Is Hades evil? He is just misunderstood and putting on a facad. He does things that seem evil, but they were mostly necessary. Look at Zues. Supposobly the wisest and good, yet look at all the wrong he did. (Ate his pregnant wife) I think the best characters are the ones who start to realize what they are doing is wrong and help in the end, usually against a greater/common threat. I suggest you look at Lunar Silver Star Story and Lunar 2 Eternal Blue (Video games). Wiki it. Basically the main bad character (Who was a hero years ago) in the first one had his own greedy, yet understandable, motives. He was defeated at the end of the first game.The bad guy returns a few hundred years later in the second game and is revived by a greater evil to help him control the world. Well, this bad character had other motives to agreeing to this, and was actually helping to build the teams strength to fight (Big boss guy and heroes did not know). In the end he saves the heroes and reveals that he wanted to make up for his mistakes, ultimatly dying but with retribution. Look at Metal Gear series. It is full of people who have different views. Some are selfish, some believe in the cause, so misguided, some spy, some just there to make the hero hate you to make them suceed.
Of course you could make an antagonist non-evil. No one is completely evil in real life and therefore your antagonist doesn't have to be evil at all. Now here's the question: are you going to lead the reader to believe the antagonist is evil (from the protagonists point of view) or are you going to let the reader know that the antagonist is innocent?
If he's never shown to be doing anything evil or wrong then why does the protagonist against him? I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done but there still needs to be a reason for the characters to b against one another.
Maybe because the protagonist doesn't agree with it. It could be as simple as one school teacher (antagonist) trying to prove his teaching methods are better than that of his colleague (protagonist).
Yes it could be done...its your classic "He Did It" scenario. For example you could have a cop(good) trying to catch a master criminal and blames a murder on him not knowing any better, only for the simple fact that he has never been able to catch him. I don't know if that's where you are going with that, but to me that's just what I got out of your question, and I hope this helps.
The antagonist is simply the opposing force to the protagonist. Heck, the protagonist could be a serial killer and the antagonist a detective! So, the question is what you mean when you suggest "[an] Antagonist of a story never does anything to actually be considered the Antagonist." If you suggest the antagonist does not oppose the protagonist in any way, then it's not an antagonist and it's simply boring (however, it's possible the character's irrational hatred for this supposed "antagonist" could be the real antagonist and also the source of conflict: aka man vs self scenario). But, if you simply use "antagonist" as a typical bad guy, then yes, an antagonist doesn't have to do typical bad guy things. It just has to go against the protagonist.
