#they talk with mock politeness and in the case of davix

[not-poignant]

Sometimes, I feel really bad that I am not head over heels in love with decent characters like The Raven Prince or Gwyn (I love them, don't get me wrong, I do!) for instead I love to death Davix and Olphix, morally corrupt and kind of responsible for A LOT of things (and one of them is kind of DEAD). How did they come to you Pia? How did you find these awesome villains? Love your work and I thank you for all of it!

It’s awesome that you enjoy villains like Davix and Olphix, just a shame that you’re pretty much always doomed to witnessing like tragic endings with them all. But maybe that’s part of the experience of loving them so much!

It’s also kind of funny to hear you say that like, the Raven Prince is a ‘decent’ character because you’re the first person to describe him that way, and a lot of people don’t think he’s necessarily 100% evil, but a lot of people don’t think he’s *good.* So there’s a pretty big disparity there between like, how you (and probably some other people) feel about him vs. like, the quality of comments I get which are just like ‘I want to see RP smacked in the face he’s the worst!’

How did they come to you Pia? How did you find these awesome villains? 

It’s probably a combination of things. Like I don’t really remember how I ‘think up’ characters. Probably because I’m thinking up characters all the time (eesh) and partly because the genesis of a character is not very interesting to me.

Villains are usually created out of a few things though. Which is like:

1. Firstly I often know or have known people like a lot of the worst villains I’m writing, with the exception of the Nightingale, so some of it is pulling from real life example. I have known some genuinely awful people, and one of the ways I enjoy like...processing that is actually turning it into characters I find compelling and interesting, and basically ‘turning it into someone else.’ But yeah no, I have up close and personal lifelong experience with sociopaths and so I am driven to write them. It’s partly why I write so often about interpersonal trauma, or trauma caused by the malice of another, vs. trauma caused by natural disaster or ill health etc.

2. Villains are usually foils to one or more of the MCs, so they’re usually created after the main characters have been created, and it’s usually in response to like, things the MCs need to deal with in their lives. Davix and Olphix are more complicated than this, as they started out as foils towards characters like the Raven Prince, but since Gwyn has inherited a lot of his issues, and Mosk needs to deal with them directly, they’ve become like multi-character foiils.

3. I usually want a villain to be attractive on some level. Often physically. But also, someone who could easily seem sympathetic or believable or even reasonable if they wanted to be (this even applies to characters like Gabriel in Eversion). Someone who maybe actually is sometimes sympathetic (Davix with Olphix) or similar, and - with the exception of the Nightingale - is not just outright a black hole of a personality. This doesn’t hold true for villains like Lludd and Perkins, to me, those are just slightly exaggerated realistic representations of domestically violent men who get away with toxic bullshit because they’re in positions of power.

But yeah I don’t remember how they came to me. I just wanted two guys who worked together as brothers (like I remember deciding that very early) who are so old that no one remembers where they came from, who are essentially tabletop gaming the rest of the world, but only with each other, and pretty naughtily at that.