Your Anti-character

[yowser]

Many of us have written protagonists quite different from ourselves, as certainly one of the benefits of writing is exploring other mindsets, inhabiting, however briefly and vicariously, alternate ways of thought.

How far have you gotten? Do you have an anti-character, capable of doing or thinking things you almost cannot imagine? Someone strange to you, not just in one dimension (physically, intellectually, emotionally) but substantially different? What sorts of challenges did you experience, and what did you learn?

 

[Omenainen]

Approximately quarter of a square meter around my navel, which is to say not very far at all. All my characters are me.

 

[KeithD]

My most frequently used anti-character is Hardesty, a Washington, D.C., Vice cop, who is captive of gay male BDSM-level vice that he's charged with controlling and protecting (the system having given up on eliminating). He makes it work by being highly desirable for what he will give and for keeping it controlled and protecting the rent-boys he's engaged with. He's completely without scruples in sexual relations and obviously is a big part of the overall problem, except that the premise of his stories is that the world created normalizing the active gay lifestyle means that, for the story, he's not much of a problem. Those he covers are more than satisfied. Crimewise, he tracks the issue down and gets it stopped. My current story here, "Political Abuse," is the fourth of nine Hardesty mysteries, with the first four posted to Lit. They continue. Number 8 is at the publishers and I'm currently writing Number 9.

 

[MrPixel]

My anti-character, an arrogant handsome jerk, was written out of the story in the most recent installment. However, he was not killed off, just relocated out of town. The ladies' interest in him was in certain physical attributes, and he was in a non-serious relationship with the leading lady for a while. He treated one of the other leading ladies poorly in front of everybody and was asked to leave. They were actually a little relieved to have washed their hands of him; on rare occasion he was fun to have around but wasn't worth the angst in the long run.

Haven't decided if he'll ever be back beyond one of the core cast running into him at some random location. I've been moving the tension elements in another direction.

 

[SimonDoom]

Sonny Biggs would qualify--the tough-guy detective narrator of BTB, Incorporated.

 

[tenyari]

Even though what I write is basically genre fiction: SciFi, Fantasy, Super heroes, etc... and maybe even because of this, all of my protagonists and quite a few of my antagonists have strong elements drawn from myself - regardless of their gender, sexuality, and level of heroism or villainy.

Minor side characters sometimes don't - and I find I have to really sit down with these characters and work to make them have depth. Give them a few passes to remove stereotypes. This in fact is how some antagonists end up having elements of me in them.

I'll start with a "villain" who just seems to be there to do all sorts of harm to my protagonist and others, and then when I start asking why... I have to give them depth that makes sense. Sort of "how does someone go so wrong like this", and then I end up writing a version of "what would it have taken for me to end up being like this," or "what could cause someone to have this worldview" - a statement which is always going to be flooded by one's own biases no matter how hard you work to avoid that...

 

[lovecraft68]

I have a lot of that type, basically they embody everything I don't like in a person, and to date every one of them is male. I have written a couple of females who are less than desirable in some ways, but don't fall into the loathsome category.

I write them well because I'm the type who believe in know they enemy, plus I was raised around a lot of that type so I know how they'll react, the shitty things they do, say etc...

Can't sniff out the scum if you don't have a nose for their distinct sour effluvium.

 

[yowser]

Approximately quarter of a square meter around my navel, which is to say not very far at all. All my characters are me.

Arresting imagery there, O.

 

[SamScribble]

Stanley, the 'heavy for hire' in 'Vanessa: Architect of My Destiny' ( https://www.literotica.com/s/vanessa-architect-of-my-destiny ), is definitely not me. But I did once know someone like him. And we got on surprisingly well. I just tried not to think too much about how he 'got results'.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't have one. I don't write that dark that I need an anti-character - although it's an interesting concept.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Yeah, I have written the "anti-me", a racist, rich, entitled fuckface of a stock broker. He's one of the murder victims in last year's Geek Pride Day story "Rotten To The Core" and I actually relished writing his demise.

The biggest challenge was making him as unlikable as possible without ending up in the cartoon villain playground. Didn't get any complaints in that regard so yay me?

 

[Duleigh]

Wareharun, she's a self-made goddess who can take the shape of a dragon or a sprite, although her real physical shape is a forest. She's completely unreliable, angry, destructive, and will only listen to one human and one elf... and she doesn't understand why nobody likes her.

 

[yowser]

Interesting offerings. The question came to mind when I ran through my catalog, trying to see how far I had stretched my wings in character development. The only MC who could come close to 180 degrees away doesn’t really count (Non-Human category, a cunning but unreflective forest demon) and while a few of my protagonists are maybe 90 degrees off-center, most stay within a tighter range.

It is curious that no one’s Anti-Character is a 19 year old, pacifist, virgin male with a high empathy quotient. Most of us have our Anti-Characters in a much different quadrant.

 

[Duleigh]

Interesting offerings. The question came to mind when I ran through my catalog, trying to see how far I had stretched my wings in character development. The only MC who could come close to 180 degrees away doesn’t really count (Non-Human category, a cunning but unreflective forest demon) and while a few of my protagonists are maybe 90 degrees off-center, most stay within a tighter range.

It is curious that no one’s Anti-Character is a 19 year old, pacifist, virgin male with a high empathy quotient. Most of us have our Anti-Characters in a much different quadrant.

Don't get me started!

Actually I don't write about much anti-anything. I spent my life preparing in the most violent ways to defend my fellows against whomever wanted to end their lives and way of lives. The 19 year old, pacifist, virgin male with a high empathy quotient couldn't be bothered to put down his PS controller, emerge from his parent's basement and stand next to me is his right, but that will never make him a pro-anything or even appear in one of my stories. (IMHO)

To me writing is cathartic, a celebration, a way of healing. It took me nearly 10 years in the civilian world to learn that if I mess up something at work no one is going to die, so my stories are going to be happy with a lot of healing. Even my antagonist Wareharun is going to heal.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I don't think I've really got any anti-characters - there's aspects of me in all of them, even the Witness, an immortal being who feeds on thoughts and has a passion for London architecture and un-overlooked niches and alleyways.

Probably my only opposite is in the few paragraphs about Molly, a college pastoral tutor who doesn't have a clue about scientists, but I just nicked her from a real person, so all I learnt is that I'm still pissed off with her 25 years later...

Actually there's also Alex (in the 750-word Denying Alex), an entitled rapist arsewipe of a man. Same applies.

It's an interesting question, though. I have two characters who are each quite similar to me, imagine 90 degrees in different directions. If they were combined, you'd get either me or someone rather different. What would that woman be like?

 

[shakna]

Are any of my characters that close to myself?

Ah well. For the purposes of this, the incredibly flighty catgirl with a passion for having fun and never looking back, Bubbles, probably qualifies. Thinking things through is not something she does. The world is big and wide and there to have fun with. Someone more cautious like myself would be an absolute drag, and she wouldn't have the time of day for.

At the other end of things you have the overthinking Lorelai, who is too young to really grasp that she's going through the transition to adulthood in a real rough and ready way. She thinks about everything to the point where she's nearly lost the romance with the light of her life because she thought that they needed space. Lor is artistic, but precise. Forgiving, but ruthless.

I am none of any of these things.

 

[Agiel]

I’ve written characters who are completely different to me.

I’ve written characters, naturally a hero, who’ve been what I’d like to be but I’ve never written someone the opposite of me although I have written despicable villains.

 

[LdyHoneybee]

No i do not write about myself. But i think all writers write from themselves. It takes a real master to write about something that is totally foreign, the kind who comes along once in a century. Shakespeare was one, i believe. His understanding of human nature made it possible for him to create many characters who, by their diversity, were evidently nothing like him. If he HAD all the problems he wrote about, he would have been an extremely disturbed human being, one more than likely incapable of writing every play he ever wrote in blank verse!

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't have one. I don't write that dark that I need an anti-character - although it's an interesting concept.

Thinking about this some more, the closest I've got to a character not being essentially me (fantasy me or historical me) was Dan in last year's Mickey Spillane piece. I deliberated subverted the traditional noir tough guy dude by making him bi-sexual, mainly to see what the reader reaction would be.

As a piece of narcissistic self-indulgence, I also wrote his bisexual partner in one of the main sex sequences as the university aged me, around the time a Dutch gay guy tried to pick me up in the uni bookshop, where he saw me buying that year's English poetry texts. As you do. He didn't get anywhere, but he introduced me to Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, for which I am eternally grateful.

The rest of the noir story sex was straight male female. Simon got a cameo as the cop, at the end of the story.

 

[PennameWombat]

My closest to this brief would be Janet and Fred Washington, a husband/wife couple of utterly amoral but extremely intelligent murderers. Helped by the fact they’re not exactly human. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they arrived and took over young, fit, beautiful human bodies. He burned a young couple and their baby to death, and killed a few others, on his way to acquiring a large sum of money. She made love to men and women and just after climax sucked their life essences out for sustenance. She doesn’t generally kill them, but leaves them brain dead, but she gets most of their memories and many of their skills. They eventually became talent agents in Hollywood and took advantage of the more desperate wanna-bes they’d find to feed on. As they viewed it, kids who failed (and even some who didn’t fail) to make it in show business disappeared via drugs and crime regularly anyway, so, why not…

Their children were supposed to be like them, but, something went wrong and the children ended up essentially just human. Once they became teens and learned what their parents were doing, they sabotaged a hot tub and electrocuted them. It killed the human bodies and diminished but didn’t kill the aliens… So…

The children are central characters in my You Promised Me Geeks series, and appear in various other stories set in Mel’s Universe. Like her mother, the daughter, Asha, needs to occasionally ‘feed’ by absorbing life essence from (she prefers) virgins, but unlike her mother she tries to avoid damaging them…

The parents’ origin story was City of Angels and an appearance in Predators.

I also have Jed Miller’s criminal gang, my Black Robe Sex & Murder Cult and the White-Hair terrorists, led by Patrick and Brigid, who murdered tourists at Stonehenge. And the Mongrel biker gang. Oh… and Brittany and Iris and the other mutineers on the alien’s (not the body-stealing aliens, different aliens) satellite.

 

[Otto26]

Many of us have written protagonists quite different from ourselves, as certainly one of the benefits of writing is exploring other mindsets, inhabiting, however briefly and vicariously, alternate ways of thought.

How far have you gotten? Do you have an anti-character, capable of doing or thinking things you almost cannot imagine? Someone strange to you, not just in one dimension (physically, intellectually, emotionally) but substantially different? What sorts of challenges did you experience, and what did you learn?

I cannot write decent villains. A good old self-centered, selfish villain simply eludes me. I can do the villainous extras who are little more than two dimensional stereotypes brought to life by a sentence or two and, usually, vanguished with about the same amount of effort. But writing a villain with any sort of depth, with any sort of motivation, just seems beyond me. Morals and limits sneak in and my villains become, at best, obstacles.

 

[MillieDynamite]

My favorite bad girl MC is from, The Case of the Richman's Wife. Being a PI, Theodora exists in a world of varying shades of gray. In one scene in the novella, she kills a man she believes beat his wife to death. There is a slight possibility it is out-and-out murder. Well, in truth, there is a minimal chance it wasn't murder. Also, believing she's been hired to find the wife so the husband can hurt or kill her, she predetermined not to turn the woman over to the client.

 

[Voboy]

I try hard NOT to write myself, mostly because I spend a lot of time with myself and don't want to read sex stories about a guy like me. So I don't tend to write sex stories about a guy like me.

By now, I've got enough practice writing characters that I don't spend a lot of time or effort consciously trying to make them either like me or not like me. But my friends who know I write will occasionally tell me they see bits of me in some of my characters, and that's fine.

TL;DR: they're almost all anti-characters.

 

[RetroFan]

Because I write Incest/Taboo, Loving Wives and Fetish stories that are heavily voyeuristic, I have characters engage in questionable behaviour in lots of my stories, but a lot of them are not bad people. For example Ian the narrator of my story 'Banging Cousin Becky In Blackpool' as the title suggests lusts after his cousin Becky but Ian isn't a bad guy, at worst he is misguided.

Some of my characters are definitely bad people though. Of my first person characters Jeff from my Loving Wives story 'Cheating on a Cheating Wife' is a subservient, cuckolded but very creepy husband. He secretly stalks his wife to watch her with her younger lover, and puts up with her abuse because he likes perving on the 18-year-old girl next door, hiding in his study watching her in her bedroom, noting from light patterns in the house when she goes to the toilet or takes a shower, and watches her hanging out her bras and panties on the line to dry. He also listens into the young girl's conversations with her friends on her phone so he knows where she is going and can set up 'chance meetings', is friends with her two gay fathers so he can get closer to her and on one occasion when it is her time of the month goes through their bin so he can extricate her used feminine hygiene products. The Loving Wives crowd of course absolutely loved this story, heaping fawning praise upon it in the comments, nominating it for reader's awards and giving it high scores. Jokes aside though, a word of caution about Jeff is that he he is so fucked up in the head that may not be a reliable narrator. Or maybe he is?

My worst female first person character would be Harriet, a rich English girl from 'Spoiled Heiress Gets Kidnapped', a spoiled rotten brat with definite sociopathic tendencies.

Of my third person characters, some are absolutely reprehensible people. Lorraine, the wife in 'Grumpy Humphrey's Easy Wife' is a nasty floozy who has affairs all over town, and makes 'Ruby', the titular character of the song by the late Kenny Rogers seem like a great and supportive spouse. Breanna, the obnoxious, abrasive and violent lead character from 'Trailer Trash Teen Hates Rules' has gained infamy on the site with her antics, which include (but are not limited to) using the toilet with the door wide open to shock and offend people, throwing her used sanitary pads on the bathroom floor, playing sociopathic practical jokes on people for her own amusement, getting into physical fights, stealing anything she can get her hands on and having sex with a variety of people.

Worst of all though would have to be Cornelius and his authoritarian father Alistair from 'Crazy Cornelius and the Magic Pills', an Erotic Horror story series I wrote last year. Being such bad people doesn't make Alistair and Cornelius close, in fact the opposite is true. The son hates the father, and the father hates the son. Alistair is a mean-spirited, rage filled, homophobic and racist bigot, who is an abusive husband and father - verbally and emotionally with his wife, daughter and the daughter's boyfriend and worse with his sons, with whom his is also physically abusive. Cornelius, who is married to a sluttish and trouble-making wife Danielle (also a bad person and also hated by Alistair) is an unemployed, mooching, parasitic sociopath whose life's work is to make an absolute nuisance of himself and drive his father insane with his antics. While Cornelius's bad behaviour could fill a psychology textbook, it is an incident in chapter 2 that shows what a sick, fucked up person he really is. Carrying on a running war with a grumpy elderly neighbour, Cornelius hides in the bushes at the man's house before leaping out when he returns, throwing chocolate flavoured milk all over him and playing a cassette tape of vicious dogs barking at him as a practical joke. When the man collapses to the ground with a heart attack, Cornelius does not attempt first aid or call an ambulance, but stands over him laughing at the funny faces the man makes and that he wets himself when dying. Cornelius then drags the man's body behind the bushes, takes his wallet and steals all his money, before pissing all over the body and leaving him lying dead in the garden, Cornelius then taking the cash to a drug house and buying drugs from a dealer.