Embrace Your Villain Nature: Why Every Story Starts with the Antagonist
Don’t start with your protagonist.
Most writers reverse-engineer their antagonists from the protagonist’s arc—as if conflict were a seasoning to add after the hero’s built. But that’s backward. Plot isn’t what a character wants. Plot is what stops them. And what stops them, meaningfully, structurally, irreversibly, is an antagonist. Not a villain. Not necessarily a person. But a force with goals, beliefs, and designs of its own.
Writers spend a lot of time on protagonists. We design their goals, backstories, flaws, growth arcs. We ask what they want and what stops them from getting it. But here’s the truth most fiction avoids: what stops a protagonist is never just an obstacle. It’s an opposition. And that opposition is the antagonist. Not a villain. Not always a person. But a force designed with as much narrative intent as the hero themselves.
A protagonist without an antagonist is just a person with a wish. Add a well-designed antagonist, and suddenly there’s friction. Friction is what creates plot. And tension. And meaning.
Antagonists Aren't Evil. They're Designed.
A good antagonist isn’t evil. They’re right. At least in their own mind. And they pursue what they want with clarity, consistency, and conviction. The antagonist is defined not by morality, but by opposition. They want something the protagonist can’t allow—or they want the same thing but by a means the protagonist can’t accept.
Think of Iago in Othello. His jealousy is not just personal—it’s strategic. He wants to unmake Othello, not with brute force but with narrative manipulation. Iago is not stronger than Othello. He’s more precise. He’s what happens when ambition turns inward and goes cold.
Or take Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. He’s not just chasing a whale. He’s rejecting the very idea that something can remain beyond human will. His obsession opposes not just Ishmael but the entire structure of natural law. Ahab’s monomania isn’t villainy—it’s opposition embodied.
Opposition Creates Change
The antagonist isn’t just there to block the protagonist. They’re the reason the protagonist must grow. Without the antagonist’s pressure, the protagonist would remain unchanged. The antagonist designs the crucible.
In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s real antagonist isn’t Porfiry or the police—it’s his own fractured conscience. That internal pressure is made manifest through other characters, but the story’s momentum comes from Raskolnikov’s inability to escape himself. Without that pressure, there’s no confession. No transformation. No story.
Want to write a strong arc? Start with a strong antagonist. Not stronger in power necessarily, but stronger in ideological force. The antagonist must force your protagonist to rethink who they are.
Mirror, Not Monster
The best antagonists are mirrors. They reflect the protagonist’s desires, flaws, and fears—but taken to an extreme. The antagonist isn’t a separate narrative. They’re an alternate outcome.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry isn’t a villain in the traditional sense. He gives Dorian a worldview: pleasure above all, morality as illusion. But that philosophy, once adopted, ruins Dorian. Lord Henry is Dorian’s antagonist because he’s the version of Dorian that never stops to question himself. One believes. The other pays.
Designing an antagonist means designing pressure that tempts your protagonist toward their worst self. This is where internal conflict becomes plot.
A Web, Not a Wall
Opposition doesn’t have to come from one character. Often, it’s a network of forces. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred is opposed by Serena Joy, Aunt Lydia, the Commander, the Eyes, the Handmaid system, her own doubt. The antagonist is the system itself, made visible through characters and choices. And it works because every opposing force is designed to push the same pressure point: submission.
That’s what builds real pressure. Not one villain. A web.
How to Design an Antagonist
Designing an antagonist isn’t about inventing a bad guy. It’s about building a counterforce.
Start here:
Clarify the protagonist’s goal. What do they want? What do they need? What are they willing to do to get it?
Now design a goal that directly opposes that. Not just a different goal. A mutually exclusive one. If the protagonist succeeds, the antagonist fails—and vice versa.
Define the antagonist’s belief system. What do they believe that your protagonist must reject—or be seduced by?
Give them agency. They must take action. They must outmaneuver, manipulate, confront. They can’t just wait for the protagonist to arrive.
Make them credible. They must be smart. Or powerful. Or both. If the reader doesn’t believe they could win, there’s no tension.
Design their influence. What else in the story supports their goals? What systems, institutions, ideologies, or people align with their vision—even unintentionally?
Make them personal. The best antagonists expose the protagonist’s weakness. They tempt. They reflect. They escalate.
If you want your story to move, you need pressure. The antagonist is pressure, by design.
Antagonist as Narrative Engine
Plot doesn’t happen because a protagonist wants something. It happens because something pushes back. The antagonist isn’t just a role in the story. They are the story’s resistance function.
In Beloved, Sethe’s antagonist is both the ghost of her daughter and the unprocessed trauma of slavery. As she tries to hold her family together, the past won’t let her go. Every time she moves forward, it resurfaces. That’s antagonist design: the past given shape, and memory turned against the protagonist’s will to survive.
You want narrative momentum? You need an antagonist with agency. They need to move, escalate, impose. The story accelerates every time the antagonist does. No antagonist, no story.
