More Believable Antagonists

Im a new author on the site. My story is The Wallflower, so far i personally like my characters' development except my antagonists. I think they are to the point that they are non believable and just outright annoying instead of being truly bitter and/ or arrogant people. My strategy right now is to take certain personalities from previous bullies, arrogant people, and hypocritical people. But for some reason I feel like those characters do not fully reflect these kind of people. I feel like its easy to become the good or neutral people, but its hard to become the antagonist. Could someone please give me some advice.

I'm on the run and haven't read your story, but some generic advice is to give them motivations. A man hates another man who stole his girl. A boy is angry because the girl of his dreams pays no attention to him. Betty once dissed June, who's hated her ever since. If you want them rounded and not flat, go all out and give them histories.

Agree with Serafina. Give the antagonist plausibility for action--if only as can be seen from the antagonist's perspective. Keep the antagonist from being a cartoon character--provide some human characteristics.

The secret to realistic antagonists is to model them after all the nice people you know. Nice is always evil, or at least a bastard.

JAMESBJOHNSON said:

The secret to realistic antagonists is to model them after all the nice people you know. Nice is always evil, or at least a bastard.

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Great idea!

Yeah that's not too far off the mark.

One thing to keep in mind about an antagonist, evil person, or villain, is that it's always in the eye of the beholder. Often times, "villains" do not think they are villains. To them, their cause is justified, and they see themselves as the hero or protagonist.

This falls with what others have said about "give them history".

Also:

The Han Solo Test:

As Harrison Ford said to George Lucas;

''You can write this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it'' (or something to that point).

Say key bits of interaction out loud. I find this helps me root out dumb lines. And helps me turn them into more 'acceptable' ones.

Cheers!

SecondCircle said:

Yeah that's not too far off the mark.

One thing to keep in mind about an antagonist, evil person, or villain, is that it's always in the eye of the beholder. Often times, "villains" do not think they are villains. To them, their cause is justified, and they see themselves as the hero or protagonist.

This falls with what others have said about "give them history".

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Quote I've seen around, attributed to various people: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle you know nothing about". As part of that "give them history", ask - what are they afraid of? The answer shouldn't just be "being killed by the hero".

Serafina's advice is good. A good friend of mine used to say "Hurt people hurt people." Even you comic book antiheroes all have histories of pain and abuse. What your characters need is depth, depth of character. longer stories, longer histories, less superficial, more real. Always remember ne's stories should almost never be true, but must always be true to life.

I wouldn't suggest going into exhaustive depth on the antagonist unless the character is really the protagonist. You should be able to deliver the crux of the character without reliving his appendectomy. Just make every word count.

BlessingAndCurse said:

I think they are to the point that they are non believable and just outright annoying instead of being truly bitter and/ or arrogant people. My strategy right now is to take certain personalities from previous bullies, arrogant people, and hypocritical people. But for some reason I feel like those characters do not fully reflect these kind of people.

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Using real people you've met as a jumping point for your characters is a great idea. It doesn't get more real than real.

Your fundamental question, though - what makes for a good antagonist - is very involved. There are chapters and chapters of books devoted to the subject. Let me see if I can think of a few good points.

(1) Make it personal. An antagonist that poses some sort of generic threat hovering in the background of the story isn't very interesting. Have the antagonist come up and do something personally, something that affects the protagonist or someone the protagonist knows directly.

I think a great example of this is Harry Potter.

First, think of Voldemort - he's scary, fearsome, definitely. Most of the story, though, he's off-screen - doing despicable things, yes, but not directly hurting the major characters that we care about. So, while arranging prison breaks and murdering strangers is certainly evil, it doesn't have a direct impact on what the reader is invested in.

Now think of Dolores Umbridge. She's tyrannical, ruling Hogwarts by iron-fisted decree. Hogwarts is the sanctuary of the series, Harry's home, and she's stormed in and infected it with her presence. She's bigoted against other magical races. She tortures Harry in detention, forcing him to carve skin off his own hand over and over. So, people recognize Voldemort as the major villain, but everyone HATES Umbridge with an intense, fiery passion. That's the difference between a villain that makes it personal and one that represents a greater but vaguer threat.

Another good example is in the Lord of the Rings. Sauron is evil and terrible - but he's also just a giant eyeball floating in a tower hundreds of miles away. What we really hate is the Ring. The Ring is corrupting Frodo, hurting Frodo before our very eyes. It's turning his friends against him. The Ring is despicable on a visceral level because it negatively impacts characters that the audience is invested in.

I got both those examples from this article:

http://www.springhole.net/writing/write_better_villains.htm

(2) Antagonists don't always lose. If they pose a big threat, they should be capable of scoring victories over the protagonists.

You see crappy dummy villains all the time - they're rife in fanfiction. These are antagonists that are hardly antagonists at all; they're flat targets that get set up so the protagonist can shoot them down with ease and look like a badass. Now, given the immediate gratification of self-insert smut, you can get away with it a lot more without people complaining, but from a narrative standpoint, it's horribly boring.

Remember, all stories are a series of conflicts, both internal and external. If Harry walked in and blasted Voldemort away on his first try, the story would lose all its tension and collapse.

At the end of the 4th book, for example, Harry is able to just barely fend off Voldemort and escape by the skin of his teeth. Ultimately, the result of that battle is a dead Cedric Diggory and a Voldemort restored to his full strength. Harry survives the encounter, but it was definitely a major loss for the forces of good, and sets up the continuing conflict for the remainder of the series. Antagonists may or may not win the war, but they should be able to win some battles, or they lose credibility as a threat.

(3) Antagonists need a good motivation. This motive is the driving force of a huge portion of the story. Usually, the villain acts, and the hero reacts, so the villain's plans and goals set the stage for the major conflicts and the narrative as a whole. The villain must be able to bear this weight.

No villain is pure evil. Many are driven by revenge; others by jealousy, or hatred, or a lust for power. Whatever the case may be, the villain is in it for a specific reason, and if what they're doing in your story isn't moving them closer to their goal, you need to reconsider what you're writing. Yes, you can make your antagonist an obvious jerk by showing him hurting a small animal, or bullying some innocent person, but this doesn't have the same impact as a personal attack on the protagonist.

Consider the Joker from the Batman series. He's especially chaotic, and constantly endangering random innocent people. But even this has a purpose - the Joker, in his madness, tries to bring people down to his level. He's trying to intentionally antagonize Batman, goad him into killing him so as to stain his self-righteous principles. So while he does go after bystanders, he does so with his greater goal in mind.

A good antagonist has their eye on the ball. They may not even consider the protagonist as an obstacle to begin with. Maybe the antagonist's goals affect the protagonist's loved ones or livelihood; maybe the protagonist just finds what the antagonist is doing to be morally objectionable. A good antagonist only focuses on the hero when the hero has made themselves the chief obstacle between the antagonist and his goal. It might happen that the protagonist themselves is the target of the antagonist's ire - that's fine, but just make sure there's a reason for it.

(4) Antagonists break the rules. This might seem obvious, but it's worth the discussion.

A great antagonist has unshackled themselves. They have prioritized their goals above commonly held ideas of morality. A major difference between a protagonist and antagonist is that the protagonist adheres to greater principles; this is why we find them admirable. They struggle to achieve success while working within the confines of self-imposed moral standards.

The antagonist, on the other hand, is not so particular about morals. How particular? That depends.

Say you have a mercenary sort - he'll do some nasty things if it means he'll get well paid, but he's not about to attempt a suicide mission. Unless killing people is the easiest path, he'll probably try to find alternative routes, if only to save ammunition. Killing is messy, after all, and he's there for the money, not mass homicide. Sure, he'll pop a few bastards if he has to, but he's not on a mission specifically to kill people. If things get too out of hand, he'll retreat and try again later rather than get himself killed.

Look back at the Joker. Hell, the Joker would actually go out of his way to make the situation as horrible as possible. The Joker doesn't care about money; he's obsessed with his ongoing conflict with Batman. To him, human lives are candies he uses to lure Batman into his traps.

So, different types of villains break the rules in different ways. Assuming you're trying to be realistic, avoid cliches. A real antagonist wouldn't give James Bond a chance to escape some ridiculous deathtrap - he'd just shoot him. A serious antagonist always brings a gun to a knife fight. A conniving antagonist brings a gun, and has a spare hidden up his sleeve, and has snipers posted on the rooftop nearby. An impatient, angry sort of antagonist comes in with a rocket launcher and blows the meeting place up.

This is important because, like protagonists, antagonists also must be kept in character. A brutally effective hitman might not care about taking lives, but if he draws the line at children, then the readers will be confused if he takes part in setting an orphanage on fire. Evil for evil's sake does not an antagonist make.

(5) Antagonists can and should change and develop just like the protagonists.

Let's go back to the mercenary example. That sort of character could develop in one of several ways. Perhaps the protagonist is able to win them over from the antagonist's side. Perhaps the mercenary's family is killed in the conflict, and he loses himself in revenge, burning away what morality he had left. The rules the characters play by - and what rules they're willing to bend and break - will change as they do.

Now, there is such a thing as a static character. The antagonist that doesn't have to develop - but eventually, an antagonist has to either achieve his goals, fail to achieve them, either because they were stopped or they gave up. And what then? It's a question you need to be prepared to answer.

If you ignore bringing the antagonist's arc to its conclusion, they become flat and stagnate in the story for no reason. This leads to villain-of-the-week syndrome, in which the antagonist shows up to thwart and annoy the protagonists for no real reason other than that he's been the antagonist and this is the Power Rangers.

Many TV series bring back villains for season after season, very successfully - but in a different capacity. Perhaps, in season 1, the hero stopped the villain's plans, but the villain escaped to fight another day. Later, the villain teams up with the hero in order to take down an even nastier foe that the former villain holds a grudge against.

In any case, villains are dynamic individuals with goals and ideas and personality, not just hurdles for the protagonist to jump over.

SO! There's some basic stuff off the top of my head. There is still plenty more to say, but that's all I feel like typing for the moment. Good luck with your story!

Thanks

Thanks everyone. All of your advice was awesome and ones ive never considered.I'll look over my antagonists and add on to them.