What are villain motivations, and how can you use them to write a realistic antagonist?

Think of your favorite villain. What makes them memorable? From Professor Moriarty to Cersei Lannister to The Joker, the ‘method behind their madness’ often plays a big role in cementing their place in popular culture.

In this post, we’re going to break down what villain motives are, how they can be used to make a villain feel realistic, and five great villain motivation ideas to help you create your own iconic antagonist. Let’s dive right in!

Defining villain motives

First and foremost, villains are characters – not just inanimate forces of evil, but beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

In that vein, a villain’s motivation is the driving force behind their antagonistic actions throughout the story. It’s not what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.

Let’s take a look at Macbeth for one of Shakespeare’s most iconic villains: Lady Macbeth. Over the course of the play, Lady Macbeth takes drastic action to ensure her husband becomes king. She convinces Macbeth to murder King Duncan, then renders his guards unconscious and frames them for the crime.

So now that we have the what, let’s consider the why.

Lady Macbeth’s motivation is fairly straightforward: power. Macbeth has good reason to believe he will become King, which would make her the Queen of Scotland. She knows that Macbeth doesn’t have the ruthlessness required to kill Duncan, so she takes matters into her own hands to ensure that he seizes the throne for himself (and consequently herself as well).

How to craft an authentic villain

Now that we understand what villain motivations actually are, how can we use that knowledge to help us write a realistic villain? Remember that a villain’s key motivation is the foundation of their character; everything else about them should link back to their motivation in some way.

Readers are going to be asking themselves all sorts of questions about your characters, so if you want them to feel authentic, beat them to the punch and consider these questions yourself as you’re writing. For example:

• What kind of backstory does your villain have? What was their family and upbringing like, and how might these things have shaped who they are today?
• What about their current circumstances? Do they feel forced into drastic action by their situation – whether to help themselves, someone else, or (in their view) society?
• How do their actions affect their conscience? Do they revel in their villainy, or does it eat away at them?

Let’s return to our Lady Macbeth example. If you look purely at her villainous deeds, Lady Macbeth might seem like your typical one-dimensional, power-hungry antagonist, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the most memorable aspects of Lady Macbeth aren’t her actions themselves, but how they weigh on her psyche afterwards.

After helping to kill King Duncan, Lady Macbeth is wracked with guilt. She begins sleepwalking, desperately washing imaginary bloodstains from her hands, and is ultimately driven to madness. Getting to see how Lady Macbeth’s villainy has affected her has a humanizing effect; while her motivations may not be admirable, they are somewhat understandable, and her reaction accentuates this even further.

5 villain motivation ideas for a realistic antagonist

Few villains think of themselves as bad people – or at least, they don’t often start out thinking that way. And if a villain doesn’t believe their actions are justified, how is the reader supposed to? With that in mind, here are five solid villain motivation ideas to help you create a realistic antagonist for your story.

Ideology

Rooting your villain’s motivation in their ideology is another great way to make them feel realistic. The ends justify the means – as far as they’re concerned, a few sacrifices are nothing in the grand scheme of creating a better world.

Having an antagonist with a specific ideology that informs their actions can also create a compelling dynamic with the protagonist, as it may force the hero to question their own ideology. These kinds of antagonists typically have a compelling villain backstory that helped shape their worldview into what it is today.

Take Black Panther, for example. Our hero, T’Challa, is committed to the safety and prosperity of his nation; he keeps Wakanda’s existence a secret to protect his people from external threats. His antagonist, Erik Killmonger, exists to highlight the flaws in that way of thinking.

Growing up in the United States, Killmonger experienced the effects of systemic racism firsthand. He rejects T’Challa’s worldview of isolationism, arguing that Wakanda’s resources could be used to liberate Black communities across the globe. Although he ultimately goes too far and is defeated, Killmonger’s ideology causes T’Challa to reconsider his own beliefs, and he finally decides to open Wakanda to the world.

Revenge

This is a classic motive for heroes and villains alike. Centering a character around their desire for revenge opens the door for some juicy internal conflict as the story unfolds. Oftentimes, characters on a quest for vengeance will eventually be forced to make a pivotal decision – are they willing to go against their principles in order to achieve their goal?

If you’re writing a villain, odds are the answer is yes… and forcing them to cross this line can make your antagonist feel both tragic and realistic in one fell swoop. If the audience sympathizes with your villain’s motivation at first, then watching them take that step into immorality will be all the more affecting.

Misguided, but well-meaning

If you dig deep enough, the core of a villain’s motivation is often selfish – but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. That said, writing a villain with genuinely pure intentions can be difficult. After all, their nefarious ambitions are what make them villains in the first place!

We often see this motivation with characters that have little to no conscious agency over their actions, such as a wild animal acting on instinct. But there is still plenty of room for exploration beyond that, so let’s take a look at a villain plot idea that tackles this trope from a different perspective.

Say that you’re writing a sci-fi novel, and Earth has become uninhabitable for some reason. Humanity has sealed themselves underground, and for their own safety, a scientist has programmed a defense system to ensure that no one can leave. Years pass, and Earth becomes habitable again! However, the defense system still remains, so it is up to your hero to disable it and free mankind – but first he has to get through the scientist, who remembers how bad things were on Earth and has reason to doubt what the habitability tests now say.

In a scenario like this, every party is acting with good intentions: the scientist genuinely wants to protect humanity, the defense system is doing what it was designed to do, and the hero is justified in wanting to escape. The conflict is warranted, and your villain’s actions are a realistic but unfortunate outcome of someone acting in good faith.

Control

So far, we’ve mostly talked about villain motivations that have a layer of sympathy to them – villains that may have started out with good intentions, but got lost somewhere along the way. But what if you want to write a villain that’s unabashedly evil, yet still feels realistic? This is where a desire for control comes in.

Villains motivated by a desire for control are commonly seen in children’s books, because they’re as simple to understand as they are easy to hate. Think of Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl’s Matilda. Authoritarian, oppressive, rude – Miss Trunchbull is the quintessential control-freak antagonist.

This motivation is particularly effective because most of us have known a ‘Miss Trunchbull’ at some point. Whether it’s a bullheaded sports coach, an overbearing office manager, or a mean head teacher, we’ve all known someone that loves to flaunt their authority over others. That’s what makes a desire for power such an easy go-to villain motivation – it’s relatable and realistic.

Love

Finally, we all know love can make us do crazy things. For some people, it can get a little too crazy. Many of us would go to the ends of the earth for the ones we love, but that desire can easily lead an otherwise sympathetic character onto the path of villainy. As such, using love as a motivation often works best for villains that are convinced that they are the hero.

Walter White from Breaking Bad is an excellent example of a realistic villain motivated by love. When the series begins, he’s a mostly sympathetic character – a dying man who wants to ensure that his family will be provided for after he’s gone. While his decision to enter the drug trade is undoubtedly immoral, the audience understands his reasons for doing so because they come from a place of genuine care and concern for his family.

Conclusion

With these ideas and examples, hopefully you’ve gotten a good grasp on what a villain motivation is, and how you can use them to make your antagonists feel realistic. If you’re eager to put what you’ve learned into action, why not start by writing a short story with an antagonist inspired by one of the villain motivations we’ve discussed in this post? Here’s hoping you can create some impressively wicked (yet also three-dimensional!) villains for the ages.

 

Author bio: Rose Atkinson-Carter is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors with the world’s best publishing resources and professionals. She loves a good three-dimensional villain and currently resides in the UK.