Big Ed's PlaceMelodrama and Mary Sue
Recently, I had a reader point me to an argument by a popular science fiction author that contradicts my “no one’s a villain in their own mind” philosophy. I’ll address that, but I realized there was a topic I needed to go through first, which was when fiction really does have true villains.
Because there’s a certain pleasure to simple villains. It’s entertainment without having to do a lot of thinking.
The best example I could think of was a theatre troupe I know that specializes in Melodrama. While the scripts and shows change, the basic format does not. They start each performance by introducing the characters to the audience and teaching the audience their queues. When the heroine comes out, everyone sighs. When the hero comes out, they cheer. When the villain comes out (always with a thick black mustache), they boo. It’s simple, it’s hokey, and they’ve been in business for over 25 years.
I myself have been a couple of times. It’s just fun to allow oneself to be swept away with something that is so transparently unreal. Yes, the characters are cardboard, but nobody cares.
The second case where it’s acceptable to have a villain who’s cardboard thin is in a Mary Sue story. I use this term in the sense of ‘the author creates a character that is essentially their avatar.” Usually these characters are amazingly perfect or good at what they do and that idealization means, of course, that those characters who oppose them also have to be idealized as evil.
Now, while such stories are often poorly written, they can be a lot of fun. They’re particularly enjoyable to that segment of the population which shares enough with the author to easily slip into their shoes and see the avatar as themselves. For example, “Nerd overcomes popular jock, wins hot girl.” Hey, I like those stories. 
The erotica equivalent is usually “nice guy finds some trick that allows him to accumulate a harem of hot babes who don’t mind him fucking all the other women in the harem.”
Again, pleasant simple entertainment without having to do a lot of thinking.
In these genres, the cardboard thin characters are part of the package. They can still be poorly or well written. Honestly, it also doesn’t take much to keep them from being too thin either. Take the harem novels–all the women don’t have to be incredibly busty blondes with hair trigger orgasmic capabilities. Mix it up a little!
Which is ultimately, I think, where the threshold is. If the story’s a cartoon, be it because it’s melodrama or Mary Sue, it’s okay to have pure villains. The problems come when either the characters are too flat for even a cartoon, or the story is intended to be more.
I’ll tackle the “more” case next week.