Heroes and... er... oh, yes--Villains.

Just a few moments ago I read a great ‘Blog’ that made me stop and think... Oh, wait! I wrote it. It was my ‘Blog’.

Start again.

Curse my memory—it’s definitely not what it was a few years ago.

How many times have you walked into the kitchen, stopped, stared at the cupboard door and wondered why you came in here in the first place?

Happens to me all the time now. Once there was a time when it was only an occasional thing but now those ‘senior moments’ are much more frequent.

Now I have no idea what it was I was going to write about. I got myself distracted, did I not?

Should’ve written it down. Oh, but that’s what I’m doing; it hasn’t helped.

Solution: stare at computer monitor screen hoping that it will all come rushing back but, so far, nothing.

I went back to that ‘Blog’ and stared at that for a while, too. Useless. Completely useless.

It was the one about heroes and heroines. I do remember missing out the bit about villains.

If you’re going to have a hero or heroine then you definitely need villains; some sort of figure that the reader (or movie-goer) will be happy to hiss at.

There was some point to be made, in that original ‘Blog’ about how far you can go with the villain—or, indeed, villainess! If you can have a heroine there is no reason why you can’t have a villainess. I have had a couple of those. Successfully so, I thought.

But, then, I would, would I not? Think they were successful. They are, after all, my characters; they emerged, in all their hateful glory, from my brain.

Do villains have to be really evil? One of my female villains is lovely. She is sweet and kind. She just wants everyone else dead or gathered in as foodstuff. Nevertheless, she is just the motherly type, very fond of her children.

There seems to be a convention, in Hollywood particularly, that says that aliens have to have slime dripping from their maws. Of course, not all of them are like that but it is quite a common feature if the alien is really ugly. In their human forms the likes of ‘Sil’ (Natasha Henstridge) from ‘Species’ and Lara Flynn Boyle in ‘Men in Black’ as ‘Kylothia’ can hardly be regarded as slime drooling monsters although they are evil through and through—especially in their alien personae.

Mostly villains are aliens or people who have vindictive feelings towards others. They may require to rip humans apart or they may, through terror and subversion—if not outright cruelty, have a need for world domination.

For my part I just have the feeling that this ‘Black and White’ approach may be a step too far. If it is used to often we get jaded, it becomes tiresome.

I have used, in several stories, the approach that the ‘villain(s)’ may not be evil at all; they may just have a different point of view. It may be that they feel that they are protecting their rights to live in the way that they see best fit.

In this case we could see ‘Meevo’ as misguided; certainly he is striving to survive and kills at the drop of a hat to ensure that survival.

The aliens in ‘Crater’ do what they do in order to survive. Does that make them evil? From our perspective it makes them villains, of course. Equally, from our point of view they are most evil because they are bent on wiping us out.

In neither case do they see themselves as evil; they are merely seeking to continue with their life as they see best fit. They just have no concept of others as ‘serious’ life forms.

HG Wells saw this idea very clearly when he wrote ‘The Time Machine’. Naturally the writing reflected the idea that there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but the tenor of the story suggested that we were never quite sure which was which.

As in war, it is very easy to see ‘good’ and ‘evil’ when the uniforms are very different.

When we get into terrorist attacks the situation is far more blurred. We are more inclined to ‘knee-jerk’ reactions that dispose one group of people against another group regardless of actual blame or guilt.

How much harder would that be with aliens?

If we were to be attacked by one group of aliens would we not then feel that every alien ‘out there’ is against us?

Why is it that Hollywood feels that every alien visitation requires to be faced off at gunpoint? Surely, if an alien ship has gone to all the trouble to reach us and contact us (something that they would surely do) why would they then open up hostilities?

Is it not possible that the aliens are friendly? That they are nice people?

Perhaps they are the sort of people that you should greet warmly and invite into your homes; feed them, offer them succour and a seat in front of the TV to watch the football. We are, after all, only human.

Mostly.