The Commander

There's something really refreshing about writing a villain.

Not a good guy with a sinister side, but an honest to god villain. A character who makes your skin crawl. A smug bastard who you want to punch in the face. A manipulative sleaze who even the most innocent sentences have some vague undertone of horror when they come out of his mouth.

The Commander is that villain.

(Or, at least, I hope he is.)

Marcus and Carson's old mentor wasn't originally going to be included in the play, but I got talked into it and I'm in a better place for it. In fact I sort of dread to think what I was going to do before I put him in because the play needed an antagonist and here he is.

He's meant to be a pastiche of every franchise headliner ever, but mostly Captain America (his theme), Superman (his powers), and Batman (his tendency towards taking pubescent male sidekicks). His introductory paragraph introduces him as "More Jor-El than Superman at this point in his life," which is also accurate - the Commander's in his late sixties. He's on the verge of retirement and everyone knows it and that's why they're so keen to shower him with accolades and awards.

The dark side of this is, of course, that he's an unrepentant child molester and Carson and Marcus's varying degrees of disfunction are almost certainly a result of apprenticing with him. Trying to make him repent is a huge action of the play, and I can't really say more about that without spoiling massively but the Commander has a lot up his sleeves. You don't make it in the hero business as long as he has without being ruthless.

There are certain lines I write for his character that seem perfectly tame at first - but become suddenly sinister when considered with the rest of his character. As I discussed with my roommate, "Anyone who can mention visiting a children's hospital and make the audience squirm is probably villainous gold."

I haven't written a proper villain in a really long time - probably not since sophomore year of high school. So this is going to be really fun, I think. Villains are fun to write. It's fun to make everyone around them uncomfortable and I'm going to have a blast.

Even if the Commander is a wretched human being.

Especially because the Commander is a wretched human being.