Is there a "best" way of writing antagonists?

Oh it could be interesting, but the vast vast majority of HGs and CoGs have the protagonist “present” in every scene. The reader only knows what the protagonist knows. It’s one and the same. It could be confusing if the reader is suddenly whisked away to the cut scene and gains information that the protagonist doesn’t have. Does the reader make future choices based on what the reader knows or what the reader’s character knows?

Now I do think you could make a great interactive novel where the reader was not the protagonist, or any character at all! The reader could be floating above the fray, (like a ghost!) guiding the actions of multiple characters and watching how the plot lines are impacted by reader choices. In that set-up, yes I think you could shift scenes all you want.

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A lot of good writers have already spoken, so I will only add something not yet discussed.

Writing an antagonist is just like writing another character except the need to execute that writing is greater. You can get away with sloppy writing when inserting minor-bit characters that act like the Star Trek “Red Shirts”. These are characters that are inserted just as filler.

An antagonist, on the other hand, is often dissected under a microscope by a reader. If a reader’s logic, intuition, heart or feelings clash with the character you are writing it makes it that much more difficult to pull off.

It is very hard to write an antagonist in a “decent” manner - but when you do it, the feeling you have is awesome. With my latest effort, each and every person I had read my draft had a strong reaction to my antagonist - the fact that each had differing opinions on what they felt towards that character made me feel like I nailed the antagonist so far. The most important thing is that this character made a connection with each reader and I couldn’t ask for more.

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The best type of antagonist is the one that your story needs. Like for example, Disney villains aren’t usually deep and complex, but they don’t need to be, they’re good enough for the movies they’re in.

But writing antagonist really isn’t all that different to writing any other type of character.
You must think: what is their role?, What motivates them?, what are their strengths and weakness? And probably the most important, what is their backstory?

And by backstory I mean all of the life experiences that make them the way they are. Usually, the role, the personality and the motivation of a character will be based on their backstory.

This doesn’t mean that you need to show the player all of this, but you as the writer should have it in mind, therefore you’ll know how the character will act in every situation.

There are some villains that had been through alot. They do all kinds of horrible things, because they feel like the world owes them something. But although suffering can explain a horrible behaviour, it doesn’t justify what they’re doing.

Some villains, have been raised with other ideals in their life that doesn’t match with what we usually associate as good or bad. Therefore they just think that their actions arent really bad.

Maybe the antagonist is just a decent human being, that have a goal that conflicts with the protagonist.

There are a lot of different possibilities, and not every one of them can serve for every story.

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I’m not saying it would work for every CoG but it would be nice to see someone try it. And yes you would need to be careful what you reveal in these scenes but if you focus more on showing who they are rather then what they’ll do next it can only help. You could also show the villain doing something that is revealed to the protagonists and reader at the same time. Maybe the protagonists is looking at the scene of a crime and it cuts to a flashback of the antagonist committing that crime.

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As long as it’s not done to often it shouldn’t break immersion to much. It was done in Samurai of Hyuga a couple times (just remembered that) and helped to create suspense and even revealed information to the reader the protagonists didn’t get to much later but didn’t affect choices as you could not choose to go save someone the protagonists didn’t know was in danger.

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I think it’s very difficult to pull off a perspective switch in COG for this exact reason. That being said, I have played games where perspective switches are done very well. I don’t think it’s a case of “try to avoid this,” I think it’s a case of “try to avoid this if you don’t know how to do it well.”

Best idea is to make it obvious which shouldn’t be to hard. And most importantly trust your readers you’d be suprised by how smart they can be.

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Also, going back to this, the discussion here applies mostly to villain antagonists, but I think a lot of it would work well with other kinds of antagonists, too. A story where our protagonist, a villain, slowly uncovers the deplorable motives of our antagonist, a hero.

I think it’d be interesting to have a story where cutaway scenes are a natural part of it, but the antagonist is a master of disguise. We get cutaway scenes where we don’t know that who we’re reading about is the antagonist. Maybe they’re disguised as someone close to the protagonist. The protagonist would even have to deal with not knowing who they could trust in this case when they eventually figure this out. And then there’s the case of: what if it really IS one of the people they’re “disguised” as?

I’ve also had experiences with media where my own views align with the antagonist too much. Which is past the point of grey morality. I actually have this exact issue with Batman. Yes, killing is wrong. But in cases where it’s a choice between killing someone or having them murder countless innocents, I don’t think I’d hesitate. For a reader, this can be alienating and frustrating.

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True! We did that in our epilogue. Since I agree with @Eric_Moser that it is really tricky and not, at first blush, inherent to the CoG/HG experience, this seemed like the only appropriate place in our game to tack a little something on for the reader that the MC wouldn’t/doesn’t know. It’s a great challenge to consider ways to bend those perspectives a bit without losing immersion.

Edit: Darn fingers forgetting to add words :smile:

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when I am writing about antagonists I generally start with their background story then work my way up from their which I know can get a little time consuming but is worth it when you have a well fleshed out character. I have also found out that getting the background done first also helps to get the looks of the character sorted out too as it makes it easier to know if they are battle worn (scarred), rugged, dainty or something entirely different which then can lead us to composing the name.

I’m not sure it would break immersion as much as you would think. These days our minds consume so many stories from books, movies and games that we’re hot wired to accept things like cuts to other scenes and changes in perspective.

I think it’s just the matter of “how”. How the writer should write their antagonist’s perspective? With at least the reader get a hint it’s the antagonist? (The hint can come on a later scenes, though)

I mean, at least the reader should get the idea that they was once viewing through the eyes of antagonist, right? If not, then the whole point of antagonist’s-view shifting is just useless.

I agree to some extent, but I feel it’s different when the reader is actually playing as the main character (which is the case in COG). I say this mainly because I have had several experiences where I felt this to be the case, unfortunately.

This sounds like it would also be helpful to assure that one’s character’s remain consistently characterized. Starting off unsure, it’s too easy to write a character that has no consistent personality (often finding the personality you desired of the character later in the writing process).

Distance believe it or not is something you should be aware of in terms of relating how dangerous an antagonist is.

Very few people are afraid of someone or something that is far away. If your villain closes the distance he becomes ‘present’. For example the ultimate villain ‘The devil’ fiction or doctrine the story of this big bad have the readers feeling that he’s in your heart and mind now that is lethal close. All great terrors had that ability to close the distance, both mentally and physically. Say if you’re on the phone with somebody yet you get that creepy feeling they can ‘see’ you is an example of closing the distance.

So what you want to do is make the reader ‘feel’ like their villain is never far away. There are countless ways one can accomplish this one of my favourites is the ‘devil on your shoulder’ method. The antagonist develops a rapport with the MC they converse at length and regularly whether hero wants to or not.

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As many of you know I love playing as evil or machiavellian. And bore to death of playing as goodie savior of the world.

More boredom provokes all the antagonist villain dichotomy. My stories or just bluntly put a big baddie there just for plotting there deus ex machina one dimensional npc.

Antagonist are worse, predictable force that is just there to make player feel powerful and comfortable with his killing because they are the best sane person and has to defeating that old friend or random peasant obsessed with him.

So I decided that I don’t need big villain or antagonist at all. And just created a realist setting where we just in the middle of a crappy situation where everyone has muddy the political waters because their ambitious plans and convinced they are correct and the good side of a story.
in certain way all npc would find us a teen trying to find love in this mess and survive the antagonist.

Distance if used correctly can also have the opposite affect. If you write something to be so distant that it becomes this haunting unkown, something that the protagonists struggles to understand but can’t then that can also be very threatening. After all nothing is more terrifying then the unkown.

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That’s still closing the distance as such thoughts creep into your mind and corrupt. It’s a different way of closing the distance, like I said there are a lot of ways to use it, theoretical, psychological, physical.

Human fear can be summed up by: that thing over there is scary… I hope it doesn’t come over here. We distance ourselves from such things and feel safe ‘away’ from these things.

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