The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 3: Antagonists

Everybody loves a good asshole to justifiably kick. Antagonists fill this space wonderfully as the main instigators of conflict and are directly opposed to the protagonist, though...not necessarily evil. Evil itself is already a very wonky thing that takes on different meanings depending on the person, culture, time period, the alignment of the stars, and most importantly, perspective. But of course, you can still have evil antagonists who are undeniably cruel and horrible no matter who you ask. Your Maleficents, your Saurons, your Jokers. The whole shebang. These are villains, who I distinguish as a subset of antagonists and cannot be used interchangeably. 

So what makes a good antagonist? Uh...great question. This is a really big can o' literary worms to unpack, and it's close to impossible to cover this entire question with a wholly satisfactory answer. But to start, I'd say that the most important thing about them is that they create tension. That's their most important job, this should be top priority if you want to build a great antagonist. Their actions should directly affect the protagonists, and they should win sometimes. There's a reason why the three-act structure is a thing, because it builds tension to a climax and then releases it. It's so common that it's nearly universal, and the reason why it's universal is because it works. If the antagonist means anything to the protagonist, they should be a legitimate threat and not a punching bag. The question after that is what made them a legitimate threat? Why do the protagonists and the antagonist want to kill each other so badly? How are their stories intertwined?

Antagonists represent a physical conflict involving the protagonist no matter what, but this is at the very barest level. From this basic level of physical conflict, such as, I don't know—"Oh, the evil villain killed my parents! I require REVENGE!" or whatever, you can then evolve this main conflict to represent the protagonist's flaws, fears, arc, etc. so that the antagonist's rise and fall tie into the protagonist's personal growth. Otherwise the overarching plot feels separate from the protagonist and doesn't spur them to fix their personal problems, and is broken from each other. These two things—tension and connection to the protagonist's growth and personal arc—I name these as the most critical things to a great antagonist. Everything else is up for grabs, and the specifics can be pointed in whatever direction you want and they can still be great.

But I will touch on those specifics, because these define the antagonist's character as opposed to the protagonist and there are wrong ways to write those. Remember how I said that villains are a separate category of antagonist? They are (as I define them) universally agreeably evil antagonists, and you don't write those the same as morally gray antagonists. You'd think this would be as obvious as it seems to be on the tin, but even Disney can't seem to figure this out in recent years. Let's talk about that.

Disney Evil is a specific term that describes unredeemable monsters such as Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Scar, what have you, and people crap on this kind of evil the most. "Oh, it's so unrealistic, you need complexity and morality and—" No. No you don't. Remember—the only requirements an antagonist needs to be great is to cause tension and to be linked to the protagonist's arc and conflict. That's it, and this is what these guys do best. They don't waste time contemplating the morality of dangling people off of cliffs, they just get evil shit done and they have fun doing it. If they did waste time with that kind of complexity, that detracts from their villainy. This isn't just limited to Disney villainy either, which targets a specific audience of children who would particularly find that kind of complexity distracting. In adult media, one of my favorite villains ever is the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from Dune. He's more fun to watch than the protagonists sometimes and he's disgusting. He just gets shit done. That's all we're here for.

But that doesn't mean that villains can't be more than what they appear as on first glance. What?! Isn't that contradictory to what you just said about complexity being bad for villains, Phyre? No, it's not. What I mean is depth. Depth is not the same as complexity, and it's part of the reason why I mentioned Baron Harkonnen. To my knowledge (I haven't finished Dune yet and I refuse to look at spoilers) he has no backstory, nothing to muddle his villainy or justify it. How Baron Harkonnen makes up for it is in the depth of his thought processes and actions. He does have a stated goal: put a Harkonnen heir onto the imperial throne as Emperor (which, tying into my first point about linking the antag and protag, is actually the same goal as protagonist Paul Atreides) and he intentionally manipulates his family and subjects around this ultimate goal. Very simple, but how the Baron plans to reach this is extremely in-depth. 

Old Disney used to understand this but in recent years seems to...not. I've specifically mentioned Scar and Cruella de Vil for a reason to contrast how their backstories have been presented by Disney, especially since these are both supposed to be classic evil characters. I know that Scar doesn't have a stated backstory, but, hear me out, his is still handled a lot better than Cruella. If you pay attention to a few of his lines in The Lion King, Scar actually implies that he was neglected or at the very least ignored by the royal family while Mufasa was placed on such a high pedestral, and the point at which he had had enough was when Mufasa's son Simba was born, and even Simba was more important than Scar. Note that this doesn't attempt to justify his actions and only explains how he got to the point of villainy; Scar still works as a villain without this context and Disney doesn't go out of its way to make it more complex. It's only a couple of Scar's lines that you can use to extrapolate this. 

This was 1994 Disney. This is something that modern Disney doesn't seem to understand or is intentionally moving away from characters like this. I think it's a mix of both. They're trying to create more complex antagonists and experiment with gray morality (which is fine) but they're also trying to shove it down the throats of villains who were never designed with that in mind and also have no idea why it would even matter, because it doesn't. This is what they tried to do with Cruella, who is even more pointlessly cruel than Scar. I kid you not, in her origin movie her mother is killed by Dalmatians. I kid you not. This isn't trying to explain how Cruella became a villain, it's trying to justify it by making stupid shit up. Don't do that. I haven't actually seen Cruella but I don't think her character benefits from it. She doesn't need a movie about her teenage crime spree that would say anything meaningful about her adult incarnation. Complexity is always less important than depth when you create an villain.

But I've been talking a lot about villains. What about morally gray antagonists? Because you can still write these, and they can still work. You can set them up for redemption, or they can be tragic characters who are never redeemed. This is a harder antagonist to write because now you do have to justify murder/theft/whatever the hell they're up to, and this is where you can make them complex without appearing desperate. If you're trying to make your antagonist their own good guy, you're gearing your audience to hold them to a higher moral standard, and their actions must be justified for their moral grayness to be convincing. This lends itself to complexity. I know I've been bashing complexity for a while because it's famously unnecessary in many villains, but it's a case-specific trait.

Can you write complexity without depth just as you can write depth without complexity? ...I don't think so. Complex, traumatic, life-defining events force people to adapt and reevaluate their position in the universe and these are probably required if you're creating a morally gray antagonist. I think the only way you can do this is if you make the character painfully stupid, and antagonists as a rule can't be stupid otherwise they don't represent a threat. 

So how do you write good complexity? Well, in this case, the depth that I've talked about earlier is directly linked to specific complexities in a character's backstories. Let's talk about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zuko is driven by shame disguised as honor by his father, he's driven by a vicious rivalry with his sister, and he's struggling to find his identity as he's split between his mother and his father's ideals. This is some heavy stuff to deal with, but the reason why it's here is so that the show can set up for a redemption arc later but also defines how Zuko acts before he reaches that redemption. Zuko talks constantly about honor because that's what his father has forced him to prioritize in his mind, by claiming that Zuko had dishonored him and forced him to exile Zuko. And Zuko legitimately isn't as terrible of a person as the other villains. This is complexity done right because it's applied to an in-depth character who undergoes a lot of change throughout the story.

Meanwhile Azula is an example of complexity that doesn't result in a redemption arc, and instead a downfall. Azula is Zuko's sister and was considered the golden child. She exemplified her father's ideals of being ruthless, exerted aggression and domination over all others, while Zuko attempted to explore moral complexity to his own detriment in his father's eyes. So when Azula's worldview cracks towards the end of the series, she also cracks, and this represents a downfall arc that lends itself to complexity. There's a lot more to both of these characters—Hello Future Me has two whole videos on Azula and Zuko's psychology that are over an hour long just based on what we can extrapolate from their behaviors. It's hard to do this without complexity. These two were very well thought out.

So that's villains and antagonists. Remember—their most important job is to drive conflict and connect to the protagonist's arc in some way. In villains, you should prioritize depth over complexity, but in morally gray antagonists, you're going to need both.