Tags
characters, colorblind, connor rawleigh, novels, villains, writing
Related to, and continuing from, this post.
Sometimes, you can’t even show the villain’s true Intent of Evil, because it’s simply too dark and unpleasant to think about. You know what the villain really means, whether it’s genocide or betrayal or something else entirely, but it’s too horrific to simply come out and bluntly say it. What to do?
You show your characters’ reaction to the potential evil to show how Very Bad it really is. Even when it’s unclear who the villain is, you can still hint at their villainy by having some character have a strong negative reaction to them… (No, Connor, your bad feeling about a certain gentleman is totally unjustified. Honest!)
And sometimes, just showing the reactions and not the event that evoked them can be more impactful than any amount of gruesome detail. (People have very active imaginations.)
When all else fails, in a well-scripted and acted movie, watch the eyes. You can generally guess what a character is thinking. It’s sort of the same thing here. By watching the characters’ reactions, you can guess at the true horror of the villain’s misdeeds.
It’s like that scene where the bad guy shoots someone, but we only see him as he makes the shot, not the grisly results.
Thanks for reading, and God Bless!
The Upstairs Archives 
So true! The readers usually look to the characters for how to react to the latest problem, so reactions are very important.
I think the best example of this I’ve seen was in the old Charlton Heston Ben Hur movie. They didn’t have many special effects back then, so what they’d do instead of showing “The Creepy Thing” was to show everyone’s terrified reactions to it.
Case in point: the leprosy scene. Seriously, all they did for giving someone leprosy was some white makeup and a few warts. But when the prison guard came in and saw the “Lepers”, he was so terrified just looking at them I wondered if I should be watching this before bed. XD
Yes! Maybe they should go that way more often… It would make things easier. And acting was better then, too… *sigh* or at least it seems that way.
Yeah, the old movies all have awesome actors. 🙂 And besides, if they did that more in movies instead of turning themselves inside out to show us how gory they can really make it, there’d be a lot more family friendly movies out there.
YES.