One of my LJ friends made a very interesting post on this subject recently. It was locked, so I won't go into detail or give the author's name, but it did spark several Ace-related thoughts for me.

Lord Fear's a villain. He's a villain because he was born evil, created evil. The post remarked that unmotivated evil was often boring to read about, which it is. Which is, to a certain extent, the case with Lord Fear and (to some extent) Kilobyte...

But is it? My problem with Fear was incompetence, not motivation. I also spent my time trying to rationalise him in a 6D=RW sense, and came up with: that he supports a vaguely libertarian/anarchist view, that the Knights are far more authoritarian, and that he's set himself up as an obvious contrast to them, since after all they've coopted words like "good" and "chivalrous" to apply to them. Which may or may not be plausible, but since he's called a Lord I would assume he would have some following on the basis of some premise. I liked Kilobyte for his competence, and when he chose to redirect his potential to encompass a slightly different goal I appreciated that. It was understandable motivation falling in perfectly with the theme of becoming real.

Of course, the real villain is also evil. And he's not glamorous-evil. He's human-evil. He's quiet and keeps to his computers. He's probably never hit anyone in his life. He doesn't seem to have a social life, and likely never asked anyone for a date out of fear of rejection. He probably faints at the sight of blood. And yet he's set creatures loose on the world capable of destroying it. He's responsible for rape-by-proxy (what other word would you use for a character forced to engage in a relationship that she quite clearly does not want?). He's deliberately placed children in danger.

Which is certainly...interesting. It's not sexy. Kilobyte is (arguably) sexy, because he's okay-looking. FeArdantane's Lord Fear was sexy, because he was powerful and confident and intelligent and quirky. But that's actually what real evil is. Very few villains really are dashing and charismatic and black-souled, despite the number of them haring around.

Which makes Rick a really good villain. If not quite so compelling as a darker and more competent Lord Fear, who in turn would make a better evil overlord than the less mature Kilobyte.

You know thats a good point. The "being programmed bad rather than getting their through vchoice" brings up it's own metaphysical and philosophical issues. There can be a whole expanse of meaning and rrasoning as to why someone would be made good or bad. Process of making a good story, like what the ace makers were thinking of? Some kind of cosmic balance that means for every really good thing you have to do something really bad?

Even for fear there was an actual motivation for evil, susposedly - even if you ignore the fact that ace crippled him in battle, he was probably evil before then. In that somebody made him bad FOR a reason.

I know the answer! I know the answer! But I'm not telling you what - read e-mail reply thing to find out! :D :lol:

...well bang goes the meta on the subject :P

Rick igglekow really is a very accomodating producer, it's good of him to mae these replies.