I liked Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, but was a bit disappointed by the end. Yes, the good guys won and the bad guys lost, but the main good guy didn't kill the main bad guy. For some reason I really wanted to see him do that. Instead, just as the bad guy was escaping, another character zoomed in out of nowhere and . . . kaboom!

Have you ever seen that happen? Did it bother you?

Or what about when some of the bad guys are punished, but some of them get away? I'm thinking of the original Star Wars, where the Death Star blows up but Darth Vader escapes.

In my story, I've created four or five nasty villains. They all do disgusting things, in addition to opposing the hero every chance they get, and reader should hate them all. But my main story arc is a mystery, and in the end only one of them will be guilty of the main crime. The reader should assume that the other villains are still out there making trouble for future stories.

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another character zoomed in out of nowhere and . . . kaboom!

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Whether villains getting away is "satisfying," well, life certainly is not satisfying in that respect. (Of course, to the villain, he would find that extremely satisfying! )

Once the hero is no longer driven to action, the story has a resolution of sorts. Your hero can still be active, for instance if he makes a vow to hunt down all the remaining villians, but because the internal crisis that motivated the story has been resolved (i.e. he now knows that he is the one that must hunt down the remaining villians).

Just don't do what Sagan did in his book Contact. In that book, three major tensions are raised to provide the dramatic tension for the story. Is there a God? Will she fall for this guy? Will anyone believe that they've really been contacted by aliens? At the end of the book none of these tensions are resolved! All the tensions that are resolved in the book are resolved well before the climax and termination of story (there is no "resolution" to the story as a whole).

Kolona, in the story I mentioned the "out of nowhere" character had a brief scene earlier in the book. The ability to zoom into any scene at any time and do tremendous damage was mentioned, but not demonstrated at that time. The "goodness" of this character was never established, even in the final scene. This character didn't even know the bad guy. His function in the story was to zoom into the climactic scene from hundreds of miles away, kill the bad guy, and disappear. It turned out that all the hero's efforts to beat the bad guy weren't important, since this character was going to come in and kill him anyway.

Survivor, here's my problem: the protagoinist's main motivation is to solve a mystery. As he does this he confronts several suspects, and all of the suspects do nasty things to him. In order to have a satisfying plot twist, the real "killer" is not the most evil of the suspects.

Here's an example:

Imagine a Batman trying to solve a murder. During his investigation, The Joker tries to unmask Bruce Wayne, the Riddler tries to steal the Batmobile, and Catwoman tries to seduce Batman to embark on a life of crime. All of these tension-building distractions cause Batman (and the reader) to suspect that one of the supervillains must be the killer. But in the end it turns out that the killer was Bobby, the victim's jealous and insecure boyfriend. To make matters worse, Bobby is a friend of Alfred the Butler, and Bobby was also the one who saved Bruce Wayne's secret identity in an earlier scene. Yet Bobby goes to prison while Joker, Riddler, and Catwoman remain free.

After the murder is solved, Batman (and the reader) will still be pissed off at Joker, Riddler, and Catwoman. But the supervillains are also pissed off at him, setting up great potential for a series.

Did you ever see the Woody Allen movie "Crimes and Misdemeanors"?

[**SPOILER**] Martin Landau's character has his wife murdered, but he is never caught, and his life actually improves. Meanwhile, Woody Allen tries to do the right thing and is punished because of it.
[**END SPOILER**]

As far as the original question; personally, that’s my new beef with mainstream film. The bad guy ALWAYS dies. It’s rather annoying and altogether banal at this point. Shit, let the bad guy win. Screw satisfying—at least it would be a change.

Doc, the way you describe what happened, it was indeed a stupid ending. John has a point that it would have been better to let the bad guy get away as a result of the protagonists unwillingness to get his hands dirty. If the villian really had to die, you could always use the trick where the hero has him dead to rights and the villian attempts something truly desperate and risky in his bid to escape, thus killing himself.

The bad guys were really bad. They were murderers and thieves, torturing innocent people and sexually molesting little girls. The good guy was a genius whose main skill was in uncovering their plot for world domination. The fact that he was trained and equipped to kill was secondary. He defeated enough minions that we knew he was capable of getting the bad guy. But the writer went out of his way to make sure the hero never got the chance to kill the villain.

I honestly think that Stephenson's reason for this ending was a moral one: he didn't want his hero to be a killer, but he also didn't want his hero to be a coward. So Stephenson put the villain just far enough ahead of the hero that the hero never had to make the moral choice of whether or not to kill.

The "out of nowhere" character was not particularly good or evil. He came out of nowhere and killed the villain because the villain had done something evil earlier in the book. So the bad guy did die because he had been bad.

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My problem is bringing some sort of characterization to the bad guy. Especially in a fantasy setting told solely through the protagonist’s POV. If your heroes are on a quest and the bad guy is off doing bad things far away, every so often setting up roadblocks for the good guys—you really never get to KNOW the antagonist. Will his death have any meaning?????

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How do you characterize any character not the POV character? You may not get to know the antagonist internally, but you’re going to have all the other character’s reacting to him, and the POV’s impressions and observations, etc of the antagonist creating a persona for the reader.

As for whether he death has any meaning, that hinges strongly on what the antagonist has come to mean to the protagonist. If it means something to the protagonist, and the reader cares about the protagonist (which we hope he does by the end of the story), then the defeat of the antagonist is going to have meaning.

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I think he knew the reader wanted the bad guy to die, but he didn't want the hero to get his hands that dirty. The hero did defeat quite a few minions, including the villain's main "muscle," but he never killed anyone.

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I haven’t read the book, but doesn’t that sound like the writer was being a bit too easy on his character? I see this whole other aspect developing where the hero has to face the consequences of winning (which maybe he did anyway, but this would raise the stakes a notch, I would think). Skirting around him getting his hands dirty seems like that might be cheating the story out of a layer of depth, especially if it was replaced with a bit of a “out-of-the-blue” ending.

The audience experiences the story through the POV character for a reason. It is actually easier to get the audience to care about whether or not a villian dies by giving them the POV of a person with whom they can comfortably identify, then giving that character reasons to care one way or the other about the villian. If you try to put them in the villian's POV, they will probably not relate easily to that point of view (and if they do they won't regard the character as a villian) and you'll lose them.

Wanting to keep your hero's hands "clean" in a story that demands the death of the villian is a cheap trick. Even most Disney movies allow the hero to kill the true villian, if necessary. It would be more interesting if the villian was set up to be redeemable (at least in the hero's eyes), and the hero is trying to avoid the villian's death, but then the villian dies (horribly) as an indirect result of the hero's actions. Or on the other hand, if the hero is all set to kill the villian, but then that is snatched by someone else. In one case, the hero doesn't intend to kill, but does so, and in the other, the hero intends to kill but does not.

Snow Crash takes place in two worlds: the real world and a Virtual Reality world generated by computers on the Internet. One of the main dangers of the book is that the bad guy has created a Super Weapon that can damage your brain if you are exposed to it in the Virtual Reality world. Thus, there is real danger in the VR world.

There are also virtual weapons in the VR world. They work just like weapons in the real world, except that when you "die" you are simply ejected from the VR world. The book's hero is the world's greatest swordsman, capable of killing in either world.

During the course of the book, the hero wins many sword fights in both worlds. In the real world he always fights in self defense and never actually kills anyone. In the VR world he "kills" many times.

The hero did kill the villain, and he did it many times. Usually the hero was in mortal danger while the villain was in virtual danger, so these well-written scenes were packed with tension. At the climax of the book, the hero "killed" the villain, dispatched his minions, and destroyed the Super Weapon in the virtual world. In the real world the villain was defeated, but was making his escape. Then the other character swooped in out of nowhere and killed the villain in the real world.

To better grasp the situation, imagine this alternate ending to Star Wars: A New Hope . . .

Luke Skywalker has blown up the Death Star. The Rebellion is saved, although Darth Vader survived in his TIE fighter. But just before the ending credits roll, a chunk of the planet Alderaan (destroyed by the Evil Empire earlier in the movie) suddenly smashes Darth Vader's TIE fighter to oblivion.

What would you think of that ending?

And, true, why kill the antagonist?

Forget what "the reader wants" - give them what the story demands. Your exploration of characters and their relationship should determine that.

Vader isn't the major tension. None of the characters hate Vader personally. They just want to save the Rebel base from being blown up along with any planets sympathetic to the rebellion. The destruction of the Death Star is the major tension, Vader is just one of the bad guys. His being cast into outer space in his little one man fighter seem symbolically appropriate (of course, at the time we all thought that was a short range fighter like the TIE fighters). But even if he weren't cast into outer space, he isn't the one that made the Death Star. He doesn't have the power to go around blowing up planets on his own hook. So his escape doesn't negate or diminish the victory over the Death Star.

As I understand your description of Snow Crash, the villian created the superweapon, and could create another one unless he is actively prevented from so doing. So I would think that catching him is necessary and is known by the protagonist to be necessary. Therefore, it is necessary that the hero have a plan for either killing or imprisoning the villain so that he can't resume his evil plot. It is also necessary that the villian be captured or killed for the story to be resolved.

If imprisonment is not a viable option (say in the future access to the virtual world is a basic right, even for convicted murderers...or better yet, they can't convict this guy because legally it was a VRinterface malfunction that killed the users, and this guy has a legal codicil that gets him off the hook), then killing or incapacitating him is the only option. In that case, the hero must have a plan for that. And the villian must be killed or incapacitated for the story to resolve.

I did leave out an important tidbit about how the hero destroyed the Super Weapon. He essentially found a cure. The Super Weapon was malevolent software, sort of like a virus, and the hero wrote his own software the could detect and destroy the Super Weapon any time, any place. The book could have implied the possibility the the villain could make a stronger Super Weapon, but it didn't. Destruction of the Super Weapon seemed final.

In Snow Crash, the escape of the villain would not have negated or diminished the hero's victory. Imprisonment was not an option, since the story takes place in a sort of libertarian utopia in which all governments are very weak.

Frankly, I remember the villain's main muscle more vividly than the villain himself. The main muscle was VR "killed" by the hero a couple of times. In the end the muscle was physically killed by a mafia boss instead of the hero. That was slightly disappointing, although I forgive it because the method of his defeat involved an ingenious plot twist. I remember that I wanted the main villain to die, both because he had done such awful things and because he was a threat to the world. I also remember that I wanted the hero to kill him. I'm not sure why I wanted that. It's probably because the hero had demonstrated the skills required to kill that I wanted him to actually do it.

Point one, if a software based entity can cause a hardware malfunction that kills the user, then any software patch that would disable that software entity could be bypassed by a new software based entity, because the defect it exploits is in the actual hardware not solely the software.

Therefore, it is implicit that a new weapon could be created. The fact that this is regarded as improbable only demonstrates that the villian is likely the only one that has both the ability and motive to make a new weapon. The ineffectual state of government authority in this situation would render imprisonment a nonviable option, which means that the villian's death is indeed necessary.

Therefore, your feeling that the Deus Ex ending was solely to keep the hero's hands "clean" is probably correct. More importantly, even if Stephenson had a more compelling literary reason for the ending, he failed to make it apparent to you. Thus your sense that there was no good reason for the ending is borne out by your actual experience reading the book.

Avoid this in your work. The protagonist has to come to grips with the resolution of the story. If you ever kill a character that must be killed while keeping the protagonists hands "clean", then you are cheating the protagonist of the chance to come to grips with the story's resolution. It is okay if another character actually kills the villain, but in that case the protagonist has to approve or else grapple with the fact that he has benefited from this act, whether or not he approves of it. Otherwise the protagonist suffers from moral myopia, if he is not an outright moral imbecile.

One key to the book was that the human brain has an underlying "machine language" which was the original human language before the Tower of Babel. At that time, someone learned to write "code" in that language that could trigger madness. The message sisn't make sense, bur anyone who saw or heard it would instantly go mad.

The hero wrote a program that could detect this message and erase it.

If Stephensen wanted to write a sequal, I suppose he could have had the bad guy write a different "machine language" program . . . perhaps causing enslavement or violence instead of madness. But the hero had definitely disabled the madness Super Weapon.

In retrospect, my desire to have the hero kill the villain is very selfish. The story could not have ended at that point, because the hero was a nice guy. Even though he was an excellent swordsman, he would have been traumatized by the act of drawing blood, let alone killing someone.

Okay, granting the rather...completely insane premise, I'm wondering how the hero was able to write a program that could detect the code if it was something that was picked up by the human brain directly. I mean, it could be sent in any kind of multi-packet encryption as a raw data file like a picture or audio format and just waft right through the filters unless the hero actually assembled a program capable of intercepting not just a particular sequence but also of anything that could be reassembled into a representation of that sequence, and to do that wouldn't he have to know what the message was? In fact, how did the villian figure out the message...or is that how he became the villian?

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A couple of tough guys came over to Hiro, "Hey, are you a nigger or a kook or what?"

"Isn't there a New South African embassy up the street? Why don't you go hang out there in racial purity?"

"Yeah, it's a real nice place up there, only one problem -- no one to beat up!"

"Thank you for making your intentions clear"

"What good does it do you?"

"It justifies my doing this."

He cut the mans head off. What else was he going to do?

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I've probably botched that, and I apologize if anyones offended by the language, but Hiro does kill people. I think he kills some more guarding the small raft.

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He[Vader] doesn't have the power to go around blowing up planets on his own hook.

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Lol, I'm such a nerd.

I'm afraid my question resurrects a point made earlier that wasn't exactly central to Doc's original post (sorry about that). Characterising the villian when he/she isn't POV character was raised earlier, but how do you characterise him/her if they're manipulating events from afar? Is that even possible?

I characterized him partially through the reactions of those around him, his "minions," for lack of a better word. As the hero gathers more and more information in his attempts to find out who the Big Bad is and what he's got planned, he learns about the villain through the descriptions provided by the minions. This way, the hero (and the reader) get a physical description, personality assessments, motives, etc., all before the Big Bad takes the stage.

I also have the villain make an appearance within the first couple chapters. He is not identified at that time as the Big Bad, but clues are dropped for the reader that lead to an "ah-ha, that's him!" as they continue on in the story.

For the record, I also set up a situation in which the Big Bad is not destroyed by the hero, but by another main character. However, the hero enables the killing to take place, so even though it isn't his hands around the villain's neck, he's still the reason it gets done.

Based on these examples, I think you need to reveal the following:

Motivation: What makes this villain do what he/she does? What is his/her goal?

Power: This supervillain must be very powerful. Show your readers some examples of this power. Make them tremble with fear.

Determination: Your villain will not give up the fight. Make it clear to your readers (and at some point to your hero) that this villain is bound and determined to win at all costs.

Penboy, I do feel satisfied with my ending. In fact, during the course of this discussion I have resolved to make the ending a bit more uncomfortable for one or two of my side villains, and I find myself even more satisfied. But I'm still wary about leaving the most evil (but least guilty) villains running free at the end of my story.

Survivor, I appreaciate your help in understanding my protagonist's role in the final resolution. That is what allowed me to discover extra ways for my hero to punish the side villains. But the original question was more about whether it's okay to leave some villains unpunished. I realize that it's possible, but does it weaken the story?

If I only punish half the villains, does it weaken my story by 50%? What if I only punish 10% of the villains?

I just finished Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier (Fantasy). While several of the conflicts were more internal in nature, there were a couple of clear-cut bad guys. One of them bit it in punishment, off screen – but it was okay. He’d already failed to thwart the heroine and was effectively neutralized anyway. The other, main villain, which put the heroine in her the difficult position in the first place, rather disappeared without a trace for some reason. She too, was thwarted, but not exactly in a confrontational way. Her only punishment was that she didn’t win; nothing bad happened to her at all.

None of this bothered me when I was reading it nor did it weaken the ending for me. (I’m a bit bothered now about the disappearing thing though not the punishment part, now that I’ve started really thinking about it, but at the time it didn’t, which was the first impression. This is also the first book in a trilogy, so villain carry over may be being used here. It also is, I believe, a first book though, so it wasn’t probably planned as a trilogy from the get-go, and was for argument sake, completely contained otherwise.) I was much more disturbed by the behavior of some of the other “good” characters, which had gotten priggish and a hair ungrateful by the end. This irritated me much more that the villain aspects.

But is it enough to have the hero overcome the obstacles? Will readers consider triumph over obstacles sufficuent resolution to those obstacles? Will it be stronger if the hero also defeats each villain who created the obstacles?

Bernard wasn't as cruel and disgusting as the characters I'm throwing at my hero, at least to readers who are Americans in 2003.

I wonder if that makes a difference? Perhaps the reason I wanted the villain in Snow Crash to die was because he was cruel. If a villain commits evil acts like greed or vanity I'm satisfied to see the hero simply overcome the evil acts. But if the villain is cruel, I want the villain to be punished in proportion to the cruelty.

This is very interesting. It may lead me to make a significant change in my book. I've got a character with a mild cruel streak (a new type of cruelty I invented as sci-fi dressing for my world) to whom I intended to give mild punishment. He or she would be an ongoing thorn in the hero's side.

In the sequel, I planned to explore this new form of cruelty with a totally different character. This character would take the cruelty to great extremes, necessitating a severe punishment. The problem is that the sequel will really wring this cruelty gimmic for all its worth. If I wrote a third or later book, the mildly cruel character would seem trite.

But I could turn my mildly cruel ongoing character into the main villain for the second book. If he/she is not punished in the first book, he/she might sink into indulgent depths of terrible cruelty for the second. Thus the second book could resolve itself with this character being punished for his/her cruelty in both books.

This could be a great idea. I've just got to figure out a way to leave the cruel character unpunished in book one, yet still give it a powerful ending.

I think that perhaps if you [temporarily] removed your villain from causing any immediate danger to your hero (like say, Darth Vader after A New Hope), you can leave space for both a powerful ending and a strong sequel, like if he seems to reform and goes away. (Kind of a lame example, but I hope you know what I mean). Or, if you are completely certain that a sequel will be written, the minor villains may be dealt with while the greater remains elusive. Some ideas...