people born evil" but "group of people who chose to get together and be assholes".

[kickair8p]

Another drive-by link-dump, sorry, but it might (tangentially) be helpful: "So, knowing the history of stories and all that stuff I talked about above, it makes sense that our brains are built to try to process everything we see as a story. We want all of our information packaged this way -- it's the way data has been fed to us for the last thousand generations, it's how you've been absorbing it since the first time your parents read you a bedtime story. And every story needs to have two elements: a defined set of good guys and bad guys, and a neat structure with a beginning, middle, and end.

~

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

That's a bit of puzzle. In my Triumvirate universe I've sorta got the old Evil Empire setup. The Dragons live over the next mountain range, and engage in nasty Cold War style fun and games in the Three Nations, rather than outright war. Especially after most of their alcehmically engineered Evil Horde figured out there was a life better than Grr, argh, smash if they joined the good guy's side.