How can I make good hero-villain pairs?

You can make one have a crush on the other one. You can make them be very similar except for one key difference in their philosophy or totally opposite in philosophy. You can make them both representative of their races, and their relationship symbolic of the relationship between their two races. You can make one socially advantaged and one socially disadvantaged.

Take a look at some of your favorite character pairs and ask yourself how they are the same, how they are different, and what their relationship to each other is.

By NOT making either of them perfectly good or perfectly bad. That is the biggest failing I've seen in manuscripts in any genre of fiction: stereotypes.

Case in point?: Sherlock Holmes was vain, egocentric, often distracted, a drug addict, and a generally unlikeable jerk. His arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, was brilliant, even moral, within his own set of values. Made 'em both way more interesting that pure good and pure evil characters.

romantic or family entanglements, as mentioned, but also, as blac mentioned, by avoiding cookie-cutter characters. Blac mentiones holmes, if you have not read the stories, read a couple. The man was much more like Gregory House than like the character Basil Rathbone usually played, who was utterly stoic and victorian and politely reserved.

Other good examples would include pairings like Pacino/deNiro in "Heat", Magua the "bad" Indian in Last of the Mohicans, who lost so much he could only hate and lash out, but the scene where he explained his story, while an infodump, humanized him, etc.

add something personal to intertwine them....

as an example, I'm working on a story now where the "good guy" lost his wife. four "bad guys" beat him and one of them raped and killed the wife.

The "good guy" is out for revenge, along the way he is distancing himself from his closest friend and placing judgement, looking for the character he deems most unsavory to illegally buy a handgun from, knowing the police may come back and arrest a man he essentially entrapped. He does not care, this man can go to jail, if need be, despite having nothing to do with Pitta's death. He will kill the four men in cold blood, and he is slowly dehumanizing out of love and loss, two things we consider uniquely "human".

In contrast, of the four, one guy is pure malice, and all bad--he does border on cookier-cutter. His best friend is bright enough to realize the mistake they made and is considering going to the police to confess, reasoning that they deserve prison for their f'up. The other two are brothers, one is a carefree pothead who thinks what happened was "bad", but you need to roll with it, and going to prison won't bring back any dead girls, so better to simply shut up and ride things out. his brother is the most conflicted, the group's fifth wheel who watched even as part of him said to speak out, the most damaged by what they did, and slowly slipping towards suicide over it.

Everyone has personality and motivation, even the "man" bad buy was scorned and is a racist with a uniquely malicious streak. Good conflict comes from real, fleshed out characters, and real, fleshed out characters are rarely completely good or completely bad.

I look at the ying/yang approach. Without bad, how can you judge what is good.

flaws in even the good person's nature can be expressed and used by the bad person. The bad person's good side even if it is the smallest detail like he likes kittens. Might have killed 30 people and is a sadist but he likes kittens and nutures them. Can be used to catch that villian. Again it goes back to there is always something good in even the most horrid villian and something evil in the most righteous hero.

Otherwise, cookie cuter and boring.

A piece of advice I received a while ago was that "A good villain is the hero of his own story."

Look at your villain's side of things. Is your hero now the bad guy? They're two sides to the same conflict and I do see it just as Jill did above with the yin/yang approach.

Don't think of your villain as a villain, but as an antagonist. Your antagonist may be a villain, cackling maniacally and tying women to railroad tracks, but he may be as heroic as your hero, only in opposition to the hero's goal. Two guys after the same girl for example. This is hardly revelatory and has been stated many times before, but there is definitely wisdom there.

blacbird said:

Sherlock Holmes was vain, egocentric, often distracted, a drug addict, and a generally unlikeable jerk. His arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, was brilliant, even moral, within his own set of values.

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Wasn't Sherlock the good guy?

Alan_Often said:

Don't think of your villain as a villain, but as an antagonist. Your antagonist may be a villain, cackling maniacally and tying women to railroad tracks, but he may be as heroic as your hero, only in opposition to the hero's goal. Two guys after the same girl for example. This is hardly revelatory and has been stated many times before, but there is definitely wisdom there.

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AGREED.

Also remember that the truly insane think they are sane. It's those of us ho question and doubt ourselves that are the sane. Your antagonist will be convinced of their RIGHT, not necessarily aware of doing evil or wrong.

I like the idea of giving my protagonist and antagonist a common pain and letting their differences ignite from that single thing. One chooses a particular path while the other alters in ways that mean they become diametrically opposed.

But with a small slip, a different choice, each of them could have easily become the other.

Alan_Often said:

Don't think of your villain as a villain, but as an antagonist. Your antagonist may be a villain, cackling maniacally and tying women to railroad tracks, but he may be as heroic as your hero, only in opposition to the hero's goal. Two guys after the same girl for example. This is hardly revelatory and has been stated many times before, but there is definitely wisdom there.

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Perhaps even more interestingly, your protagonist could be a villain, with a brilliant dastardly plot (probably doomed to fail hilariously) and a maniacal laugh.

aadams73 said:

I like the idea of giving my protagonist and antagonist a common pain and letting their differences ignite from that single thing. One chooses a particular path while the other alters in ways that mean they become diametrically opposed.

But with a small slip, a different choice, each of them could have easily become the other.

Click to expand...

ooh, this is nice.

I don't know if your familiar with R.A Salvatore, but his Drizzt & Artemis are a perfect example. In Legacy, the two have to team up, and even though they still hate each other, there's a strange kindred spirit there. They can both see the potential in the other.

aadams73 said:

I like the idea of giving my protagonist and antagonist a common pain and letting their differences ignite from that single thing. One chooses a particular path while the other alters in ways that mean they become diametrically opposed.

But with a small slip, a different choice, each of them could have easily become the other.

Click to expand...

Oh yes. I love hero/villain type pairs who are uncomfortably similar people. You see a lot more of the hero worrying about this than the villain, but it's useful to show both because it makes the villain human -- and that can be the most disturbing thing of all.

ElizaFaith13 said:

I don't know if your familiar with R.A Salvatore, but his Drizzt & Artemis are a perfect example. In Legacy, the two have to team up, and even though they still hate each other, there's a strange kindred spirit there. They can both see the potential in the other.

Click to expand...

Charles Xavier/Magneto is a similar relationship, and one of the richer and more popular ones in comics for the same reason.

All "good" bad guys have either a ton of personality (Hannibal Lechter) or a humanizing trait or six to ground them (Magneto is driven by certainty he needs to strike pre-emptively, Magua lost his family in Last of the Mohicans and blames Munroe for all his misfortune).

REALLY good bad guys have both (agree with Annie Wilkes as an example or not, she is the only one my tired mind can pull out at 7:30 this morning)--she is a lonely, sad woman with serious mental health issues, who also likes to use expletives like "cockadoodie" and considers hobbling the most reasonable way tocontrol her favorite writer's room-to-room wanderings.

REALLY "BAD" bad guys have no agenda, other than "twirling their moustache as they laughed evilly"....you know the type. they're just bad because the story needs a bad guy, and they have no compelling story or traits, other than they needed to be bad so the writer had a conflict.


Another way to make a compelling pair is to tie them: In Manhunter and Red Dragon, Hannibal Lechter was still thin on humanizing traits, but a fascinating character made even more fascinating because of the way he got under the agent's skin, and the way that the agent had a history, including nearly dying at Lechter's hand, but he also needed Lechter.

I agree about pairing, or tying together the hero and villain. The most obvious example (actually surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet) is Star Wars. Luke and Vader are literally related, as well as being the dark/ light reflection of one another. This is brought home in Return of the Jedi when Luke cuts Vader's hand off at the wrist--and see that, like Luke himself, his hand was artificial, with dangling wires and such hanging out.

The first pairing that came to my mind was Mr. Glass and Bruce Willis' character in "Unbreakable."

My protagonist is part of group colonizing another planet. She is going to be with her sister. She is following America's protocols in order to get there.

My antagonist is also in that same group. But he/she, I don't know the gender yet, wants to go to a different planet to colonize.

Each person represents two sides. Protagonist who represents America's interests and the Antagonist who represents their own interests.

The protag and antag are normally bound by one very powerful thing.