Common Problems With Fantasy Antagonists
As a fiction writer, you are allowed to bend reality to your will, but if you want to be realistic a bit, you might realize that many fantasy stories have antagonists that don’t make sense.
There is an evil crossing the land and killing everyone in the hopes of world-domination. That evil is a type of creature, which is pretty much always male. They are killing all humans they come across to concur the world. No one is safe, not even the children.
Spooky, right? But what about the person in charge of all those creatures? What will he do if he does succeed? Who will make him food? Who will farm the lands? Who will continue trade with other countries?
By killing off all humans, the only option he would have left is to have those creatures he controls do the work, which brings to mind a goblin-like creature carefully baking a four-course meal.
Another popular option is to have all of the attackers be creatures, including their leader. They want to kill and eat all the humans…and what after that? What do they do once all the humans are gone? This is why predators in nature tend to have limits.
For example, a mother wolf typically has 4-6 pups a year, while a mother rabbit has the capability to have 168 babies a year. This is just one of many ways to keep the rabbit population healthy, despite the predator’s hunting them.
To get around this, some writers have the creatures be an invasive species, or have those creatures enslave the humans, or simply say that the creatures are just trying to cut down on the overpopulation of people.
Even if the evil army is all humans, the fact that they would all be evil and thoughtless is unlikely. In many wars throughout the world, there have been people who try to help their enemy.
If, instead of creatures, they are all human, what is their goal? What would the world look like if they won? It is important they have a reason for all this effort, otherwise they might be easily influenced to switch the side of people who aren’t killing all people for no reason.
If you need high population of antagonists for your main characters, and don’t want to have your readers feel uneasy about slaughtering other humans, then writers typically turn to evil creatures.
You are, of course, free to do whatever it is you want in your own fiction, but some readers complain that having every soul of a race of human-like creatures be evil is not only overdone, but can also be taken as racist if you are not careful. As well as that, some writers tend to be too vague with the goals. They have an evil lord, they have evil creatures, but the writers do not explain why the evil creatures bother to follow the orders of the evil lord.
Why should they put any effort into their work if they won’t get any value out of it? Have they been promised something? If not and they just like killing, what is stopping them from disbanding, ignoring the lords orders, and simply going on a killing spree wherever they please?
Even if the evil army is all humans, the fact that they would all be evil and thoughtless is unlikely. In many wars throughout the world, there have been people who try to help their enemy.
Too often, writers only concern themselves with the heroes of stories, and that makes an entire army of boring look-a-likes and a evil leader who we don’t meet until three books later. No one stands out all that much, so no enemy is more threatening than another.
Putting more thought into the enemies your character will face can make them seem more real, more threatening, and easier to imagine. This is not to say you have to carefully describe every enemy, just that carefully picking a few here and a few there to pause on can really add to the story.
If you plan on having an evil army that you say is led by a crafty and dangerous foe, prove their intelligence! Show us them:
Disrupting or stopping supplies and resources
Slipping false information
Assassinating leaders or people that bring hope
And more! There is more to war than two enemies meeting in a battlefield, and if you are trying to say that the evil person has been planning this attack for years, then he should probably have a better plan then “I am going to send out these creatures to hit things with their weapons.”
5. Kingdom Locations with Unfinished World Building
Writers love to pick lonely dramatic places for their evil characters to live in. Sometimes it is in an eternally icy landscape, sometimes a lava field, sometimes a desert. That is fine, and there is nothing particularly wrong with these locations if you plan for them, but if not, they don’t make all that much sense.
I have read of evil characters living in eternal winter with no trade partners, and yet they are eating grown food. That had to come from somewhere. Did they work out some sort of greenhouse system? Do they have secret trade partners that send them supplies in return for a promise of safety? Is there no life on land, but plenty of fish and sea greens in the sea?
As well as that, what do they heat the castle with? You said there was no life, so certainly not trees. Is it coal? Magic?
Where do they get their clothes? If there is no life at all on land, that means no plants, no prey to eat those plants, and no predators to eat that prey. That means no fiber and no hides to make clothes from.
Where does their money come from? War is incredibly expensive, so how do they make their money? Do they have some sort of resource only available to them? Who dares trade with them?
That’s it for now! These are just common problems that I come across while reading fantasy, but that does not mean you have to fix them in yours. Fiction does not have to be realistic, so feel free to go with your gut.
