I’ve discovered a writing flaw of mine whilst working on my current writing project (which is none of the projects I was working on the last time I was properly reporting on them (¬_¬”)). It’s my antagonists.

I am not a person who believes that good and evil is clear cut and find that both always need reasons to manifest in a character. The problem with that is it means that my antagonists are almost always just three types of people: people with greed, people with x/phobia and people with tragedy. Usually it’s about power and money, hating a particular type of person or their life has hopeless points in it.

For me, the first two are easy to pick but because I prefer not to interact with those types of people in real life, I design them very poorly. They lack dimension of a real person and so there needs to be an added pressure for their greed, which usually then pushes them into the “people with tragedy” category. People with x/phobia (by this I mean discrimination against other people/person and not general phobia) are people I don’t tolerate and so they end up with only two paths: they are inherently hateful or they are educated and seek to compromise. Though there definitely exists people in the real world who are one or both of these things and they have qualities that are fairly normal, I always seem to have an issue with applying more human traits to a hateful character without moving them along a path that would take them out of the antagonist role.

Now, the third type of person is probably my most common pick for the main antagonist (little baddies are often given the greed and hate) but this almost always means they end up as some kind of anti-hero or a compromise is met. And, whilst I don’t think it’s bad for stories to be solved through learning, communication and compromise … I don’t think all of them can end that way (‘T᷄⌑T᷅)

My problem, I think, is that one of two things happen when I write my antagonist:

1. I fall in love with their design and just really don’t want them to be the evil big bad (this often results in there being a true big bad behind them)
2. In order to not like them or offer a path to redemption, their background needs to be ignored and they end up with little dimension

Sometimes I picture it like I’ve sculpted all these cute kids and now I put them in the playground and they start fighting and I’m just like “hmm … no, I don’t like that.” I don’t think it’s impossible to give a character bad cards and then have them play a great antagonist (just look at Cersei Lannister) but I think my problem is making sure they stay an antagonist.

Or.

Maybe that’s my problem? Maybe I’m focusing too much on the fluidity of a character’s nature and not realising that I can put that into the story itself. If no one is truly on one side of the “good and evil scales”, then perhaps at any point in the book that can move between these scales. What’s worse than the great evil you and your party have set out to destroy to protect the lands? The character who changes their mind every now and then about being that great evil.

I don’t like it when people who have unprocessed injustices are treated as evil because of how they have developed, and that always leads me to sympathise with those characters, making it harder to put them in proper antagonistic scenarios. It’s like they become a victim twice over: once when it occurs and then again when their developed behaviours from that are condemned. It might be too much of my reality pouring into my fiction. I like to think it’s not a bad thing, but then I worry that I cannot write anything like I read as a child, where the great big evil was just that. A great big evil. But then again … that’s not a bad thing either?

These days, the antagonists for me feel more like the structures. It’s society, it’s the monarchy, it’s the patriarchy etc. It’s the oppressive systems that churn out battered people who become villains to survive and then a villain twice over to meet peoples expectations. It’s usually not the people at all.

I think I just answered my own dilemma.（;・・)ゞ Hmm..