Finding Ourselves in Our Villains

When I became a teenager, I became very interested in darkness. Cruel, evil, cold, void of color and feeling darkness. It’s lonely and hard, while also sharply continuous. I never felt purely alone within my darkness, rather, it became part of me that still exists today. We all have something similar, I think.

I have wondered that perhaps mine was born from an obsession with villains and antiheroes (Teen Titans Raven was a BIG one), or raging hormones clashing with my preferred state up to that moment. Either way, within that darkness where I loved to sink, my (and thus Kari’s) greatest villain was born.

Raven Sikiko started as a simple nightmare, but not one of mine. In our pre-teens, my close friend Kit once dreamed that a black-eyed Kari (me) killed her. We pondered this (mostly where the black eyes came from, and not why I was killing her, because girls). At some point, I don’t remember when or how, we decided. This is a person. A female. She is evil beyond repair. She possesses Kari (when or how doesn’t matter yet) and threatens the ones she loves.

She is Raven. Because originality is hard when you’re 11-12 years old and have only watched anime.

In High School, Raven entered my official story line in what would later become “book 2.” Kit had it all: she would call a massive wolf made of shadow, and it would destroy things (namely her enemy, who was not Kari, as Kari was just a bystander). So simple, and yet, I found solace in Raven that I could never find in Kari. As I wrote her, I lost myself in the freedom to do whatever it took to complete a goal. Such power is unimaginable. The learning psychologist in me would say that was adolescent-me trying to find the power and control that I had lost in my life. My home life, my friends, my boyfriends…they had ruined me, and in a sick and twisted way, Raven helped me regain that control.

I wrote Raven’s origin, wherein she tortures small boys and demons, often merely for the sake of cruelty. This was my love letter to my inner sadist, the one who follows morals but can’t contain the thoughts that come from darkness. Raven had no limits; why should she? And so neither would I.

My friend and editor Olivia Castetter (https://thepensivebookworm.home.blog/) recently told me she thinks Raven is attempting to hide or destroy her inner child. Like most villains, I gave Raven a youth just hard enough to make her hard, too. She struggles with these hardships in unhealthy ways (i.e., torture) and lashes out with violence. Maybe she is my abandoned inner child, moping for the past she could have had and the future she must now carve out of rough and frigid stone.

Over the years, Raven has become my primary villain (even though, series-wise, she is not the “final boss”). I love her more than Kari most times. She is my personal darkness, the pieces in me that whisper yes, you can do those things for the sake of yourself and yours alone. As messed up as a person as she can be, when I returned to writing, Raven was the one to help me scrap the parts of me I no longer needed. Kari kept me willful, but Raven made me strong. This is why I love villains in a fantasy setting, I’m starting to realize. They are the hard in life, and thus they dole it out to the protagonist, knowing that with or without them, the journey will be hard anyway. Our precious villains are simply making use of their inner darkness.