Kingpin: How to Write a Badass Bad Guy

Villains should be scary.

I hold no truck with modern sympathetic emo villains. Nothing turns my stomach more than the “he’s just misunderstood” trope. Even when it comes in an appealing package (hello, Kylo Ren), I’m not down with it.

I’m also not fond of stories where the antagonist is the main character. “He’s fighting against himself. It’s super deep,” explains the annoying guy in every film class.

What I like is a proper, terrifying bad guy, one who embodies proper villainy. And I don’t mean the cartoonish mustache-twirler. This is a human, with vulnerabilities. Despite those vulnerabilities, the villain should be unambiguously frightening, dangerous, and a force to be reckoned with. This is how you construct a villain. I will accept no substitutes.

For me, there are few examples in modern storytelling better than Kingpin in the Daredevil series (now available on Disney Plus).

I’ve written about Kingpin before here, but I’ve never gone deeply into why I find him to be a good villain, or the qualities that o…