The Ruthlessness Of Antagonists – The Climb #594

Thursday 8^th October 2020

I’ve been reading some craft things about antagonists and threat that may prove useful in an upcoming project.

I want my antagonists to prove a challenge to my protagonist. Sometimes that threat comes in the form of intellect or power, but in this project it comes in the form of ruthlessness.

And this is where I sometimes struggle. I want to show them as being ruthless, and that often means I go graphic and dark. There’s a place for that but I think it’s better suited for a twist or an escalation rather than establishing the character.

And so I’ve struggled with working out what a clever way of doing this is.

The answer, it seems, is pretty simple. They need to be validated by the protagonist rather than the author.

What do I mean?

I’m still investigating this – and it may prove to be bad advice – but the best summary to myself would be “You don’t need to show someone cutting off a hand, your hero just needs to be afraid of having their hand cut off”.

It seems a little simple, so I need to try it before I really endorse it, but often solutions in writing are simple. I’ll try it out and see where it goes.

However, what I read went much further, and the example I saw talked about was the movie, John Wick.

This movie does a clever reverse. In it the bad guys validate John Wick’s ruthlessness by expressing their fear. The movie also ensures that the viewers are behind John and his one man war, by first establishing his humanity. His spree of revenge and murder is OK, because he loves dogs.

I note that the *spoilers* death of the dog is still a piece of visual ruthlessness, but it works because it has emotional underpinnings.

There’s lot to think on here. The project I’m thinking about, plays on a lot of these ideas, and I suspect that if these observations are true and I execute them properly, then some of the moral complexity that lurks in this book will work.

I suspect I’ll refer back to this in the future. I’ll be interested to see how well it works out.