How to write (or not write) a good villain backstory

[redwoodalchan]

The villainous backstory is an elusive beast but I think I’ve finally cracked the code. And all thanks to an over-the-top villain from an ultraviolent horror anime I just happened to tune into!

So, as you may be aware, I’ve decided to watch the ultraviolent horror anime “Deadman Wonderland,” a show I like to think of as the good “Elfen Lied.” Now, back when I sporked “Elfen Lied,” one of the bits that gave me the most trouble was Lucy’s backstory (and the other characters’ backstories, but Lucy is the best case in point here). I couldn’t help but feel like something was off about it, but I didn’t really know what that was at the time. Well, now I know, because as it happens my favorite character in “Deadman Wonderland” is a villain who has a backstory almost exactly like Lucy’s!

Azuma Genkaku is a villain that the heroes have to fight late in the series. He’s the leader of a group called the Undertakers, basically specialized armed guards that keep the eponymous Deadmen in line by punishing (read: torturing and murdering) any Deadmen who attempt to escape their imprisonment or rebel against the current state of affairs. The Undertakers are all, to a one, ridiculous and horrible in the extreme and this guy is the most ridiculous and horrible of the lot. But he actually has quite a good villainous backstory—good enough, in fact, to illustrate, once and for all, why some such backstories work and some don’t. In fact, to show you what I mean, I’ve decided to do a direct, one-to-one comparison between Azuma Genkaku’s backstory, and Lucy’s backstory from “Elfen Lied.”

The really funny thing is, if all you knew about these characters was their overall premises, you might reasonably conclude that Lucy would be the more sympathetic of the two. Lucy is a seventeen-year-old girl; Azuma Genkaku is a twenty-six-year-old man. Lucy became a murderer because a voice in her head told her to; Azuma Genkaku simply chose to start murdering people. Azuma Genkaku is, arguably, a more vicious and sadistic person than Lucy is; in some respects he’s actually more like Mariko than Lucy. However, he’s also the much better written character, and thus is a lot easier to relate to and sympathize with. This will become abundantly clear if we look at each backstory in depth.

In terms of the actual content of the backstories, they’re actually very similar—so similar, in fact, that I can’t help but wonder if it was deliberate. Both characters appear to have been raised by people who were not their biological parents (admittedly, it’s outright stated that Lucy is an orphan but only gently suggested that Azuma Genkaku might be). Both were mercilessly bullied, and both eventually killed their bullies in turn. Both befriended animals in order to have some company (Lucy gets a puppy; Azuma Genkaku a kitten). And both of these characters officially turned to the dark side very soon after the deaths of their respective animal friends. Yet, despite their similarities, these backstories don’t produce anywhere close to the same response when I watch them. When I watch Lucy’s backstory, I may occasionally note if something is particularly horrible; but once it’s over I move onto the next thing and forget about it relatively quickly. Azuma Genkaku’s backstory, on the other hand, sticks in the brain. It gets under your skin. It will haunt you long after the final credits have rolled.

If you watch the backstories of these two characters, you may notice that Lucy’s backstory is a lot (a loooot) longer than Azuma Genkaku’s. In fact, her backstory is ridiculously long, lasting for the final ten minutes of Episode 8 and virtually all of Episode 9. This is a problem because exposition in fiction comes with its own law of diminishing returns, where the longer it goes on the less interesting it is. While it might be fun to fill in gaps in your knowledge of a character’s life and times for a while, there comes a point at which adding more information about a character’s past and personality doesn’t make them more interesting, but only takes time away from other, more interesting and pertinent parts of the narrative. I’m pretty sure it’s no accident that my favorite villains all have backstories that are unobtrusive and take up relatively little space in the story. Generally speaking, good shows are frugal with details that don’t drive the story and characters forward.

Azuma Genkaku’s backstory is very short, lasting for only about three minutes. However, those three minutes are intense. Through a series of carefully curated and framed scenes, we see exactly how he went from being a fairly gentle and peace-loving teenager to being a deranged mass murderer. Nothing truly essential is left out, and yet nothing extraneous is included; the show understands that it doesn’t need to provide every single detail of the life he used to live to make him interesting. Instead the fans are left to speculate about those details themselves.

When viewed with this lens, Lucy’s backstory comes off as incredibly unwieldy and ill-disciplined. In fact, large chunks of it are just plain boring. In between scenes that could be used to build her character and explain her motivation we’re forced to endure tons of padding that seems to go on forever, in which she hangs out with Kouta or makes melodramatic pronouncements about how alone and unhappy she is. I think the reason why it’s so long is to reveal that Lucy used to be capable of compassion and normal human interaction; but it doesn’t work because a) “Deadman Wonderland” makes the exact same point with Azuma Genkaku using scenes less than a minute long each, and b) any scenes of Lucy being nice or normal are interspersed with scenes in which she murders someone, plans to murder someone, or picks on Kouta. Azuma Genkaku doesn’t have this problem because he’s consistently sympathetic right up until he starts killing people, and then it cuts back to the present day where we already knew he was a sadistic murderer in any case. During my “Elfen Lied” spork I remember seeing some comments saying that Lucy appeared to have been pretty bad even as a child, and that the abuse and rejection she suffered just made her worse than she otherwise would have been. In “Deadman Wonderland,” though, there’s no question that Azuma Genkaku used to be nice.

Both of these stories attempt to build sympathy for the characters chiefly through depicting the bullying they suffered at the hands of their peers. In the case of “Elfen Lied,” the climax of the bullying sequence comes when the bullies decide to torture and kill Lucy’s puppy. There’s just one problem: most real-world bullies don’t go around randomly killing other people’s pets. In fact, it was pointed out to me during my spork that it would have been more realistic of the bullies to simply claim the puppy for themselves and not allow her to see it anymore. There’s no realism or consistency in the scene at all; all the creators care about is tugging at your heartstrings in the most heavy-handed way possible.

On the other hand, the notion that a group of young men might gang up on and beat up a weak and vulnerable teenage boy is all too plausible—especially if that boy stands out for being different, or is gay or otherwise socially disadvantaged (and Azuma Genkaku is implied to check all of those boxes). In “Deadman Wonderland” we see exactly the sort of mistreatment Azuma Genkaku receives at the hands of his bullies, and it’s one of the very rare times that the series doesn’t glorify or revel in the violence on display. Ironically enough, “Elfen Lied” probably could have made Lucy’s backstory more psychologically-plausible and compelling if it had spent more time on the bullies’ mistreatment of Lucy herself and less on their mistreatment of her stupid dog.

It’s worth noting, as well, the way authority figures in each of the backstories are depicted. In “Elfen Lied,” unsurprisingly, the staff who work at the orphanage all hate Lucy too, and they talk about how creepy and awful she is while she’s within earshot and sick. In “Deadman Wonderland,” we see Azuma Genkaku briefly conversing with the head monk, who chides him for getting into a fight with his bullies yet again. Note, once again, which of these sounds more like a real situation that someone would actually find themselves in.

As I said before, the first people that both of these characters kill end up being the bullies who tormented them. Nevertheless, the way it’s handled in these two stories could not be more different. Lucy kills her bullies in a moment of passion when they kill her puppy; Azuma Genkaku murders his bullies in cold blood after a disaster leaves them wounded but him unharmed. The way he does it is a lot more viscerally disturbing as well. I think the big difference is that it’s already been established that Lucy can kill people with hardly any effort—all she has to do is use one of her vectors to pop someone’s head off—whereas Azuma Genkaku, being an ordinary human with no special powers, has to put more effort into it.

Now, punishing the bullies is a fairly common setup in villain backstories, and even a few non-villain backstories. However, these characters didn’t just kill their bullies and stop; they’ve been killing ever since, and that requires more effort to explain. The refrain that “I was abused so I became evil” only goes so far, because most people who are bullied and abused don’t actually become mass murderers. An articulation of motivation and a psychologically-plausible villainous worldview are the most important parts of any villain backstory, and it’s the main reason why Azuma Genkaku’s backstory works and Lucy’s doesn’t.

Simply put, Azuma Genkaku’s motivation for killing is clear. Fundamentally, he’s a Buddhist monk (albeit not a very good one) who’s taken the Buddhist teaching that all life is suffering (and his own miserable circumstances) to mean that it is desirable to brutally murder people in order to end their suffering. This is clear in the backstory and it’s reinforced by the things he says and the choices he makes in the present storyline, and it’s ultimately what makes him such a striking and memorable character.

With Lucy, by contrast, we don’t really know why she decided to keep killing after her bullies were safely dead. It’s implied that the voice in her head told her to do it; but the problem is, the narrative never bothers to explain the voice, where it came from or how it operates (after all, that would cut into the time we could spend watching Lucy hang out at the zoo and play in the river with dear Kouta!). As a result, it ends up seeming like just a more circuitous way of saying “just because,” and you can’t build a solid villain backstory or motivation on “just because.”

To give a brief summary, for a villain backstory to work it requires three main points: a clear depiction of what the villain used to be like; a marked contrast between what the villain was like in the past and what they’re like now; and a clear motivation that’s either articulated explicitly or easy to infer from what we already know about the villain in question. Azuma Genkaku’s backstory, despite being short, contains all three of these things, and executes them appropriately. Lucy’s backstory, by contrast, does not. We’re told that Lucy used to be nice, but it falls flat when there are so many scenes of her murdering people even as a child; we’re told that she has a motive and a reason for killing, but that reason is never articulated convincingly. To put it another way, Lucy’s backstory knows the words but not the music.

Ultimately, I’m most interested in how these backstories reflect on the relative quality of the shows. Azuma Genkaku, as fun and interesting as he is to watch, is meant to be seen as a horrible murderous monster with no redeeming qualities. Lucy, by contrast, is depicted as tragically beautiful, and her wicked deeds are depicted as wrong, but still understandable given the circumstances. What does it say about these two shows that “Deadman Wonderland” can make the former character engaging in a way “Elfen Lied” can’t even manage with the latter, who is its central antagonist?