When I started crafting my story, I had to do a lot of research. Cultures, philosophies, character types, strengths, weaknesses, the usual stuff. Just like any other writer, I'm passionate about the stories I create and I want others to be able to experience these worlds as vividly as possible. One of the things that never came easy for me were villains/antagonists (talking about a person as an antagonist). There are tons of checklists online and countless videos on YouTube. I think I've read all of them yet all of my prior stories were lacking in that regard, at least in my opinion. So I decided to reevaluate my view on villains. I've started my research by analysing the ones that people considered great villains and I noted down what I thought made them so scary. Then I created a little questionnaire to find out how other evaluated my findings. I came up with a few points that seemed to be the mist important when creating a great villain. From there I crafted my main antagonist and my secondary antagonist and for the first time in my life, I'm actually in love with my villains. So I thought my tips might help someone who struggles with the same thing: What kind of villain do you need? To understand what kind of villain you need, you need to look at what your story represents. What is the main issue? What is your protagonist fighting for? You probably know the example of the Joker. The Joker is usually referred to as a nihilist. I don't find that to be true. The more I researched him, the more I realized that the Joker finds existence itself meaningless. Why are we living? For no reason at all. That's was his answer and because there's no meaning to life, there's no meaning to morals, so why shouldn't he just do what he wants? In that way he was actually living life while everyone else was still occupied with finding meaning where there is none to find, just like Batman. So while everyone else was denying what life truly is the Joker was living it. Batman on the other hand lost everything but he never stopped believing that there has to be something good out there. His belief in meaning and a greater cause drove him to fight even after he lost everything. So you have two sides of the same coin. One strives to find meaning and the other accepted that there's no meaning yet when you break it down both live in meaningless world. It's just that one believes he can get out of it. Understand what scares people. During my investigation I found that the scariest villains were the one we couldn't understand. In fact I think the primary reason for fear is the lack of knowing. When we cannot predict what is happening, we become scared. That's why people are so terrified of demons or ghost. I was always fascinated by the fact that some people believe that there are invisible beings that want to torture us and ultimately kill us. Wouldn't it be more logical to assume it's simply a scientific phenomenon that has yet to be ex- plained? I think that's what a lack of knowledge does to us. We don't understand, we get scared and to protect ourself from possible danger we imagine the worst possible being. Just look at the scariest villains you can find. People call them psychopaths left and right. That's because we don't understand them. They are unpredictable and it scares us. Obviously they can't share our values, so they must be psychopaths. Play with our virtues/beliefs and twist them into perversion. As I already mentioned above, we are scared of what we don't understand. However when you create a character that's just chaos, it will seem unrealistic. Going back to the Joker: We are all searching for meaning. Meaninglessness is scary yet it's a topic we all understand. It's not like that thought never crossed our minds. We just aren't villain to accept it. So what makes the Joker so scary is the realisation that in some way he lives in all of us. We just aren't willing to accept this. Another villain I found incredibly interesting is someone called Nagito Kamaeda. He's part of a story that mainly revolves of the antagonistic forces despair and hope. In the first part of the story we learned the importance of hope. Nagito is also someone who believes in hope yet he is willing to sacri- fice anything and anyone to create this hope. In fact he doesn't seem to have morals. He is willing to kill for someone else's hope. He is willing to help anyone as long as it is the name of hope. What makes him even more dangerous is the fact that he beliefs that despair and hope are inseparable. After a while he becomes incredibly unpredictable. You never know if he is on your side or if he isn't. I'd even say that he might be on your side one minute before betraying you the next. He is a really interesting character and the perversion of the great virtue we call hope. Now you might not be able to relate to this character at first but let me put him into perspective. Just like the Joker, Nagito is consi- dered a psychopaths by most of the fandom. Now I agree, Nagito has a lot of issues even beside is weird longing for hope but what I found most interesting is that people usually don't point these out. They are usually focused on the fact that he is willing to kill friends, family, pets and even himself in name of hope. But I wonder: What is so different about revolutions? People who are willing to kill for a greater good. They want to protect a world. He wants the same. Yet he is a psychopaths and others are heroes. Isn't the perspective off? Why is he a villain and we aren't? In truth nothing is truer than the saying: "Everyone is a hero of their own story." These villains are a parody of ourselves. We can relate to them and that's what makes them so scary. If you want to write a villain, steep down into your deepest depths. Are looking for an antagonist or a villain? What I found to be the main difference between villains and antagonists is that an antagonist is usually redeemable. Darth Vader is an antagonist while the Joker is a villain (technically he is also an antagonist, just by definition. However in order to be able to differentiate the two I created a new definition for antagonist). Antagonists work slightly different than villains. While villains are created by our deepest depths, anta- gonist are exactly like us. If you had just made a different decision, you might've ended up the same way. So when you are crafting your protagonist's opposing force, you need to think about what you need. What is it that you want to relay to the reader? Both an antagonist and a villain can drive the story. So decision is less about their function in the story but more about what this story is supposed to tell the reader. It is also a good idea to have a look into what it is common practice in your genre. Villains: Backstories aren't important, intentions are. Now I think I've talked about intentions quite a bit. However one of the main tips I found online was that a good villain needs a backstory. I would like to disagree. A villain can have a backstory but he definitely doesn't need one. This goes hand in hand with one of my prior points. We are afraid of what we don't understand. A backstory helps understand where a character is coming from, so it makes a character less scary and more predictable. A truly scary villain is unpredictable and represents the parts of ourselves that we usually suppress. Antagonists: Backstories and intentions are both really important. Like I said: You could be the antagonist if you had just made a different decision or if you were dealt different cards in life. That's why backstories are of fundamental importance for an antagonist. What made you them to feel this way? How did they react to that? How did that influence their beliefs? So while a villain is all about taboos, an antagonist is all about understanding. You want the reader to fell for this person. While their actions aren't good, it is all rooted in something that we can all relate to. We understand antagonists. We fear villains. A character can also start out as a villain but become an an antagonist as the story progresses. This is totally up to you. He needs to have some good traits I don't care if it's humour, intelligence or just in general a charming personality. There needs to be some reason why the reader enjoys reading about them. You don't want a boring villain/antagonist. A character with absolutely no redeeming qualities is also really unrealistic. So go ahead and make your villain likable. A great example for a charming antagonist is Littlefinger from GOT. His charm also made him extremely dangerous because it made him a great manipulator. Another example is (again) Nagito whose intelligence made him really important, entertaining and dangerous all at the same time. There was absolutely no way around Nagito. You couldn't trick him while it felt like he was playing you like a puppet on strings. You had to rely on the most unreliable person just because of his intellect. Let them take actions. Just like a good protagonist is active, a good antagonist/villain does the same. Let them take actions. Show just how capable they are. Don't make them wait for the protagonist. The world doesn't stand still for anyone, not even a protagonist. Give them strength. Nothing is worse than an antagonist/villain that needs his lackies to defeat you because they are to weak to do it on their own. There are countless stories like this. Remember that anyone who has a con- viction will do anything to achieve it. They can start out weak but they usually don't stay weak. So allow your villain/antagonist to be strong. That concludes the main aspects I wrote down. I have a few other small tips but they aren't all that important. I hope this helps those who struggle with writing the opposing force just like I did
CORRECTED VERSION - PLEASE READ THIS ONE When I started crafting my story, I had to do a lot of research. Cultures, philosophies, character types, strengths, weaknesses, the usual stuff. Just like any other writer, I'm passionate about the stories I create and I want others to be able to experience these worlds as vividly as possible. One of the things that never came easy for me were villains/antagonists (talking about a person as an antagonist). There are tons of checklists online and countless videos on YouTube. I think I've read all of them yet all of my prior stories were lacking in that regard, at least in my opinion. So I decided to reevaluate my view on villains. I've started my research by analysing the ones that people considered great villains and I noted down what I thought made them so scary. Then I created a little questionnaire to find out how other evaluated my findings. I came up with a few points that seemed to be the most important when creating a great villain. From there I crafted my main antagonist and my secondary antagonist and for the first time in my life, I'm actually in love with my villains. So I thought my tips might help someone who struggles with the same thing: What kind of villain do you need? To understand what kind of villain you need, you need to look at what your story represents. What is the main issue? What is your protagonist fighting for? You probably know the example of the Joker. The Joker is usually referred to as a nihilist. I don't find that to be true. The more I researched him, the more I realized that the Joker finds existence itself meaningless. Why are we living? For no reason at all. That's was his answer and because there's no meaning to life, there's no meaning to morals, so why shouldn't he just do what he wants? In that way he was actually living life while everyone else was still occupied with finding meaning where there is none to find, just like Batman. So while everyone else was denying what life truly is the Joker was living it. Batman on the other hand lost everything but he never stopped believing that there has to be something good out there. His belief in meaning and a greater cause drove him to fight even after he lost everything. So you have two sides of the same coin. One strives to find meaning and the other accepted that there's no meaning yet when you break it down both live in meaningless world. It's just that one believes he can get out of it. Understand what scares people. During my investigation I found that the scariest villains were the one we couldn't understand. In fact I think the primary reason for fear is the lack of knowing. When we cannot predict what is happening, we become scared. That's why people are so terrified of demons or ghost. I was always fascinated by the fact that some people believe that there are invisible beings that want to torture us and ultimately kill us. Wouldn't it be more logical to assume it's simply a scientific phenomenon that has yet to be explained? I think that's what a lack of knowledge does to us. We don't understand, we get scared and to protect ourself from possible danger we imagine the worst possible being. Just look at the scariest villains you can find. People call them psychopaths left and right. That's because we don't understand them. They are unpredictable and it scares us. Obviously they can't share our values, so they must be psychopaths. Play with our virtues/beliefs and twist them into perversion. As I already mentioned above, we are scared of what we don't understand. However when you create a character that's just chaos, it will seem unrealistic. Going back to the Joker: We are all searching for meaning. Meaninglessness is scary yet it's a topic we all understand. It's not like that thought never crossed our minds. We just aren't willing to accept it. So what makes the Joker so scary is the realisation that in some way he lives in all of us. We just aren't willing to accept this. Another villain I found incredibly interesting is someone called Nagito Kamaeda. He's part of a story that mainly revolves of the antagonistic forces despair and hope. In the first part of the story we learned the importance of hope. Nagito is also someone who believes in hope yet he is willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to create this hope. In fact he doesn't seem to have morals. He is willing to kill for someone else's hope. He is willing to help anyone as long as it is the name of hope. What makes him even more dangerous is the fact that he beliefs that despair and hope are inseparable. After a while he becomes incredibly unpredictable. You never know if he is on your side or if he isn't. I'd even say that he might be on your side one minute before betraying you the next. He is a really interesting character and the perversion of the great virtue we call hope. Now you might not be able to relate to this character at first but let me put him into perspective. Just like the Joker, Nagito is considered a psychopaths by most of the fandom. Now I agree, Nagito has a lot of issues even beside is weird longing for hope but what I found most interesting is that people usually don't point those out. They are usually focused on the fact that he is willing to kill friends, family, pets and even himself in name of hope. But I wonder: What is so different about revolutions? People who are willing to kill for a greater good. They want to protect a world. He wants the same. Yet he is a psychopath and others are heroes. Isn't the perspective off? Why is he a villain and we aren't? In truth nothing is truer than the saying: "Everyone is a hero of their own story." These villains are a parody of ourselves. We can relate to them and that's what makes them so scary. If you want to write a villain, steep down into your deepest depths. Are looking for an antagonist or a villain? What I found to be the main difference between villains and antagonists is that an antagonist is usually redeemable. Darth Vader is an antagonist while the Joker is a villain (technically he is also an antagonist, just by definition. However in order to be able to differentiate the two I created a new definition for antagonist). Antagonists work slightly different than villains. While villains are created by our deepest depths, antagonist are exactly like us. If you had just made a different decision, you might've ended up the same way. So when you are crafting your protagonist's opposing force, you need to think about what you need. What is it that you want to relay to the reader? Both an antagonist and a villain can drive the story forward. So the decision is less about their function in the story but more about what this story is supposed to tell the reader. It is also a good idea to have a look into what it is common practice in your genre. Villains: Backstories aren't important, intentions are. Now I think I've talked about intentions quite a bit. However one of the main tips I found online was that a good villain needs a backstory. I would like to disagree. A villain can have a backstory but he definitely doesn't need one. This goes hand in hand with one of my prior points. We are afraid of what we don't understand. A backstory helps understand where a character is coming from, so it makes a character less scary and more predictable. A truly scary villain is unpredictable and represents the parts of ourselves that we usually suppress. Antagonists: Backstories and intentions are both really important. Like I said: You could be the antagonist if you had just made a different decision or if you were dealt different cards in life. That's why backstories are of fundamental importance for an antagonist. What made you them to feel this way? How did they react to that? How did that influence their beliefs? So while a villain is all about taboos, an antagonist is all about understanding. You want the reader to feel for this person. While their actions aren't good, it is all rooted in something that we can all relate to. We understand antagonists. We fear villains. A character can also start out as a villain but become an an antagonist as the story progresses. This is totally up to you. He needs to have some good traits I don't care if it's humour, intelligence or just in general a charming personality. There needs to be some reason why the reader enjoys reading about them. You don't want a boring villain/antagonist. A character with absolutely no redeeming qualities is also really unrealistic. So go ahead and make your villain likable. A great example for a charming antagonist is Littlefinger from GOT. His charm also made him extremely dangerous because it made him a great manipulator. Another example is (again) Nagito whose intelligence made him really important, entertaining and dangerous all at the same time. There was absolutely no way around Nagito. You couldn't trick him while it felt like he was playing you like a puppet on strings. You had to rely on the most unreliable person just because of his intellect. Let them take actions. Just like a good protagonist is active, a good antagonist/villain does the same. Let them take actions. Show just how capable they are. Don't make them wait for the protagonist. The world doesn't stand still for anyone, not even for a protagonist. Give them strength. Nothing is worse than an antagonist/villain that needs his lackies to defeat you because they are to weak to do it on their own. There are countless stories like this. Remember that anyone who has a conviction will do anything to achieve it. They can start out weak but they usually don't stay weak. So allow your villain/antagonist to be strong. That concludes the main aspects I wrote down. I have a few other small tips but they aren't all that important. I hope this helps those who struggle with writing the opposing force just like I did
