My story, set in the future, is about the journey of a young woman working in an anti-fascist resistance movement in New York City in an ex-USA split up into four different countries (NYC being in the Atlantic States of America). With her dedication to working in this secretive underground organisation, she has limited contact with anyone outside the Resistance and I'm wondering how I can fit an antagonist into this situation, one who she interacts with regularly. I already have another character who turns out to be a double-agent spy for the neo-Nazi government, but the way I've built her character means she can't really be considered a villain in the sense that she's mostly an antagonistic force to my main character with mostly negative interactions with her, and who tries to obstruct her progress and development - because that's definitely not who this double-agent character is, she actually becomes a close friend of my main character and was blackmailed into her position spying for the Nazis. There's obviously 'the system' as an antagonistic force, but I didn't want to leave it at that without creating any antagonistic, villainous characters. Do any of you have any good ideas as to how I can create this antagonist in the situation I have in my story?
Hmm...You could always go the route of creating a character within the resistance that is in competition with the MC. Or there could be some personal drama not related to their work.
What does our MC do for the anti-facist rebellion. If she's, say, a hacker, you could have her get caught by our antagonist, which opens up a venue for a dialogue between them, both then and for the rest of the book.
She's not a hacker herself, although there are characters who are hackers. She is a nurse, however, and works at the Bellevue Hospital before she finds herself joining the Resistance, before her 'call to action'.
Does she still work at the hospital? Could she run into a villain there? Could the villain be someone from her past?
Yes, she works there up to a point when it’s discovered she’s doing something illegal, though the authorities at that point don’t know the full extent of what that is, they know (by then) only a fraction of it. When that happens, my MC has to leave and go into hiding somewhere else. That may well be a good place to have my villain, but the problem with that is after my MC stops working there, there isn’t really any way for this antagonist and my MC to maintain contact - unless I adjusted the plot to have her working there for longer, and reworking the plot is something I am about to do, so a lot is likely to change and perhaps I will find a much more convenient situation in which to create room for a primary antagonist. But I’ll have to see.