What is evil, exactly?

I wish I could add more questions.

Do you like putting your characters through pain? Do you like emotional or psychological or physical pain? Does it vary depending on the character?

Do you think any of your characters are really evil? What's the difference between "evil" and just being a bully?

I need your wisdom, PA!

I don't LIKE putting my characters through pain, but I enjoy the dramatics of writing painful scenes. I find my heart breaking for my character when they get too hurt, but I persevere because I want to see them triumph over their situation. I think psychological pain is the one I come across most. (I am using this all in application to Jack, for she has been the most tragic of my characters.) It does vary on the character. Some characters I have less care for and don't mind letting them die off. Others, I love.

I think Naomi is evil. She has taken out all of her pains on the world and has amplified small reasons to be reasons strong enough to kill. She is selfish and envious and she lashes out on innocents.

See, I really enjoy putting my characters through pain.

For example, I made Liesl really ill because I wanted to describe the magical illness in a more detailed way. And my favourite post from a previous site was of my character being in a catch 22 where she had to choose between caning another student herself, or letting the teacher cane him for twice as many strokes.

I also often make mean characters, and I want them to reap what they sow.

But in terms of mental & emotional & awkwardness, I often feel like I'm subconsciously metagaming when I don't do it. I'll read over my post before I press send and realise I've written something a little out of character so the character can avoid one of those things. So then I go back and rewrite it.


I don't really think any of my characters are evil. Even when I try to make evil characters, they don't turn out that way. I had one application for a character who could have been really evil, but I never ended up playing with him cos the site died.

I realized it is hard for a writer to create a character that is evil in this sort of setting because, to make it real, you need some sort of sympathy for the character and that ends up making them into misled, misguided, etc. Pure evil is not something I am sure can exist. See my two 'bad' characters... One I would call unbalanced, and the other misguided. Not evil.

Evil isn't just deliberate genocide (which still exists anyway, I have met people who have literally run across entire countries to flee the war in the Sudan).

I think of it more as thoughtlessness and selfishness.

For example, there are plenty of politicians who are willing to do morally objectionable things to a vast number of people to gain an insignificant number of votes even when arguments in favour of those things have been falsified.

I also see my characters' decency as a holistic thing.

Like, the Ashcroft children were essentially an experiment, so they get emotional trauma points for that (although not many), but they were also had a decent upbringing so they know when they're doing something morally objectionable.

Whereas, Liesl Dolohov's father has been on the run almost her whole life and her family moves around a lot. She has a very shaky idea of what's morally sound in the first place, because until she came to Hogwarts, she had no appropriate role models.

So even though Liesl has a lot of potential to become "evil" I don't think of her as an evil character, whereas when any of my Ashcroft characters do something wrong I'm far more harsh on them.

When I'm writing the dark sides of my charries, I don't really empathise with that part of them, anyway, because I write characters with parts that I don't like. In fact, I love being obvious about stupid things about my characters. Like how Monroe is a hypocritical social justice crusader.