2024: The Year of “Normal” Villains
Quick: Describe your villain.
What do they look like, act like, sound like? Who are their friends? What do they love, if anything? What drove them to wickedness? Taken together, how do those qualities communicate evil?
(5 Tips for Helping Readers Empathize With Your Villain.)
Now, hold on to that description while we talk about what makes a villain, and why writers need to guard against co-opting marginalized groups—like autistic people—into villainy. Creators can drive a change in the way society perceives neurodiverse people, and we can start right now by making 2024 the year we write so-called “normal” villains.
First, let’s establish what makes a villain. Every story needs a force that compels the main character to change. As Sacha Black (author of 13 Steps to Evil) argues, another word for change is conflict, and a villain is a fantastic source of conflict. Villains’ twisted values and morals cause them to harm good people. They’re manipulative, selfish, deceitful, and lacking in empathy. We can be forgiven for thinking even human villains are, well, not quite human.
Historically, fiction has embraced the “ugly villain” trope. The idea likely arose from physiognomy, the ancient Greek theory that an unattractive face is a sign of poor character, and vice versa. Although physiognomy has been pooh-poohed as unscientific since the late 1800s, the idea of beauty going hand in hand with goodness has been more difficult to stamp out. Over a century later, conventionally attractive people make more money than their less attractive peers, get convicted of fewer crimes, and benefit from teacher favoritism starting as early as elementary school.
Not all fictional villains are ugly, and not all main characters are beautiful, but stereotypes based in physiognomy are still highly prevalent in Western media. Historically, any bodily appearance or way of life different from the majority was at risk of being portrayed as inherently frightening and bad. This led to a shameful history of fictional media perpetuating racism, antisemitism, queerphobia, fatphobia, ableism, and demonization of facial differences, among other prejudices, by disproportionately casting people who belonged to marginalized groups as villains.
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As advocacy group Facial Equality International points out, turning already-marginalized people into fictional villains worsens persecution and discrimination in the real world. And as an autistic writer, reader, and viewer, I’m noticing a disturbing uptick in villains who are socially different from heroes—that is, socially “ugly” villains. Take Peter Isherwell, the amoral billionaire genius in the 2021 Netflix film Don’t Look Up. He’s portrayed as borderline inhuman—disgusted by children, reckless with the fate of the world and everyone in it, and completely unconcerned with mass extinction as long as he makes a profit. His inhumanity is strongly linked with his sensitivity to sound, unusual speech, and odd facial expressions.
Research shows that the Peter Isherwells of fiction are the rule, not the exception, of autistic (or autistic-coded) characters: They’re overwhelmingly white, male, extremely intelligent, and even savant-like. They often have all of the characteristics associated with autism, such as visible stimming, hyper-attuned senses, and rigid, inflexible routines. Autistic characters are portrayed as unempathetic, self-centered, socially dysfunctional, isolated, and a burden or punishment to their families. They are othered so thoroughly as to be considered inhuman, garnering descriptors like “robotic.”
Inhuman? Selfish? Lacking empathy? Maybe even a robot? Sounds like a villain to me.
There are a lot of problems with the way fiction depicts autism, obviously. For one thing, we don’t have enough autistic main characters, and far too few of the ones that exist were written by autistic authors with diverse, authentic, rich lived experiences. As a high-masking, late-diagnosed autistic woman, I can’t tell you how much pushback I get from people because I don’t fit their idea of autism, which is usually either Temple Grandin or Rain Man.
(On Writing Neurodivergent Characters.)
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the typical portrayal of autism is just plain wrong. For example, autism research done in the 1980s concluded that autistic children lacked empathy, but newer, better research shows that communication and empathy gaps between autistic and non-autistic people originate on both sides. For example, non-autistic people are less likely to want to interact with an autistic person after watching just two seconds of video showing the autistic person speaking.
Of course, most people don’t go looking for the latest neurodiversity research; TV, film, and books are most people’s primary source of information on autism. Whether a character is explicitly labelled autistic or they’re simply given multiple autistic characteristics, inaccurate or stereotypical representation can contribute to autistic people in the real world being labeled as abnormal or even dangerous.
Check out Maggie North’s Rules for Second Chances here:
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As writers, we have pretty compelling reasons to make sure our villains don’t embody harmful autistic stereotypes. I’d like to suggest we not only avoid damaging physical and social stigma, but that we take our villains to the next level. How? Let’s make villains “normal.” (I’m putting scare quotes around “normal” because, as we all know, it’s normal for people to have a variety of physical types and neurotypes.)
What if your villain didn’t have facial scars, or a limp, or social awkwardness, or anything else that marked them as “different?” What if they were . . . ordinary? I don’t know of anything scarier than a villain with the ability to blend in, like a serial killer. Or a villain who said all the right things at all the right times, but turned out to be a relentless backstabber. Think of the people who’ve hurt you in real life—the bullies, the unfaithful partners, the roommate who moved out and took your best pot with them. How many of those people were marked by the physical or social differences we expect in fictional villains? Yup, didn’t think so.
Now that we’ve had a chance to think about villains, let’s come back to the description of your villain. What do they look like? How do they speak and move? If a non-autistic person saw a two-second video of your villain, would they want to hang out with them, or not? We know better than to fall back on racial stereotypes or facial scars—let’s make it just as unacceptable to turn autistic people, or any neurodivergent people, into our easy, convenient, all-too-visible villains.