One of the scariest ideas in The Lord of the Rings is when it is revealed that Sauron is not actually the Dark Lord at all. He’s just an emissary, a sort of apprentice Dark Lord. A Dark Lord Lite. That’s quite scary. Tolkien got a lot of things right in his portrayal of Sauron. For a start, he doesn’t. You never see Sauron; he’s just a brooding presence in the background. The reason for that is perfectly obvious; he’s far scarier that way. Any Dark Lord that actually gets portrayed is somehow diminished.
We’ve all seen them in those dreadful kids’ animations on a Saturday morning. The Dark Lords in them have names like Skeletor or Gorgoth, Bringer Of Doom. They all do the evil laughter. You know the type:it goes Aaaahahaahahahahahahahahahahaaaahhhhhhh…… and acts as an effective scene closer, not least because there’s more or less nothing that anyone can do after doing the evil laugh without looking like a complete prat.
Which most of them, frankly, do.
Dark Lords are not evil, by and large: they’re just a pain in the ass. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think they’re nearly as interesting as people make out.
Let’s take a couple of recent examples. Game of Thrones, for a start. For six seasons, it as an elaborate, intelligent, hugely entertaining political fantasy, full of human decisions and moral choices. Then what happens? The Winter King. Dragons. And all of a sudden, we’re back in territory which has been covered a million times before. It’s kinda sad.
Then we have The Walking Dead. Whut? I hear you say. Where Skeletor? Where Sauron?
Negan.
Negan is just another Dark Lord. And all of the dark and complex moral choices, the fear and terror that made the show so fascinating and affecting, they a
ll boil down yet again to Sauron and bloody Mordor. And the problem with Negan is that he is neither as interesting nor as entertaining as the show runners seem to think. He’s just annoying. You want the sucker dead, so we can go back to being scared of the actual zombies again.
There’s this theory that bad guys are more interesting, more fascinating than good guys. I’ve never got that. It’s the sort of dumb adolescent psychology that causes otherwise intelligent adults to fall for partners who treat them like dirt. Let me tell you something: I worked for a psychopath. He fulfilled six of the seven behavioural requirements for definition as such. Here’s the news. He wasn’t strangely fascinating. He wasn’t likeable despite his faults.
He was just a twat. And he made people miserable and frightened.
I’ve never really been good at bad guys in my fiction, and the reason for that is that I’m not really interested in them. I’m more interested in the good guys (and girls); the people who have a choice between the right way to behave and the wrong way and choose the former. Because, frankly, that’s a far more difficult choice to make. That’s why Joe Ackerman is a more interesting character to me than Mr Thompson, because Joe may be weak, but he still has the moral fibre to make the right choices in the end.
That’s who we all are.