They call it the Hero’s Journey, not the Villain’s Journey, don’t they? There’s a reason for that. You want there to be obstacles to your hero’s goals, but you don’t need to have an explicit villain in every tale obstructing traffic.
Now, I’ve never really been fond of writing villains, at least not in my preferred genre (SFF). Certainly there are genres that require villains: thrillers, mysteries, and so forth. The villains in those genres are essential, either as direct antagonists or as the criminals being sought. They are part of the engines of those plots.
But for my genre, or other adventure genres, villains are just one choice, one way of providing resistance to the goals of the hero. I haven’t got the slightest problem coming up with obstacles for the hero — his own incapacities or errors, his planning inadequacies, the accidents of circumstance, the unintentional cross-purposes and goals of others, the perversity of timing, bad weather, random chance, the fickle finger of fate, and so forth.
I don’t actually like direct villains in my sort of stories. For one thing, they compete for attention with the hero without the story payoff that a hero is due for succeeding at his task (the hero’s journey). For another, they strike me as hubristic, somehow, as if my hero were so important in his world that it takes the dedicated efforts of another to get in his way, that otherwise he would be unstoppable (when the whole of his fictional reality exists to thwart his aims with insentient indifference, chaos, and entropy).
And then, personally… I don’t enjoy living in the POVs of real villains. I go there out of storytelling necessity, and sometimes to revel in their defeat, but I’m too tied up in the fundamental morality I prefer for my heroes to enjoy spending time with villains. I can understand their competing goals that interfere with others, and that they aren’t villains in their own minds, but I don’t really grasp the emotional drives (revenge for minor offenses, cruelty, the satisfaction of pointless destruction, indifference to the problems they cause) that make them active villains rather than accidental obstacles. This is no doubt a deficiency in my personal toolkit, as well perhaps in my vision of human reality, but there it is. Many people write compelling villains, but me, I’m happy with providing all the obstacles that any hero could ever dread facing without making them the product of a criminal mastermind or a deluded monomaniac or a power-mad bureaucrat.
What sorts of antagonists do you prefer, and for what genres? Competing persons, or impersonal uncooperative circumstances? How villainous are your lovable rogues? If you like give-and-take or cat-and-mouse stories with real antagonists, how do you handle the scene-stealing risks? Do you play them straight or for comedy (where thwarting the villain is the chief goal of the hero)? Most importantly, how do you get into their heads seriously, to do justice to their independent motivations as rational beings, without resorting to the “to know all is to forgive all” assertion (with which I am not fully in sympathy)?
Mad Genius Club 
33 responses to “Antagonists”
If the story tells us anything from the villain’s pov, I want a villain whose story arc is comparable to the hero’s. I find the best villains are those you can actually sympathize with to some extent. If you’re showing the villain’s perspective and he doesn’t have any redeeming quality, I’m as likely to wall the book as I am to finish it.
Villains. I put them off-stage a lot and don’t show their point of view as much. And I don’t fool around with “everyone is the hero of his story.” The villains think in terms of what’s in it for them, not heroism vs villainy.
I always thought that ‘Everyone’s the hero of their own story’ just meant that everyone sees themself as the most important figure in whatever’s happening, be it fiction or real life.
Some people explicitly say that it means that whatever you do, you think it’s the *right* thing to do at the time.
From my own experience, I know that’s false.
:blinks: Wow, yeah, that’d kind of make me … wonder.
Even at my best, I usually am picking the least bad option.
I first heard of this in college and remembered many a time when I KNEW it was folly to put off homework. That didn’t mean it got done.
Not remotely. A moderately villainous person in my life justified a LOT with variations on “I know it’s not right, but X screwed me over so I might as well screw Y over.”
One of the advantages of writing alternate history is that humanity’s real history provides a surfeit of villains for an author to pit his (or her) protagonist against. Most of my villains are just being themselves, with only minor stretching for one or two.
I have to be in the right mood for the “impersonal circumstances” antagonist, usually reading non-fiction. It might be reading too many relatively recent short stories that seem to follow the plot of “the environment wins every time over mere humans” but I like that less and less in fiction.
I find it too easy to get into the head of a bad guy. It’s like Nietzche’s abyss – I don’t like what I see looking back at me. Vicious, sadistic, cruel monsters who are so full of selfish pride that they won’t see the harm they do, and don’t care about the harm so long as they get their way, are easy for me to write. Very, very easy. Scary easy. It takes work to make a more complicated antagonist, at least for me.
Some of the best villains are on the border of impersonal circumstances because they act more like forces of nature than people.
I actually like true villains. Not antagonists (though those have their place as well). VILLAINS. Too many stories leave out the villain and everything turns into a muddy shade of gray. There’s no clear right or wrong, there’s just muddling through. There’s enough of that in the real world. I find nothing particularly fascinating about following a character around mundanity in another world for any great length of time. (Which is why I don’t read fiction set in the real world very often.)
I am rather puzzled that you think that villains are an exercise in hubris on the part of the hero. I think you have it reversed. A properly done villain requires a hero. The hero does not require a villain. A proper villain requires that someone actually act to oppose him. Because to do otherwise would be unthinkable. It is a particular type of story, one you don’t seem to be fond of, which doesn’t make it either wrong or hubristic. A hero would do other things without a villain. A villain will not stop his wickedness without a hero.
Give me a gung-ho iguana and a last stand against the armada at the edge of the frontier. Give me hobbits carrying a ring over half the world because who else is there? Give me a hidden king who defends the frontiers in secret because the frontier needs him more right now. Give me an accountant who throws his boss-the-werewolf out of the 14th story window. Give me a kid who finally pops the school yard bully in the face if you want to think small. Give me a girl from another world who just wants to make a life, but can’t stand aside and let an old evil rise again. Give me desperate battles, large and small, where people have to CHOOSE to oppose the evil. The Evil is already there. What we’re short on is people opposing it. I can find mundanity just about anywhere. I want actual heroism and adventure.
Antagonists fit in, but they have a different role, or many different roles. Often they are gatekeepers. Sometimes they are challenges. Other times they are potential allies. Other times they’re simply obstacles, like the weather. They are a different kind of challenge for the hero than the villain, and I find they work better, most of the time, if there is a real villain lurking in the background as well.
Then again, I’m the writer who’s publishing a book where one of the main villains is the devil himself. And no, I don’t put anything from the villain’s POV as a rule. The story isn’t about them. They are an integral part of the story, but the story isn’t ABOUT them.
I like having villains, and I like antagonists, and I hate it when they’re treated as interchangeable!
You can convert an antagonist really easily, you have to put work into a villain being repentant, and it’s much more reasonable when an antagonist teams up with the hero.
Generally, a villain’s mind is going to be an unpleasant place to hang out– while an antagonist can have a point and not completely turn your hero’s world upside down. (But might make him more willing to give the villain credit he doesn’t deserve.)
I could easily imagine pre-Disney Thrawn teaming up with the heroes of Star Wars against a greater threat.
Could you imagine Palpatine teaming up with the heroes? They’d rightly believe he’d double cross them the first chance he got.
Exactly. In my books, Admiral Godfroy and General Prételat are opponents, Marshal Pétain is a villain.
I don’t know if this will help, but in the John Thunstone occult detective stories by Manly Wade Wellman, he has several scenes done from the POV of the main villain, Rowley Thorne. He can be best described as ‘Aleister Crowley, but with real magical powers and a murderer as well’. The way he’s described you can see a veneer of charm and class that could attract people who don’t know him, but beneath that he’s a self-serving con artist who despises almost everyone. The scenes with him as a viewpoint character always have him either planning to work evil on someone, or in the process of doing so. I like Thorne in the stories as a character, but I’d never want to know him in real life.
Sounds like a good role model to me.
I love those stories. Thorne’s POV showcases his arrogance, and by the end his plan has backfired, but he never seems to learn his lesson: he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.
Yes. Thorne is smart, but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. When I first saw Disney’s ‘The Princess and the Frog’ Facilier reminded me almost at once of Thorne. Both of them are clever, manipulative, and arrogant men who had the power to get anything and everything they wanted if they stayed honest — if you can work miracles on demand, it doesn’t matter who you are or what sort of a society you live in, people will meet your price — but both of them found more amusement in scamming and deceiving the ‘suckers’ to prove they were superior to everyone else.
Or as someone once put it about another man, “Given the choice between dealing honestly with you for a hundred dollars or cheating you for ten, he’ll cheat you. Because then he’s proved he’s smarter than you.”
I personally like to use antagonists that are misfired protagonists. Basically characters who could have been protagonists but for whatever reason turned the wrong way and became the bad guy instead.
Either they’ve drawn the wrong lesson and can’t let go, or they’ve become eaten up by envy or resentment, or in some other way they’ve turned bad.
Ironically, the one character I’ve done so far who was intended to be unrepentantly evil was also the one who did the hardest heel-face turn. Because they suddenly felt shame…
It can make a nice contrast if, for instance, a villain (or villains) are consumed with envy at other people’s happiness, and the hero keeps fighting the villainy in a way that enables other people’s happiness, and so faces the temptation.
Ironically, the most dangerous villain it’s the most evil: someone who wallows in depravity and evil would be too weak in mind, body and will to do that much damage (unless facilitated by a bureaucratic position or somehow put in charge of helpless children, but that’s another story).
No, the most dangerous villain is a largely virtuous man who is nonetheless twisted in a fundamental way.
C.S. Lewis made an interesting observation in Out of the Silent Planet: the ‘bent’ man can do much more damage than the ‘broken’ (completely depraved) man.
To paraphrase the passage (I don’t have it handy): “There are laws written on every heart – of fair dealing, love of kin, etc – and the Enemy has taken taken one of those virtues, set it up as a little god in your soul, and bade you sacrifice all the others to it.”
John C Wright put it another way: When a brave man becomes wicked, he’s a brave wicked man, and that’s worse than a wicked coward, because now you’ve got Darth Vader or the Witch King of Angmar.
I meant the most dangerous villain ISN’T the most evil!
Dang it I meant to say the most dangerous villain ISN’T the most evil.
I don’t really write my villains different than my “heroes,” though hero might be a strong word for any characters I write. Perspective changes everything. I’ve always had a fascination with trying to imagine out how I or others would be different in different circumstances, if we’d had different lives or made different choices.
I start with the assumption that any of my characters could turn out to be villains, and I sort of plan for that in my outlining and in their backstories/personalities. At the end of my epic fantasy debut, I have the MC sort of realizing that she’s part of the problem.
It’s easy for me to write like that because I can imagine myself as a villain with little effort. I can even see how I might be the villain in the story of a few others in my life. If I remove my own perspective of me from my view of how others might see me, it’s pretty clear I am. Those same people, in their way, are the villains of my story. I’d like to think I’d be the more relatable to readers, but who knows. More though, I can imagine myself having turned out very different if just a few things in my life had gone differently–I can easily imagine having become a person that I wouldn’t like at all.
As I write my characters sometimes go in the villainous direction, and sometimes not. I may plan for them to have their villain era starting in chapter ten, but then I get there and it just doesn’t feel right. Other times I have no set villain plans for a character until they’re already halfway there.
I’ve been having the urge to adapt this guy’s story as a villain ‘arc’ since I first watched his vid a couple days ago.
The first 12 minutes or so is also a good reminder of what real evil is, in case you ever start to fall for the romanticized version.
– I don’t really grasp the emotional drives (revenge for minor offenses, cruelty, the satisfaction of pointless destruction, indifference to the problems they cause) that make them active villains rather than accidental obstacles. –
It’s probably a moral failing of my own that I find these motives quite easy to grasp.
I also found the devil as portrayed in Faust to be very relatable.
Faust: Stay, Mephistophilis, and tell me,
What good will my soul do thy Lord?
Mephistophilis: Enlarge his Kingdom.
Faust: Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?
Mephistophilis: Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris.
“Misery loves company.” “Pull down everyone and make them as miserable as I am.” I understand that. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, and I’m often surprised that other people don’t.
There’s been no few times I see the confused faces of others and hear them ask: “Why would so-and-so do that?”
Why? Just to do it. Just to hurt you. And he’ll/she’ll do it again if you keep letting him/her.
I like giving my villains at least one worthy attribute, even if it’s just that he/she is competent at doing whatever it is they do.
Those are some of the best parts of the old pup serials, where Ming and his minions and Flash Gordon and his friends act and react to each other, move and countermove.
Doesn’t a villain need to be competent to count as a ‘villain’ and not just an annoyance?
Well it depends.
The villain can be a venal and incompetent bureaucrat and do a lot of damage.
Prince Regal, the villain from the Farseer books, is vain, incompetent and all-around contemptible, but because of his (unearned) position, he’s out of the hero’s reach and can do all kinds of damage.
That’s the kind of villain who’s the definition of ‘love to hate’ – you get a real thrill of rage whenever he’s around, and you dearly want to see him punished.
Well it depends.
The villain can be a venal and incompetent bureaucrat and do a lot of damage.
Prince Regal, the villain from the Farseer books, is vain, incompetent and all-around contemptible, but because of his (unearned) position, he’s out of the hero’s reach and can do all kinds of damage.
That’s the kind of villain who’s the definition of ‘love to hate’ – you get a real thrill of rage whenever he’s around, and you dearly want to see him punished.
If your villain needs an ‘arc,’ and the arc doesn’t end in redemption, then I like it when he becomes more powerful or more of a threat while degrading morally.
My favorite example may be Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, because he ‘progresses’ just like the player character.
When you first meet him, he’s bottom-tier just like you. There’s no indication that THIS is going to be the main villain of the game. In your first fight you beat him easily, and your party is nothing at this point in the game.
There are a couple more encounters, but in your next fight you’ve leveled up, and Kefka’s actually become a challenging boss fight, because while you’ve leveled up, he’s infused himself with more magitek which increases his power while dissolving his sanity.
Then you infiltrate the enemy base and you see Kefka take on two espers (fairy/magical creatures who the bad guys capture and extract magic from) and kicks them around like they’re nothing. You go in and have to fight these same two espers a little later and they can easily kill you if you’re not prepared, and so on.
Ive been struggling with the dilemma of villains for some time now ie how I view them and what I want for my own story. I have hit a wall with my WIP because I dont have a defined sense of the villain in my story and sometimes I argue with myself about “do I really need one?” I mean, we went through quite a bit in the Harry Potter books before ever actually SEEING who Voldemort really looked like or how he was encapsulated in his own “quest story” and I think I rather prefer that myself. But how do I emulate that when my vision for my own story is so different? I like exploring the different kinds of villains but I am finding it takes a lot more thought work than a hero simply because, for me, (like Sarah), Im not all that keen to spend that much time with him.
Thank you for this…it comes at a really good time for me…