The villain must be, or have been, a hero to somebody. Osama bin Laden, that magnificent bastard, has been a hero to everyone in turn. He kicked the villainous Soviet from Afghanistan, with a little help from Uncle Sam. And as for the Arab world—there are quite possibly more babies named Osama right now than are named Jesus. Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein didn’t stay in power for so many years by being a friend to no-one. Hussein in particular was a friend for many years of the United States.
It is corollary to this that one need not fall from grace to be a villain, but it helps.
The villain must stand for something. There is, fortunately, little restriction on what, exactly, the villain stands for. One cannot be a villain without being a hero to someone at some time, and what is a hero but a person who stands for a principal, an emotion, an outlook on life? What else, then, can a villain be?
The villain must live a story worth telling. All tales grow until they hardly resemble the truth, but a tale cannot grow if it is never told. If no one talks about you, then you are not a villain. If they talk about you after you die, then you were consummate.
The villain must be larger than life. She must, metaphorically speaking, punch above her weight. The average person does nothing of note, and dies unnoted. If a villain does not rise above this, then how can her story be worth telling? A villain does nothing by half measures.
The villain must have victims. Otherwise, why a villain? The villain must seek vengeance, or retribution, or conquest, or something that someone doesn’t want him to have, and crush any who stand in his way.
The villain is not an altruist. One cannot be a villain without putting oneself first.
The villain cannot be humble. The very idea is preposterous. To be a villain is to realize that you’re better than everyone else, or at least better than these sorry bastards.
The villain can bend, but cannot break. To break is to fall from the ranks of villainy, to the grey obscurity of the rank and file.
