In novels, it is often done, and too good effect, to portray the bad guys as unabashedly evil. Sometimes you can humanize them a bit, like make them nice to dogs before they kick in the door and start machinegunning down innocents, but often that gesture is not even made.
When Anakin goes to the Dark Side, he heads off to the nursery for Jedi, and not just kids, but kids who LIKE him, he then slaughters. Its hard to muster much sympathy after that point for him as he gets burnt and maimed and then loses the love of his life.
In a lot of action adventure films, the baddies do something so horrible and vicious to the hero, that the audience then cheers as he proceeds to mow through the baddies on the way to the ultimate scumbag.
This is an important and useful technique. When your pc is hunting vampires, make sure to drop in an occasional pretty girl on the way to the market or convenience store aka innocently doing her duty in a pleasant way, but then add with her throat ripped out. It helps to make the reader hate your villains. The reader or player is then more emotionally involved.
One thing to keep in mind when creating evil is to be relevant. Everyone likes Nazis as villains, and that includes me, as I've just used them as such. But the Nazis are pretty much a dead threat. The membership rolls of the Aryan Nations probably have more FBI infiltrators than actual racist scumbags.
This was one of the problems with the movie Avatar....oh no, the Villain is...a megacorporation using the USMC (sorta) to plunder peaceful natives....oh the surprise, the shock, I never, ever could have seen that coming....if this was 1951 (well, it probably wouldn't have been a total surprise even then, but at least it would not have been so threadbare a couch in the mental furniture of writers that you can see the floor through the couch.)
So for our Villains we want 1)Those we can hate. 2)Relevant to the Modern World and 3)Not so threadbare from overuse as to be predictable.
I'm writing this in part because I need to come up with the villains for Torchthrower so that my TP cryo marines can have someone to maim and slaughter with their plasma cannons.
Now there are a lot of evils in the modern world. We're quite burdened with them, and a lot don't make it to the stories.
1. Machete chopping off arms.
2. Muslims in Uganda?? going after the Christians and the Animists with extreme prejudgice.
3. Hussein's Iraq had 20% of a religious minority oppressing th eother 80% in large and small ways. And oh, yeah, they were Nazi descendants in politics.
4. There was supposed to be at least one African nation that is Nazi. But people only see Naziism when its blonde haired and blue eyed. But really, there's nothing that says you can't be Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer if you're black or Asian or Hispanic (La Raza is headed that way with its all for the race, nothing for outside the race).
5. One Child Policy in China sounds like something out of a 70's era SF short story. And its going to have the 'happy' effect of unleashing a bunch of twenty year old guys (and by a bunch I mean a BUNCH) who can't get a date with a girl because their neigbours aborted the daughter to have a son. And you can just imagine how cranky fifty thousand guys are going to be when they find theirs only five hundred girls for them.
6. Embyronic Stem Cell research for longetivity....or 'Dark Lord, we sacrifice this infant to your dark majesty in exchange for another decade of life'.
7. MLPHD Syndrome....People like Ward Churchill who opined that the jumpers on 9/11 were 'little Eichmanns' (a Nazi scumbag) and one guesses deserved their fate would make excellent villainous lieutenants....they're not smart enough or tuned in enough to be the actual villainous leader.
8. People like 'Freezer Cash' Johnson??, the representative who stowed 80k in his freezer make excellent examples of hapless minions.
9. The SEIU goons who beat up that black guy selling the 'Don't Tread on Me' flags are also helpful as goons.
10. The reward receiving scientist who longed for a virus to wipe out 90% of the human race would make an excellent master villain.
11. We've also seen a fair number of scientists in recent years claim great things which turned out to be not so much...Cold Fusion.
Now these offer some frames for mental furniture, and then we turn to metaphor to put the upholstery on.
And remember, Freezer Cash Guy might be just a stupid greedy man, but in stories, its fine to add characteristics and make him a true spawn of evil.
So, lets take La Raza and illegal immigrants. Instead of reality which is 1. A lot of lawbreakers, some wannabe Nazis, and some criminal scumbags, and drug cartels we go to 2.. At 2. we make them really nasty. The ordinary folk are more like locusts, and they don't just disrespect one law or two, but almost all of them. The Wannabees are Actual. They keep the ordinary folk in line with the Movement by Terror. The criminal scumbags are worse....all the serial killers, pschyo war vets, and everyone else inclined to disturb the peace is given a choice Exile or a Bullet. The Drug Cartels are plenty evil enough already with their tendency to kidnap judges and kill reporters, but we can make them more effective. Make them Warlords.
Now, we got to put on another layer of Metaphor.
They're in space, on a planet, and we call them....oh, Tarkans. Why Tarkans...it sounds cool, but not overly nice, and its easy to remember, and its got sharp edges in the sound and the letters as written.
The Tarkan Dynasty is massively corrupt. Typically, the passing of the king is followed by a sort of bidding in the Council where various contenders offer favors and money and stuff (that they may not own but intend to steal once they get the crown) to the council members in exchange for their vote.
If the Tarkanite Kingdom did not have access to large amounts of hydrothermal energy which it can tap, it would be a very poor country and probably better run. But as it is, the Tarkanite leadership can buy weapons and sometimes mercs from overseas to help them suppress anyone of their people who gets too upset.
Most of the people live in sheds on the sides of semi-active volcanoes where they are able to have easy access to the geothermal power taps. Now, other nations on this planet of Wanderjahr are able to do this as well, and they provide their people with twenty mile long railroad commutes to the power tap sites. That way, only the workers on one shift, and not all the workers, their wives, and their kids, bare the danger of a volcano erupting. And in the most advanced countries, the workers on a shift have just enough volcano shelters to help them ride out an eruption.
The Tarkanites on the other hand, just slap up sheds and shovel in more people after an eruption. The usual technique is to cordon off a neighborhood in an overpopulated city, grab everyone, and bus them to the new site where they will now live. Then one of the Tarkanite princes buys the old neighborhood at a tenth of its value, and razes the cheap houses, and builds himself a new sports stadium.
Now, sometimes energy prices dip, and then the Dynasty is in trouble. It has to do some minimum of food supply to the poor to hold off starvation. And everyone in gov't takes their cut. And when th epie shrinks, people get restive.
So the Tarkanite Dynasty grabs some, busses them up near the border and says 'Bullet or Border, your choice.' They have a machine gun on a jeep ready for anyone who tries to escape back home.
To make it properly SF, change the machine gun to a pulse laser mounted on a hovercraft. And change the drug warlords to illegal pleasure wire tappers who can insert a wire into your brain and tap the pleasure center with a little jolt of electricity.
At which point, the TP marines arrive,a nd decide to try to fix things.
Its one way of doing things.
We'd need to have some acts of horror by the La Raza counterpart so that the reader can justifiably hate them.
