CommonPlot is an ongoing series of plot ideas, characters, settings and other story elements I'm putting out under the Creative Commons license for everyone to use. Given the current climate of ever expanding Copyright laws that are harmful to society and creativity, and the new nonsense of plot patents, I want to do my small part to keep the world of imagination free and open. Please help!
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I was watching the latest Teen Titans last night. They were battling Doctor Light, a supervillian who creates inventions that let him manipulate light. He can make it solid, or turn it into energy blasts or use it in other ways. So I'm wondering, if he's so smart that he can invent stuff like that, why would he be a villain?
The CommonPlot element I'm contributing today is an evil genius character. Not that there's anything new about evil geniuses. The "invention" I'm adding is motivation. Take the example of Art Fry, the man who invented the Post-It note. It made 3M millions, if not billions of dollars. Since Fry was under contract to 3M, they own his invention and he got nothing more than a, "Thanks, Art, what else you got for us?" from 3M.
Lets say someone like Doctor Light came up with a great invention while working for a company. The only way he himself could actually benefit from his invention would be to turn criminal! For a fun twist, he could borrow a costume design of some comic book character in an obscure comic from a company that's been out of business since the 50s, only to discover that it is still copyrighted. So his turn to villiany is based on breach of contract, patent infringement, and copyright violation. These are, of course, gateway crimes, leading to bank robbing, drug traffiking and murder.
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