They Say You’re the Bad Guy
Conflict is at the heart of storytelling. Whether it’s internal, between people or whole groups. They can be personal, social and ideological in nature, and authors have a multitude of ways they can be present conflict to a reader. Writers may elect to present a narrative conflict with neutrality and allow their audience to decide for themselves, based on their own values and where their sympathies lie. But more than often, authors will pick a side.
Once a writer has established which side they’re on, the classical archetype of the heroic protagonist takes shape. We follow their exploits, and bear witness to their spirited and virtuous character. Where there is a hero in a story there will also be their binary opposite: a foe, an enemy, a nemesis who wants to defeat them and their cause. This character is the antagonist.
In the same way the writer has a variety of ways they can present a conflict they have a breadth of choice in how they choose to depict an antagonist. In genres like action, science fiction, fantasy, horror and westerns, the antagonists can be rich in psychological depth or decidedly one note. They can be nuanced characters or simplified, cartoonish bad guys.
Writers’ choices concerning their antagonists can determine the success and strength of their storytelling. There is a sliding scale regarding how much or how little humanity is present in a story’s antagonist that affects how we as readers perceive them. If their characterization is incongruous to the tone of the world they inhabit, our experience can be compromised and ultimately harm a story’s dramatic impact.
Villainy
On the far end of the antagonist scale are characters with no pretense or delusions about their nature — they’re evil and they know it. There’s no doubting their identity as wicked, malevolent figures and they’re intentions are similarly insidious: wanting to rule the world, wiping out mankind, destroying civilization, and so on. Their ambitions are clearly villainous, and only brave, intrepid heroes can stop them.
Their villainy is derived through their use of violence to achieve their goals. These antagonists will harm and kill people without remorse or mercy, uncaring of the devastation they unleash. This is a conscious choice — they want to inflict suffering.
Consider their appearance oftentimes: dark, oppressive, even demonic. Picture Sauron from The Lord of the Rings trilogy — living under perpetual storm clouds in a barren land of volcanic rock, with ugly and deformed orc minions and black-hooded Ringwraiths subject to his will. And his goal: to rule Middle Earth by conquest. Does Sauron see himself as a good guy? How could he?
The Sith from Star Wars, including Emperor Palpatine, follow the dark side of the Force. They dress in black, embrace hatred as the source of their power, and fight with red lightsabers. What do the Sith want? To rule the galaxy. The Emperor orders the construction of planet-killing superweapons to instill fear and control over his Empire and crush the Rebellion — Palpatine knows he’s the bad guy.
The problem with this extreme kind of antagonist is that they are emotionally flat. They can only be villains, with no introspection or depth to their actions — they are dehumanized, reduced to a single motivation and mode of behaviour.
Psychopathy
A step down from villainy are antagonists who exhibit skewed reasoning and justifications for their actions. Unlike villains who know themselves to be evil, psychopaths (in the fictional sense of the word) view their actions as defensible — they don’t see themselves as the bad guys. Their world view is built on the belief that they have moral superiority, while simultaneously using violence and intimidation to serve their own ends. They are manipulative and indifferent to others’ suffering — in their eyes, if someone is hurt or killed they most likely deserve it. A psychopath’s reasoning can be reinforced by political, religious or philosophical beliefs.
In Stephen King’s novel and Frank Darabont’s film adaptation of The Mist Mrs. Carmody exploits other’s fears of the story’s horrifying events to her own benefit. She interprets the monstrous goings-on as the Christian end of days, and appoints herself as the people’s spiritual leader to redemption and salvation. She also abuses her power to act spiteful revenge on her dissenters, telling her new congregation that non-believers must be sacrificed in order for them to survive. In an atmosphere filled with uncertainty and terror, Mrs. Carmody seizes the opportunity to be seen as a saviour, while also indulging her confrontational, hostile, and fallible nature.
Where villains are one dimensional forms, psychopaths are imbued with greater emotional complexity. As antagonists they are given layers that make them feel more real — we believe these people could exist. While they’re incapable or unwilling to see their hypocrisies the audience is shown the wider facets of their personality. As readers, we understand them better, but the author keeps us morally and emotionally separate from them.
Sympathy
Distinct from villains and psychopaths are antagonists who emotionally resonate with audiences. We can understand why these characters have taken drastic action and, to some degree, feel their beliefs are reasoned. We may see their methods as extreme but at the same time we question whether they’re entirely wrong. Sympathetic antagonists are often tragic figures and victims of circumstance — believing they have been forced into action because of their own experiences of loss and injustice. We can view ourselves as being these characters had our own paths in life taken a different turn, and if we had suffered as they did.
Another aspect that distinguishes them from villains and psychopaths is their use of force as a last resort. They have exhausted every other means at their disposal, but because of their treatment by society or because of political distortion their only remaining option is to fight outside of the system.
Erik Lehnsherr, more popularly known as Magneto, is one of the most morally and emotionally conflicted antagonists in 20th century comics and 21st century mainstream film. Being an opponent and occasional ally of the X-Men for decades, Magneto was a young Jew in Europe during the rule of the Nazis, who witnessed and survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Erik is also a mutant with the power to control metal. When hatred and suspicion grows among humans about the potential threat mutants pose, the older Erik believes another war, another holocaust, is inevitable. Unlike his pacifist friend, Charles Xavier, who believes mankind can one day accept mutants as equals, Erik knows from personal tragedy the evils that one group can enact upon another.
Rather than allow mankind to marginalize and terrorize mutants, Magneto wants to fight back. In the final act of X-Men: First Class, American and Russian naval ships fire their arsenals against Erik and his fellow mutants, but he is able to stop them mid-flight. Having demonstrated the lengths mankind will go to suppress them, going so far as to kill them, he refuses to live any longer under their fearful and tyrannical rule. He won’t allow his kind to be victims any more — “Never again.”
Despite the tragedy that has befallen Erik, and understanding his distrust of mankind, he remains an antagonist. His intention may be to protect mutants but his retaliation is twisted into fanaticism and militancy, wanting mutants to wage a pre-emptive war against all humans, steadfast in his belief that peace between them is impossible. For Magneto it’s either them or us.
We don’t want sympathetic antagonists to succeed, but we don’t want them to lose, either. As terrible as their actions may be, they have a just cause worth fighting for, leaving us to question how we would respond if we were in their position. How many of us would allow injustice and prejudice to continue, and how many of us would do something about it? How far is each of us prepared to go?
Antagonists can serve a variety of purposes in storytelling. A villain can unite disparate people in defeating a common enemy. A psychopath can warn us of the dangers of combining peoples’ frailties and apathy with influence and power. And a sympathetic antagonist can show us how a righteous person with the noblest of causes can still do the wrong thing.
Our awareness of an antagonist’s humanity, or lack thereof, will determine how we absorb an author’s fictional world and their narrative tone. Is the world split along clearly defined lines of good and bad, or is there no absolute morality for us to hold onto?
Coming soon: Please Don’t Touch
