Villain Grades and Why the N.I.C.E. Isn't Scary

While writing an essay for school, I came to a realization of something that's bothered me for a while: why the final Space Trilogy villain isn't scary.

But before we get to that, it's time to talk about... grading villains in villainy. Yes, you read that right, unless you read that wrong. Here it is again: grading villains in villainy.

Being a "good villain" is a combination of five factors: end goals, probability of achieving end goals, displayed power, evilness/tragicness, and emotional impact. For my purposes, I put these on a scale of 1 to 10.

"End goals" is exactly what is looks like: what eventual goal the villain has. At the low end of the scale, 1, is things like Team Yell from Pokémon Sword and Shield: yelling a lot and being hooligans in support of one specific gym leader. On the other end (10), Morgoth the Dark Foe of the World from The Silmarillion has the end goal of conquering the world, killing or corrupting the Ainur, and usurping Eru Illuvatar. At around 5 would be Prince Humperdinck from The Princess Bride: he wants to start a war between Florin and Guilder. That's bad, but not conquer-the-universe-and-kill-everything-in-the-process bad.

"Probability of achieving end goals" is also exactly what it looks like: how probable it is that the villain will achieve their ultimate purpose. So at 1 would be Jack Frost from the Rainbow Magic series: he's tried and failed to steal the magic so. many. times that it's not even remotely probable he'll succeed. The Dark Lord Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, is nigh unstoppable if you don't yeet the One Ring back into Mount Doom; he gets a 10. Desdemona O'Pinion from The Problim Children clocks in at 6, as she's pretty good at it, but not extremely so.

"Displayed power" is where it gets a bit trickier: this is the amount of power that the reader knows the villain can wield within the story, relative to the power of the protagonists. Thus both Sauron and Morgoth get a 10, despite Morgoth's forces being a heck of a lot stronger than Sauron's, because Morgoth's enemies are also a whole more powerful than Sauron's. Lady Catherine de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice is a 1 or a 2, because she thinks she has an enormous amount of influence but it's really just over Mr. Collins and she can't make anyone else do anything. In the middle at 5 is Baron Danglars from The Count of Monte Cristo, having a high absolute value of power but middling-to-low when compared to the Count.

"Evilness/tragicness" is a metric of, you guessed it, how evil and/or tragic the villain is. This is distinct from "End goals" because your villain could have a goal of, say, finding his lost cat (a 1 on that scale), but burn a path of destruction and cruelty on his way to that goal. In the first third to half of The Princess Bride, Fezzik gets a 1 on the Evilness side but about an 8 on Tragicness, and this statistic uses the higher number (thus, Fezzik is 8 in tragicness). Most of Team Plasma from Pokémon Black and White gets a 5 or so for tragicness, but its leader Ghetsis gets a 10 for evilness BECAUSE SERIOUSLY THE GUY IS AN UBER-JERKFACE.

And finally, "Emotional impact" is the villain's ability to make the reader care. This is one of the more important attributes for a good villain; low impact is going to leave the reader dissatisfied. (Incidentally, if your villain makes you kind of root for them, it's the same as if they make you hate them.) Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gets a 10, because it is nearly impossible not to want to throw her in a lava pit; Dr. Edgar George Zomboss from the Plants Versus Zombies graphic novels gets a 5, because while one doesn't hate him or root for him, he is just so darn funny and so good at scenery-chewing that you can't help being amused. The villain (mostly nonexistent) from the Dungeons and Dragons novel Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed gets 1... and I DNF'd the book, so there may be a correlation.

At last, the long-awaited reason why the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (or N.I.C.E.) isn't scary at all.

 

Its end goals are (probably intentionally) mysterious, and we don't even know what they are except that it is Obviously Not Good. (I suspect that Lewis was trying to pull a "fear of the unknown" here, but it failed.) Even most of the way through That Hideous Strength, I was still going "Yes, but what is it they want to do?"

 

Relatedly, the probability of achieving its end goals is also low, though not as. It's shown to have resources to do what it wants, and it does contain various large animals for... what exactly? Again, refer to "End goals".

 

The power they display is... well, their total shown resources are about a U.S. platoon of "policemen", around 12 weird scientist people, an absurd lot of buildings, a creepy reanimated head possessed by some sort of evil thing, and maaaaaaybe some corrupted eldils (the angel-like things established to exist in the first two Space Trilogy books). |The protagonists get a resurrected Merlin to go all Tower of Babel on them, and then they're effectively gone.| Their score would be lower but for the possibility of corrupted eldils.

 

Evilness/tragicness is one of their strong suits (they're firmly on the Evilness side), which is kind of sad given their score in it. They do engage in wanton arresting of protagonists, trying to make people go insane by putting them in rooms full of mild imperfections, and being jerks to animals (this last didn't turn out well for them).

They don't have much emotional impact either; they miiiiight have had more if their end goals gave the reader a reason to mentally oppose them. The only thing that ever made me go "okay, I want this one to get wrecked by Shrek" is that their police-chief-lady does manhandle one of the protagonists a couple times.

Final score: 

  End goals: 2/10 

  Probability of achieving end goals: 4/10

  Displayed power: 3/10

  Evilness/tragicness: 6/10 in evilness 

  Emotional impact: 2/10

  Total: 17/50, or a solid D in my system.

Link to the actual post.