There are different kinds of powerful characters. There are characters like Voldemort who use pain and torture to intimidate others. They're desperate to have power and keep it. Like Klaus (from The Originals). They've had to fight for their power and they've done anything to get. A little remose would make them sad, but they aren't, instead they're just assholes.
Which makes me think of Joffery (A Song of Ice and Fire). And how no amount of remorse would ever make him sad, he will always be the most sadistic asshole in literature.
He's a completely different kind of powerful character - one who isn't powerful. He never had to gain power by working for it, it was handed to him on a golden platter (or with the tusks of a boar). Everyone knew he was just a boy so he acts like the sociopath he is by using terror and cruelty to try and get his way. In contrast, someone like his grandfather Tywin or Marcel Gerrard (The Originals) have worked intensely hard to get the power they've had and realize that sometimes, honey catches more flies than vinegar. Basically, it's like what everyone's always saying to Klaus - Mercy. Or a great line from The Count of Monte Cristo, "Mercy, Fernand. Mercy." Right at the end where Edmond is trying to let his anger go and leave with his family. But alas, true to his character, Fernand Mondego does not show mercy. His is still, after 16 years, after getting everything he wanted, still angry and still jealous of Edmond. He shows that he is more like Joffery, with his entitlement and... lack of any real feelings...
Both characters prove in the end that they have only delusions, whispers, dreams, of the power they so desperately seek.
Edmond is another interestingly powerful character. He worked for his power, mostly bought it, lied for a good deal of it, and took the rest of it at the tip of a sword. He was smart enough to know when he wasn't the most powerful man in the room, and how to use that to his advantage, rather than letting it work against him. He had mercy when it mattered most, and left it behind when he couldn't deal with it. But he always had pity, mercy, a heart, and all that doesn't just make him sad, it makes him a character you root for. Like Daenerys. She's a character everybody roots for. She was born to it, but she wasn't born into it. She's risen from the ashes (pretty literally) and worked, and fought, and lost, and conquered.
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| Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons |
I think about these characters a lot. Mostly, I think, because I don't understand it. I don't know how to write characters like this, with any kind of power. I think it is so beyond me and my life of having any kind of power like this that I can't really imagine a character with these traits, goals, lives, into being.
But there are real people like that. Maybe not in the supernatural ways, but in their quests for power. And even in real life, I don't understand them.
Maybe I even understand them best in fiction, in print, on film. Because when I am so crushed, so torn apart by evil and thirst I will never understand, I can put it down. I can turn it off. I can walk away. I can go back to a life and a world that almost makes sense. Even if there aren't dragons here.
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