Right now I am struggling through a draft of my story about a rebel leader/cameleer who falls in love with an enemy scout. All of the main cast/narrators are teenagers. The first narrator is the hero, the other two are the heroines. One of the girls is from the same tribe as the hero, but was born into slavery and is something of an anti-heroine (she has the evil eye, shown by her dark skin and blue eyes as well as the ability to dance so well that she can control people's minds. And she's not above using those abilities to manipulate people mostly for her own self-interest, although she does have some interest in working for the cause (mainly because they freed her but she also has more motives). And then there's an issue of her past? What motive can I give her beyond "I was enslaved and now I'm free" and a past other than "Poor me, woe is me, all I've had is pain, misery, and more and more pain!" because those examples feel really flat.
Stop thinking of her as a villain or antihero, and think of her as a character. Better yet, think of her as a person. Making a character feel real is not something that can be covered in a single post, but there are many, many threads in this section addressing that. But the first step is to stop thinking of her as an archetype.
