Source
r/writing•
missing404

Annoyance with "all according to plan" villains

Discussion

Hey guys,

I've not posted in here before, so I hope this isn't out of place.

I'm not a particularly prolific writer myself, but I consume more than my fair share of stories.

I was just looking to start a bit of a discussion on something that bothers me about a lot of stories: the "excellent, just as I planned" villain. Lately I've found my willingness to suspend my disbelief quite lacking when at every turn, the villain has some sort of countermeasure, or every development of the plot somehow moves them towards their goal until the very end of the story.

First question: I can't quite put my finger on what to call this feeling of annoyance. I suppose it's just general weariness of this kind of plotline. Anyone know what to call this? Or shares my frustrations?

Second: I wonder, how do you guys approach writing a smart villain without leaving a cynical reader such as myself thinking "oh, of course he's prepared for this too!" and losing interest.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!

EDIT 2: Again, thanks for the insights. I found this very useful and hopefully others will as well.

Posted Mar 1, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC · edited

6073
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

Have fun!

28
missing404OP•

welp. see you in a year or two.

23
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

I'm pretty sure tvtropes grow faster than humans can read it.

18
serendipitousevent•

Have fun!

1
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

Imagine you meet a magical leprechaun. For a bargain price, he offers to fix up the your house and add an extra room. So you take him home, and he proceeds to eat your house and shit out a hundred and forty more leprechans, which promptly murder you.

2
101Alexander•

This is a trope within a trope

5
Chowatron•

We need to go deeper.

2
MagnusCthulhu•

Am I the only one who fucking hates TV Tropes and all the shitty, Well there goes my night! posts that follow.

5†
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

I dislike clapping at movies and encore chants.

3
MagnusCthulhu•

Me too! It's like, Who are you clapping for? Nobody involved is here. And if they haven't played one of their biggest songs, they're planning an encore! Don't fall into the trap.

2
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

I've actually clapped when I knew the filmmaker was there. Then it's fine.

2
CookiesRiot•

It's basically a catalogue of all possible literary elements masquerading as an in-depth study of common/overused plot devices.

It's a crappy encyclopedia that says "See <other entry>" numerous times as a definition for every entry.

And the articles are written with the formality of a 12-year-old who thinks he's an adept literature analyst and has a penchant for exclamation points.

1
missing404OP•

i mean, i don't think anyone considers it a "study" of anything. Or at least I never have.

6
LordFishFinger•

It's very informal in tone. I don't think there's any pretense to being serious there.

And they insist that "tropes are not bad", i.e. the things they describe are not necessarily implied to be "too common".

2
Jameskirk10•

Fuck you, TV Tropes is awesome. Truly one of a kind.

1
cmbel2005•

Oh no, what have you done. You've killed us all.

4
viaovid•

All according to plan.

18
Retlaw83•

I have to leave for work in half an hour and almost clicked on this.

3
The_Fustilarian•

I find it interesting that three shows by Whedon made that list.

3
BiffHardCheeseEditor/Good Cop•

Whedon embraces the tropes. A lot of his humor comes from subverting them.

3
JohnnyGoTime•

Part of the reason this works (and why stories do it so frequently that it's cliché) is because the villain is often actually the one who initiates things before the protagonist starts taking action:

If the protagonist is out to right some wrong/balance some injustice/etc, well it's often the villain who put the world in that state. So the villain has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo; they know their ultimate goal while the hero often has to try to figure it out; and the villain's had more to time to ponder all the eventualities than the hero (who is often reacting to the crisis and just trying to keep their head above water).

This is why it's so effective when the hero outwits the villain (Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard or Ethan Hunt at the end of M:I 1, 2 and 5; etc.) because they had to go totally non-linear to recognize all the variables and solve them in a manner the villain hadn't predicted, while at the same time, fighting through all the low-level challenges/henchman/obstacles along the way.

22
concussedYmir•

Not to mention that it's a very straightforward way to set up the third act for the Desperate Last Stand and eventual victory.

11
Mr_Mu•

My villains are as dumb as my protagonists. I build tension by having them both screw up, making things hard for both each other and themselves.

13
missing404OP•

thanks for the answer.

Makes sense. But I imagine it is hard to write convincing screw-ups for both sides.

1
Mr_Mu•

They don't have to be "screw-ups." Things just don't always go your way. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. No character, antagonist or protagonist, should get everything they want. Avoid writing a "perfect" villain by making them as susceptible to their world as your heroes are.

6
JohnnyGoTime•

This is one of the things I've always loved most about Ian Fleming's James Bond novels & short stories.

3
NeonFraction•

On the other hand, having a hero succeed because a villain screws up can feel like a very cheap victory.

2
mkglass•

I like the idea of an "evil" villain who isn't as evil as he'd have you believe. For example, he's planted a bomb at the local mall, but doesn't want to set it off because there is a kid's birthday party going on in the food court that he didn't know about. Just as the good guy can have some bad qualities, the bad guy should have some good qualities. Nobody is pure evil.

1
nickbedford•

That kind of villain is very cliché which is probably the reason you (and I) dislike these kinds of characters.

They're quite often used in superhero movies. This is probably one of my biggest pet peeves with traditional superhero movies over adaptations like Christopher Nolan's Batman series which make the characters much more real and tangible and not just tired old tropes and clichés.

8
PM_ME_GOOD_BJ_PICS•

Well, the Joker in The Dark Knight was a pretty stereotypical "All according to plan" villain.

8
RowYourUpboat•

I don't recall the Joker's plots working out implausibly well for him in The Dark Knight, and he at least seems to improvise a bit. I don't think he knew Gordon wasn't dead, and the scene with the ferries near the end also comes to mind. And the fiendish plots that the Joker does pull off successfully make some sort of sense planning-wise when they're revealed. Contrast that with the villain's planning in Skyfall, for example - very silly and unrealistic if you stop and think about it, and very much an example of what OP is talking about.

The Dark Knight Rises sequel, on the other hand, is about as ridiculous as Skyfall in this respect.

5
PM_ME_GOOD_BJ_PICS•

You have a very good point, it was a lot more believable than most other villains.

2
logic11•

The jail sequence in the Dark Knight is an example of this, and a pretty egregious one. Overall the movie isn't, but that one plan on the other hand... and yes, the plan in the sequel is awful, and incredibly stupid.

1
nickbedford•

He was, but he's one of the few examples of pulling it off in my opinion.

4
[deleted]•

...Really? The whole point of his character is that he is literally the opposite of the "all according to plan" villain.

For gods sake he's called The Joker; the wild card in the deck that fucks things up. His entire raison d'etre is to destroy "the plan" via complete, unrestrained, unpredictable anarchy.

4
PM_ME_GOOD_BJ_PICS•

I may have misspoke.

I didn't necessarily mean everything he did was calculated. I possibly used the wrong villain archetype.

Dark Knight's Joker was the kind of villain who, even if he fails, still wins somehow.

He had all these different strings extending from himself, making it impossible for Batman to stop everything he began, so even though both ferries survived and Gordon and his family were alive and Gotham was relatively safe, Dent was still broken and his legacy destroyed.

That is, until Batman took the blame to keep Harvy the White Knight Gotham needed.

So even though Harvey, the last of the Joker's threads, was kept intact, the Joker had successfully broken the Batman. Now Batman is an outcast, a criminal, and must be hunted.

Until the next movie comes along and shits on everything the Dark Knight accomplished. But that aside, you're right, I did miss the entire point and incorrectly label the Joker as a Luthor-type, "all according to plan" villain.

4
missing404OP•

I agree. It dissapoints me that it seems to occur so frequently with certain genres.

I suppose what I'm really trying to dig towards is that it seems to cheapen the story. Too often the villain is one step ahead at every juncture until, suddenly, he's not anymore. I guess what I'm really looking for is stories that actually illustrate a real struggle.

1
navarin•

You can make the story less cheap/favored toward the villain by having the protagonist win a pyrrhic victory. Things didn't go according to plan for the villain because the protagonist got what they wanted, but new information/unintended consequences happen and even though the villain doesn't succeed, the protagonist(s) also are facing a harder path.

1
MonkeyCube•

I'm trying to think of an example of 'all according to plan' from superhero movies, and honestly the only one that comes to mind is the Joker's multiple plots that must work perfectly to have the desired effect in The Dark Knight (though he claims the opposite).

Granted, I haven't seen every superhero movie, but I really am struggling to think of another instance. Maybe the Avengers where Loki claims his plan is for everyone to gather and fight so he can steal the device he stole at the beginning of the movie?

1
Reivaylor•

I think a lot of it stems from Lex Luther who has to have something working for him in order to oppose a god.

2
Komnenos_Kasuki•

I quite like them. Not a villain that has a plan for everything, but ones that can adjust their plans to the situation and not break down pathetically when things don't go their way and they're losing.

Comedy would be one way to have a villain who (thinks) he/she knows everything.

6
missing404OP•

Not a villain that has a plan for everything, but ones that can adjust their plans to the situation and not break down pathetically when things don't go their way and they're losing.

Yeah, i have no problem with adaptable villains. But I will say it seems, to me, that it's hard to execute it right. If you show them adjusting too well then you fall right back into the same trap again.

2
Ro_Gan•

this makes me want my next villain to say this and then turn/pull cape, and attempt to flee directly into a brick wall.

...

yep. leslie nielson is my next villain.

4
novelconcepts•

I find this is annoying on the good guy side, too. I loved Leverage. I thought the episodes had some brilliant moments, but the way the good guys kept perfectly anticipating the evil doers to the point that even when things went south, everything went according to plan.

I don't think you show off any of your characters off to their best abilities if everything works. It's at the moment where the character, despite everything they've got invested in the outcome can't see a way through the problem is when the story really shines. I have a lot of big complaints about unpublished books I've critiqued, but not pushing the character out of their comfort zone, forget to their failure point is a big one for me.

I like watching resolve totter on the edge of a precipice.

4
missing404OP•

Thanks! Yes, it's equally as annoying on the hero's side. In my view most writers seem to know that a good protagonist arc has to contain failures.

Perhaps one should plan a villain's arc as if they're the hero of their own story?

Thanks for the response!

1
novelconcepts•

Ideally, you should. Nothing is worse than the bad guy who shows up at the protagonist's birth, shaking his fist in rage and yet does nothing to prepare for the 15-21 years (depending if it's a YA) without growing an ounce stronger from the birth to the end of the book.

The bad guy should have all the resources needed to defeat the protagonist and, ideally, have his own minor redemptive arc that he could have taken if he wanted but didn't choose it.

2
DoerOfStuffAndThings•

Second: I wonder, how do you guys approach writing a smart villain without leaving a cynical reader such as myself thinking "oh, of course he's prepared for this too!" and losing interest.

What I do is I sit down and write a story outline from the villain's perspective. First I go through the strengths/weaknesses and come up with a backstory. Then I take a look at what it is the villain wants to achieve, and develop a tragic arc to complement the hero's arc (or vice versa if it's a tragic story for the hero).

4
Garibaldi_Biscuit•

There's a nice subversion of this in the Watchmen movie, where Ozymandias is explaining his plan as casually fends off attacks from Nite Owl and Rorschach. When he's finished, Rorschach cries 'You won't get away with this!'

'Get away with this?' he replied, quietly amused. 'I implemented my plan forty minutes ago. Did you honestly think I'd tell you while you had any chance of stopping it?'

4
CaptainHarlockMan•

Gendo Ikari, exit stage left.

3
LaBelette•

I like to write villains who think they are this type of mastermind, and even at first appear like they are to the reader, but are in actuality not nearly as omnipotent as they would present themselves.

3
alcibiad•

I am trying to get around this by having both my mastermind villain character and my, er, mover and shaker smartypants character (not the narrator) having a LOT of different plots in the works. This doesn't mean there are any "low key plots"--everything is high stakes, but both characters are trying to accomplish their goals from a variety of angles which sometimes fail and sometimes don't (I think the Allied intelligence effort in WW2 is a good example of the kind of plotting I'm thinking of). The first book of my story basically ends up with almost a complete win for the bad guys, for example, except the mover character acquires a significant amount of intelligence that lets her effectively counter-strike in the next book.

2
IngwazK•

It depends on how the villain is portrayed in my opinion. For example, if it is well established, and with believable evidence, that the villain is very smart, I can easily accept a villain who has laid traps and thought out contingencies that might occur. However, if a villain has a contingency for basically every single plan that the hero can come up with, then there either is a problem, or you have a villain who is far smarter than he should be for the heroes he is facing.

This kinda goes into the main thing I really dislike about superman as a basic character. Superman is unbelievably strong. He's so strong that he basically cannot lose a fight unless his one weakness is used against him. Any fight, he would win it. Even if the villain tries to out smart him and use something against him outside of physical violence, he like has some super power he can use to counter it.

Yes, I'm aware that superman has been used to explore some really good aspects of his humanity, and those parts are good imo. It's just that the other parts seem to be a major problem when those aspects of his humanity aren't being explored.

In my experience (as a reader, not a writer), if you have a smart villain, you need to have a smart hero or have a hero that has some way to counteract and fight against that problem at least. The hero doesnt have to be as smart as the villain, but they need to be able to think on a level similar to the villain and at least give the villain a run for his money.

2
Legendary_Plus•

It depends on how the villain is portrayed in my opinion. For example, if it is well established, and with believable evidence, that the villain is very smart, I can easily accept a villain who has laid traps and thought out contingencies that might occur.

Another good thing to do is have the villain improvise at least a little. An example that springs to mind is Littlefinger in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. He tells Sansa outright that he thought he'd have more time to get things into position, but that Cersei is exceeded all expectations and that his maneuvers have given him years less time than he thought he had. Indeed, paying close attention to major players such as Littlefinger or Varys shows that while things are going mostly good for them, they're having to come up with patches to their master plans to keep things on track. (Consider Arya's descent beneath the Red Keep, where the men she spies on explicitly discuss that things are moving too fast for their liking, or Tyrion's adventures in Essos, which are a deliberate spanner in the works).

A villain who can keep on top of things but is clearly thrown by the occasional unpredicted action is much more acceptable to me than a villain who has planned everything out thirty moves in advance. This is in part because it allows our hero to save the day at the end of the story by doing something unpredictable, and also in part because it establishes the villain as someone capable (to be able to rise to the occasion at all) but not invincible (whereupon the story has to cheat to come to a satisfying ending).

2
missing404OP•

A villain who can keep on top of things but is clearly thrown by the occasional unpredicted action is much more acceptable to me than a villain who has planned everything out thirty moves in advance. This is in part because it allows our hero to save the day at the end of the story by doing something unpredictable, and also in part because it establishes the villain as someone capable (to be able to rise to the occasion at all) but not invincible (whereupon the story has to cheat to come to a satisfying ending).

I think this sums up most of what I'm thinking here.

Basically there's line between competence and "omniscience" that sometimes gets crossed. If you can keep your characters close to the line but clearly behind it, you'll have much more convincing storylines.

2
Sirkai•

Fanfic is looked down upon but hey, have you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and/or any of it's spin-offs?

I hate it when a character "just knew it" and had prepared and has some crazy countermeasure ready. HPMOR takes the approach that everything is out in the open in the text. It's not frustrating when the villain curb-stomps the protagonist's plans and you as a reader have an intense flashback to everything done wrong and everything set up for it and all the pieces click. It doesn't work out quite like that every time in HPMOR, but it's the most recent exmple that came into my mind. Also half the time the plans and countermeasures and such are fully or partially stated beforehand, so as a reader you can 'participate' better.

And then things go to shit in ways the intelligent characters couldn't anticipate, and their overcorrections breed more problems, and it's beautiful.

So in short I'd say it's bad when it's a deus ex machina, but so good when the writer (and so also the reader, as this model forces the reader to guess and think!) has done the work and earned the "just according to keikaku."

2
SFbuilder•

I have (unseen) villains with big plans, though it's the mid-level guys in their faction who are the main antagonists. They have a fail condition just like the protagonists.

I think that antagonists are far more interesting when they have something to lose as well. They can plan ahead, but they won't make plans that are too complicated to function.

2
logic11•

My one gripe with The Dark Knight was having the Joker plan to get arrested with this stupid, incredibly elaborate plan that had a million ways it could fail. In fact his plan required a lot of people he had no control over to act in some pretty seriously unpredictable ways (if they had shot the henchman with the bomb the whole plan fails for example).

I like a villain who plans ahead logically and well, but that's not what happens most of the time. In fact what happens is that the villain has a brittle plan that calls for it to look like the hero has won, usually when the same goal could have been achieved without baiting the hero.

I will say that Return of the Jedi is actually not an example of that, and is kind of a clever idea... and if the plot was slightly more realistic the rebels still would have lost, it's not like the imperial fleet stopped running once the Death Star blew up. It was a reasonably well designed trap that the heroes survived due to extreme plot armour.

2
Jesufication•

it's not like the imperial fleet stopped running once the Death Star blew up.

Like many plot holes in the Star Wars movies, this is explained in the EU in a way that makes Star Wars sense. Once the Emperor died, he was no longer controlling the actions if imperial forces so their coordination and morale took a serious nosedive.

1
ThatGuyJohan•

I don't really have a villian as such in my story, but there is a character who does the "according to plan" storyline, only to end up realising that he has bet on the wrong horse and now has to take damage control.

It can work, especially if it's not too convoluted.

2
PeeJayx•

The problem with a villain who pulls the "it was all part of the plan" shtick is that it declares your villain to be omnipresent and omni-powerful, something which your protagonist probably isn't. And the bigger the gap between protagonist and antagonist in terms of power, intelligence, will etc., the more author will need to stretch to eek out that unbelievable, fluky victory that feels hollow because...well, it's unbelievable.

So in this case, your villain is established with a pretty devastatingly huge skill in looking at all of the variables and outcomes and integrating it into his or her masterplan. And after all of that foresight, the protagonist will probably still beat them in some mundane way, by sheer fluke or a technicality. Which is probably what results in that feel of annoyance.

2
missing404OP•

Yep, i think this is part of it.

For me another side to it is, regardless of the fact that most stories end happy, that it just gets a bit depressing after a while to constantly see these unflappable bad guys. It's always like everything has to be so hopeless, haha.

1
scubsurf•

I've always had this feeling that these "all according to plan villains" are often just full of shit and are trying to appear unshaken by unexpected outcomes.

I mean, I know a lot of them aren't intended to be read that way, but that's how I started seeing it after a while. I think sooner or later I'd like to write something where I emphasize that while the antagonist refuses to admit that things aren't going as he would like them to, it becomes more and more clear his "plan" is falling apart.

2
CheeseQueenKarikoLearning-Author•

First: I think the frustration is two things. 1. It makes it entirly unbeleivable and dissappointing when the villain is eventually defeated. 2. It seems contrived.

Second: For smart villains...Hmmm. Someone once told me ''The perfect plan is not the one that goes off without a hitch, it's the one that can adapt to the new situation''. Don;t have the plan conveniently fall into place, have the villain adapt to the situation and think around the new problem.

2