There are a few narrative crutches that are in common use these days, but the one that frustrates me the most is what I call the Conveniently Implacable Bad Guy, or CIBG for short. A CIBG can take many forms, but the one thing they have in common is that their desire to do the heroes harm is rooted in something alien, unknowable, and completely antithetical to whatever it is they’re menacing. They can’t be reasoned with, they don’t have political opinions, there’s no chance of empathizing with them or coming to an understanding. In fact, it almost seems as if they were created to make violence clean. Force is the only solution with them because the author has decreed that it should be so. A CIBG lets us indulge our bloodlust without any nagging ethical questions getting in the way. It’s black and white because the possibility for gray has been surgically removed from the narrative.
In other words, why fight Nazis when you can fight zombie Nazis? Nazis were real people, with all the complicated, messy, uncomfortable details that that implies. Yes, the Third Reich was evil and it’s good that we destroyed it, but a lot of the people fighting for were uncomfortably sympathetic in a certain light. Not all of them, no, I’m not saying that. It was a monstrous regime that promoted monstrous people, but not everyone fighting for the Germans was as vile as a camp guard. (This, by the way, is why Saving Private Ryan is such a great movie: it doesn’t hesitate to make the Germans just as scared and human as the Americans, and thus casts the slaughter as tragic rather than triumphant.)
But zombie Nazis? Now you’re talking! Now we’ve got something we don’t have to worry about seeing ourselves in. We can relax and enjoy symbolically murdering it in our fiction, over and over again.
So on the one hand it seems, saturating your fiction with CIBGs seems if not morally suspect, than at least a bit gamey. It corrodes the work, urges it towards becoming a context free celebration of violence for its own sake. On the other hand, the much, much worse hand, it’s fucking boring as sin. Bad guys who are tautologically bad, who can never be anything but bad, who have no leverage points to bend, no humanity to be discomforted by…they’re just dull. They’re simple. Flat. They bring nothing to the story but the promise of fight scenes, and that’s a pretty thin reason for existing.
A CIBG has no chance for internal development, a shift in motive, a change of allegiance. Entire worlds of narrative possibility are wiped out of existence, and the story is almost always poorer as a result. Giant bugs, zombies, the Reapers and other similar alien invaders…anything which gives the promise of a problem that can only be solved by total annihilation of the threat, these are the CIBGs that plague us, and I’m sick to fucking death of them.
This is why I was so disappointed to learn about the nature of the ultimate Big Bads in the Harry Dresden series. Until that point, Butcher had done a pretty good job of making Harry’s antagonists have motives beyond omnicidal mania. Even the Denarians, who are basically Satan’s fan club, mostly had reasons for wanting to join up with the forces of darkness. But in the most recent book we get a sneak peak at who the real bad guys of the series are going to be, and they’re evil invading spirits from outside reality who just want to make everything dead. Which is so boring and disappointing I almost set the book aside. I don’t look forward to the final trilogy.
The Reapers of Mass Effect are another sad example of a good series undermined by a boring CIBG antagonist. There’s so many interesting points of conflict in the ME universe, why oh why did we need to spend three games messing around with evil monsters invading from beyond the galaxy? We could have had three entire games worth of Lair of the Shadow Broker, people! Just think of all the missed opportunities, and weep.
I’m not going to go much further into listing examples. I’m sure you can think of plenty on your own, because this trope is littered all over popular culture these days.
Now, are all stories that feature a CIBG uninteresting? No. Equoid, by Charlie Stross uses a CIBG to eerie effect by making the utter impossibility of empathy with his CIBG a one-way problem. That is, we can’t hope to understand or negotiate with the monster, but the monster understands us just fine. Starship Troopers (the movie version, at least) uses the CIBG to lampoon the way a lot of war movies treat real life humans on the battlefield. The Borg of Star Trek started out as a CIBG, but you’ll notice that all the best stories about them are always about an individuals relationship with the collective, either Picard’s survivor trauma or Seven’s difficulties adapting to individuality.
If you include a CIBG in your story, you’ve got to be including it for a reason. There’s got to be a narrative or thematic point that you’re trying to make, usually about the protagonists. It’s got to be thoughtful, it’s got to be deliberate, there needs to be a reason aside from just a handy bad guy for the heroes to kill heroically.
Or else your story is going to be really, really boring.