Do you know how to pronounce the word ‘evil’? You have to start with a really long ‘e’ and load all the stress on it; then you gently put down the ‘vil’ as if you were laying a silver knife on a sacrificial stone block.

Ideally you’ll have a really rich upper class English accent, which drips with contempt for anyone who doesn’t own a stable of warhorses and a company of elite knights. It’s not absolutely necessary, although you should work towards that.

Today we’re going to talk about good and… evil. Yes, the pause is important, too.

Look you’re fed up with this joke so I’ll stop. But this is important.

I write, as I often say, fantasy and SF. And nowhere is the trope of absolute good and evil more pronounced than in fantasy. It’s – in my opinion – a huge millstone around the neck of the genre and we need to talk about it.

We’re here because fantasy is a unique genre. Not in the sense that there’s nothing like it, but in the sense that we can lay the origins of it at the pen of one man, who I’ve mentioned a few times: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He didn’t invent the genre by writing The Lord of the Rings, but the success of that book is the main reason that we have fantasy. By having a single man and two (three? Hands up if you’ve actually read The Silmarillion) books at its core there a set of hard tropes that we have carved in the centre of our genre that we have to look hard at. And the one that I find the hardest to swallow is the idea of absolute good against absolute evil.

Tolkien was a man of his time, and that time was World War II. He wrote to the background of the war in Europe, with his son fighting on the front lines. He was also a devoted Christian; he was actually the person who converted C S Lewis from atheism. In that world, with death all around, are we so surprised that he produced a work where the forces of good make a final heroic stand against the massed hordes of evil?

In Tolkien’s world, Eru is an immortal, benevolent God. Gandalf is an angel. Sauron is a tiny fragment of a banished Satan (Morgoth) and the story is set in a shattered world which mirrors Saxon Britain after the Roman retreat. In this universe, of course there is an absolute good and an absolute evil: The Lord of the Rings is sometime between the fall of Eden and maybe the flood, and details how an interventionist god sent an angelic host to deal with a demonic problem. The hobbits and rings are just details.

It’s clever because its good characters are flawed. The only reason that the goodies win is that the most complex character in the book, Gollum, looses his shit over his ring addiction and plunges off the ledge into the river of lava; and he only got there because Frodo – and Bilbo before him – spared him. Their heroism isn’t in the big actions, but the little ones. People have choices and make mistakes but their compassion is what wins the day.

But we’re not talking about good; we’re talking about evil. And this is the book’s biggest flaw.

The problem is that Sauron is incomprehensible. If you stop and ask what his deal is, you have no answers. Like, dude, chill! What’s your endgame here? Sure squash the absolute monarchists and introduce your orc-based industrialism, but what then? (Yes, that Russian book is about this.)

We don’t believe him because we don’t empathise. We’ve got nothing to empathise with, because we never even get close to his point of view. And we can’t get close to his point of view, because if we do that we might end up believing that what he’s doing is right, and then he’s not absolute evil.

So what’s the solution?

You have, I think, two options.

The first is just to accept that your baddie is ludicrous. This might be fine! Some fantasy does this. There are a few paths here: the ‘I don’t understand and that’s OK’ is when the baddy is like the bugs in Starship Troopers: incomprehensible to the human mind. This is tough, because you need to work hard on making this believable and there aren’t many ways into this. My favourite is Fred Saberhagen’s Bezerkers which are alien AIs unable to understand anything except for the war that they were built for and won and then encountered humanity.

The other path is the ‘this guy, right,’ which is not even bothering to engage from a narrative point of view. This is essentially the path that Tolkien takes. Be careful here. He got away with it because he invented the most popular genre of writing… you probably won’t.

Your other option is to make the enemy comprehensible. Now to be clear, I’m not talking about the grubby politics of low fantasy where it’s all just humans messing with each other. I still want to live in a high fantasy good-versus-evil scenario, so we need to find a way where there’s a definitive force of nastiness, and yet we can get behind that.

Probably the most believable way in here is the corrupt ruler trope. In fantasy there is a depressing belief in monarchy being the way forward and that’s a great way to bring in a really nasty character. Have them power up on a puissant artefact and bosh bosh bosh you can go full Caligula. It’s worth reading about the worst excesses of historical rulers here; you can get deep inspiration from how awful humanity has been.

Next: delusions. The only good enemy in the MCU was Thanos because he actually had an agenda. Is he right? No. Do you stop and think about it? Yes! It’s very clever. What moral dilemma can you give your antagonist such that they actually can cause a Reddit debate? And yet we still have good versus evil in nice stark terms.

Lovecraft plied a great trade in hunger. The creatures from beyond the stars which haunted his world just needed to eat. It’s old, but it’s worth thinking about.

So there are options here. If I want you to take away one thing it’s that you can’t just pit the forces of good against the forces of evil without sounding like an eighties cartoon. You’re just asking for a deconstruction, and no one wants that.

So – why does your high fantasy villain sit on their throne and plot the end of the world?

Good... and eeee vil

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