A VERY basic rule of writing is to challenge your protagonist. A story is only as good as its antagonist at the end of the day. The antagonist doesnât need to be a personâit can be a situation, the environment, or the protagonist to themselvesâbut whatever it is, it has to challenge the protagonist. If a hero just overcomes everything with little or no effort, thereâs really no tension or stakes, which makes for a poor story. When I read a book or watch a movie, I know LOGICALLY that the hero is going to survive and win (unless itâs a tragedy) but I need to wonder HOW. Even childrenâs stories understand this.
Let's say I'm writing a story about Little Timmy entering a boat race. He builds the best boat and he wins. That's technically a story, but it's not very gripping, because it has no stakes. There's never a moment I'm really wondering if Little Timmy will win, or how he will pull it off. When I go into watch most movies, I know the good guys are going to survive/triumph unless it's a tragedy. But a good movie makes me wonder, holy shit, how? How can they get through this? That's what keeps me there. I know how it will end, but I'm there to see the journey. So, Little Timmy enters the boat race. But the store is out of materials to build his boat! So he has to hunt through junk heaps to find materials. The time he spends doing this gives him less time to build his boat than the other kids, so he's at a disadavantage. Then on the day of the race, his dog gets sick and he's in a time crunch to get his pup to the vet AND get to the race in time to start. He manages that, and once the race begins, another kid's boat rams into his! Â That kid is trying to sink him!
See how it gets more exciting when things go wrong for Little Timmy?
And in order for these stakes to exist, the antagonist has to be competent. If a master martial artist is attacked by a common street punk, the fight isnât really interesting or impressive, because the master doesnât have to do much to win in a second. If the master martial artist has to face another master, then we get to see them struggle, and theyâre forced to display their best moves, which is far more impressive. You can certainly have a comical antagonist, but unless youâre actually writing a comedy where the joke is the antagonist constantly failing, they still need to present a threat. Like, Don Karnage in TaleSpin is funny as hell and really ridiculous and I love him, but he also genuinely has the heroes on the ropes a few times. I have to wonder how theyâre going to get out of this, and in order for me to have that concern, Don Karnage has to be competent enough to warrant that concern. If heâs weak and stupid and ineffectual altogether, and presents little or no real challenge to the heroes, thereâs no concern, no tension, no stakes, and thus no satisfaction when the heroes best him, because itâs not impressive that they did so. If Little Timmyâs boat is never under a threat that seems genuine, Iâm not really invested in his win, and itâs not much of a story if he does win.
This not only means making your villains competent, it also means letting them get one up on the heroes. Think of the climax scene in any movie or book or show, the big showdown between the hero and villain. The moment of truth. In order to get to that point, the villain has to have gotten a few wins in. How could Will and Hannibal have ever gotten to the cliff scene if Will had bested Hannibal every step of the way from the start? How could A Series of Unfortunate Events have lasted past a single book if everyone believed the Baudelaire children and Count Olaf was successfully captured?
This is where a lot of writers mess up; they do a good job building the villain up as being a real threat in theory, but theyâre so against letting their darling protagonists so much as struggle or, gasp, LOSE for even just a moment, that in practice The Big Bad is barely an annoyance, no matter how menacing they originally seem. In the Anita Blake series, Marmee Noir, The Mother of All Darkness, is a great example of this. Sheâs presented as being the originator of both vampires and wereanimals, an ancient pre-human who has been in hibernation for thousands of years, and a being of immense power and terrible intentions. When the characters realize sheâs begun to stir, itâs a huge Oh Shit moment, and thereâs a lot of buildup over the books about how bad this is. But when Anita is actually up against this supposedly all-power supernatural force, she just. . .absorbs all Marmeeâs power and kills her, lickety-split. A great many fans understandably found this terribly disappointing and anti-climactic.
Let your bad guys be threatening, and let them make good on at least some of that threat potential before being defeated. Let the villains get some wins in. Which, yes, means letting your protagonist lose sometimes---and have to WORK for their ultimate win, become their best selves to triumph, pull out all the stops and everything theyâve got so that the audience sees what theyâre really made of. It makes both your hero AND your villain look cooler to the readers, AND makes for a better story!