"Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct - because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd."
Nietzsche - The Gay Science #1 "The teachers of the purpose of existence", 1887
I may not be a writer but I am terrible, so I've been taking Terrible Writing Advice. While for the most part I find JP's sarcastic jabs both incisive and insightful (translation: hating the things I hate makes you a genius) his segment on villains did raise an eyebrow for decrying the will to power as insuffucient motivation for a megalomaniac. Sure, "I wants it 'cuz I wants it" does lack a certain narrative oomph, but here unfortunately narrative conflicts with verisimilitude. As I've laid out the issue several times here before, even with stone-age technology a tribe of naked apes so efficiently concentrates usable resources that evolutionary pressure will increasingly favor not just ability in acquisition but partitioning the take, by hook or crook. We lionize taking the lion's share because that tendency gave our ancestors a higher chance of passing down their genetic material, and we have inherited their predispositions. Powermongering and the race for social status have obviously suffered from runaway selection within our species (indeed may well be more responsible for our increased intellect than tool usage) and being baked so hopelessly into our instincts will fuel any amount of insanity. Asking why someone might want a bigger house than the neighbours' (or by extension, ALL OF THE HOUSES) is as obvious and meaningless as trying to define complex motivations behind the desire for sex or sucrose: a beginner's lesson in evolutionary psychology, which from the point of view of the individual just *is*!
If you must fill in some Dark Lord backstory, focus not on why the villain wants power, but on why the villain's powermongering strategy has shifted from cooperation to domination. Tolkien, for instance, did this quite naturally with his famous Quisling deciding he was better off biding his time and growing stronger under Sauron's newly stretching wing than supporting the ostensibly toothless White Council. Same goes for Sauron himself making a personal power-play at the end of the second age, with his greatest potential opposers' mutual defeat / retreat beyond the boundaries of the world made round leaving him poised to seize control, and his own physical change rendering his previous covert strategy untenable. His motivation never once changed. His circumstances did, and his story accordingly.
While you might say Sauron's not human and did not evolve, fantasy authors invariably base their races on the human lowest common denominator, motivations tracking human ones with little divergence and even less creativity. Which is odd given that fantasy paradoxically is in some ways better positioned than Science Fiction to include evolutionary change. Not only do Fantasy creatures inhabit more natural worlds with fully connected ecosystems (rather than SF's spaceships or run-down cities) and conflict-prone environments which could easily apply adaptive pressure, but Fantasy's kalpa-length timeframes frequently dwarf SciFi stories' more condensed action, allowing for gradual change. Evolution (a hot topic in the late 19th, early 20th post-Darwin media landscape) or the passing of geologic ages featured in many of the stories which jumpstarted SciFi's popularity (think The Time Machine) and also helped Tolkien drag fairytales into modern relevance by providing a LostWorld-ish sense of depth to LotR's history. Ghan-Buri-Ghan the primitive knuckledragger, many passages of troglodytic goblins once again recalling cavemen, the Nazgul's winged mounts* immediately suggesting pterosaurs, and Saur-on himself as master of a world before the world of men (to my teenage self that always read "he's a dinosaur" and canon be damned) consider just how much more believable, more solid as a world, these little touches rendered Middle-Earth.
I consume little fantasy in general (Song of Ice and Fire, Dark Materials, Kingkiller Chronicle) but such settings and tropes are inescapable in computer games and much of the frustration fueling this post and its upcoming sequel comes from hopelessly generic landscapes like Faerun, Dyrwood or Ferelden with their rule of placing every single monster in every single zone for the sake of monetizing assets to the fullest possible extent. Still, I'd blame this lack of imagination more on the genre than on the medium, and my last example comes from a webcomic.
I've mentioned Selkie here before in the context of webcomics' treatment of fatherhood. It's a science fantasy story about a human adopting a child from a species of (suspiciously humanoid) aquatic predators with claws, webbed digits, razor-sharp teeth and poison spit. Lot of potential there, predictably squandered in an effort to keep the Sarnothi relatable and familiar to the audience in the worst tradition of Star Trek wrinkly forehead aliens. They could, for instance, not have been given hair to increase their drag while swimming, but you're just scratching the surface there. A recent comic addressed the heroine on a playground as "Sarnothi of the climber bars" and I couldn't help but groan at the wasted potential. A swimming species would likely not develop a very strong grip for climbing. Otters don't do chin-ups. Sharp slashing claws and webs don't mix - see drag again. Nor do flippers generally maintain spring-toed musculature, but I guess it was more important to show the young heroine bouncing around in gym class with the human children. Nor are poisonous species, for that matter, particularly prone to develop massive overpowering musculature (picture viperacondas or mantispiders) but a species of spindly ambush predators using one-hit poison tactics wouldn't have yielded an imposing enough strongman in the figure of Mr. Scar-Kill-Him-Die. For that matter, how did their hunting style develop and how does it compare to human/wolf prey-harrying tactics... and given the impact such organization has on social dynamics, how would their society differ?
The entire spectrum of differences between Atlantean aquatic / predatory specialization and human plainsrunning prey-harrying is wasted because:
1) The author's desperate to drive home a politically correct message of coexistence and unity, willfully ignoring necessary divergence
2) The author just wanted to make them cool, but never considered they don't need to out-human humans to retain their coolness as fanged, poisonous sala-Man-ders
If you'd like to see a better take on the same divergence, you could try War with the Newts by Karel Capek (you remember, the guy who repurposed the word "robot" to its current usage?) War with the Newts' fairly relentless dark humor largely stems from humans' incapacity to recognize the other species' capabilities and danger, simply because it does not manifest in cozily familiar human facial expressions and social interactions. Moreover, the greatest danger stems precisely from our similarities in newts' ability to absorb human ideologies... while repurposing these in pursuit of their own instinctive drives and biological prerogatives.
So how might our current fantascifi worlds better integrate the truism that aliens are alien? Well, I've rambled enough for one night, so I'll cut off the observational half of my musings here and devote the next post to the speculative half.
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* Weirdly, Tolkien denied consciously tailoring the flying beasts as pterosaurs, and true enough in early drafts featured in The History of Middle-Earth, they're initially just nondescriptly vulture-like.
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