How to get readers to hate antagonist

BethS said:

I think you've got it. Make it personal. And make him enjoy making it personal.

Of all the books I've read, I think the antagonist I hated the most was a man whom you don't realize at first is a bad guy. He's a man of sterling reputation. Everyone admires him, emulates him, wants to follow him. He's the hero everyone's been waiting for--a brilliant warrior, handsome, highly intelligent, yet self-sacrificing and humble. Except he's not. And when, through first one action and then another, the facade starts peeling off, you are at first stunned then horrified to learn what he really is underneath and to what lengths he will go to destroy the character you care about the most. This bad guy, you realize, is not just bad, he's entirely without conscience, scruples, morals, or ethics. Like Satan, he appears as an angel of light and is completely evil. And you hate him so very much, and meanwhile you suffer, because he seems indestructible, and he attacks the real hero in the most personal and cruel ways imaginable.

So maybe your bad guy could be a little like that.

Click to expand...

I agree with this. The worst kind of people to me are the ones that present themselves as the heroes who are actually self-serving, manipulative monsters. I'm doing this in my WIP. Interestingly, my inspiration centers around the fall of Lucifer, only in my story the fallen one is the actual good guy and the "God" character is the villain. Which I know isn't anything new, but it's a trope that's close to my heart.

Self-righteous hypocrites are what I loathe the most. So that's what my villain is.

you cannot make a reader feel a specific emotion.

the goal is to make the reader feel, full stop. Whether they love or loathe your villain is up to them.

Harlequin said:

you cannot make a reader feel a specific emotion.

the goal is to make the reader feel, full stop. Whether they love or loathe your villain is up to them.

Click to expand...

True. Consider Darth Vader from Star Wars - a lot of people liked him better than goody-two-shoes Luke Skywalker, and yet were willing to see him as the villain.

indianroads said:

True. Consider Darth Vader from Star Wars - a lot of people liked him better than goody-two-shoes Luke Skywalker, and yet were willing to see him as the villain.

Click to expand...

Well, they certainly made people hate Anakin in the Prequels, so there's that...

But this is why you have to be careful with HOW you present your villain, as much as what you have them do. Otherwise you veer from "Love To Hate" right on into Draco In Leather Pants.

Long John Silver is indisputably a villain in Treasure Island, yet he's just so LIKABLE that in most adaptations most of his more overtly BAD traits get rounded off, and his fatherly relationship with Jim get played up (on a related note, see pretty much ANY role played by Tim Curry; the man is a MASTER at taking utter bastards and making them one of the most likable characters in the movie). People loved the Joker in The Dark Knight despite all of the horrific things he does because he's just so much fun to watch with scenes like the Pen Trick. Loki may be an even better example: Despite all the deaths and destruction he was responsible for between Thor and the Avengers, he's probably the most popular character in the entire MCU after Iron Ma,n because you can't wait to see what he's going to say or do next (and god forbid you give your monstrous villain a tragic or sympathetic backstory to drive their villainy...).

indianroads said:

True. Consider Darth Vader from Star Wars - a lot of people liked him better than goody-two-shoes Luke Skywalker, and yet were willing to see him as the villain.

Click to expand...

This is so true. The reaction in this video https://youtu.be/Fzd9YRyRHT0?t=579 between the 9:40-10:00 mark is typical of how Star Wars fans feel about Vader. He's a baddie, but he's such a good baddie that we cheer for him.

MythMonger said:

Why is it important for your readers to hate/get angry at your antagonist?

Click to expand...

+1

BethS said:

...Of all the books I've read, I think the antagonist I hated the most was a man whom you don't realize at first is a bad guy.

Click to expand...

Oh - please do tell the name of this book

Why is it important that the reader hate the antagonist?

I finally started playing Red Dead Redemption - the first one. {Minor spoilers ahead, for a 9-year-old game, but spoilers nonetheless}
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
In the game, a pair of US government officials have John Marston's wife and son captive to blackmail him into doing what they can't - capturing or killing the members of Marston's old gang.

Marston has multiple antagonists along the way - the members of his old gang that he has to hunt down and kill.

But, as I'm playing, I don't hate them. I hate the government agents. They are despicable, mean, nasty men - who are trying to rid the country of murderous outlaws. I find myself forced to work with a Mexican general who I would happily boil alive as soon as look at him, but I need him. I hate the "good guys" and I'm indifferent to the antagonists, and it makes for a gripping, emotional story that completely draws me in and keeps me coming back day after day.

Personally, I like antagonists that are nuanced and not all bad. I like the ones that, but for a few bad turns, might have been heroes themselves.

But if it's that important to you that he be hated, you can always give him a Kick the Dog moment.

I believe it was Vonnegut that once said that a reviewer once pointed out that none of his novels have villains in them. Seems like that tactic worked out well for him.

Layla Nahar said:

+1



Oh - please do tell the name of this book

Click to expand...

PM me. It would be a major spoiler to name him.

I want to echo those who have asked why it's so important that the audience hate the antagonist/pointed out you can't really control audience reactions. I suppose it would be important if you were writing a message book? Might undercut the moral if the villain is too likable.

But I do think there are different ways to like a villain. There are a lot of despicable villains that I genuinely enjoy as characters, but I don't want to see them succeed (Darth Vader is a great example of this for me, pre-Return of the Jedi redemption arc). See also, basically all the great Disney villains. I think this is an ideal outcome in a lot of ways. Why should the audience not enjoy the antagonist, especially if they get a lot of page time and/or narrative influence? In my experience, liking a villain AND wanting them to succeed is pretty rare, and it generally only shows up in works I didn't like or thought were poorly written. The heroes have to be pretty terrible for me to start rooting for the villain

ah interesting topic. I'd say the key word here is *fear*. Any character that is capable of extraordinarily cruel and evil things, where that malevolence takes form in brutal acts...will get the reader really upset and morally scarred, and afraid of him. That way, killing him off later will resolve that 'fear' for the reader.

The idea of gratuitous violence, something that antagonist could've easily avoided but still went through doing, blows the common individual's mind. Like, if you're the bad guy, sure you can kill someone for money...but did you have to humiliate him in front of his wife and kids, did you have to torture him physically; and the shock comes from the generally unfeeling demeanor of bad guys: how they act out unspeakable horrors, and don't even seem bothered by it.

Even in a story with a message I am not sure it matters, and I would say still cannot be controlled for.

Paradise Lost had a "message" but reader reactions to Satan still varied.

The problem is that what one person considers repu alive or unlikable might be appealing to another.

I wrote the MC for ms2 as deliberately unlikable, picking traits I thought were unpleasant. She wasn't an antagonist as such bit she did antagonize the other protagonist.

Joke's on me, more readers liked her than didn't. Some hated her, as I did, but not all. How people responded to her behaviour ran the spectrum from "ugh, she's awful" to "wow, she's refreshing and honest" to just finding her funny and everything in between.

And it doesn't matter. As long as they felt *something* then that was a success. What they felt, precisely, was up to them.

I can like a character who is supposed to be a baddie. Murder, dictator, crimes against humanity, it can all be over looked if the antagonist otherwise follows the rules of cool.

I'm beta reading a story for someone currently. One of the main characters is an unabashed racist, somewhere between "drunk uncle at thanksgiving" and "just sayin'". The character is otherwise well written and the prose is decent enough, but I really do not like that character.

So you don't even have to go over the top, look how bad this guy is, if you give them one or two traits that make them unforgivable in the reader's eye.

An interesting question. I think one important factor (for me) is the element of choice in an antagonists decisions.

When you have a baddie that simply does x, y or z, it doesn't engage me so much. When a baddie has a choice between doing x, y or z, and chooses something terrible....that engages me as a reader. Then I can make my own decisions on their decisions, allowing some investment in the character and the projection of morality.

Of course this works both ways, for good or bad. Just an opinion

D. E. Wyatt said:

I think we're getting past the days where simply killing a bunch of people is enough to make a character unlikable without SOMETHING else to go on,

Click to expand...

We most certainly are not. That is an odd perception to have.

Of course, there is a problem with the doomed family/hometown trope having been fairly blase for centuries. If the dead characters and the protagonist's reaction matter to the readers, then you're working in the right direction. If they're just props of no real importantance, then the reader probably won't care much.

There's a reason why Raul Julia's performance in the live action Street Fighter movie is so enjoyable. When a protagonist, driven to avenge her murdered father confronts him, he laughs it off. "The day I came to your village was the most important day of _your_ life. For me? That was a Tuesday."

Thomas Vail said:

There's a reason why Raul Julia's performance in the live action Street Fighter movie is so enjoyable. When a protagonist, driven to avenge her murdered father confronts him, he laughs it off. "The day I came to your village was the most important day of _your_ life. For me? That was a Tuesday."

Click to expand...

Two problems with this example:

The first is that Raul Julia's performance is the only reason to even WATCH that movie. The second is that it also proves my point: Despite being a mass-murderer, Raul Julia's charisma and laughably over the top performance made him the most enjoyable and fun to watch character in the entire movie. It's the same thing I pointed out about the Joker and Loki: No matter HOW many people they killed or how much destruction they caused, they're the characters that audiences LOVED because of how entertaining they were to watch.

This isn't real life. People are much more willing to overlook the horrible things a character does in fiction if that character is the wrong sort of entertaining when they do so, or if their motivations are given too much sympathy. Case in point: Thanos. You're not going to find many characters in modern fiction who have killed more people. Yet a charismatic performance from Brolin combined with a sympathetic motive, (he's trying to save the universe the only way he believes possible) the regret he shows over what he's doing, (he believes he must, and acknowledges that it costs him everything he has) and the profound respect he shows to his adversaries, especially Stark, Strange, and Rogers means that even if the audience isn't rooting for him, he still manages to remain somehow sympathetic. And this is someone who wiped out half of all life in the universe!

We're living in an era where even "true" heroes are much more likely to kill than they were 50 years ago, and the modern concept of the Anti-Hero (characters like Wolverine, James Bond, etc.) have become increasingly prominent. The metric HAS changed. It's frankly naive to dismiss that.

Odysseus killed with wild abandon, shagged a lot of people who weren't his loving + faithful wife, and sacrificed his men like chess pieces in favour of his own survival.

By modern standards he'd probably be a bit of a shady hero, but because his actions aren't analysed at all in the Odyssey, the reality of that is very glossed over.

What *has* changed, at least in relation to Odysseus, is our perception of ethics and equality. It was quite alright for other people to die while Odysseus lived, because men weren't equal and he was obviously more important than the other dudes. It was okay for Odysseus to not be faithful to his wife because he was operating on a different set of moral and social expectations from his wife.

And it was okay for Odysseus to be bloodthirsty, because our definition of "justice" has changed. The ancient Greeks understood justice as a concept which meant (in effect) someone who follows their pre-ordained fate. A just life is one which adheres to the plan of the gods.

I am not sure that the actions of "heroic" characters has changed that much, in a strictly objective sense, but I do think the context surrounding those actions is more closely examined these days. Maybe I'm wrong; just my take.

Harlequin said:

Odysseus killed with wild abandon, shagged a lot of people who weren't his loving + faithful wife, and sacrificed his men like chess pieces in favour of his own survival.

By modern standards he'd probably be a bit of a shady hero, but because his actions aren't analysed at all in the Odyssey, the reality of that is very glossed over.

What *has* changed, at least in relation to Odysseus, is our perception of ethics and equality. It was quite alright for other people to die while Odysseus lived, because men weren't equal and he was obviously more important than the other dudes. It was okay for Odysseus to not be faithful to his wife because he was operating on a different set of moral and social expectations from his wife.

And it was okay for Odysseus to be bloodthirsty, because our definition of "justice" has changed. The ancient Greeks understood justice as a concept which meant (in effect) someone who follows their pre-ordained fate. A just life is one which adheres to the plan of the gods.

I am not sure that the actions of "heroic" characters has changed that much, in a strictly objective sense, but I do think the context surrounding those actions is more closely examined these days. Maybe I'm wrong; just my take.

Click to expand...

This suddenly made me think of the scene from True Lies where Ah-Nold's wife learns he's a spy and asks if he ever killed anyone, and he replies, "Yes, but they were all bad."

And Ah-nold certainly racks up quite a a body count in that movie, but because of the filter we see him through (they were all "bad guys") he remains the hero. It's no different with any Cowboy Cop movie: Riggs and Murtaugh, Dirty Harry, Axel Foley, John McClane. The only things that really establishes them as the heroes is the narrative, and because of WHO they're killing and why. Even though they may have a HIGHER bodycount than the villains, the people that they're killing are crooks and killers themselves, and they're doing it in the name of "justice." IRL, EVERY SINGLE ONE would have likely been booted from the force or at the very least stuck behind a desk for the rest of their careers.

For me personally, good and evil have always been malleable concepts.
It seems to me that 'GOOD' is something that benefits the person that thinks it such. Evil is something that harms us, so we think it's bad.

If you could murder Hitler, Stalin, or Mao as babies, would you be a hero or villain?

Considering Star Wars - which was worse from the POV of the citizens, the republic or the empire? If the revolution destroyed your home and your way of life, you'd probably think it was evil. Better to keep the status quo, no matter who is in power. Maybe change itself is evil because it always comes wrapped in destruction.

In my writing, I try to stay away from the most common archetypes (hero, villain, etc), and let my characters act upon their own motives.

I agree with other posters about raising the temperature.

I would add this: use fear.

From a psychological standpoint, fear is close to anger and hate. Fear evokes flight or fight reactions. So maybe you can have your antagonist be frightening, put your reader in a situation where they can relate to fight rather than flight.

Show your antagonist as someone w/o empathy. Perhaps their standing next to a child that gets hurt very badly and they just don't react at all. The kid is screaming in pain and the antagonist is still eating his pizza.

You could also use the maiden picking flowers in a field gambit, which is a setup for something horrible to happen, like being torn to shreds as the antagonist eats pizza like nothing happened.