Who Needs Great Villains?

by Sean Daugherty 

In his recent editorial, Fritz Fraundorf explains that for a villain to be effective, that villain needs to engender hatred. Perhaps this does make a great villain, but, if that is the case, then who needs great villains? I certainly don't.

For an example, Mr. Fraundorf refers to Balio and Sunder in Breath of Fire III. They are, by all accounts, unmitigated bastards. They attack and imprison an innocent child, plot to sell a princess and an orphan into slavery, and generally commit all the really heinous deeds invariably associated with villainy. However, that's the only character depth they have. They are, also by almost all accounts, ridiculously two dimensional.

Let's now take a look at one of these supposed "failure villains": Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Mr. Fraundorf correct asserts that he wasn't really a bad guy, just misguided. He implies this makes him a failure as a villain. By my reckoning, it makes him all the better for it.

Sephiroth, unlike Balio and Sunder, is a human character. He is meant to skirt the line between pity and contempt, and, indeed, he does so marvellously. On one hand, he appears genuinely hurt by the injustices shown to him by Shinra. On the other, he cruelly slices down an innocent with no remorse at all. If, in Mr. Fraundorf's words, "many people didn't feel that he should even have been killed," it's because that ambiguity, and that uncertainty, was at the very core of his persona.

Sephiroth was a threat, and his actions endangered the world, but he was nonetheless a sympathetic figure. He had to be defeated for the sake of everyone else on the Planet, but the decision was deliberately painful. Sephiroth was not meant to engender blind hatred, but merely the knowledge, however grudgingly, that he could not be allowed to complete his scheming.

This, by the given definition, makes Sephiroth a poor villain. If that is so, however, give me a poor villain any day over the stereo-typical "bad-to-the-bone" route that has, until very recently, been the norm.