How to Write a Story Where the Villain Wins

Most stories have happy endings… but why?

What if you want to write a story where the villain wins?

Let’s take a look at some examples of stories that do that, and talk about how they accomplish it!

During the last stream, the subscribers voted that we talk about “how to write a story where the villain wins.”

Watch the full video here or scroll down for highlights.

Happy Endings

The vast majority of stories have happy endings, but why?
One of the reasons is because stories don’t reflect life accurately, they’re just a short fictional exploration of an idea. This means that stories don’t need to have a balance of positives/negatives in them like life does.
We also don’t have bad endings in stories for the same reason we don’t show characters going to the bathroom: for most people, they’re unpleasant.
Lastly, unlike life, stories need an ending. If they continued indefinitely like life does, many would have bad/sad ones.
Most people want to be entertained, and for most people being entertained requires positive emotions, thus happy endings.

“Bad” Endings

If you want to write a story where the villain wins, you have to first ask yourself: why?
Just writing a story where the villain wins for the sake of it happening by itself will not be satisfying to readers.
Reading a story for hundreds of pages just to have the main character fail/die is not fun.
However, if it’s properly set up, and works with the theme of the story, a bad ending can work

Let’s take a look at some examples of stories where the villain(s) win and see how they pull it off!

#1. Villain Wins… But There’s a Sequel!

– Having the villain win can set up excitement for the next installment.

Empire Strikes Back (Luke is beaten and Han Solo is frozen!)
Goblet of Fire (Voldemort is back and Cedric is dead!)
Game of Thrones (Ned Stark is dead and everything sucks!)
Infinity War (Thanos snapped his fingers and killed lots of people!)

– The villains doesn’t REALLY win, since in the sequel the good guys usually win, but in that one story itself it can be a powerful and unexpected ending.

#2. Villain as a protagonist

– If the main character of your story IS the villain/anti-hero, then they can easily win.

Gone Girl (Works because villain Amy is just as much the protagonist as Nick.)
Nightcrawler (The character who does the most evil things is the protagonist.)
A Clockwork Orange (The book and movie say different things by having the evil protagonist win.)

– Usually when the protagonist villain wins, it’s because they represent something, such as society’s fetish with violent news in Nightcrawler, or free will in A Clockwork Orange.
– Or, if your story has multiple POVs, the villain POV could end up the winner, like in Gone Girl.

#3. Villain as a concept

– If the story doesn’t really have a villain, then the abstract “villain” can win.

1984 (Big Brother wins in the end, even though “he” is not a character.)
Romeo and Juliet (Prejudice wins in the end, killing the main characters.)
Requiem for a Dream (Drug addiction wins in the end.)
The Omen (Eternal evil wins in the end.)

– This type of ending makes sense for tragedies, but those can be very difficult to write effectively, so be careful!

#4. Villain Wins in a Different Way

– Perhaps the villain doesn’t get exactly what they want/ what we think they want, but something bad still happens.

Se7en (Villain does die in the end… but that was his goal.)
The Usual Suspects (Villain is found in the end… but gets away.)
Saw (We think the villain is killed… but it turns out it was someone else the whole time.)
The Mist (The evil mist goes away… but at a cost)
The Dark Knight (The Joker is defeated… but Batman has become a “villain” to the people to preserve Harvey Dent’s image.)

– These endings still give some satisfaction while staying true to their horror/gritty tone.

After that, we outlined a story where the villain wins in the end. Chat voted that we outline this idea: an elementary school girl wants to murder her teacher.

Here’s the outline we came up with:

– She wants to kill her teacher for a petty reason, something like:

Her bag of cookies had one less than her friends (would work better with endings 2/3 below).

Her teacher has the same birthday as her, and she doesn’t like that because her birthday IS HERS (would work better with ending 1 below).

– On her first day of school, she and another girl seemed to hit it off when they showed up wearing the same shirt. The other girl didn’t show up the next day. (Forshadowing to any of the endings.)

– She sets up a bunch of booby traps, but uses things like safety scissors, nontoxic glue, playdoh weapons, and stuff that fails. The girl also steals chemicals from the janitor and puts them in the teachers coffee mug.

ENDING #1
She eventually gets her teacher fired (close enough to death from her perspective), she can’t get hired anywhere else, can’t afford her life saving medicine, and then dies.

THEME: Broken health system, blacklisting in society, etc.

ENDING #2
For the first half you think the girl is super creepy/evil but then the twist is she was the hero as the teacher is the one who has been serial-killing all the other students. In the end, the teacher kills the student.

THEME: Trust children, they’re smart; how the education system is broken, etc.

ENDING #3
The teacher and student are both killing classmates and discover each other and team up.

THEME: Evil always finds evil, birds of a feather flock together… in a murder or crows!

Be sure to check out the video for more details, discussion, and some awesome contributions from chat!

After that we wrote a story based around a randomized SCP, a collection of stories that all categorize fictional supernatural monsters/aliens/entities similar to Area 51. This was the one chat voted for, an anomaly that turns into random locations.

Here’s what we came up with:

Steve had never needed to pee so badly in his life. He was brand new to this little town in the middle-of-nowhere England, having been assigned there for work despite never leaving the U.S. in his entire life.

His bosses had said it’d be good for him to get out, lubricate the relationships with the British Branch—as they called it—and maybe even get over his recent breakup with what’s-her-face and move on with his life.

If only they knew the prostate pain he was going through right now at three a.m. in the middle of nowhere. Bladder bloat out the wing wang. Cheap drinks at pubs did not mix well with the lack of public bathrooms, apparently.

Still a mile walk from his apartment, Steve clutched his groin and grit his teeth, darting his eyes everywhere for any sign of a place to let loose sweet urinary relief. The rinky-dink town was mostly just a few streets with apartments and closed-up shops, everyone else in their right mind having made the sensible decision of going home to their beloved toilets hours ago.

Every single shrub and hedgerow seemed to call to him like sirens singing, but the lit up windows in the buildings warned him otherwise. In a place like there, where everyone knew everyone, and all the old women had nothing better to do than stay up all night and spy on each other, if Steve unleashed the floodgates right alongside the wall of one of their homes, he’d never hear the end of it. He just had to bear it until he got home and hope not to pop.

It was when Steve stumbled past a familiar-looking TARDIS with a lightning bolt spray-painted on it that he realized something even worse: he’d been walking in circles. In his slightly-drunken state, he’d gone around the same block at least five times, only adding more miserable minutes to his torture.

Steve stared at the TARDIS, weighed his options, and decided that tonight would not be the night for him to spray what little remained of his humanity against the walls inside of it. He continued to trudge forward, regretting everything in his life up to this point.

That was when he saw heaven on Earth.

A Tesco convenience store that he’d somehow missed the first five times he’d walked by was brightly lit up down a road, like christmas lights on a magical night. But best of all was the sign sticking up out of the parking lot: Alcohol, Cigarettes, and Public WC.

Steve would gladly let loose in a real closet right now, but this was nothing less than a gift from god himself. With renewed strength in his legs, he pumped his waterlogged body toward the shop, popped inside the neon-yellow-and-white indoors, and bee-lined it straight to the bathroom.

He was in such a hurry that he didn’t notice some of the strange items on the shelves.

Five minutes later, the toilet flushed, and Steve stepped back into the store a changed man. He declared to himself then and there, never again would he fall for the temptation of five mugs for five quid Fridays at the Fire Pub ever again. Even if it was fun to try and throw tips into their goblet on the shelf, getting less and less accurate as the night went on.

Although now that he thought about it, Steve patted his pockets. His wallet was missing. Dammit, he must’ve accidentally thrown his whole wallet into that stupid tip-goblet. Everything was in there: his cash, credit cards, driver’s license with his name on it. Great. Along with his hangover, going back there to sheepishly ask for it back was another miserable experience he had to look forward to for tomorrow.

As Steve trudged through the Tesco, he decided that he should at least buy something from them, to thank his savior. He didn’t want to be one of those pee-and-go guys, after all. Stopping in his tracks, he looked at the first shelf he came to. Maybe he could pick up some coffee or Gatorade to help with tomorrow’s inevitable hangover.

He perused the shelves. Then he blinked, shook his head, figured he must’ve just been seeing things. With new, fresh eyes, he looked again. Nope, it was all still the same. He didn’t recognize a single item there, and not just because they were British, but because they were weird.

Boxes of owl feed. Refill cartridges for Spell-o-Tape. A mini-pack of something called Skele-Gro for minor injuries. And in the drinks section, chilled bottles of Butterbeer.

As Steve looked them over, they all felt oddly familiar. He stepped back and looked around the store. There were a few other customers there, a man about his age with red hair looking at the dirty magazines on the rack. A woman browsing the cleaning section with a broom over her shoulder. And a hairy man the size of two refrigerators standing near the back, slowly pulling eggs out of the freezer, sliding them into his pocket, and looking around, as if he thought no one could see him.

Same with the items, everyone in the store felt vaguely familiar, like Steve had met them before, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Suddenly hit with an intense desire to leave, he grabbed a bag of rat food and bolted to the cash register, eager to get out.

“Planning on having a fancy dinner for yourself, mudblood?”

Steve looked at the man scanning his rat food. His small face was pale with a delighted scowl and slicked-back blonde hair on top. His blue collared uniform had the nametag “D. Malfoy” on it.

“How did someone like you manage to find the Room of Requirement?” he asked, glaring at Steve up and down. “When they tore down the school and put this pathetic little town here, we thought there was a chance this could happen, but you’re the first idiot to actually do it. Wait until Father hears about this.”

A jingle came from the door, and before Steve even had a chance to look over to see who it was, strong arms gripped his shoulders. He was violently spun around, suddenly facing an old man with a long white beard dressed in purple robes, only the letter “D” on his nametag underneath the words “Store Manager.” He was already red in the face, ready to scream at me.

“Steve!” he yelled. “Did you put your name the Goblet of Fire?!”

If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.

And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.

Hope to see you next time, friend!

Featured image: Pakutaso (edited by me)