Things can get deadly.
Unlike other hazardous weather, the fog is deceptive. It flows in and out with the alacrity of a typhoon, and blinding and confusing as surely as a winter blizzard. Until the very end, however, the fog is unassuming — we can feel wrapped and comforted in the arms of a fog in ways no one could trying to navigate a hailstorm or torrent. They can be warm or cold, soupy or misty, but always mysterious and inviting.
And therein lies its trickery. You find yourself going up the wrong path, not cautious and watchful but confident and surefooted, ever unaware that your route may leave you staring straight into the jaws of destruction. Your eyes narrow as you fight to steer a straight course, the periphery melting away, leaving you with only a few feet ahead to warn you of perils in your path.
Wandering in the foggy night, what can one hope to do? You begin second-guessing your choices, fearing a wrong turn may have damned you for good. But hold the line — or else the confusion might prove paralyzing, halting you in your tracks until things are clear. But by then it could be too late.
The only sound option is to push on through the uncertainty. Hesitation will clear the path but with it your chances of success. You have to grit your teeth, banish your doubts and march onward. You may be wrapped in so tightly that from moment to moment, you will never truly know where you are headed.
But have faith. Strengthen your nerves, steady your heart, trust to your instincts and never for a second doubt that you will find your way.
So stay your course, stealing forth and into the woods.
It’s going to be a foggy night.
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The best characters in the stories are villains, if the villains are made well.
The hero nearly always wins, is always good, and always gets the girl. Villains rarely have it so lucky. Purveyor of evil and wielder of a black heart, they are made by design to be hated. This seems to appeal to some, lovers of the things you’re not supposed to love and depressed gothic kids with too much time on their hands. On top of it all, that’s often where the portrait of the villain ends. They are evil, they must be defeated.
A good villain, on the other hand, has a method to his madness, and more important a motive. The essence of a villain, the core that makes him evil, is not the inhumanity he brings about but the distorting and misaligning that made him who he is. With luck, the villain in the story gets a motive, but rarely is he really made the man by it.
“A wicked or evil person.” “the cause of particular trouble or an evil” By its definition, a villain either has no humanity or forsook it for some reason. Hateful, merciless, cunning, dangerous, these words are his descriptors. What can drive someone to take up this title or engage in villainous behavior?
Hatred, for one. If he is taught to hate, if he is hated, then he will hate. If nothing he does seems to change that, then he will cease to appreciate the company of others out of anger and fear. Fear that they will hate him, and anger that he is powerless to change it.
That, then, leads to loneliness. True loneliness has a way of breeding a lack of humanity. Loneliness born of boredom is a lull in the day to be filled. But wrenching, torturous, inescapable loneliness fuels the fires of anger and resentment, for if you are perpetually alone, it is not enough that you have been hated by those around you… you have been abandoned by the entire world. If they all abandon you, what does it matter what they do what does it matter what they think… only one thing matters.
Power, a villain must also have power. The villains of the real have gained it through the support of numbers, but the villains of fiction act alone (how fortunate that the emerging villain is alone already). While an emerging villain might be deluded into imagining himself in a position of supernatural power, all he can do is wait for it. And the more he believes the fiction and the dreams and the power of the night, the further he drives himself from his humanity, till the darkness and his delusions of grandeur feed his own hatred.
Thus a villain cannot simply be assembled on command. It is a slow and agonizing process of the extraction of humanity and the extinction of the light. He must be driven over the edge, and seeing no way or reason to go back, embrace madness.
On his climb up the ladder of evil, a villain discovers his trade. He learns to use people as he was used, and discard them when he is through, as was done him. He learns to look past the smiling faces and good intentions and view humanity for what it is: basically good but ultimately flawed souls, driven at their heart by selfishness and no concern for the ones they step on. Is this humanity worth loving? Is this humanity worth being part of? Once all the light is gone, what’s the point anymore?
War, oppression, destruction, these things breed hatred and pit one humanity against another, but the soul is still intact. Israelis still love Israelis and Palestinians still love Palestinians. No, what breeds a villain is the loss of humanity, the rejection of grace, and the ultimate acceptance of a distorted view of the world.
Love is the villain’s antithesis, and it cannot stand in the face of it. It is the outermost bastion, the last straw and the final fig leaf in humanity’s stand against villainy (at least the hero stories got that right). For when all else is lost and the villain has almost forsaken all hope, he will continue to grasp foolishly at love to pull him back from the brink. Failing that, he finds that nothing else matters but himself.
A true villain never embraces evil. He is borne to it on the backs of hundreds.
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