How do you write a likeable villain?

There are several options for writing villains that build the foundation for a reader’s perception of just how evil they really are. The villain is often a story’s antagonist but can also be the story’s main character. But they are not always a pure evil character. So how do we create a villain that our readers will like? 

Sympathy

The strongest way to bridge the gap between your villain and the reader is by appealing to sympathy. A tragic backstory goes a long way in setting the stage for a character’s fall to villainy. Many people can identify with the fear—or knowledge—of how much one bad thing can persuade someone to do bad things. No matter how strong a person appears, there’s an extreme situation that can push anyone to make a bad choice. 

The two common avenues you can pursue within the sympathy track are the impossible situation and desperation. To embody the ‘impossible situation’, your villain’s motivations need to stem from something where the bad choice was the only real choice. In a fantasy world, your villain may be a dark wizard that was an average person before they were abducted by a larger evil force, and forced to become evil or die. They may be indoctrinated into the wrong cause now—thus becoming the villain. In a modern setting, your villain may have grown up in an environment that promoted crime or violence as the only way to live. 

Desperation is a good motivator when the villain needs to gain (or re-gain) something, and there’s a “bad” option that will get the desired results faster. Perhaps your villain had to make a terrible choice to keep their livelihood or significant other, and covering up that choice continues to make their actions antagonistic. More specifically, desperation shows up in a pivotal time of need: where someone could take the high road, but we understand the appeal of the so-called low road. 

So how do we keep the sympathy real?

Your reader needs to see how they, or a loved one, could stoop to the villain’s level. This may be the most difficult part of creating this character because you can’t appeal to every individual member of your audience here. 

I suggest starting with research on whistleblowers (people who report illegal or unethical business practices that are undeniably in the ‘right’ but are certainly the ‘villain’ to the company) and thinking about the perspectives of the business’s employees. Many of them didn’t know about the wrong their company was doing, so now they’re angry with the whistleblower for taking away their jobs or ruining their professional reputations. Then, think about the people who were aware of the acts and were eager to keep profits high at the risk of getting caught. 

For the first group of people, it’s easy to imagine the hatred they hold for the whistleblower, even knowing that person did the objectively right thing. That’s the dynamic you want to capture for a likable villain. Your audience knows the villain had a noble reason, but the characters are still justifiable in their disdain for the villain. 

Do you need a redemption arc?

Nope. People go too far sometimes, and there’s no saving them. For some people, redemption may only come in their total and utter defeat, whether they’re imprisoned, killed, or otherwise incapacitated. 

If you are considering a redemption arc, you need to stick to the character’s established principles: it was all for nothing if their villainous actions are washed away by regret or the hero’s need to defeat them. We sympathize with conviction — you have to let your villain keep theirs to maintain character integrity.

A villain can realize their actions were wrong (murder often isn’t a good answer!), but they need to still believe in their actions, even if they wouldn’t do it again. A likable villain does the wrong things for the right reason. Stripping them of that reason strips their character of meaning. Who are they, in the end, if they were a monster for no reason at all? 

Perceived injustice and your villain

I want to talk about using perspectives and hidden information to play on the sympathy of your readers. If the circumstance that led to the villain’s actions was a lie from the start, the audience gets to experience the grief of being a monster for no reason at all. They could spend the entire story hating the villain along with the character’s telling the story and have it come crashing down in the denouement.

The burden of realizing their actions were all for nothing, or that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d known the truth, is a powerful emotional appeal. We don’t necessarily need to like the villain from chapter one; we can like them in the epilogue, where they have to deal with the consequences of their actions. 

In the end, the villain is just a character

A villain has just as much opportunity to be likable as the hero does, though it’s trickier to get there in a tale of good versus evil. Anyone short of truly evil can be likable, and I’m sure someone out there still has a soft spot for the truly evil and irredeemable.

People do bad things for good reasons every day. You just get to figure out how to balance those with redeemable qualities or convictions.