Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

So for us Orthodox Christians it's Good Friday today and it'll be Resurrection Day (Good Saturday) by the time you're reading this. In the neighborhood where I live, a new (boisterous and with many members) family has moved in, who brought a live rooster a few days ...

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The Quackcast this week is about entitled bossy Karens. In fact it was originally going to BE “the Karencast” but the whole “Karen” thing is a bit ...

Entitlement. Privilege. Obnoxiousness.

We all deal with these things every day, whether we want to or not. It comes in all shapes and sizes. From the kid that throws a tantrum if they can't take some other random kid's toy to the adult that is pissed they stole ...

Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

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Today we talk about an unusual type of villain, a secret type of bad guy and a particularly nasty one: the person who maliciously does nothing. This ...

Wrapping up this series of character designs for antagonists, villains, and even protagonists with toxicity as their flaw, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the toxicity of inactivity.

The motto is well known- all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to ...

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Arrogance is a fun subject. Related to cockiness, hubris, assertiveness, self confidence and pride.
It's a fantastic trait for a villain and it's really fun ...

Tough love is so cool, eh? It's going to magic the “whining” right out of you, won't it? You just need to stick out through the harshness, and then when you reap the benefits, you'll realize your tough loving benefactor had the right idea. You'll be ...

So last time, in Part 1 of this discussion of …sunnier villains or antagonists, we had left off talking about how toxic positivity is all about the toxic person's comfort. And that this need to impose a certain behavior, dogma, and/or approach to reality in their environment leads ...