Sadly, Spooky Season is almost over, but before we wrap up October, I’m posting one more Throwback Thursday blog. This one’s all about the bad guys – and bad girls! I’ve always loved a good villain, although, admittedly, I haven’t always been great at writing a good villain. But, over the years, I have gotten better at it. Here are my top five favorite fanfic villains!
5. Jamie Turner
Jamie may not be the first of my characters to come to mind when you think of villains, but, aside from the big C, he’s definitely the biggest antagonist in the Broken series. Jamie is first introduced in Broken as Claire’s childhood friend and high school sweetheart, but we don’t actually get to meet him until the sequel, By My Side. Yet, even in Broken, he causes trouble for Nick and Claire, albeit unintentionally. Near the end of the story, Claire rushes off to Iowa to support Jamie after the death of his father, which causes her to miss Nick’s charity concert and nearly miss her chance to see him before he undergoes a risky operation. In By My Side, Jamie moves back to Florida, where he creates tension in Nick and Claire’s relationship, becoming a shoulder for her to cry on when she and Nick call off their engagement. Jamie and Claire eventually get back together, get married, and get pregnant through IVF. Then he whisks her away to Iowa, which is where his villainous side really comes out.
While he’s never physically abusive to Claire, Jamie is manipulative and emotionally abusive, especially during her pregnancy and after their twins are born prematurely. He has a pattern of abandoning Claire whenever things get hard, as he can’t seem to handle the complications that come with cancer treatments and premature births. At the same time, he resents Nick for stepping in to comfort Claire whenever he runs out on her, which results in several confrontations between the two men.
The whole love triangle subplot of BMS was at least partly inspired by The Notebook, which came out the same year I started writing the story. I originally wanted to make Jamie likable, like James Marsden in the movie, even though I knew Claire would ultimately end up with Nick. But it was also influenced by the fanfic Cover Me With Dreams, particularly the part where the female lead is trapped in a loveless marriage while Nick pines for her from afar, and I think that’s one reason why Jamie became more and more of an asshole as the story went on. The other reason is that I based his character on my college roommate’s boyfriend, whom I initially found very cute and charming until he broke her heart. It was easy to write Jamie as a self-centered, manipulative asshole after that. But I also needed him to be an asshole in order to motivate Claire to leave him and make her way back to Nick, which was my end goal all along.
As an antagonist, Jamie served his purpose by causing conflict and paving the way for its resolution. And, boy, did my BMS readers love to hate him, to the point that one of them actually wrote her own fanfic about killing him. To this day, Jamie is my only villain to star in his own spin-off fic, written by someone else. That was enough to land him on this list!
4. The Misfit Fans
Are the Misfit Fans really villains, or are they just misunderstood? That all depends on your perspective. First introduced in my Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer parody, The Gift of the Pandaskunk, the Misfit Fans serve as a stand-in for the Misfit Toys in Rudolph. While certainly less loveable than their stop-motion counterparts, they aren’t originally portrayed as villains, just lonely BSB fans who are overjoyed by the Backstreet Boys’ arrival on their planet. But they take their obsession to an unhealthy level, which leads them to become the villains of the next two pandaskunk stories. In Return of the Pandaskunk, the Misfit Fans leave their home planet and invade Earth, Independence Day-style. Led by their rabid and unhinged leader, Princess Kujo, they try to make the rest of the world as miserable as they are by destroying the happiest place on Earth: Disneyland. And in The Year Without a Pandaskunk, they avenge Princess Kujo’s death and placate their new leader, Melissa Schuman, by kidnapping Nick with the help of their new ally, Aaron Carter. So, from Nick and the Boys’ perspectives, they are definitely villains. But they wouldn’t be the first fans to do crazy things to get the attention of the guys they love.
I had a lot of fun writing the Misfit Fans and their descent from harmless mental illness to full-on madness and malevolence over the course of the trilogy. Some of it may seem a bit mean-spirited when you consider the fact that some of them (some, not all) are based on real people who were rather infamous in my small corner of the fandom at the time I wrote them. But you know how people say you shouldn’t piss off a writer because they might put you in one of their stories? Yeah… it’s true. Some of those people were put on the Planet of Misfit Fans for a good reason, and I have no regrets about that. Besides, the Misfit Fans still make me laugh every time I imagine them singing, “A diamond for AJ, a t-shirt for Nick. Did you know that Thor is our name for his dick?” If you know, you know!
3. Serial Killer Nick
Serial Killer Nick is the star of Revenge of the Slaughtered: Nick Strikes Back, which I wrote about in my last blog. In this series of one-shots, Nick seeks his revenge on the fanfic writers who have repeatedly harmed him in their stories by hunting them down and brutally killing them, one by one. Some of these victims are fictional, but many of them are based on real people who volunteered to be part of the story. If you were on the Absolute Chaos forum back in 2011, it was a big honor to be murdered by Nick in this fic! I, myself, met an explosive end in at least one installment, which was well-deserved after everything I’ve done to Nick in my stories.
As much as I love torturing fanfic Nick, I also enjoy writing him as an assailant rather than a victim. Serial Killer Nick may be twisted and conniving, but he’s also creative, clever, and quite witty. Whether he’s using a diamond engagement ring as a murder weapon or singing “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” while he’s baking a woman’s body into a batch of muffins, he comes up with some pretty unconventional ways to kill his victims – and manages to still be sexy while doing it. That’s why Serial Killer Nick slays!
2. FANS
FANS, an acronym for Forgotten Agents Need Status, is the villainous organization from 00Carter. Founded by failed secret agent Howard Dorough, who reinvented himself as the purple-loving supervillain Dr. Rough, FANS recruits prospective agents that have been rejected from other secret intelligence organizations, such as the CIA, MI6, and Himitsu Takana (home to the heroes of 00Carter). They seek power, vengeance, and, most importantly, attention by wreaking havoc and unleashing terror upon the world. Their evil plots have included infiltrating popular reality singing competition shows to hypnotize the audience, melting the polar ice caps with a giant “laser,” manipulating the weather, infecting the world with a bioengineered virus called FANthrax, stealing Christmas, kidnapping a star Olympic figure skater, planting a microscopic bomb inside the body of HimTak’s leader, and creating a social media app to brainwash the world.
While most of Dr. Rough’s minions are named for the “forgotten” members of boybands, such as Chris from *NSYNC, Justin from 98 Degrees, and Danny from New Kids on the Block, his right-hand man is Justin Timberlake, who goes by the alias Drums, a reference to the real JT’s song “Like I Love You.” Unlike the other FANS minions, who couldn’t make the cut as secret agents, Drums was once a high-ranking agent at HimTak, before he was sidelined by a career-ending injury. Angry and bitter after being let go from HimTak, he was snatched up by Dr. Rough and quickly rose through the ranks at FANS to become Dr. Rough’s most dependable henchman. Like Dr. Rough, Drums is largely motivated by revenge, wanting retribution against the organization that wronged him and the agents he once considered friends.
I’ve written enough about Dr. Rough and FANS in previous blogs that there’s not much else I can say without repeating myself, but they are absolutely my favorite characters to write in 00Carter. Their dastardly deeds, silly schemes, over-the-top antics, and quirky idiosyncrasies are a lot of fun… and completely different from the last group of villains on this list!
1. The Key West Four
The Key West Four are the villains from A Heart That Isn’t Mine: Dani, Elizabeth, Rob, and Patrick. When I came up with the premise of this novel, which is about two of the boys being abducted, held hostage in a fake hospital room, and made to believe they are critically ill or injured, I knew it would take a team of people to pull off such a scheme. I also knew they had to be a particular type of people – people who were devious and depraved enough to come up with the plan in the first place, but also intelligent and knowledgeable enough to successfully put it into action. The plot may have come first, but I couldn’t have made it work without the right characters and motives.
As the heart of the whole scheme, Dani was the first character I created. A former critical care nurse turned fetish porn actress, she is largely motivated by her own deviant sexual preferences. When pretending is no longer enough to satisfy her, Dani finds a way to turn her wildest fantasies into reality with the help of her husband, Rob, a former emergency medicine physician who has both a savior complex and a sadistic streak. Together, these two psychopaths make an attractive and charismatic couple, which is how they were able to lure Nick right into their trap without him realizing it until it was much too late. They even managed to fool most of my readers, who were simultaneously rooting for Dani and Nick to fall in love while feeling sorry for Rob for being a victim of infidelity – that is, until their true intentions surfaced.
Rob may be the brawn, but Elizabeth is the brains behind their operation. A practicing cardiologist, Elizabeth is key in procuring the medical equipment and drugs needed to create their hospital set and control the hapless patients they keep within it. Together with her twin brother, Patrick, she also supplies the perfect location to house it: the family-owned funeral parlor they inherited from their late father, whose death Elizabeth orchestrated in order to protect Patrick after their dad discovered what his son liked to do with the dead bodies left in their care. Yeah… Patrick is a practicing necrophiliac. Elizabeth, on the other hand, prefers beating hearts – like, really prefers them. She’s not just a cardiologist, but a cardiophile – someone who is attracted to hearts and heartbeats.
While this story was a mindfuck, researching and writing about these characters was fun and interesting for me. I dove deep into the psychology behind their thoughts and actions, trying to understand what would drive someone to do the disturbing things they do to their victims in order to write them as realistically as possible. A lot of my research revolved around so-called “angels of mercy,” healthcare workers who kill their patients. I read a whole book about the serial killer Charles Cullen, a critical care nurse who murdered patients by injecting them with various drugs, including the heart medication digoxin, which became Dani and Elizabeth’s drug of choice. I also researched Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which involves caregivers – most commonly mothers – purposely making the people in their care sick in order to gain attention and sympathy, as Dani does with Nick. I even researched paraphilia, a category that includes fetishes and necrophilia, in order to write that aspect of their characters. This aided me in developing them as multifaceted humans who commit monstrous acts. I’m really proud of the work I put into this story and these villains. That’s why the Key West Four came in at number one!
And there you have it, my five favorite villains… or, technically, groups of villains (because it was too hard to narrow them down to five individuals). Thanks for reading! Happy Halloween!