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(I’m going to try and articulate my question clearly. No promises. 🙂 )
I am struggling with creating a believable antagonist who is a terrible person, but not too terrible. In my mind, a good antagonist is one who has a clear soft spot (something like cruelty to other humans but kind to animals), yet his/her bad actions are also clearly visible.
Well, I always like to seek out the best in people (real people) instead of focusing on their flaws, so creating an antagonist without too many soft spots is proving much harder than I anticipated.
So here’s my question: what tells you that a character is a bad guy? ( in fiction) What type of negative character traits raise red flags in your mind?
I’m going to share a quote from a book that really helped me with my villain.
“I find vanity repellent. As a person I loathe it, and as a policeman I distrust it.”
“It’s a harmless sort of weakness,” Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.
“That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, ‘I must have this because I am me.’ It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn’t understand what you are talking about. He would rather kill a person than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six months’ stretch.”
“But that’s being insane.”
“Not according to Vanity’s reckoning. And certainly not in the medical sense. It is merely Vanity being logical. It is, as I said, a frightening trait, and the basis of all criminal personality. Criminals- true criminals, as opposed to the little man who cooks the accounts in an emergency or the man who kills his wife when he finds her with a stranger- true criminals vary in looks and tastes and intelligence and method as widely as the rest of the world does, but they have one invariable characteristic: their pathological vanity.”
I had a huge “aha” moment after reading that. 😛 Hope it helps you as much as it did me!
Oh my, what a deep question! We could spend years dissecting this one thing, but I’ll spare you the ordeal of everything I could find to say on this subject. 😛
A few things that raise red flags in my mind are as follows:
1. Does the person disregard the taking of life as a necessary part of living? Even hardened warriors do not slay for pleasure, and they would have to have hardened themselves almost into deadness if it doesn’t bother them that they’ve killed so many people. This is the one thing that will tip me off right away that the guy I’m dealing with is not a good guy.
2. If the MC is very obviously the good guy, then the antagonist is going to have to seem unreasonable in some instances, because if the MC is the good guy and is doing the smart thing for the right reasons, and the antagonist is… well, antagonizing him, it follows in implication that the antagonist is not doing the smart thing. He’ll think he is, but the reader can tell he isn’t. Does that make any sense?
Like say we have two lovers who want to get married, but the father of the daughter doesn’t approve of the man his daughter loves. Assuming the man the daughter loves is the MC, he’s probably a pretty good guy with nothing the father could seriously object to. Yet the father objects anyway. This doesn’t mean that the father is dumb— far from it! Usually it just means he’s selfishly blind, mistaken, or too proud for his own good.3. One other thing that would set me off would be the way the guy treats children. Does he hate them? Does he push them away as nuisances? Does he openly despise them? Then it’s a pretty good bet he’s got some issues.
But a lot of the stuff I just said could be applied equally to a villain, and is not specifically for an antagonist. So what sets the antagonist and the villain apart? Glad you asked.
Remember, Ivy, that just because a character is an antagonist to the protagonist doesn’t mean that the antagonist has to be bad. It doesn’t mean he has to be stupid or conceited. It doesn’t even mean he has to be vain! (Good quote, by the way, @writefury— where’d you find that?) There are millions of perfectly wonderful people in the world who absolutely cannot stand each others company. It may be only an annoying habit that the other has, it may be some conflict of doctrine or ideals, it may be a racial or regional or personal prejudice that one or the other holds subconsciously, or it may only be as simple a thing as an unreasonable ‘I don’t like that person so I don’t like him’.So ‘antagonist’ doesn’t have to be synonymous with ‘demi-villain’. Remember that.
I hope that was helpful.
Good stuff, @kate-flournoy! 1 especially. That’s the thing that in my mind that tip the villain scales to frightening.
The quote was from Josephine Tey’s book, “The Singing Sands”. The speaker is Inspector Alan Grant, one of the most awesome MCs of all time. There are actually a few other observations on villainy and such in The Daughter of Time, another book with him.I think the issue rather simple. A person is not labeled good or bad because one quality outweighs the other. A downright villain may have (or really appear to have) many countless qualities, but that does not make him a good person. What defines him is not a balance of qualities but the one quality that defines him, the one thing that drives him that is the measure of all his actions. I’m going to use the Count of Monte Cristo as an example here. He had many good points about him but at the root of his nature, the very core, was a thirst for vengeance.
And now we take a quick pause to make a very important point. If you have not read the Count of Monte Cristo, go do so!!!!!!! (My all-time favorite book.)
Alright, as I was saying. So he’s an example of a man with many good points but he could not be called good because of his core inner nature. Now to complicate things. What I have been talking about is really a villain. An antagonist is just someone who opposes your MC or MC’s friend/cause. An antagonist could even be a truly good person. Now back to the Count of Monte Cristo example. He could be called a bad character but he is also extremely captivating, and you just absolutely love him (in a strange sort of way), and he is the MC. So even though we might label him a bad guy (even though he is so amazing and near the end you see him back in somewhat of his original pure light without his baneful passions sullying him and the ending is just, just ……..!!!), he is neither a villain, nor a antagonist, but a protagonist and an absolutely … ah, I want to read it again.
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Well do it then!
See, I know what you mean, having just finished the book, and for a great deal of the story I almost felt that the Count himself was the villain. My feelings of pity were more strongly invested with de Villefort than with the Count, because the Count was, as you said, thirsting, we might even say lusting, after vengeance. But he’s so fascinating.
And then in the end, he realizes that no man, however wronged, has the right to take the place of God.That has nothing to do with antagonists, but I had to say it.
I agree completely with what you said about this: ‘What defines him is not a balance of qualities but the one quality that defines him, the one thing that drives him that is the measure of all his actions.’
This is very, very true. I don’t think I could have said it any clearer than you did.Pity for de Villefort? Mmm, I don’t know. I felt a lot of pity for him when he went mad, but not much until then. You could really sympathize with his daughter though.
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Show the reader why the bad guy is doing what he’s doing. If the reader understands that, then they will feel for him, even though what the man does may be bad. Take Rumple in Once Upon A Time. He is very bad…he’ll kill people who go against him without a thought and has intricate plans and curses; and yet you discover that he’s doing this to try to find his son and you feel bad for him at times, even though he is bad and is going about everything wrong.
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
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