Hollywood movies are especially big on dispensing justice to ‘the bad guys’. Characters who perform irredeemable acts (in the eyes of movie producers and financiers) must get their appropriate come-uppance. This could come in the form of prison time or a gruesome death but whatever happens, evil characters rarely escape their fate.

This sort of thing is particularly prevalent in action movies. An older one with Brandon Lee ‘Rapid Fire’ has some overt bad guys that get killed in bad ways but I’d like to look at a secondary villain. An FBI agent who takes payoffs from one of the criminals sets up the main character to be killed. During the scene where the hero escapes his imminent death, an innocent police officer is shot.

If betrayal wasn’t enough, he’s added indirect murder to his list of film crimes. Years of wicked activity haven’t caught up to him before this movie but because we’re on screen with a protagonist now, he’s going to get his. A few scenes later he’s gunned down by his former boss, despite his desperate attempt at redemption.

An important element of storytelling that many people, even professionals, forget is that characters are the vehicles of the story. The events that make up the plot of a novel or video game could be stellar and that wouldn’t matter if the person we’re experiencing those elements with is unsympathetic, boring or painfully unbelievable.

When a story endeavors to be straight entertainment, there are a lot of small things that need to be done in order to keep a reader’s attention. The character must be someone we can relate to. We might not be brain surgeon rock stars but Buckaroo Banzai still has a dad that he cares about and friends that rely on him. Those relationships help us to see that despite him being a cheesy super hero, we still have something in common.

Relating to a character can be as simple as showing that he has some frailty or as deep as expressing some major event in his past that conveys real world problems. Maybe the character experienced mental abuse in school, survived his parent’s divorce or broke his leg in ‘the big game’. Any event that we can say ‘yeah, that happened to me once’ or ‘I knew someone that happened to’ will bring the character home. Suddenly, we’ll be able to use our own experience to appreciate his trials better.