Why would someone embrace the harmful nature of Evil?

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One of the more interesting stories I’ve been reading lately is an “erotic” story where the protagonist has invented a method to completely control people, and takes exquisite pleasure in making someone’s life a living hell. Some 10 chapters in, the author finally gets around to explaining his motivation.

Essentially, he had the mindset of an incel. It takes effort, motivation, and perhaps most importantly, the desire to be helpful and pleasant to others in order to build strong, healthy connections with people. The story protagonist decided, instead of pushing through the difficulty, to end-run his way around it, spending four years of his life developing a mind control device.

And so he achieves his ideal lifestyle. His device forces his victim’s minds to direct their bodies towards his will. The horrors he inflicts are, well, too graphic to get into here. But he wants his victims to experience, deeply and exquisitely, the pain and torture he inflicts. His every wish, every whim, he gets to force onto an unwilling victim.

But his main victim isn’t just a two-dimensional receptacle for vile intent. She’s powerless to oppose him directly in any way, and she cannot escape the situation, but she’s a keen student of his psychology, she has to be as she has nothing else to focus on.

And so she’s able to work out his incel mentality, forcing confession after confession from him about the sadness of his goals and the pitiable nature of his childish wishes. Just because he’s created a world in which he can immerse himself in endless fulfillment of those wishes doesn’t make them any less sad, and she’s able to remind him of this.

It doesn’t make anything better for her. He digs deeper and finds yet another horror to inflict on her. He’s embraced his demonic nature, in fact he’d done so long before the beginning of the story, which opened when he’d finally finished his device and is ready to find his first victim.

So how did he get to this point?

From a story analysis perspective, you can’t have interesting drama unless you have at least two people involved. And there can really only be three main participants in a scene. The fascinating thing about drama is, anybody can break these rules, it’s not like you can’t put four people in front of a camera, or even just one. In fact we see it all the time.

What happens when you break the rules of drama is, you get something less interesting to watch. Two or three participants in a scene, no more, otherwise what you have isn’t drama. These participants have roles, there’s a protagonist, someone with a goal they’re trying to accomplish; an antagonist, someone who gets in the protagonist’s way; and optionally a watcher, intended to serve as the representative of the audience. These provide the building materials for dramatic tension, and without dramatic tension, you don’t have a story.

So we don’t get to see the protagonist’s slide into evil. And because of the rules of drama, that you always need two people to create tension, you’ll never see a story that can actually depict such a slide, not in close enough detail to really allow analysis. It has to be revealed somehow, in backstory, montage, or in revelation, for it to really be relevant to a story. Otherwise you get what’s called a shaggy dog story, a bunch of events strung together without anything really tying them together.

A person becomes evil all on his own. They have to be trapped in the hell of their own minds for a long enough time such that they think nothing is wrong with inflicting that hell onto others. If you grow up getting hit all the time by your parents and siblings, what’s going to happen when you start going to school? You’ll think nothing of hitting your classmates. Hitting and getting hit are normal for you.

That’s how hell, and evil, work. Evil people become that way outside of the story, and that in fact serves the purposes of drama because it amps up the dramatic tension. The devil you don’t know is always scarier than the devil you do. And in order for the story to keep going, for you to stay interested, for the scenes to stay tight, as you get to know the devil, the devil gets worse and worse and worse. Until the climax where the tension is finally released.

And so at some point in the story, the protagonist is forced into using his device on the husband of his victim, and so he, and by extension now you, are now forced to stop merely watching someone torture someone else, but also to experience it yourself as this watcher. It’s masterful storytelling. The husband makes all the same mistakes the victim did, and it only makes the victim’s life even worse, all to the exquisite pleasure of the protagonist. who loves watching others suffer.

But it’s through this third character that the truth is revealed. The protagonist just wants a family like the one he’d just destroyed. He knows he’ll never get it, because, he’s, well, evil, he realizes he’ll never get the love and affection he so desperately desires, and so he’s just fine subjecting the object of his desires to his inner hell. His hell is a place he understands better than anyone else. He’s brought to tears when he realizes they had everything he’d ever wanted out of life. And with the tears came yet more fresh hell.

The story hasn’t ended yet, and it’s hard to extrapolate. The stakes just keep getting raised. There’s limitless room for exploration here.

But I hope you’ve learned a little something about how literature, drama, and character analysis tells us about human nature. Evil happens when we’re not looking, you have to dig deep into psychology to understand how it happens. It happens differently to everybody, and it’s a matter of perspective. One person’s monster is another’s scared little boy.