• Favorite Villains
• David: Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Pattern: you can give the villain a speech, and he can be fascinating and rationalizing. You can’t give the hero a speech, because it’s alienating.
• Corry: Dr. Horrible. Sympathetic villain. He wants something.
• Pierce: Dracula. The Joker. 
• Shoshanna: Villain as central character. Richard the 3rd. Frankenstein’s Monster.
• Richard the 3rd: He’s likable and charismatic, but he’s horrible.
• Robin: Moriarity. Snape. Snape is more interesting than Dumbledore. And sympathetic.
• Villains are victims of their circumstances.
• The villain is never the villain in their own story.
• Tolkien: the elves could be seen as the villains. The victors get to write the propaganda. Soroman could just be viewed as an industrialist who wanted to raise up the proletariat. 
• Brin: The ability of villains to rationalize. As a writer, you can make the rationalizations almost tempting to reader and to the hero. 
• Corry; The ends justify the means archetype. As a reader, we can believe that.
• The villain has less rules guiding their behavior, compared to the hero.
• We as readers also have rules that govern our behavior, and we like to experience freedom by living vicariously through the villain, who experiences more freedom.
• Robin: 
• The Heros, Joe Abercrombie. You see two sides of a two day war. By the end you don’t know who you are going to root for, and no matter which way it goes, it is going to be tragic.
• Prince of Thorns: does unspeakable things to win, but you come to see his point of view.
• Book by Anne Pratchette about terrorists who lock japanese businessman in a room, and by the end you are rooting for the terrorists.
• calling the paid protectors (e.g. 911)
• the hero doesn’t think to call them
• the hero calls them but they don’t come
• they come but they are incompetent
• they come and their competent, but they are in cahoots with the villain
• or the villain has framed you
• and it scales with the threat: in the movie independence day, the entire united states citizens, the u.s. military and police force are all good and all competent, because the threat is so large.
• the villainy is on a sliding scale, along with the competency of the paid protectors.
• the villain can ensure the protectors don’t show up.
• all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing
• flowers for algernon: there isn’t a villain. it’s the circumstances. fate is the villain.
• yellow wallpaper