A short workshop on villains
1x04 The Price of Gold
Henry: And I’m just trying to spend time with you.
Emma: Oh that is really not fair.Don’t worry, I’ve got the perfect mother-son bonding activity! We’ll act like my adoptive mother is really an evil queen we have to defeat! That couldn’t have anything to do with her parenting issues, could it?
The way to make your villain seem like a real human is to give her reasonable, well-intentioned goals. Don’t just give their backstory a body count. For example:
Reasonable:
Audience: “Why is she being so crazy and irrational?”
Queen: “Well, I just want to raise my adoptive son as my own, so when he calls me an evil queen, skips town to find his birth mother, and then proceeds to call her his “real mom” in front of me, I can’t help but feel threatened.”
Do the above and you have a completely reasonable and sympathetic villain. But no, the Evil Queen is portrayed as having no right to raise her own son.
So you have this kind of motivation:
Audience: “Why is she being so crazy?”
Queen: “Oh, someone close to me died or something.”
This. Unless the writers commit to making Regina a character with complexity and humanity instead a plot device, the show will continue to devolve into Disney Princess dress-up time.
(Source: zooeycarter)
