Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-16047389-20131219193422/@comment-16047389-20131219195926

Here's my opinion. A good villain is a careful blend of motive, resources, origins, and capabilities.

The motive is the reason why the villain is, well, a villain. Alduin wouldn't have been very evil if his motive was to bring candy and ice cream to the children of the world. I believe that a motive must reflect an aspect of the villain themselves. In Alduin's case, he wanted nothing short of the destruction or enslavement of all mortal races, and he had the hate and vanity to back up that motive.

The resources and capabilities of a villain can more less be the same thing. If Alduin wasn't an all powerful dragon and instead was just a slightly stronger Skeever, he wouldn't have been threatening so much as laughable. I found Ancano a particularly weak villain due to how easy it was to kill him. I actually had more difficulty with the Magic Anomoalies than this "boss" fight.

Origins are an imprtant part of any character development, villains are no exception. If the villain's origins are unclear, then they are just confusing. Mystery is certainly a good part of an origin, if done correctly, but there is a difference between wonder and confusion. When a villian's origins are just confusing, it distracts from the present, and makes them less threatening because the audience is no longer focusing on what they're doing so much as they are trying to figure out how any of it makes sense. A good villain can have a mysterious origin or a clear origin, without taking away from their threatening nature. But it must be done correctly.

I've always found that the Joker (mainly from the Dark Knight, but really any of them work) to be one of the most compelling villains I've ever seen. He's not fueled by greed or the pursuit of power. He's only concerned with causing as much destruction and chaos as possible. I find this the best motive for a villain, since it's not the kind you can reason with. Villains wanting money can be bought off, and those driven by the pursuit of power will have to spend almost as much time and effort simply maintaining their control as they did obtaining it in the first place. In the Joker's case, he wants something that no one else can give him. It's the kind of goal that he can never "fully" accomplish, and thus will never stop in trying to do so. This is what I think a good villain looks like.