I
love books. Specifically, I tend to love fantasy novels (in all their 600+ page
glory), but I’ve noticed a somewhat annoying theme in them. The “bad guys.” If
that phrase on its own doesn’t make you wince like it does me, then allow me to
explain. In a story there is the protagonist and the antagonist, and I have
come to appreciate those terms as an alternative to “the good guys and the bad
guys.” However, in all too many stories the antagonist is a cop-out: a purely
evil character who does bad things because… well because evil.
You
see the problem with this idea; it’s not realistic. If art imitates life, and a
good story has life-like characters, are you really going to find an evil
character that actually thinks he is evil?
This
type of antagonist has his place, particularly in more lighthearted stories
such as comedies (particularly satire) and children’s stories, but he often
steps outside his proper domain and into more complex writing. Some of my
favorite authors are guilty of this, but I suppose a popular example would be
best: Voldemort.
In
Harry Potter, Voldemort is just
straight up evil. It’s been about a year since I last read some of the books,
but I can’t recall any motive given for Voldemort’s actions other than he came
to the conclusion that wizards were better than muggles. There was no series of
reasoning in which he explained why he truly believed this to be for the
greater good, it was always pretty clear that he was just in it for ruling the
world.
But
very few real bad guys actually do that, and very few interesting ones do. How
much better could those seven books have been if we the readers had been forced
to explore the Dark Lord’s thoughts a little bit? If we had been forced to see
his side of things and understand that he really did think that he was doing
good and that Harry was standing in the way of the righteous path?
My
favorite example of an author who does this, and who has rapidly become one of
my favorite authors, is Brandon Sanderson. In each of his stories so far he
really plays around with the idea of the bad guy. This ranges from starting a
book with one character as an antagonist and having their entire worldview
shift to keeping a character ambiguous but possibly evil and not revealing
their true motives until the end to spending an entire book painting a
character as pure evil and then forcing another point of view on you to show
that they were actually helping the whole time.
This is how I
think antagonists should be done. Nobody is evil in his or her own eyes, every
bad guy has a reason for what they do that they probably completely believe.
This can be as simple as greed and a “looking out for number one” attitude or
as complex and involved as a worldview that says murder, oppression, and war is
the only way to bring about piece. The point is that they believe in their
cause as much as the noble heroes believe in theirs.
This has brought
me to the conclusion that I can count my writing as successful if I can just
for one moment get a reader so invested in an antagonist’s story that they find
themselves rooting for the “bad guy” before they can stop themselves. Who knows
what other false assumptions about people they might start questioning then.
