The Narcissistic Villain

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Villains can be a tricky proposition--in fiction as well as in our day to day world.  We all hope we don't become entangled with malevolent people--ones who wish us harm--in real life. "Mad and Bad & Dangerous to know," was said of Byron, who was definitely NOT the kind of man you wanted to enchant your daughter. However, in a story, a villain provides driving force to a plot, and gives the hero and heroine an antagonist with whom to spar.  Inside a book, we are safe; there is no actual blood spilled.

By the way, the gentleman on the spooky cover above is not the villain, although he is a shape-shifter. The villain in Zauberkraft: Black is "a man of wealth and taste" who also happens to be a vampire. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and vampires, certainly, have eternity in which to brood and plot.

Villains can be fun to write--my cohort were brought up on movie theater cowboy serials, thus today, in our most entertainment ready mode, we still enjoy a good melodrama. Here, the white hats win and the black hats are carted off to justice. And what could be more melodramatic than a movie like "The Heiress"? Though this picture was made before I emerged from my mother, it's one of those movies I vividly remember seeing for the first time. I remember long cold Skaneateles winter-frigid afternoons, wrapped in woolens and watching a small Zenith TV. The somber black and white flickering on the screen matched the mood of the frozen world outside.

For anyone who isn't familiar, here's the plot. A naive, lonely heiress falls prey to a narcissistic con man, whose plan is to marry her, drive her mad, and then have her committed so he can assume control of her fortune. At first, he is the caring, genteel lover of whom she's dreamed. He does every little romantic thing for her so that, without knowing anything about him, she accepts his proposal. In modern psychological parlance this is called "love bombardment."  It's the full charm offensive with which the narcissist sweeps his target off her feet.

Next, the husband seduces the parlor maid and enlists her aid in his plot. Then the two of them begin to undermine his wife's trust in her sanity. Every night, he turns down the gaslight in the hall just a little bit, all the while staunchly insisting that his wife's "just imagining" it. The setting, in 19th Century America, where women were easily dispatched to asylums by husbands who had tired of them, smooths the villain's way.

Now, more than half a century later, "gaslighting" is a term with which most are familiar. Now, however, instead of referring to the actions of a single smooth sadist in an old film, it's commonly used by therapists to describe one of the ways in which a narcissist first undermines and then controls his relationship partner. In the real world, the narcissist is a dangerous creature, and lately it seems they are everywhere.

Back to the more innocuous world of fiction, where a narcissistic personality type makes a great villain. The narcissist, it turns out, has a sort of universal playbook. Reliably unreliable, considering only their own advantage, they love nothing and no one. In their world, empathy, or its cousin, sympathy, are incomprehensible, concepts "for suckers." They swallow up the people around them like a black hole. Absolute power, a constant stream of praise from sycophants combined with blind obedience to their whims is a narcissist's dream of heaven.

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Some of the other traits that characterize a narcissist are grandiosity, an excessive need for admiration, disregard for the feelings of others, inability to accept criticism, and an air of entitlement and superiority. They target vulnerable, empathetic people who have something they want; they are masters of manipulation. When they don't get what they want, they become epic bullies, hounding their targets into submission.

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Without really knowing what exactly I was doing or sticking a label on and then writing a character to fit the diagnosis, I have used this type of antagonist in several of my books. In some of these stories, the character is somewhere along the spectrum toward utter self-centeredness.

After all, the true full blown malignant narcissist (at least, as a fictional character) is one who seems constantly in danger of "over the top." There is, after all, a wide spectrum of human behavior and one of the first duties of a writer is to convince the reader that the story is--on some level--believable. So many of my villains are somewhere in the dark gray end of the zone, not irredeemably black.  Still, there are some terrors in these books of mine. 

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~~Juliet Waldron
Website of Juliet Waldron

Brief history of the written word - Part three and last - by Vijaya Schartz

Celtic Legends by Vijaya HERE

In the two previous parts of this article, we talked about the origins of writing in Asia, India, cuneiform writing in the Middle East, and hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, and the gradual switch from graphic representation of objects to the use of sound symbols, then letters. The first alphabet, created by the Phoenicians in the 8th century BC, was borrowed by the Greek then adapted by the Romans, and imposed through their conquest all over Europe. We now had the power of writing almost anything, any language, with an infinity of possibilities.

During the dark ages and the early Middle Ages in Europe, only the clergy, nobles, and government officials could read and write. Educating the masses was considered dangerous and sometimes evil. Only the clergy was allowed to read the Bible, for fear of misinterpretation. Most religious and political documents were penned in Latin, which, after the downfall of Rome, was still understood, if not fluently spoken, by the nobility and the literate elite throughout the Christian world. Books were handwritten in calligraphy on parchment and heavily decorated, usually by monks. These books were labor intensive, very costly, and not available to the population at large. 

The layman’s knowledge, however, was still imparted through oral tradition from elders to younger members of society. The intricacies of seasonal planting, weaving, sewing, tanning, preserving food, and other everyday activities were often condensed into how-to songs, learned in childhood and later taught to children and grandchildren. The rhyming and the melody made the task description easy to remember.

Storytellers memorized and retold in songs epic battles and important moments in history, like the song of Roland. Many African and Polynesian tribes still use song and dance to impart knowledge of historic events and storytelling. 

But the Latin alphabet also allowed writing in one’s native tongue. With the advent of commerce, trading and shipping companies required written records in everyday language. So did transmission of orders to armies far from home, and communication with conquered territories in the East during the Crusades. Hand writing on parchment spread among the higher middle class. 

In 1440, thanks to Gutenberg in Germany, and his invention of the printing press with removable characters, books could be mass-produced, and the written word became affordable. 

Soon, the Italian Renaissance saw the creation of many new schools and rich patrons financed the arts. Then Europe saw an explosion of knowledge, culture, arts, and considerable advancement of science, engineering, mathematics, and philosophy. 

Writing and designs of Leonardo da Vinci

Nowadays, most everyone can read and write and has access to books on every topic, but we are left with a different problem. We have come a long way from writing only the most important truths of our time. Writing has gone from sacred, to important, to artistic, to sometimes frivolous and trivial. 

With basic education, anyone can express thoughts and opinions about everything in writing. We are dealing with an overload of information from an infinity of individual sources. Fortunately, our sophisticated computers can handle that immense load, and when someone cusses on social media in Canada, someone in Japan can let them know it’s not okay. 😊 

Since the advent of Social Media, we also have derived other forms of written communication in abbreviations for texting, and emojis to express feelings. Universal binary language uses zeros and ones. Computers invent their own languages to communicate with each other. Someone even wrote an entire story in emoji symbols. 

I also heard that some law-makers are thinking about getting rid of cursive and lowercase in schools to keep only block letters. Can’t wait to hear my characters screaming at me in ALL CAPS. What’s next? Getting rid of punctuation? Shakespeare must be turning in his grave. 😊 

As a writer of sci-fi and fantastic legends, I predict that one day, if we do not destroy ourselves first, Earth will have only one language made up of mixed words and abbreviations and writing styles from various old countries, with one unified alphabet of simple characters everyone will understand.

alien writing on an I-beam fragment found at the Roswell crash site.

I only hope that despite this unification, we manage to keep the wonderful variety of cultures, and the colorful traditions of all the people of Earth, along with their best recipes, dances, costumes, and favorite games.

In the meantime, you are welcome to check out my books. Here is my Celtic Legend series, CURSE OF THE LOST ISLE. Find it everywhere in eBook or paperback. 

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From history shrouded in myths, emerges a family of immortal Celtic Ladies, who roam the medieval world in search of salvation from a curse. For centuries, imbued with hereditary gifts, they hide their deadly secret, stirring passions in their wake as they fight the Viking hordes, send the first knights to the Holy Land, give birth to kings and emperors... but if the Church ever suspects what they really are, they will be hunted, tortured, and burned at the stake.

5 stars on Amazon "Edgy Medieval. Yay!"

CURSE OF THE LOST ISLE - MEDIEVAL CELTIC LEGENDS - SERIES by Vijaya Schartz

Happy reading.

Vijaya Schartz, author
Strong Heroines, Brave Heroes
http://www.vijayaschartz.com
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Caught between two worlds—Tricia McGill

Find all my books on my Books We Love Author Page

As writers, we usually live in two worlds—the one we are creating

and the real one where we have to do the dishes and other mundane activities. Needless for me to say, I prefer the imaginary world sometimes. Currently immersed in life as they knew it in London during the blitz (1940) for my current book, I can’t help comparing those days to the weird lives we are being forced to live these days as we cope with enforced separation and the rules of self-isolation.

Just when we thought life was about to get back to normal in my part of the world things have gone back a few paces. No visitors unless they are essential for your care, no nipping out to the shops unless it is an urgent matter. Thank heaven for our TVs and computers. Imagine a world without them—and without streaming TV watched by most of the population in one way or another. I can’t imagine living without my personal choice—good old Netflix.

During WW11, radio (called a wireless back then) was the most popular form of entertainment. Many shows became popular, and quickly gained influence. Radio broadcasts were regulated by the government—as was most entertainment at the time. One popular radio program back then was Tommy Handley's “It's That Man Again”, which continued airing until 1949. Comedian Handley used radio to keep the spirits of the British population high. His last show aired on January 6^th 1949 and sadly, he passed away just three days later. 

Then there were singers like Vera Lynn, whose beautiful rendering of songs like ‘We’ll Meet Again’ gave heart to her listeners. I recall my sisters who lived through those years as young women telling me how they danced to the music of bands like Joe Loss and Oscar Rabin who played at local dance halls and gained a huge radio audience.

Thank heaven for the cinema (called the flicks in those days). I had to use a movie in my latest book that my characters saw back in 1940 and chose Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday”. Cary Grant was very popular then along with great actors like Tyrone Power, Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart. As with radio, the film industry was an important source of communication in a time when TV was unheard of. Much like media today, it was also a great means for the government to use propaganda to influence the public.

Just like recently there was a shortage of essentials, but panic buying by a selfish few didn’t bring this about—no this was because the ships carrying food and raw materials were attacked regularly. One noticeable thing when this pandemic started was that there were not so many cars on the road. Back then, most of the population didn’t possess a car but caught public transport. So we grumble because we can’t get hand sanitizer or tissues—how about living at a time when soap was rationed to 3 ounces a month, and there was no white bread available—at all.

I’m off back to that other world now—but first I might have a cup of

tea. And that’s another thing I forgot to mention, their cup of tea seemed to be a mainstay back then, even if perhaps there was a lack of sugar to sweeten it.

Please visit my web site for more on my books