Why Villains Always Think They’re the Main Character
A Project Heartless reflection from The Files
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Why Villains Always Think They’re the Main Character
Every truly dangerous villain has one thing in common: they don’t think they’re the villain at all. They think they’re the protagonist. The world is wrong, the system is corrupt, everyone else is blind — and they are the one person finally willing to do what must be done.
In psychological thrillers, this isn’t just flavour. It’s the engine. If your antagonist doesn’t have a story in which they are the hero, your reader will feel it. The character will flatten into a cliché: evil for the sake of evil, cruel for the sake of cool. Entertaining, maybe. But forgettable.
1. The story in their head is different from the story on the page
Most people live inside a private narrative psychologists sometimes call a narrative identity. We take messy facts and rearrange them into a story where our actions make sense. Villains do the same thing — they just have sharper teeth.
On the page, we see an assassin, a corrupt official, a cold strategist signing other people’s death warrants. In their head, they see:
- A reformer cutting out a cancer the system is too weak to touch.
- A protector doing terrible things so that softer people can sleep at night.
- A survivor who refuses to be a victim one more time.
Once they lock into that story, almost any action can be justified. The more brutal the action, the more heroic they feel for being willing to carry it. That tension is where psychological thrillers live.
2. Self-serving bias: every horror becomes a sacrifice
In psychology, there’s a quiet little engine behind a lot of human behaviour called the self-serving bias. When something goes well, we credit our character. When something goes badly, we blame circumstances, systems, “the other side.” Villains just run this bias at a higher voltage.
If an operation succeeds, it proves they were right. If it fails, it proves someone else was weak, stupid or disloyal. They don’t see a trail of victims; they see a trail of necessary sacrifices that history will one day understand.
In one of my earlier Files notes, I asked: “What would you do with a weapon in human form if you truly believed your side was righteous?” That question doesn’t only apply to governments. It applies to every antagonist who looks in the mirror and sees a martyr instead of a monster.
3. Moral licensing: “I’m allowed to cross this line”
There’s another useful concept called moral licensing. Roughly: once we feel we’ve done something good, we give ourselves permission to do something not-so-good next. (“I helped them earlier, so I’m justified in betraying them now.”)
For a psychological thriller villain, moral licensing can sound like this:
- “I stopped worse violence in the past. I’ve earned the right to choose who gets hurt now.”
- “I built this organisation. If I need to destroy it to save my vision, so be it.”
- “I protected them for years. If they turn on me, they chose what happens.”
They grant themselves a private licence to cross lines other people still respect. On the outside, readers see escalation. On the inside, the villain sees consistency. They’re just following through.
4. The most unsettling villains are almost right
The scariest antagonists in fiction (and in life) usually have a point. The city is rotten. The system is corrupt. The hero’s side does ignore certain victims. What makes the villain dangerous is not that they see a problem — it’s the solution they decide they’re entitled to enforce.
If you’re building a complex antagonist, try this:
- Give them a belief the reader can nod along with.
- Give them a wound that makes that belief feel urgent and personal.
- Then let them choose a solution that crosses a line your protagonist won’t cross.
Once you do that, you no longer have “the bad guy”. You have a competing main character whose story collides with your protagonist’s. And in a thriller, that collision is where the electricity comes from.
5. Why this matters for readers – not just writers
Part of the quiet unease of psychological thrillers is this: somewhere, deep down, readers recognise pieces of themselves in the antagonist. The urge to rewrite a memory so we’re less at fault. The temptation to think, “If I had power, I’d fix this my way.”
The villain is the logical endpoint of instincts we all carry: loyalty, anger, fear, hurt pride, a hunger for justice. Turn the volume up, remove the brakes, add resources and ruthlessness — and you get a person who still believes they’re the main character. They just leave bodies in the margins of their story.
That’s why, when you meet them on the page, it doesn’t feel like watching a cartoon. It feels like watching a possibility.
If you want to see how this plays out on the ground in my world, you can peek at the cover reveal for The Sheriff’s Daughter and the questions it raises about loyalty, law, and what happens when “doing the right thing” starts to look like a crime.
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