Villainous Opinions

The villains need to have some opinions with meat on their bones. The reader can agree or disagree, but the reader has to be able to believe the villain believes.

If Evil Bob is out doing bad stuff, Evil Bob has to be able to tell the reader why he’s doing bad stuff. I read way too many books where the villain is doing bad stuff, interesting bad stuff, but I never believe Evil Bob is doing it for any reason other than to make a plot.

FPGA design engineering

One of the classes I’m TAing for is basically intro to FPGA design engineering. I show the students how to plug things in, where to right-click for menus, so on and so forth. Verilog is written in the accusative case, passive voice.

But I’ve never had much academic instruction in digital logic, not the theory beyond truth tables. So my experience is wildly disjoint from the class. The prof went over Karnaugh maps, and the students were all bored. They’d seen it a dozen times. I had never even heard of this stuff.

Meanwhile they’re assigning A to B, not knowing an assign statement reads right to left.

Weird stuff. The consequence of going back to school after having been out in the world for a few years.

Redemption

What’s weird about redemption arcs is the villian can’t have done anything the audience won’t forgive. This isn’t about relative moral weight; it’s about what the audience reacts to emotionally.

Evil Bob kills a dozen people? Redeemable. Evil Bob drowns a dozen puppies? Not redeemable.

Emotional reaction is a function of time and culture. It’s a very interesting way of dating a society’s mores in reverse. If a villian does xyz and is redeemed, xyz isn’t that bad as felt by that society at that time.