Being a Better Writer: What is an Antagonist?

You know the drill! Hit the link or the jump for the full post!

Welcome back readers, and a big welcome to the first topic from Topic List #20! Being a Better Writer sure has come a long way since 2013, when it was largely (and effectively) the equivalent of message-board posts responding to fan messages asking writing questions, hasn’t it? Maybe in August of 2023 I should do a ten-year special of some kind. Thankfully, I’ve got a year to think about it. But that does sound like fun.

Ten years of Being a Better Writer in 2023. Sands and Storms, that’s a lot of content. Of course, it didn’t start being weekly. Originally it was just a response to a message asking for writing advice. But the one response inspired more people to send in their writing questions and then before long I was getting a few messages a week, and I started making a list, and the posts started to become regular …

That was nine years ago, and things have definitely changed. The initial “boom” of writing questions died down, though I still get the occasional request through Discord these days or on on the Topic Call posts. Being a Better Writer migrated off of its origin point and onto this site, which also became the main hub for my books and other materials. At the urging of a number of fans, I finally opened a Patreon that, to this day, helps keep the site entirely advertisement free—no pop-ups or intrusive ads over the text here! Being a Better Writer has been sourced, quoted, and cited everywhere from Wikipedia to major education systems, collegiate and public.

It’s come a long way.

Sorry, just sort of got nostalgic there with the whole start of Topic List #20. Side note, readers, but this is another Being a Better Writer post prepped and scheduled in advance, as I’m gearing up for a trip in May. Which … let me check my calendar … I haven’t departed on yet, I think, but hey, I’m getting this ready to go now.

Anyway, let’s talk about today’s topic, and step away from the reminiscing. Today’s topic is one most of you will likely recognize from a few weeks ago, when we talked about villains and how to make them deliver on their premise.

Well, one thing that came up over the course of that discussion was a small segment on the difference between a villain and an antagonist. The reason for that segment being that a lot of people—even critics—tend to use both terms interchangably. It’s not at all uncommon to see a review, for instance, refer to the villain of a piece as the “antagonist” or vice-versa.

But there’s a real problem with using these two terms interchangeably: They’re not the same thing. A villain is not automatically an antagonist, nor is an antagonist automatically a villain. As stated in the villain discussion, it’s like the old logic statement: Some villains are antagonists, and some antagonists are villains, but not all villains are antagonists, and not all antagonists are villains.

Worse, using them interchangeably like this is actually kind of harmful, as it blurs the lines for those who may not realize that there’s a very clear difference between the two identities. For a comparison, imagine a car magazine reviewing a new vehicle, but clearly treating rally cars as identical to rock-crawling cars, simply because both can traverse rough unpaved roads. Yes, both can, but they’re also very different kinds of cars.

Villains and antagonists are the same way: They have similar positions in a story sometimes, and can even overlap into the same character, making a villain antagonist. But they are not the same, and not understanding that can lead to confusion both in the writing and in the explaining of the story.

Look, if you take one thing away from this post, let it be this: An antagonist is not a villain. There is no requirement that an antagonist be villainous at all. They are separate character roles that can be combined into one, but don’t have to be.

You ready to break this down in depth? Then hit the jump.

Continue reading →

Comments

[Muggonny]

I haven't read this blog yet, and I plan to. It's especially convenient that this showed up in my feed today because last night I found this very well-written comment on a video that encapsulates the issue with modern villains.

This is why it's notoriously difficult to write good, complex villains. In order for a villain to be complex, they need to be human. In order to be human, their motivations and goals need to be relatable. The problem is, most writers focus so much on making the villain's goals relatable, that they rarely put much thought into making the hero's goals and motivations equally relatable, because the villain is usually supposed to be the driving force of conflict, and thus the driving element of a story. So what you often get is one of two outcomes: 1) the villain's plans and ambitions are actually quite reasonable, and the hero is left with little moral rebuttal, so even though the hero has to win, the writer fails to deliver a proper argument against the villain's worldview, making the hero's triumph feel cheap and undeserved; or 2) the villain's plans and ambitions are reasonable, but the writer has to make them resort to unnecessary and gratuitous violence in order to achieve those ends, because violence in most cases is seen as beyond the pale of most reasonable ideologies. The violence, then, is the thing the hero fights against, not their ideals. This in turn makes the hero's argument weak because the villain's main argument is left unchallenged, and it is only their ancillary actions that tarnish their character, even though the writer will try to make the audience believe otherwise.
In order to write a truly strong story, your villain's goals and motivations have to be relatable and reasonable, but there has to be some major flaw, and the hero's responsibility is to have an argument that successfully contradicts it and proves itself superior. A villain like Thanos, for instance, is complex, and their ideology is built to be relatable despite its extremeness, and it even has an in-built fallacy that can be argued against (eliminating half the population of the universe would not solve the problems Thanos claims to want to solve—it is his insistence on not looking for alternatives that betrays his true nature, that of a bloodthirsty despot more interested in satisfying his own ego than in actually making the universe prosperous). Unfortunately, the writers of Infinity War/Endgame do not take advantage of this in-built flaw, but rather treat Thanos as an evil simply because he resorts to violence, and this is a failure to write a heroic counterargument against his actions, despite one being available. So the other side of this trap is, even when a villain is legitimately written well and with a relatable but appropriately weak argument for their actions, heroes and their arguments can often be ignored.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.