His father persecuted him for this, and he tried to run away. Arthur was a studious lad who preferred reading to playing football in the rain. It took me several goes to get this one right. Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What humanizing reason are you using to motivate your bad guy? Tell me in the comments! The deeper you go, the more rounded a character your antagonist will become-and the better your protagonist will also have to become in order to face this impressive bad guy you’ve constructed for him. It’s not enough for your antagonist to hate your protagonist just because. But, alone, they are not enough to motivate his story goals. Hatred, vengeance, lust, and any other number of dark emotions are good qualifiers for your antagonist. What good reason does he have to continue to engage in the conflict with the protagonist?.What good reason does he have to initially engage in the conflict with the protagonist?.What is the Lie He Believes that’s driving him?.Your antagonist needs to have a motivation every bit as strong and compelling as your protagonist. At the very least, even the most wicked of men committing the most wicked of actions will almost always believe they are justified, on some level, for their deeds. Good people can have bad reasons for their actions, just as bad people can have good reasons. Any one of them would have made him a far more compelling antagonist, and the conflict itself far more meaningful and realistic.Īs it stands, he becomes a one-dimensional stereotype-a bad guy who is present in the story for no other reason than to simply be as bad as possible. Why is he so obsessively, and ultimately self-destructively, determined to exact revenge on two people who were, at best, minor annoyances in his overall scheme?Īny number of suitable motivations might have been created to account for Bishop’s obsessive evil. Putting his money where his mouth is but… why? He’s even got a reward out on these people. The entire story and its thematic argument weakens.Ĭonsider Gavin O’Connor’s western Jane Got a Gun, in which Ewan McGregor chews through the scenery as John Bishop, the villainous leader of a ruthless outlaw gang-who is dead-set on annihilating protagonist Jane and her husband Bill Hammond. In short, you may think that in making your villain as evil as possible “just because,” you’re making him all the scarier and more impressive. Your protagonist’s struggle lacks meaning and depth.Your antagonist turns into a one-dimensional cardboard cutout.When you create a bad guy who has no clear goal other than kill the good guy, and no clear motive other than just because I’m bad, several not-so-great things happen: As archetypal black-hat figures, bad guys don’t always have to be complicated, but be wary of oversimplifying them. Why the Bad-Just-to-Be-Bad Antagonist Doesn’t Workīad guys are often conceived simply to give the protagonist someone to overcome-someone to run from or fight against. Let’s take a quick look at how to motivate your bad guy-and how not to. What it does mean is that your bad guy must have realistic motivations for his actions. This may or may not mean he’ll end up being sympathetic to readers in some way. He may be aligned only a little to the moral south of your protagonist, or he may be a dyed-in-the-wool, raving, slasher-scary psychotic killer.Įither way, it’s your job to make sure he’s still a dimensional human being. The antagonistic force is nothing more or less than an obstacle between your protagonist and his story goal.īut, as often as not, this character will be bad. An antagonist doesn’t have to be bad.ĭoesn’t even have to be human, come to that. Now, it’s true not every story will require a “bad” guy. Skimp on him, and the entire story-including the protagonist-will suffer as a result. Next to your protagonist, your antagonist is the single most important character in your story. He’s the bad guy just because… well, he’s bad. Even today, it’s far too easy for authors to slip into the remnants of the old melodrama stereotype-black cape, twirled mustache, trick laugh. No character is more misunderstood than the bad guy.
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