Writing an Effective Villain
When creating a good story, we spend a lot of time and effort imagining our protagonist, the supporting characters, and charting the course of the epic adventures they’re going to have.
We don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about the force of antagonism, and that’s a vulnerability in a lot of stories - including a lot of the ones I write. Look, I like heroes; brave fighter pilots, gritty swordsmen, taciturn rangers - just like anybody else. But it turns out your hero is only able to be as heroic as it takes them to overcome the villain. So give the badguy some attention.
What makes a good villain? In a Campbell sense, he’s the shadow of the hero, in some cases the hero if taken too far, or if they allow themselves to succumb to the dark choice at the crisis point of a story. That’s all well and good, and works great on a symbolic level in your story, but here I really want to talk about the tactics of the villain, not just the overarching strategy.
Be careful with making your villain comical or the butt of too many jokes. If your antagonist is the object of mockery, it can often defang their menace, and then your cleverly set up final act battle with the mean old badguy loses a lot of its power, because your hero just defeated the guy everybody makes jokes about. Deep down, as humans, we know that real power and menace isn’t a laughing matter, and that you don’t casually mock a genuine threat - because it’s far too dangerous.
A good antagonist should be, if possible, more competent, more dangerous, and more powerful than your protagonist. If the hero is the best swordswoman on two continents, then her force of opposition needs to be the best swordswoman on the other three. Having a villain who is better than the hero at what the hero is best at makes them a great challenge to overcome, and requires your character to dig deep to find a way to win. That makes for the strongest stories.
That’s not to say they always need to outperform the protagonist on an apples to apples fashion, though a lot of antagonists will. Sometimes your antagonist can be strongest where your hero is weakest - a billionaire industrialist versus a poor farmer, or a physically powerful noble versus a peasant girl, or a even wizard versus a swordsman (I have a whole book about that coming up). This asymmetry creates a different kind of tension in your plot - now your protagonist isn’t just the weaker party in the fight, they can’t even contend with the antagonist in their area of greatest strength. They must find a way to win that’s clever and unexpected. (Bad news - that really means YOU have to find that way for them, and then write it well!).
So go out there and make great heroes, and greater villains. I look forward to reading them.