Creating An Antagonist

Hey everyone,

So this week I decided to look at creating an antagonist.

In lots of fantasy books, the antagonist is a villain (though this isn’t mandatory). Villains can be ordinary people. They can’t be evil just for the sake of being evil. Your antagonist, be they a single character or a group, they must be relatable in some way, or believe what they’re doing is right. In Into The Wild, the first book in the ‘Warriors’ original arc, ShadowClan is lead into tyranny by an ambitious, and psychotic leader, Brokenstar. However, ShadowClan is shown to care about their friends and family, and are even willing to disobey their leader to do what is best for them and their clan. 

ThunderClan gives us a parallel. In ShadowClan, we have the purely bad Brokenstar, and in ThunderClan, we have the ambitious, charismatic, and, as we can start to see, just as evil, Tigerclaw. Tigerclaw’s rise to power is used to show how Brokenstar may have gotten his own clan onside.

Although it is powerful, showing this parallel between the ‘evil’ clan, and the ‘good’ clan (or group), it’s not paramount. You can have an evil, yet relatable antagonist without showing someone else like him who is not yet in a position of power.

Antagonists can come about by seeing an imperfect world, and believing they alone know how to fix it. If they only wish for power then you may get a heartless, authoritarian leader instead. Interesting characterisation will make your antagonist memorable to the reader.

Your antagonist should also resonate with the focal point, or themes of your story. It should connect to other things the protagonist struggles with thorough. In ‘Warriors’, Fireheart defeats Brokenstar. We see the same thing happening in Thunderclan, adding wieght to the main arc, and Fireheart then exposes Tigerstar. Both these acts protect his own clan, just as the original anagonist, ShadowClan, wished to protect theirs.

Hopefully this will help you create interesting, and memorable villains (antagonists).

A video by LZRD WZRD explains in greater detail how the villains in ‘Warriors’ are used.

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Happy writing,

     Teen Fantasy Author