Bad Guy by Default
Shorthand for evil.
Writing is quite the magic trick when you think about it. You’re trying to create a world for the reader to experience without the barest fraction of the time and resources required to do so. It’s literally impossible to do it, so you cut corners. You use smoke and mirrors and write something which is detailed enough that the reader fills in the blanks in their head to their own satisfaction. This is why suspension of disbelief is a crucial factor for writers to consider. It’s also why any tactic which cuts down the work a writer has to do is very welcome.
Which is probably where the bad guy organization/race/species came from. So many stories have a group who are just automatically the bad guys. And for an author who wants to write a thrilling fight scene for their plucky heroes, this can be such a godsend. Because you probably don’t want to characterize your heroes as violent whack jobs who just attack people without knowing if they’re working for the main villain or not. Nor do you want to have to bog each action sequence down with them having to make sure each opponent is definitely a bad guy first. But having a ‘bad guy by default’ group neatly solves both problems, while opening up so many new possibilities. Need your heroes to strike first, or ambush their enemies? There’s no awkward moral complications if they’re faceless stormtroopers. Want to have a fun scene of two of your protagonists having a competition to see who can kill the most enemies in a battle? It’s not in bad taste if they’re orcs or robots.
There are plenty of famous examples of this trope, such as the orcs and goblins from Tolkien’s Middle Earth are an obvious example. There is a great range of moral character amongst Elves, Men, Dwarves and Hobbits, but orcs are violent and evil without exception. Star Wars has its infamous stormtroopers who are clad head to toe in identical, faceless armour. This anonymity and absolute obedience to their villainous masters leaves no audience member feeling bad about them being cut down in waves. For the alien version, the original series of Star Trek had the Klingons, while the Next Generation had the Romulans.
Now, it’s worth noting that, with the exception of the organization variant, this trope sees most use in fantasy and sci-fi stories, whose settings can provide different races and/or alien species for the position. Meanwhile, if your story set in modern day London has your protagonist killing, say, the Spanish on sight that’s not a convenient literary shortcut, that’s just the character being a violent racist. And this comparison has not gone unnoticed as audiences have grown generally savvier and more educated as time has gone on. Which has had an impact on stories being produced, even long-running ones. The Next Generation saw the Federation at peace with the Klingons, with one of them even being part of the main cast. And even the Romulans have gradually been shown to not be intrinsically evil as the franchise has carried on.
This push to question this trope is actually older than you might think. One of the examples I listed above, the orcs from Lord of the Rings, gave Tolkien trouble for this very reason. Because the cosmology of Middle-Earth (influenced by Tolkien’s own religious beliefs) made it clear that intrinsic evil did not exist in the setting. So Tolkien’s explanation for the orcs was that, when the elves first awakened, OG Dark Lord Morgoth abducted some of them and performed hideous experiments on them, mutating and corrupting them into the orcs. This apparently satisfied Tolkien, but it’s not a satisfying explanation from my point of view. It’s a quick justification for using a classic trope that doesn’t impact the actual story itself. We never see any orcs questioning their cruel and evil ways.
But this isn’t to say that this trope is intrinsically bad, or that it should be discontinued. It does serve a valid purpose in stories, and, as I’ve previously discussed, not every villain benefits from having moral nuance. You just need to satisfactorily answer the question of why this group can’t be treated with kindness and diplomacy. And there are a number of ways to do that. The first way is to make them literal monsters. The Heartless from Kingdom Hearts are a great example of this approach. These monsters are created from hearts fallen to darkness and operate on pure instinct. They have no higher thoughts, they simply follow instincts which compel them to destroy people and entire worlds. The evil organization template, meanwhile, is the easiest way to justify instant hostility with no moral complications. Because this setup implies choice on the part of the henchmen your protagonists are taking out. As long the organization doesn’t forcibly recruit members (and isn’t something someone on hard times could join out of desperation), then the henchmen are willingly choosing evil.
But possibly the most interesting approach to justifying this trope is what I call ‘the incomprehensible opponent’. This is where the thought processes and values of the enemy group are inscrutable and/or fully incompatible with your protagonists’ on a fundamental level. My absolute favourite version of this is depicted in the manga and anime, ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’. In this fantasy setting, our protagonist, the elven mage Frieren, is a member of the hero Himmel’s adventuring party. The story opens with them being celebrated for having slain the Demon King, ending his thousand-year reign of terror, which reduced the non-demon populations of the continent to one third of their size (and rendered the elves functionally extinct). The main story picks up ninety years later, when Himmel dying of old age has prompted the immensely long-lived Frieren to form another adventuring party to go on a journey in search of answers to her growing existential crisis.
The demons of Frieren seemingly aren’t inscrutable monsters at first glance. Aside from their horns, they look human and they’re intelligent beings who can talk. Not long into the new journey, Frieren’s new travelling companions (born long after the current era of relative peace started) ask why it has to come down to violence with the remnants of the Demon King’s forces. Surely trying to come to an understanding and brokering peace is better for both sides?
Frieren tells them about a time when Himmel’s party cornered a young demon girl in a village after she had murdered a village girl. The demon cried for her mother, prompting pity from the mayor, who decided to take her in as his daughter’s adoptive sister to help her learn a better way to live. Himmel himself, wanting to give peace a chance, overrode Frieren’s objections. After a short period where she seemed to be fitting in, she murdered the mayor and tried to give his daughter to the parents of the girl she killed, as a replacement.
This story encapsulates what makes the demons in this setting so fascinating, and why instant hostility towards them is entirely justified. Demons evolved from monsters who lured humans to their deaths by mimicking human speech. Deceiving and killing humans is such a fundamental part of their thought processes, they can’t get their heads around not doing that. They are incapable of feeling empathy, or guilt, because there’s no evolutionary advantage to feeling that towards your prey. When the demon girl cried out for her mother, she didn’t know what the word meant (demons don’t raise their young), she just knew it was ‘a magical word’ which stopped humans from killing her. They are thinking, intelligent creatures, so some demons try to learn these emotions because they want to co-exist with humans. But, in a twist, these are the most dangerous demons of them all. Because killing humans is so fundamental to them, they kill even more humans than they normally would to try and feel guilt or empathy. They just can’t see the contradiction in killing humans and wanting to make peace with them.
In conclusion, the ‘default bad guys’ can be a very rich and convenient story trope, you just need to make it work by justifying it.