August Content Update: The Heroic Antagonist (Patreon)

So far, we've talked quite a bit about conventional villains, as well as antagonists who pretend to be on the protagonists' side. Now, I'd like to tackle a rather different sort of antagonist: the one that is actually the good guy.

The Heroic Antagonist is, for the purposes of this discussion, an antagonist with the moral high ground over the protagonist by the standards of the audience. That last part is important, because ultimately the decision of who comes out as hero or villain is determined by the judgement of your readers or players, not by your setting itself. That means if an antagonist is seen as heroic by the standards of their setting, but not necessarily by the standards of the audience, that means you don't really have a heroic antagonist so much as you do a villainous antagonist who is supported by the faulty, or malevolent mores of the society they inhabit.

This is not a bad thing, if done intentionally. Indeed, most narratives which are also works of social commentary are set up like this. The reason why Inspector Javert serves as an antagonist in Les Miserables is to comment on the injustice of the French system of law and punishment which the inspector serves - a system which had hitherto been seen as just, or at least tolerable - at the time of the novel's writing. By showing how easily such a system could twist a loyal and driven public servant to persecute a genuinely repentant man like Jean Valjean simply because he was once a felon convicted of a crime of necessity, Victor Hugo showed the inhumanity of that system of law and punishment. Javert himself is a victim: a man driven by his loyalty and his desire to do good to his destruction by the faulty institution he serves - the institution which ultimately serves as the real villain of the story.

That being said, these sorts of stories not ones I'd consider narratives featuring heroic antagonists. Ultimately, an antagonist which serves societal norms which are exposited to the audience as repugnant or fundamentally unjust are still villains, merely ones serving the interests of a more powerful villain (the institution) rather than their own ends. While it's easier to see these sorts of distinctions in unfamiliar societies or with traditions we've been conditioned to view with a certain degree of distaste (it'd be hard to, for example, see a character enforcing a forced marriage or a ritual infanticide as heroic, even if they are merely adhering to the standards of their own society), this applies just as readily to stories within societies like our own, where people with pure or even noble intentions may serve institutions which our society frames as good - even as they do harm.

If you've ever heard the Anarchist slogan "All Cops Are Bastards", that's what that means - not a declaration that all members of police forces are morally bankrupt, but that the police as an institution is fundamentally harmful despite its societal reputation - and thus causes the individuals which make up police forces to do harm, regardless of their intentions.

This all leaves us with a fundamental question: if the heroic antagonist must hold the moral high ground over the protagonist in the eyes of the audience, how do you keep the audience's sympathies with the protagonist? What's stopping the audience from deciding that the protagonist - and thus, the narrative - is on the "wrong side" and either breaking their ability to empathise with the protagonist, or worse, dropping the story altogether?

When considering how to tackle this question, the one thing to remember is that perspective engenders sympathy. All characters are subjectively rational: they act in a way which they think will best serve their interests, based on the information they have available, filtered through the prejudices and biases which they hold. That means when an audience inhabits the inner thoughts of a character, they are also exposed to those same biases, and are encouraged to rationalise the character's actions in the same way. Being privy to a character's inner thoughts is effectively a constant monologue from that character serving to convince the audience that they are in the right, and that their actions are both rational and necessary. 

The more closely an audience inhabits those thoughts, the more easily that sympathy builds. That means a first-person narration - where the audience effectively sees the world precisely how a character sees it - is the most capable of getting the audience on board with a given character's biases. If the audience is flatly told the truth the way that given character sees it, without alternative perspectives or other means of establishing that narrating character's unreliability, then it becomes very easy for that audience to see that character's interests as the correct ones to champion, to befriend and support that character's friends, and hate that character's enemies.

This means that the best way to have your protagonist keep the audience's sympathy is to privilege their perspective in narration. This could mean anything from giving your designated protagonist more point-of-view chapters or scenes than other characters, providing more in-depth explanations of their motivations, skewing the narration in a way which presents the world in a state closer to the way that character sees it, or even shutting out the antagonist's perspective altogether. That way, even if the antagonist transparently holds the moral high ground to an impartial observer, the audience will still be discouraged from sympathizing with them, simply because through the skewing of narration and differences in "screen time" you can ensure that the audience become very partial observers, for no other reason than the fact that they are exposed to your protagonist's motivations more readily, and are told that those motivations are more sound than those of the antagonist, even if a more objective view of the situation would make it clear that is very much not the case.

All this is part of the reason I've spent so much time talking about the protagonist in a discussion of the antagonist: ultimately who your audience sides with is a matter of relative sympathy, a contest in which a heroic antagonist already has the advantage. As a result, keeping the audience's sympathy where you want to keep it means skewing that contest to the appropriate degree.

But what is the appropriate degree? How much should you tilt the field in your protagonist's favour? That depends, ultimately, on three factors.

The first is how much moral ambiguity you want to put into your narrative. If you want your audience to constantly question who is actually on the right side, then it might pay to give the antagonist more time in the limelight. Giving the audience some insight into their motivations and how they justify opposing the protagonist will give them a chance to accept those motivations as valid, or even as superior to the protagonist's. Indeed, you might even want to set up your central conflict in a way which means your audience understands that your protagonist is in the wrong, but still retains enough sympathy for them to dread their failure. This is the perfect set up for a tragic hero: one who fails due to their own faults, but still remains an object of sympathy as they do so.

The second factor is how deeply in conflict the antagonist is with the protagonist. While the two parties are necessarily working at cross-purposes with each other, that doesn't mean there is always no opportunity to compromise. Villain protagonists can be redeemed, if appropriate - just like any other sort of villain. If the eventual goal of the narrative is to leave open a chance for reconciliation between the two opposing parties, then you have a lot more leeway in showing the antagonist's side of things - after all, you need them to retain the audience's sympathy so that there remains some potential that they might become a protagonist in future.

I should note really quick that the possibility of reconciliation or compromise doesn't necessarily have to be fulfilled. A narrative which makes clear that antagonist and protagonist's interests aren't mutually exclusive - but shows them ultimately committing to their mutual hostility is a powerful setup for a tragic narrative, where one side (or both) go to their destruction even though there was ample opportunity for them to avoid it.

The third and final factor is simply put, how much you want your audience to hate your antagonist. After all, just because the antagonist is morally lighter than your protagonist doesn't mean the audience has to like them. There's certainly narrative potential in showing the unambiguous forces of good as being less personable and simply more ill-behaved than the forces of evil. An audience will usually side with a likeable villain over an unlikeable hero - even when the moral gulf between the two is immense. There's a reason why Blake famously declared Milton of "the Devil's Party" thanks to the way the latter portrayed Lucifer in Paradise Lost - even a supposedly all-loving and all-benevolent God is easy to hate when they have no opportunity to justify their actions against a literal embodiment of evil who gets all the time in the world to justify themselves to the reader.

There's plenty more nuance in writing not just heroic antagonists, but antagonists who keep the audience's sympathy or make the audience genuinely question the morality of the protagonist. It's a very rich source of narrative which I always love dipping into. As almost always, what I've talked about here is more a basic framework than a comprehensive guide. Hopefully, it's given you some ideas on how to implement this sort of character in your own works.