June 8, 2019 / Jeff's Writing

Seven Reasons Why We Need Villains

It’s true: We’ve taken a turn towards the Villainous, the Monstrous, and the Strange.

Why do we need Villains? This helpful infographic shows seven terribly important reasons to have villainy in our lives.
To see Seven Reasons Why We Need Villains as a handy-dandy infographic, do click here. To download it as a useful, printable PDF for portable villainy, click here.

Why is that? Because we need villains, and we deserve some more exciting Villainy in our lives. Here’s just seven of the reasons why:

1. Without interesting Villainy, Readers (and therefore Writers) would be much more rare. Remember, both children and adults were reading less and less until the Harry Potter books–and the Harry Potter books would have been a lot less interesting without Voldemort.

2. Star Wars is living proof that the less screen time you give the Sith, the more screen time gets devoted to…intergalactic trade negotiations, for some reason.

3. Without Villains, Heroes would just be people who walked around punching stuff for no apparent reason.

4. Good is the vanilla of ethics: reliable, useful, important, sometimes tasty, but never, ever going to be as delicious as the chocolate-chip-triple-fudge-strawberry-butterscotch which is Evil.

5. Villains are iconoclasts. They can work outside of society’s rules to try to change it.

6. Heroes say what they’re supposed to say. Villains speak their minds. Without Villains, a lot of dialogue gets real boring, real fast.

7. Superheroes are Arbor Day. Villains are Halloween.

CategoriesJeff's Writing Repository of Villainy and Monstrosity villainy

Jeff Mach Written by:

Jeff Mach is an author, playwright, event creator, and certified Villain. You can always pick up his bestselling first novel, "There and NEVER, EVER BACK AGAIN"—or, indeed, his increasingly large selection of other peculiar books. If you'd like to talk more to Jeff, or if you're simply a Monstrous Creature yourself, stop by @darklordjournal on Twitter, or The Dark Lord Journal on Facebook.