In a full fantasy world it would be strange if everyone was a balanced psyche, can't there just be a few baddies? Baddies are fun and illogical and have cool powers that you wouldn't take home to mother. Somewhere there should be someone who plain terrifies every one of your hard, 3d, real, central, fully described guys. This thread was started to think up a new, interesting kind of evil for huscarl's background, it isn't any use if we all admit that there is no evil, really. There is evil, and it's in fantasy books. Big, scary, spooky evil. We just want a twist. And 'there is no good and evil, just a spectrum of self deluded moral stances' isn't a sexy twist. How about evil as threads of glass on the wind. They break on your forehead and you scratch off all your hair with the itching. Your hairs sail off on the wind, carrying the fibreglass curse. Bald, redfaced people, flood the land, wandering blindly; itching. Can we just let the real existence of evil slide for a bit and try to think of some interesting kinds, please?
I write scientific body-horror, so all the evil that I can think of is about people making each other sick. Someone who writes something a bit more deep should be able to come up with some cracking ways to be believably bad, in a new way. I believe in good and bad, comfort and pain, friends and assmunches. I'm an old fashioned cat. But then writing is terribly old fashioned.