Oaky, I'm going to be controversial again, and since I haven't got much time, I'm going to make this short. I find villains boring, and fics which are "villain-driven" or "A-plot-driven" very often bore me, or worse, frankly turn me off.
The way I see it, the villains that are really awfully scary in real life practically always have some sort of organisation behind them. They are just so extremely rarely lone wolves. The villains get strong, mighty and deadly because of the organisation backing them up. Usually, if they do act on their own, they have at least gotten their ideas from pre-existing organisations or movements. An example of the latter is the Army psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood massacre. He acted on his own, but he was inspired by Al Qaida, and in a world without extreme islamism this man may still have become a killer, but he wouldn't have killed in the same way, quite possibly not in the same place and not for the same reason.
The people behind 9/11 were organised. Their organisation was small, but it was backed up by Osama bin Laden and his enormous wealth, and it was backed up by an entire country, Afghanistan, which invited the killers to spend as much time as they wanted in Afghanistan to carry out whatever training and preparation that they needed.
The man at Fort Hood, who acted alone, killed 13 people. The 9/11 people killed about 3,000 people. But in order to create an even larger catastrophe you need an even bigger crowd of followers behind you. Personally, I'm often bored when people try to understand Adolf Hitler. My response is that Hitler would have been nothing if he had acted alone. The truth, however, is that he had millions and millions of super-enthusiastic followers, in Germany as well as in other countries. The fervent enthusiasm of his millions of followers is what made Hitler so absolutely formidable and so unbelievably deadly.
Too often, when a fic is A-plot-driven, too much focus is placed on the villain. He becomes larger than life, a sort of metaphysical evil. He becomes The Joker of the Batman movies. For reasons that are entirely unclear, he can wreak the most incredible havoc on his own.
Luthor, I must say, is a better villain than most. What makes him better is his suave persona, which makes people believe that he is a benevolent philantropist. People don't oppose him because he is so incredibly good at pulling the wool over their eyes. But in the long run people just have to see through him, and by that time they should try to stop him.
Of course, if Luthor is allowed to run around unchecked for too long, then he will use his enormous wealth to buy as many allies as he needs. Indeed, he will create a new Mob, the Mob of Luthor. And the mob is so difficult to stop precisely because it is made up of so many people. It is like the hydra - you cut off one head and it immediately grows two new heads. Now THAT is scary. But that means, too, that it is not enough to cut off the largest head to kill off the hydra. Stopping Luthor himself won't necessarily cripple the powerful criminal organisation he would probably have founded.
I'm just saying that in the end I can't get interested in the Luthor or Joker characters, the bearer of metaphysical evil. I find them deeply, deeply unattractive, and I don't believe that they could be real. The real world just isn't dominated by lone supervillains.
Ann
