Why is making a good antagonist so hard?

Why is making a good antagonist so hard?

Same reason making a good anything is hard.

Good antagonists aren't any harder than good protagonists (Wakfu does the former a lot more than the latter), but they are lower on the priority list.

It's not

Today's audiences rarely accept a guy who's evil just to be evil; they want to see WHY he's evil.
Unfortunately this can make the villain come off as TOO sympathetic and they you get the "Ozai did nothing wrong" types and the fangirls who put him in leather pants.

Depends really.

What's the motive? Why are they opposing the protagonists?

Assuming the protagonist isn't a "trope reversal" that's popular today in a lot of media. The villain could be a multitude of things.

The Fallen Hero is popular. Someone who discourages the hero protagonist because of his failures weight on him. Although they usually become a friend or adviser at some point. Or becomes pants on head retarded and starts killing because whatever.

The well-meaning villain. The guy who has a point, but basically doesn't care about any opposition. They can be good, but dear god usually people make them out to be the hero. Eventually the protag is shown to be an asshole because the villain is actually the good guy.

Another good one is the people who choose to do the wrong thing without acknowledging it. They just are assholes without knowing. They don't have be a monster, just a bit of a cunt.

Their can also be monsters. Your standard psycho. Nihilistic with a wicked sense of humor, bloodthirsty mongrel, and the other psychos.

The real problem is that people want everyone to be flawed, but never address that a lot of villains are really supposed to be the same as the supporting cast. They aren't just a problem, they should effect the character beyond just hurting them, force them to grow or cut them down when needed. The antagonist needs a reason to be an opposing force not just a inconvience or way to get rid of characters.

People overthink it, a simple antagonist is perfectly fine when your plot is written accordingly.

...

Making a good antagonist isn't very difficult, if we're going to be honest. The difficulty comes in figuring out how they fit into the story.

Most "bad" antagonists are the result of sloppy placement into the story: their motivations are either unclear or haphazard; or to the degree that we *do* get any motivation, it's basically an exposition dump; or they're just a surprise villain; or all/some of the above.

To make a good antagonist, you must treat them as you would any other character: they have goals (just as any other character does) and they take steps to achieve those goals throughout the story. Their goal should be a logical series of steps, not some chaotic series of ideas which are thought up at a moment's notice.

Of course, a large reason why it's never this simple is because you need "surprise" -- IMO, the scourge of good storytelling.

But you can potentially circumvent that with variety. As a non-Sup Forums example, there's One Piece's Summit War saga -- specifically, the Impel Down arc and the Marineford arc. There are 3 major antagonists here, all of whom arise as either surprises or as highly anticipated characters. But beyond that, they're written as any other characters are: Magellan (the jailer of Impel Down) has some clear goals of trying to control the chaos of the breakout; Blackbeard (a rival pirate) has his own clear goal of breaking dangerous people out of Impel Down, having them join his crew, and heading to the execution of the man he recently captured to ensure his rise as one of the most dangerous pirates in the world; Akainu (the admiral) firmly believes that justice must be served by any means necessary.

All their intentions are made at least somewhat clear at various times throughout these arcs.

American comics, conversely, would likely hide each of their motivations until the very last moment, when we no longer care.

(cont.)

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Another slightly non-Sup Forums example would be Reverse-Flash on the Flash show. Because of all the small details, even though his motivation as an antagonist wasn't clearly stated, it could be pieced together by smart audiences -- for instance: "he's RF; doesn't he want to kill The Flash???; so why is he making him faster??; maybe he wants to use his speed for something; or maybe he's even grown to halfway like him!". He's a great antagonist on the show and while we never see his motivation within the show, we get a good feeling of his goals at every major point in time.

tl;dr:

Writing a good antagonist requires good pacing, but really, it requires a leap of faith -- that is, a belief that "spoiling" the villain's MAJOR goals (and potentially even their motivation) early on isn't going to ruin your story.

This. Either a villain has to being sympathetic or LOLRANDUMB XDD to get over with an audience. A great villain is someone who you understand what they're doing, why they're doing it but you still hate them for it. An example is Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2/TPS. You understand why and how he is the villlain in BL2 but you still hate him.

I really like this villain and don't really pity him. Well, maybe a little. The guy just really needed a hug now and then.

The problem is that if you peg someone in a role of a villain (Not all antagonists are villains, but this is another question for non-villainous antagonists) they are by design less complex.

Villains exist to challenge audience and be defeated as such they must not be compelling. If they are too well-thought and compelling, they might actually defeat audience's pre-conceptions and require wirter to ruin them and taint their position with assortment of fallacies, such as alluding to their traumatic childhood.

best villain.

Because the villain can only ever be as smart as the writer.

You have to make them enteratining enough so that watching them isn't a chore while being out-and-out despicable enough that you actively want the heroes to take them out.

In cartoons? Because most writers who are working on cartoons suck.

That or they have a stick up their ass like Rebecca Sugar, and are going with this weird liberal message that seems to almost sort of mock proactiveness and ambition

It's hard to have a cool engaging villain when you take the piss out of cool and engaging stuff

>hate them
"Made to hate" villains are the absolute worst and the most boring. A great villain should instill dread, not hate.

Dread is the domain of slasher film monsters and impossible to maintain while writing an actual character.

>villains have to be LE RIGHT to be compelling and well thought-out
See right here? This is why we don't have good villains anymore.

Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. It's execution. "Thematic connections" don't mean shit. Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance has no relation to Raiden and is a big goofball from nowhere but is a memorable villain because of his sheer charisma and energy

Unalaq on the other hand is literally the antithesis of Avatar Korra, as "The Dark Avatar", but is widely regarded as the WORST villain in the entire Avatar Franchise

Here's your You

Congratulations with being a complete retard.
You fucking idiot, real people can be far more dread-instilling than any monster.
If you fail to capture that, your villain sucks.

I'm not after (Yous), I'm trying to explain why it's hard for preachy cartoons to have good villains.

When everything is relativistic and when the bad guy can never win and must in fact be mocked for even trying, good luck having a good villain

I didn't say this. I said that they can't be (Or they wouldn't be villains, but we already pre-agreed on that they are)

They need to be examined and shown wrong.

>I said that they can't be
Don't be retarded.
Again, just because you have a boner for non-villainous antagonists doesn't mean actual villains can't be well-thought-out and compelling. What's so hard to get?

Adventure Time's Lich was pretty great

No explaination, no sob story, just fuck you, I hate life, and I'm wearing your friend's skin as a suit

In the end, the main problem is that writer don't take the time to develop the antagonist. In Marvel's movies, it's obvious, all the time is taken by telling the story of the heroes, their struggles. The antagonists are present only in exposition scene.

They've already made great and amazing ones and you're just jaded enough to see any other antagonists with any similarities as a copycat and garbage.

>Marvel's movies
Why just movies their show villains suck too except for maybe Kingpin and Ward.

And in comics, the 6 chapters arc norm seems too short to create a good antagonist, even when the heroes and antagonists already exist with a define personality.

People don't want to send three books realizing that the villain has a point. They want everything given to them right away.

>Villains exist to challenge audience
Villains exist to provide the conflict to spice up the story and raise the tension and/or suspense. "le challenging the audience" is some of the most idiotic and pseudo-intellectual shit I have ever heard.

>No thematic connection
>A monster made by the government to face off a champion of the people that is Alien

I love it when genuinely monstrous villains appear human in a very twisted way.
That's why Anton Chigurh is my favourite villain ever. Yes, he's a straight-up monster with no backstory to indicate what horrible thing (if any at all and he wasn't somehow born that way) happened to make him that way. But the more you observe him, the more you realize that he's still a human being just not in a way you're used to them. It's hard to explain what I mean, but I hope I got the point across.

>Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance has no relation to Raiden and is a big goofball from nowhere but is a memorable villain because of his sheer charisma and energy
Senator Armstrong was literally a more bombastic version of Solidus and beyond that, Raiden's entire character literally embodies Armstrong motives/philosophy. So yeah, there IS a thematic connection. If Armstrong was just some randumb politician with no connection to Raiden's character, his character wouldn't have been as memorable as it was.

Also forgot to mention, as much of a joke "Nanonmachine son" was, it wouldn't have flown if not for the incessant reasoning of nanomachines which plagued MGS4. The fact that it was only through Armstrong that the reasoning was brought it in so late that it made it that much more comical.

>but is widely regarded as the WORST villain in the entire Avatar Franchise
That's Ozai. He was just a boring one-dimensional sociopath whose only point in the story is to be hated. Don't get me wrong, sociopaths as villains can be really great, but Ozai just wasn't.