RWBY: A study of flat villains

A villain can make or break your story. Villains by their very nature create conflict and conflict is what keeps us reading or watching your narrative. If the villain is flat and two dimensional that limits the kinds of challenges he presents to your hero as well as the kinds of conflict the story can contain.

RWBY is a good example for how bad villains and poor story telling can make an otherwise promising story collapse into irrelevance. For the first three seasons of RWBY we have two primary villains: Roman Torchwick and my personal favorite Cinder Fall.

Cinder is a microcosm of a lot that the series does right. Her character design is gorgeous and the fire theme allows her to appear quietly dangerous while giving her a distinct visual style from any other character.

Initially when Cinder was introduced I was very excited because she appeared to be a powerful calculating adversary in the same vein as Avatar's Azula or Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine.

At first this goes well. Our formal introduction to Cinder happens when she surprises Roman at a warehouse and comments that she's disappointed by his performance thus far. Roman is clearly frightened by this assessment.

Cinder presents herself as a threatening villain by intimidating Roman Torchwick. We already know from prior encounters between the heroes and Torchwick that he takes no shit and suffers no fools. He's managed to outmaneuver the heroes and some professional huntresses without much effort. Torchwick's obvious fear of Cinder convinces the audience that Cinder is a powerful and dangerous character just like when we are introduced to the Emperor in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back. When we see Vader kneel before Palpatine, we know he's the real deal. A being as powerful and ruthless as Darth Vader wouldn't humble himself before anything less.

The problem with Cinder and to a lesser extent Roman is that we don't really know what's going on. Cinder quietly threatens Roman to steal all the dust in the city for her. Roman, speaking for the audience, wants to know why he's stealing all this Dust for Cinder and what the real plan is but Cinder declines to tell him reminding him that he only needs to do as he's told. This is effective characterization for Cinder but the audience can only accept so much teasing about the plot and character motivations. Sooner or later if you want them to be invested in the narrative, you have to tell them what's going on and what the stakes are.

Cinder does ok in season one where she's a mysterious antagonist pulling the strings from the shadows. However this runs into serious problems when she becomes a primary character in season 2. All she does is muw-ha-ha and make sententious pronouncements. This makes her one note and boring.

What in season 1 was mysterious and interesting about Cinder rapidly becomes flat and annoying as the the formerly mysterious Cinder becomes the main villain. Cinder didn't need a motivation in Season one where she was barely a character, she was a plot point. She was a threat to make Torchwick do what the writer wanted.

However in season two where she becomes the primary antagonist, the flatness of her character becomes immediately apparent. We don't know what her goal is so we're not really sure how worried the heroes should be. We don't know who her targets are or if we care about any of them.

We've now watched 4 and a half seasons of RWBY so answer a question for me if you can: "What does Cinder want?"

It's not a complex question. What does she want? We know that she wants to destroy Beacon but that's a goal not a motive, the real question is what is she really up to.

This isn't just an abstract point. A character who takes action without motivation is a puppet of the author. The audience rejects them as fake because they ARE fake. They have no in universe reason to do what the author has commanded them to do. You can have characters with unclear motivation and cultivate an air of mystery but in order for this to work either the character has to be a secondary character (like Cinder in season 1) or the characters' need to be attempting to work out the villain's goals for the audience so our confusion is validated and it's a mystery we're trying to solve.

Look at Severus Snape from Harry Potter. For most of the series, we don't really understand his motivation and we're not totally sure what side he's on. That's fine and it actually resulted in a fascinating and complex character. However Snape is never a primary character in the series. If Snape was one of our major characters, the fact that we didn't understand what he wanted or why he made the decisions he did would become rapidly frustrating.

Both Salem and Cinder make for lackluster villains because we have absolutely no idea what they are trying to accomplish.

Even ignoring their impact on the narrative, at its core a villain is just another character. Characters in order to not be completely flat and one note need motivations and complex motivations are usually better.

Let's look at Roman Torchwick for a moment. Just like Cinder, initially he has a goal, not a motive. We know he's a thief and each time we see him he's stealing something. We later find out he's organizing a crime spree in Beacon city on Cinder's direction and even he doesn't know why.

Roman being essentially a henchman doesn't need grand or sweeping motivations to keep him interesting. Greed would be a perfectly acceptable motive for a thief and we as the audience would accept that. Roman doesn't want to change the world, he's a thief. He probably wants money, power and privilege. I assumed his motivation was purely self-interest and that was enough to carry us through the first two seasons.

It's not until season three that Torchwick's motivation becomes crystal clear. When he's fighting Ruby on the airship he talks about how he and his allies are about to destroy Beacon. Ruby asks what he has to gain from this and Roman responds: "You're asking the wrong questions, Red. It's not what I have to gain, it's that I can't afford to lose."

There you have it. In one brilliant line of dialogue they've made Roman Torchwick into a three dimensional character. His motivation IS purely self interest but it's not for money. He's afraid of Cinder and he just doesn't want him and Neo to die. He'll do what he needs to do to avoid that no matter whom he needs to hurt in the process. This is perfect characterization because it extends off what we already knew about Roman (i.e he's greedy and selfish) in a new dimension making him sympathetic and empathetic.

Now, we understand the character and why he's doing what he's doing. We don't need to approve or agree of his decisions but we understand him. We even can guess what it would take to make him change sides in this conflict. You could easily set Torchwick up to betray Cinder or even ally with Ruby if he thought it would get him out of the bind he finds himself in. You can do a lot of great things with this characterization.

I'm actually baffled that after setting this up, the writers decided to kill him off immediately.

Again Torchwick's motivation works because fear is an easy emotion to understand and emphasize with. However Cinder's motivation doesn't work the same way. We don't really understand Cinder and Salem's relationship and of course we don't know Salem's motivation at all. This results in our two primary villains feeling flat, one dimensional, and boring.

The show consistently confuses goals with motivations. Each season they reveal the villains have a new goal but never explain WHY they are doing any of it or what they hope to accomplish.

First they want to steal Dust and cause a crimewave.

Then they create panic in the streets by bringing a swarm of invading grim.

Then they cause a riot in Beacon and destroy it.

Then they want the powers of the maidens so they can access the relics.

Why do they do ANY of this?

The closest we ever get to an answer is the Salem wants to "change the world." Ok fine, but HOW? WHY? Does she want to repair it? Does she want to destroy it?

Let's look at a popular villain from another franchise: Loki.

Loki is a very popular character partially because he's played by a great actor and partially because, well, fan girls gotta fan. However Loki is also a very well written character with a complex motivation that makes him sympathetic and empathetic. What is Loki's motivation? He's jealous of Thor and wants to prove himself to his father.

In the original Thor movie, Loki tries to destroy his brother while still fighting the enemies of the Asgard, attempting to win his father's approval. He tricks his actual father Laufey into invading Asgard and killing Odin but this is a deception where Loki kills Laufey himself and then attempts to destroy Jotunheim, the home of Asgard's enemies. After fighting Thor and revealing his jealousy for his brother, Odin saves the two and Loki pleads for his father's approval. When this is denied, Loki gives up and lets himself fall into a black hole.

This is brought into even sharper focus in the Avengers. Loki is constantly proclaiming his greatness and trying to get humanity to agree. He suffers from a lack of self-esteem and he's desperate to prove that he deserves a throne the same way as his brother.

While nobody likes Thor: The Dark World, Loki is one of the only good things about it. We learn more about Loki and what makes him so interesting. We know that he's enraged by the fact that he's been lied to all these years about his parentage and that he feels like an orphan whom nobody really wants. We see Loki direct Algrim to the castle's weak point, apparently purely out of malice. However we also see Loki's rage when he discovers that this treachery got his mother killed. This makes Loki's decision to help Thor for the sake of revenge (and possibly also for his own benefit) completely in character and convincing.

In Thor Ragnarok we see Loki redeem himself. After cheating our heroes for most of the movie he ultimately chooses to risk his life to save his people. This change of goals is completely in character for Loki. With his father dead and no one's attention to compete for anymore he and Thor start to repair their relationship. Thor even makes an impassioned plea for Loki to reconsider his life and become more than he is, convinced that Loki can grow and change. Ultimately Loki decides to do this and rescues Asgard from destruction.

These clear motivations is what makes Loki such a compelling villain. He's not evil for the sake of being evil, his pangs of inadequacy and his desperate need to prove himself leads him into both bad decisions and some good ones. He's interesting because he's human not because he's pure evil.

On top of which, we don't question it when he decides to redeem himself. It seems completely in character for him to make these decisions and we never pause to wonder if he's playing a new game with us in spite of his many betrayals.

For a contrast look at Malekith, the primary antagonist in Thor: The Dark World. Did you even remember his name?

Malekith wants to destroy the universe. Why? Well, because his people lost a war and now he wants revenge. That's pretty much it. He's pure evil and exists for no reason other than to oppose the heroes. He has no real goal of his own other than absolute negation. As a result of this, he's boring.

This parallel is exactly the same for Roman and Cinder. Roman, like Tom Hiddleston's Loki, is the far more charming and charismatic character but more than that, we understand this character's motivations. We know how he'll behave in different situations without the writer telling us.

Motivation is important because it tells us how the character sees himself in his own world. Remember, almost no character views himself as a villain. Even the most evil people usually have a world view where their behavior is justified and even laudable. They are the heroes of their own story.

When you write a story featuring a villain who views themselves as a villain you usually have written either a very depressed and self-loathing villain or someone who isn't the hero of their own story. For an example of this we need to turn to "force of nature" villains. The gold standard for force of nature villains is Batman's The Joker.

The Joker is a creature of pure id and nihilistic anarchy. He has no real motivation other than to cause chaos for chaos's own sake. He's barely human and has no motives we can understand. More to the point, the Joker views himself as the antagonist to Batman. He does see himself as the villain and purely as a mirror to Batman. In psychological terms this shows a significant issue with the Joker's ego and sense of self. He's not the man character of his own story he views this as Batman's world and he's just living in it.

The Joker, being a force of nature, really doesn't have a motivation. He's not human in any meaningful way. However this is only acceptable in force of nature villains.

Without well defined villains, it often feels like your heroes don't have much to do. Rather than trading on action and adventure, RWBY devolves into a series about wandering around and talking about feelings. Nothing much really happens and when things do happen, we're left wondering what the import is and if it matters.

Villains create conflict and challenge the heroes. Flat villains feel more like an excuse to have the heroes wander around and do stuff.