I’m sitting in my backyard listening to my neighbors complain about one of their roommates. Apparently, the miscreant roommate has three bags of trash sitting by the door to his room that he has failed to take out.

“I mean, that’s not a problem… exactly.”

Each of the guys carefully, and politely denote their own housecleaning failures.

“I never make my bed.”
“You never saw my apartment; I can get meh-ssy.”
“I have empty bottles in my room too.” (“Not like that,” interjects the first guy.)

They each tiptoe up to the line of declaring the roommate’s behavior an actual problem, but don’t cross it. Clearly, the garbage is still being contained in the room. But equally clear is that they all find the roommates sloth disgusting. Note to the miscreant: When 3 twenty-something dudes, who have only a tentative grasp on hygiene, find your housekeeping habits to sub-par on the rank of foulness, you just might have a problem.

All of which got me to thinking about villains and bad guys and wondering whether or not they realize that they are failing at their end of the social bargain. What if villains are just totally incapable of realizing that their 3 bags of garbage is offending the other roommates? Getting kicked out of the house will come as a total shock if you have no idea that a hazmat suit shouldn’t be required dress for your room. Maybe if Sauron had just been a little tidier maybe he wouldn’t have had to move in with the Orcs. If Darth Vader hadn’t grown up with Jabba the Hut as role model maybe he wouldn’t have gone to the dark side. If Voldemort hadn’t had to live on the back of some guy’s greasy head maybe he wouldn’t have been so peeved all the time. What do you think? Do villains choose to deviate from the social norm, or do they just blow right by the stop signs without seeing them at all?

I was watching The Big Bang Theory the other day – the one where Sheldon was expounding on his hatred for Wil Wheaton, his “arch-nemesis.” Having an arch-nemesis is such a comic book notion that the idea of a real person with an arch-nemesis has comedic potential built in. But it got me thinking about how we approach our enemies in real life. Most of us don’t say we have enemies. We have people we don’t like – mean people at work, that jerk of a clerk at the DMV, or the weird neighbor who thinks it’s great to feed that raccoons. To say that person is an enemy is to imply that they are out to get you and that conversely you’re probably out to get them. An enemy seems to imply a state of conflict that most of us aren’t really comfortable with.

But Sheldon got me to thinking: Who have been the “enemies” in my life? That one girl at the office who over watered my bamboo plant and then blamed me for the fact that it smelled like dog poo? (That is what happens when you over water bamboo, by the way.) Could I turn her into the villain of a workplace adventure? Just how much bad behavior does it take for a reader will believe a character in the role of villain? Accidental over watering probably doesn’t make a villain. I think we’d have to ramp up the bad behavior before a reader would believe she was anything more than a workplace annoyance. And since I was considering my life through the lens of villainy I had to wonder if I had ever been anyone else’s arch-nemesis. Of course, I’d probably be horrified if I found out I was hated by someone, but to figure so large in the pantheon of someone’s life would be kind of cool. So then I paused to consider what about my character would make a good villain and I realized it was quite clearly my underground volcano lair.

What character trait do you think makes for a good villain?