This goes back to a posting written by Leslie Farnsworth last year about sympathetic characters.
When you write a work of fiction several elements go into making a great story. You don’t want to just relate facts, that’s news reporting (or at least that’s what news reporting used to be). Among the elements are character development and knowing a little more about both the protagonist and the antagonist in the story. But exactly how much is enough and how much is too much?
Fleshing out your villains as well as your heroes can add more dimensions to your characters and make the audience connect to them in a more personal way but knowing too much can sometimes backfire on you and make them less appealing as you expose too much of their flaws and make them all too pedestrian and common.
Probably the starkest example of this phenomena would be the character of Darth Vader or Annakin Skywalker in the Star Wars stories. In the original 3 movies Darth Vader was a menacing somber figure. He was the literal black knight. Monolithic and evil under his black armor. He had only the most scant of back stories. A hero that had turned to evil and who had betrayed all that he loved. At the end of the stories he receives redemption through his son.
In the prequel movies that came afterwards we receive the entire story. We see him grow up from an annoying kid that gets into predicaments and somehow always gets by (something like a space faring Dennis the menace), to a whiny self-absorbed teen obsessed with his own self-image and determined to get his way no matter what, and finally to a somewhat megamaniacal and paranoid young man who ends up betraying all his friends and ultimately trying to murder his own wife. Full of character flaws and most of those flaws marking him as a genuinely weak individual.
Many people who I know felt that knowing the entire story behind his beginnings made the Darth Vader character into something that they could not and did not find as alluring before knowing the whole story.
In some cases I think that readers want to see their villains as “totally” evil and not “partially” evil. They want to be presented with some absolutes that are solid and definite and don’t want to think that maybe there’s an excuse or maybe there’s an explanation why someone is the way that they are.
The writer’s job becomes to add just enough to the character but to leave something the reader’s imagination to fill in. Let their minds clothe the character as they see fit. That imagination will be your greatest ally in captivating the other person to follow your work.
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