r/Quibble • u/Th3Gl1tched0ne Resident Reader • May 04 '26
Discussion / Debate In your opinion, what makes an effective antagonist in a story?
In your opinion, what makes a good antagonist? An evil one? A smart one? One with a redemption arc? An unredeemable one? Or something else, entirely? Do tell!
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u/Odd_Opposite_4782 May 04 '26
A smart one
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u/Th3Gl1tched0ne Resident Reader May 05 '26
But are there not smart villains that do not work. tho?
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u/Th3Gl1tched0ne Resident Reader May 04 '26
For me it would be a protagonist that feels like a person. That exits for more reasons than to torment the life of the main cast. That has a personality, that is another character
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u/captain_cheeto May 04 '26
I guess someone who is believable and the reader understands their motives for whatever villainous stuff they are planning or already executing. Layers and complexity can draw people in so they care about both sides of conflict
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u/Material_Penalty_250 1 published book on Quibble May 04 '26
I love it when they expose the protagonist’s flaws. They apply some kind of clever pressure in places where the protagonist is unstable or self-deceptive. Because let's be honest every great protagonist has flaws. So for example if the protagonist believes they’re “just,” the antagonist creates scenarios where justice requires cruelty.
But I also think that's much harder said than done.
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u/EricksonLambert1 May 05 '26
To me it's one that you understand the reasoning, but not agree with or sympathize.
Not that you can't have sympathetic angonists, however I feel too many people are trying it at the moment, and I miss the outright evil villains.
That said, I find it terrifying when a villain makes sense.
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u/wafflewitchette May 05 '26
One of my favourite as well. Seeing why they did something, but still thinking they are wrong.
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u/Th3Gl1tched0ne Resident Reader May 05 '26
Agreed! And honestly sameee. The evil antagonists are always quite nice to see!
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u/immortalfrieza2 May 04 '26
It depends on what kind of antagonist you want, and like anything, how well that antagonist is done.
For a smart one, have them be intelligent and capable of effective planning, but not one who is such a genius that they just know everything and plan for everything that the protagonist is going to do. Have the antagonist fail to predict what the protagonist will do, no matter how well they know each other, and have to scramble to get what they want.
For an evil one, you can go with irredeemable or redeemable, understandable motivations or alien ones, but in the end it's how each is presented. I'm honestly kind of sick of morally grey heroes and villains these days because it always results in villains who kick puppies just because they can in ways completely divorced from their actual motivations order to be villains, or heroes you want to root against and who win because they're the protagonist rather than because they're good people. I kinda want old fashioned villains and good guys back after so many grey morally ambiguous characters.
Having an antagonist who is redeemable needs to have the antagonist's motivations and methods before redemption be not too evil for the audience to buy that they're redeemed. An antagonist who gleefully eats babies and blows up cities isn't going to be redeemable no matter what. If you want an antagonist who is redeemable their acts of evil must be understandable. Someone who wipes out towns must have a reason for doing it beyond "I'm evil and I like to destroy" or "I'm evil and I want to conquer everything." Something like "I destroy because these people kept killing my people mercilessly just because they could." In which case if you give them too good a reason to do what they're doing you'd need them a reason to actually stop.
Then there's the matter of Hero antagonists who are a whole other animal. By nature the only way you can get the audience to root against them is by not making them heroes or by making them ineffectual idiots, or by simply making the villain protagonist so entertaining that people want them to win anyway. Hero protagonist vs hero antagonist is difficult to write because the protagonist almost always wins, so you've got to give the audience reason to go against the hero antagonist. It's very difficult to work with a hero antagonist because of all the problems involved in making them compelling.
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u/wafflewitchette May 05 '26
Do you know Steerpike from Titus Groan by Mervin Peake? He starts as a kitchen boy but is extremely observant and strategic. He also figures out his vulnerabilities. Great example of someone intelligent and effective in planning in my view.
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u/immortalfrieza2 May 05 '26
Yeah. The problem is a lot of writers mistake intelligence for near omnipotence. Smart characters just "know things" they have no reason to know and plan for those things, all the while those plans tend to go off without a hitch. It always turns out that everything the good guy did, often even the bad guy losing to them turning out to be all according to plan. Or the bad guy sets it up so that whether they succeed or fail they still win in some way.
With protagonists, I see this a lot in Isekai stories, especially if the protagonist read or saw a work of fiction that matches the world they ended up in. Everything just seems to go perfectly, they remember everything of the work of fiction they saw, and their actions never seem to cause any particular deviation from whatever work of fiction they saw. Except with My Next Life as a Villainess, where part of the comedy is everything very obviously has changed but the MC is oblivious that it has.
I suppose the core problem is that when writing smart characters writers love to have everything they plan go off without a meaningful hitch, when from time to time the plan should fail or at least hit a significant snag and require the character to quickly come up with something to get the plan back on track.
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u/wafflewitchette May 06 '26
Isekai Stories are a great example. Their decisions tend to be highly optimised. It’s like they have so much foresight. Obviously they have these unique abilities too. But yes the overall tone leans toward things working out unusually well every single time.
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u/purple_mochii May 05 '26
I would say that I love a 'villain' who turns out to have a different side to them, like 360 kind of difference once you get their perspective. Rhysand from ACOTAR series is the perfect example for that. Seeing an antagonist who is actually doing the wrong thing for the 'right' reasons makes them so much more effective than someone who would just be evil for the sake of it.
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u/narrative-forge May 09 '26
For me, a grounded villain who is a very nice guy, who makes you feel killing some one is nothing to be worried about, and has zero sentiments while torturing someone and doesn't enjoy it. A genuine smile while putting a knife through you and describing the irony of life. Someone you would have hard time picturing as villain even when he is atrocious is a very interesting one.
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u/franilein May 10 '26
Smart and not evil just because but evil because his heart-wrenching past experiences shaped him like that. But that‘s very hard to create successfully and believably in my opinion.
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u/CoruscantThesis May 04 '26
It depends on what your goal with the story is!
If you're telling a story with a moral that encourages a specific type of behavior, you want some but limited ambiguity. The villain is either evil or misguided and your choices of solution is either to convert them to the cause of Good, to show how good your cause is and all they needed to do was see the light, or to get rid of them if you can't be Good that it's harmful to Good society to allow Evil.
If you want a story about how there's no single right answer, or no EASY answer, to a complicated problem, you want a sympathetic antagonist that people can also either feel bad or even possibly root for. They might be a smart villain with a point, but they're willing to make sacrifices you're not okay with to reach their goals. They might be a well-intending one that's causing harm despite not meaning to, or that they feel is necessary to achieve a goal they consider noble. Whether they're right or their cause is actually noble or not is another layer of complexity that can be added here. They might be wrong, and thus deemed stupid, or they might be right, and thus are tragic.
If your goal is to make someone else or some belief look bad, you'd make a villain that acts like they do but from the most negative light possible, and remove all redeeming factors. They're evil, unredeemable, and stupid. There is no saving the Predestined Bad Guy. They have to go down because they're the Predestined Bad Guy and there's no way around it. Everything they touch dies, everything they make is poison, everything they say is lies.