In a thread over in Plot Development, I asked for help framing an epic clash between the MCs and an antagonist. I just decided on the antagonist's name (Matteo Tafani) and birthdate (today, January 17, 2020), as well as place of birth (Rome, Italy). Tafani's mother dies in childbirth, and his father is unknown. He's put into a crowded orphanage, and grows up there. I need him to have some sort of dysfunction like mild autism (Asperger's), fetal alcohol syndrome, or something else that manifests as social disconnection and poor impulse control. He's very internal, sometimes doing strange things like not responding aloud to questions or conversation because he responded in his head and doesn't necessarily differentiate or understand that he didn't say anything. In general, he doesn't like people, or at least interacting with them (maybe he likes the idea of people, but can't interact well, so doesn't engage them; not sure). Somewhere in his mid twenties, Tafani discovers a cave with a bunch of runes carved in it. He has a very analytical mind, and studies the drawings intently for years. Ultimately he discovers that the cave can be used to travel in time. After a few arbitrary hops into times he doesn't want to be in, he settles in the late 16thC, where he lives essentially happy until our MCs, who are originally from 2285 (though Tafani doesn't know that), show up. All he knows about them is that they're from the future, and he's jealous of the fact that they used HIS time travel mechanism to get there (they did it by accident and wish they hadn't). After spying on them from the shadows, he attacks, unsuccessfully trying to kill them, then escapes to where he left from, the year 2051 (apologies for all the plot points). He makes the strange decision (need advice here) that the best way to deal with the MCs is to find them in time before they first use the cave and kill them, preferably as children when he has a better chance of defeating them (they bested him in hand-to-hand combat). He hops across time, spying on the MCs where he can find them, trying to figure out where they came from. His analytical skills make him a good investigator, but his lack of social skills make gathering information through talking to people difficult. I realize that I've more or less talked myself into a fairly robust character. There are still a few holes, indicated above. Any ideas? Thanks. JD
Yeah. You don't have a story. None of this matters until you have an actual story and an actual theme or message you want the readers to know.
Oooh, a reverse of killing baby Hitler. On the dysfunction, have you thought about mild psychopathy? The plus side is it describes the social disconnection as well as poor impulse control, but the downside is I guarantee 90% of all readers will then misunderstand the word to think he's an out and out Hannibal Lecter. Just thought I'd offer that up as a suggestion if you hadn't looked it up. The obvious problem with the bit you want advice on though is that you need your characters to be every bit as intelligent and quick to Tafani's line of thinking otherwise there's nothing stopping him succeeding. And on the flip side, if they're too good, and simply go 5 minutes before he tries the attempt, then you get the chicken and the egg situation, since he could've been spying on them when they came up with the idea, and went back 5 minutes before them. *Tries not to get himself stuck in a feedback loop* EDIT - Although that'd be an awesome cinematic action sequence. Every 30 seconds either Tafani or the MCs appear, jumping on one another, more and more every 30 seconds, repeating endlessly in THE BIGGEST PILE-ON/FEEDBACK LOOP IN THE UNIVERSE! You say they're from the future, I think one more piece of info might help folks' in coming up with good solutions, at least with me anyhoo... ..You say they come from 2285, and even if their time traveling is accidental, do they know about time travel in 2285, is it a 'thing'? If you know what I mean, or are they as ignorant of time travel ability as we are today?
an interesting synopsis to say the least. You seem to have the who ostracized aspergers orphan villian down already. Though it makes much more sense if in his disdain of humanity as well as unwillingness to interact with it, that he'd be "zoned out". Daydreaming of his own little world. A personality like that would be seeking future technology to escape from the hell of humanity. The only real reason i can see someone like that willfully going back in human history is because of companionship. Falling for a long dead writer or artist, someone who may have left a minor fingerprint on history, yet still enough for the villian to take note and obsess over. Then the MC shows up from a further future with a similar intend and there you go. Please keep in mind, this is just my own musings. Its not meant to be taken seriously. Its meant to throw a couple ligs in the ol' furnace and stoke the coals a bit. I do hope this helps.
This won't work. The MCs don't know how to operate the cave. Before they meet Tafani, they accidentally* time jump from 2285 back to 1381, live there for about a decade, then, trying to return home, end up in 1575. Tafani stumbles on them in 1583, and they all time jump forward to 2051 in the cave, which is under Tafani's control. Tafani knows how to operate the cave, and doesn't intend to bring them on his trip. Tafani doesn't know they don't know how to operate the cave, but also doesn't know when or where they were born and raised, so doesn't know when or where to look for them. He has a few clues, primarily their use of modern English in private conversation, which he overhears. I like this. It's something I can work with. I haven't described the plot outside of the scope I need help with, so your assertion is a bit... uninformed. * They're on a picnic and are exploring a cave. They do something (they don't know what) and end up thrown back in time. They have little beyond the clothes on their back. They try to undo what they did, but not knowing what they did in the first place, can't figure it out.
Give me the benefit of a doubt. I have a reason for why I said what I said. There's no such thing as a part of the story that's "outside the scope." Because entirety of a story works as a whole. I have very rarely seen a character that doesn't work because the author just didn't do a good enough job on the back story. Usually characters don't work because of one of the two things 1) there's no central idea or theme the author is trying to express. Or if they do have one, it's there just for the sake of being there. 2) their plot structure is a mess. Let's say you decide your theme was conformance vs being yourself. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that no nuance in the story. It's just these two contradicting ideas. You have an antagonist on the side of conformance and your protagonist on the side of being yourself. Yet your antagonist is always breaking rules. And always arguing with authority. Always trying to get away with things. Do you think that is a good antagonist? No. Because he's paying lip service to your theme. This is 90% of the issue people have with creating a good antagonist: They have these beautiful back stories and concepts that explains the antagonist's actions, but his actions fail to represent the theme properly. This was the issue in the Captain Marvel film. Although the film itself was well structured and well paced, its characters only played lip service to its themes. The other problem people have with characters is that they don't follow the basic plot structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Twilight had this problem. It literally had no rising action. It jumped from the lengthy exhibition right into the climax. And by that point, who cares? The character? They had great back stories. But no one found them interesting because the lack of plot structure didn't allow them to be interesting. That's why I said what I said. Your decisions should be based on what the themes are and what the best way is to express that theme.
Your antagonist reminds me of Smeagol. Obsession and possessiveness are pretty good motivators for murder. But I think you'll have to have a misunderstanding to create conflict that actually makes sense. Your antagonist needs to feel threatened by these people, yes they used something he considered his, but if they're doing no harm (as Frodo doesn't to Smeagol in the beginning) then he has no reason not to just send them back himself and make them swear not to say anything about it or to block off the cave when they get back to avoid others making the same mistake they did. If he's spying on them for a bit he'll know they want to get back and don't know what happened and thus, they pose no threat to him. In the case of Smeagol, Frodo and Sam posed a threat to his obsession. So, either your antagonist over hears how one character has a brother or cousin or uncle or aunt or parent or whatever that's studying different forms of time travel and would just love to deconstruct the cave time travel device. Deconstruction = destruction to your antagonist so they can't have that at all which means they have to find out how the other characters got to his time. How they found the cave, what they did to activate it, why they chose that day, that hour, that minute to be where they were if that's how far you want to go with your repercussions for time travel. If a minor detour on their picnic makes them not find the cave, or a minute longer stop along the way alters their path enough that they're not in the right places to activate the machine, or they get delayed for a day and then it storms for the next week so they decide on somewhere else once the rain clears up. You have to focus on your stakes more and the functionality of the time travel and the repercussions to changing history. But also, think of Smeagol.
This is a great simile. I'll put this into the mix and think on it. The entire problem space here is bounded by the fact that Tafani doesn't know the MC's past, and therefore doesn't know when to go to solve his perceived problem. That and it's a singular timeline, so events that occur... occur. No going back and changing things for the better or worse. I do need to work on the question of why he doesn't do one of the obvious things to solve his perceived problems.
Interesting concept you've cooked up here. I'm intrigued. However, I misunderstood your dilemma. Tafani is supposed to be the antagonist—from our modern day? I had assumed he'd be the protagonist. I'm already sympathetic to him. I think he has protagonist qualities. He has an interesting personality. He's a loner due to traits he can't be held responsible for. Traits that give him advantages in certain circumstances, but work against him in others. (Just an aside: I'd avoid the urge to 'label' his personality in any way. Just let him be himself. If you make it clear why he does what he does from his perspective, you don't need to psychoanalyse him. Let the reader into the workings of his mind, and go with the flow.) While I wouldn't attempt to tell you what to write, or whose perspective to use, it strikes me that unless both Tafani and the people from the future actually have evil intent (which is pretty boring and overdone, tbh) then you have set up a workable story situation here. One that's definitely worth developing. How WOULD we deal with people from the future, if we had the chance? People from the future who are just like us, basically, who—just like us— have also inadvertently done time traveling? Are they a threat, just by being here? Are we a threat to them? If so, why? If I were, you, I would try to make both perspectives valid, without resorting to the shallow 'evil intent' trope. Why does Tafani want these newcomers to go back to where they came from? Just being jealous because they are using his cave seems a babyish motivation, and not really worthy of a story, to be honest. I think you need to work out a motivation that's more compelling and adult, if you want this story to not descend into farce, and Tafani into a Gollum clone. What do the newcomers want? Do their personal goals conflict with Tafani's? Or, ultimately, could they be the same? Who ultimately will learn what, from whom? What are the barriers between them? Can these be broken? And what happens if they are?
I wouldn't. I was using the terms I did to spark discussion here. However much I know people with Aspergers (an outdated term) who self-identify as such ("Aspies"), it's not my business to put labels on people that way (or much of any other way, either). But I think it won't be a problem, because... I lost a lot of sleep last night fretting about this situation and think I've arrived at my path. To Tafani, the cave is a sacred place. To him, it is where a god speaks to him. When he discovers that it's a time travel portal, he learns to be adept at using it, but also learns of its limitations. Ultimately he comes to consider himself the "high priest" of the god of the cave, and the interlopers are blasphemers. What he will learn (probably as a final revelation before he dies) is that the timeline is what it is, and he can't alter it. So pursuing the MCs through time to kill them as children is a futile effort; the fact that he met them as adults means that he failed, and he should have understood that at the beginning. This is going to be a lot of work. My biggest problem to solve right now is how to have the MCs come to understand what Tafani's goal is after he first meets them. I hate the "Bond villain" trope where the evil overlord spills his guts to Our Hero. But I think (I'm not sure yet) that they will need to know what he's up to. Maybe he harries them with questions, and they figure it out. Good, I want you to be sympathetic to him. It will help when he eventually goes over the edge into evil (or insane). He's going to be rebuffed by the MCs at every turn, frustrated by his lack of success, which will drive him deeper into insanity. At first, the MCs won't even realize they're doing it. Eventually they come to realize that this guy is a bit more crazy than they took him for, and that he has ill intent for them, and will be more active in trying to defeat him. They will harbor no ill will for him, but still want to stop him. To clarify the timeline: Tafani is born in 2020. He learns about the cave in his late twenties and becomes obsessed with it. In 2051 (age 31), he uses it to go back to 1578, where he settles in to a slower-paced world that's modern enough that he can live reasonably (e.g. post-medieval) and spend his time worshiping his god. By this point, he can operate the cave well enough to make time jumps at will, but he feels like using that power is abusing his god's gift, so saves it for emergencies. There are limitations to the accuracy of the jumps anyway, so it's not like he can dial in a date and go. During the period of 2064 to 2071, life-extending technologies are discovered. Tafani knows nothing about them. By 2105, global, climate-driven famine strikes, killing about 10% of the population. Tafani knows about this because while learning to use the cave, he jumped into that time, and before learning much, gets the hell out, jumping forward again, finding himself in the middle (2165) of World War III. This is when he decides to go back, and lands in 1578; a simpler time. Our MCs are born in 2265 and 2266, respectively. They have genetics that give them multi-century lifespans. On a picnic one day in 2285, they adventure into the cave (it's just a cave with a bunch of neat graffiti to them) and find themselves thrown back to 1381, unable to figure out how to get back. They end up spending a decade in that time period before deciding that they need to try and return home once again. They partially succeed, landing in 1577 (one year before Tafani), but can't figure out what they did to make that happen, so have to settle into life again, though they have to start over gathering resources. In 1583, Tafani overhears two people talking in what he recognizes as modern English. They think they're having a private conversation, but he can understand them and realizes they must be time travelers as well. He decides they're blasphemers, because they obviously don't show up to Sunday services at the cave (or whatever). He spies on them for a period (weeks? months?), and confronts them. The confrontation results in a fight, and the MCs best him, though both Tafani and one of the MCs are wounded. Tafani escapes, and there's pursuit, all the way back to the cave. Tafani, knowing he needs serious medical attention, goes back to 2051, when he last knew the world as modern and peaceful. The MCs get caught up in his time jump and go with him. In 2051, they separate themselves from Tafani. When they realize they're in a mostly-modern time (to them), they settle in and decide to do what they can to help the world, knowing what's coming. Tafani recovers from his wounds and decides to pursue the MCs as children to stop them from going back in time (not necessarily kill them at this point). But he doesn't know when to look. He doesn't even know the MCs real names, or where they were born or lived. So he has to pop through time, pursuing them. It's going to be a real problem for him to solve. The MCs, on the other hand, will be living through 200 years of world events, occasionally having to deal with this nutcase who keeps harrowing them. Eventually they realize he's a real threat and take action to deal with him. I have a lot of writing to do. But having Tafani worked out, motivations and whatnot, makes it achievable. Cheers. JD
I think you've got an interesting character here, but I would like to give you a small word of warning. Be careful of how you write Tafani, because reading these summaries it comes across that Tafani is villainous because he has a mental handicap. If this is how your novel comes across it will be seen as offensive. It plays into the false narrative that mentally unwell people are more violent and dangerous than those who are mentally stable. That's not to say that you can't write this character as you have planned, just that you will want to get some sensitivity readers who specialize in how mental illness is handled, to look over your manuscript. So that you can avoid that harmful message.
If events that occur cannot be changed by going back in time then his only choice, to stick with this time travel rule, would be to kill them in the time he's in right? As well as that nothing he does will ever have an effect on the future, which fits if he's a recluse cause he won't interact much with people or cause waves, if your time is singular linear because him going to the past cannot be a part of history if you only have one time line. Otherwise you get a bunch of paradoxes. With this rule he can't go back in time to fix anything because it's already happened. The singular timeline cannot be messed with at all because it enforces predestination as a rule of the universe. So your antagonist was predestined to go back and live in the 16th century but he can't have records of him existing prior to his birth if you have a singular linear time line. And because of predestination he can't then change the event of these other characters finding the time machine and activating it. Thus he's forced to do something about them when he currently resides. right?
I appreciate the tip and the concern, but I wouldn't write it that way. I know several people with "mental handicaps" that are a joy to be around. I also know people who are "normal" who are wannabe villains.
Well, yes, except that he doesn't necessarily know that rule exists. He's never tried doing something that would dramatically alter his perceived past, and anyway, he's not well educated enough to know much about history, particularly that centuries behind his birth.
I love the idea of clueless time travelers from the future, never seen done before! Really, Tafani looks fantastic to me and you seem to have everything worked out pretty well. I just want to say that if the only thing at risk are the lives of your MC's, then they better be great characters. If they're not engaging, then all stakes will simply be missing. Also, Tafani reminds me a bit of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille - he's really an anti-hero, not an antagonist. If you haven't read Perfume, I heavily recommend it. Grenouille's character arc is amazing, and it really puts you in the mind of someone anti-social.
A passing thought - When your MC arrives in the future, he might stumble upon people, doctors or drugs that change him. The future's society will react to him on a different way. His brain might even get scanned and 'corrected' by the authorities (they won't even need your consent in the future, since it is a matter of public health). To travel forwards in time must be a shocking experience, regardless of your moral character or even psychological traits. Imagine yourself travelling from the 1950s to 2020, would this world make sense to you?
Tackling time travel, eh? You've got some stones, man. Or at least a lot of Advil. It sounds like you've decided where to go with this, and it has great potential. I'll admit it though, I have trouble being sympathetic to a person who decides to dogmatically worship something. I just can't put myself in his shoes. Here's two cents in the event it helps: It could be compelling if Tafani overhears the plans of the interlopers. They honestly want to stop World War 3, and might think they know how. He also learns of how biologically advanced and peace-loving they are. He could even go and visit their time, awed by the future utopia. Tafani might have the opinion that stopping World War 3 would also ruin the great future that comes after it, so he must stop the heroes from attempting to stop it. Imagine that, he thinks he's fighting to save a future where orphanages aren't needed anymore. It hits him close to home in a spicy way. That might inflict a theme of whether or not war is a needed catalyst for technological advancement, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
Perhaps it happens, but they have blocked the gov's signals. As a contemporary reader, I'd find that more plausible.
Any ideas? Does not sound Aspie/HFA to me. Sounds more like psycho-/sociopathy. People in autism spectrum use to have very strict consciousness. Some of us have been killers - even the most skilful of their domain - but then it has usually been either protective or military work. (For instance some of the best snipers are often described as being very Asperger -like persons from known autism-asperger kins/stems/kindreds/whatever is the right word here.) If you have anything to ask about this, you can privamail me. Most common reason for characters not working might be bias in motivational base, the ground where motivation is rooted, fed and growing from. And - in my eyes - that's the main problem here.
Thank you for the defense (and observation). I've never thought of people with Aspergers (e.g. "Aspies") as handicapped. They're different from the observed normative middle, but they're certainly not handicapped. I'm not even certain Tafani will end up being an "Aspie" (I feel strange using that term; it's for people to call themselves rather than me to call them). I'm not even sure I'll identify him with any specific condition. In searching for help to frame him, however, I have to draw some circles.
I do not understand his motivation a bit ... What does he want to achieve? What is his goal, which creates a confrontation with the goal of the main character ?. In my opinion, if you make his motivation more understandable and revealed to the reader, then you will end up with a complete character. Motivation should as a result be reflected in the actions of the character. Now I don’t understand what he wants, and as a result I don’t understand why he does what he does.
I'm a bit foggy on that now. I know better what impact he needs to have on the main characters than I do what his motivations are. I'll get there.
