So last week, we looked at Stakes Creep. To summarize, it's that misled assumption that as a story progresses, everything must increase in spectacle, scope, and - yep - stakes in order to give the audience this impression that the narrative is progressing and tension is rising.
So now we know what stakes creep is how can we avoid it? What can we do to avoid that vacuous spiral of meaningless spectacle? Ah, well you see, that's the thing: there's nothing wrong with big spectacle and set pieces per se. The problem is when they are vacuous and lack any real heart. When was the last time you watched or read an epic battle sequence and felt any true sense of peril? If it was recent, then I am confident that it was quite a rare occurrence, no? The mistake that big spectacle and high stakes make is a misunderstanding in what the narrative assumes the audience cares about. Put it this way: imagine an empty building collapsing. Perhaps it was a demolition site or something. Can you picture it? Now, do you particularly care? Probably not. Sure, it might incite a few "ooh"s and "aah"s from you but that's about it. Basically, it's a vacuous spectacle. Now, imagine people in that collapsing building. How do you feel now? In terms of investing in the story emotionally, this now gives you some blips on the radar, because their are humans involved. It is no longer just blind spectacle but a very real danger to vulnerable people. Let's go one step further. Let's put some developed characters into that collapsing building. A single mother of two dashing back to her apartment to grab her newborn infant. The recluse suffering from PTSD after returning from a war zone. The elderly cripple who can barely move. Imagine you've spent some time in the company of these people already. The story has given you time to get to know these characters, to know their hopes and fears, what makes them tick, their morally grey areas... Now imagine them all in that building as it crumbles. Now we're fully invested in these characters as we fear for their lives, and we see their strengths and weaknesses come into play. You're probably already thinking of some of the ways in which these character's actions will play out as they scramble to survive. And I guarantee that, as you think about that, the whole concept of the collapsing building has faded into the background. This is the key point. This is the second reason that Stakes Creep tends to fail, which I didn't get around to in my previous post. It is assumption that the audience really cares about the spectacle, the fireworks, the explosions and flashing lights. Oh sure, it's fun and thrilling, but you don't actually CARE. What you care about are the characters mixed up in the midst of the chaos. They should be at the heart of the spectacle, and the focus must be firmly on them so that the spectacle forms a mere backdrop to their plight. Look to the movie 'Children of Men' as a stellar example of this. The torn-up war zone set piece at the end of the movie could've easily descended into another generic big climatic battle. Instead, watch as the camera remains firmly fixed on Theo for the entire duration. The peril is palpable, the empathy is real, and the spectacle and stakes surrounding him are true to the moment. But wait a minute, you might think: I can still think of plenty of movies and books where the spectacle is is still focused around a character but I still feel a complete lack of investment in their plight. Why? Well, that's because the story has given you no indication up to that point that it is willing to injure, harm or kill off characters. Think of the first Hobbit movie, as the heroes run from walkway to bridge to escape the goblins. Arrows and sharp debris fly in all directions, they fall into a chasm at terminal velocity and they all walk out without so much as a scratch. The Transformers movies and most hard-boiled action movies are like this. From the get go it is clear that the protagonists are going to survive the ordeal unscathed, so the narrative scrambles to throw faux peril at you, as if to say "Look, they really are in trouble! See, they now have a sexy scar on their cheek from that sword slash, they really can get hurt!" Which is of course nonsense. So you the audience watch these bloated sequences with all the investment of watching a fireworks display: pretty, but devoid of heart. Look to the battle of Helm's Deep for a masterclass of how it should be done. This is a battle where all of our major heroes survive. So what does it do differently? How does it make us care? Well, the peril doesn't need to be directly intertwined into the spectacle itself. It can implied, or established beforehand. Watch the buildup to the battle from the moment the first splashes of rain fall, clattering on armor. Strings play. Cut to women and children in the cave, terrified, clutching their loved ones. Aragorn walks between the elves with a pep talk. The Orc army stops short of the wall. Back to the cave. A baby's cry echoes through it. Aragorn steps out, beholding the Orc army with a grimace. The Orc army begins stamping. Aragorn draws his sword. Bows are drawn. Back to cave. The stamping rolls over them like earthquake. The first arrow flies. The Orc army charges. Theoden whispers: "so it begins..." Now if you're like me and you got goosebumps just thinking about that scene, then that is because this buildup establishes the heart and peril before the battle truly erupts. Who are the main players we care about? Why are they here? Why are they fighting? It's all made clear, and is devastatingly effective. Seeing the cut from the Orc army to the terrified women and children to Aragorn drawing his sword sears real, meaningful stakes where you feel a genuine concern for the welfare of your beloved characters and the ones they fight to protect. This results in the battle of Helm's Deep being a powerful set piece that has a real, visceral impact on the audience. The spectacle isn't just spectacle for its own sake: it is real and terrifying. And once again, the difference between a meaningful and vacuous battle comes down to effective use of characters. There is nothing wrong with high stakes and high spectacle, but we must understand that that is not what the audience truly cares about: that is mere window dressing. It is the characters that your audience will cling to and empathize with as the set pieces play out around them. Give your audience a reason to care about that character in that moment, and everything else will fall into place.
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Nostalgia is a weird thing. For those of you my age, we are now at that point where we can look back at the books, movies, TV shows and video games of our youth and reminisce about the good ol' days.
But here's an odd phenomenon: have you ever had your nostalgia glands stimulated by something that you never experienced as a child, but has so many hallmarks of your childhood that it might as well have been? That is exactly how I felt when I read Redwall by Brian Jacques. Redwall is the story of Matthias, a sweet-natured if clumsy mouse who is a helping hand around Redwall Abbey. A rat named Cluny the Scourge, leading his army of vermin, sets up camp nearby with every intention of invading the abbey and taking it for themselves. As the approaching battle builds, Matthias takes it upon himself to follow the trail of clues around the abbey that could lead to an ancient weapon supposedly hidden within the abbey, once owned by a legendary warrior. I read the whole of Redwall with a mix of delight and frustration. Delight because it is a fantastic and utterly charming read, and frustrated because I just knew it was the kind of book I'd have adored if I'd read it as a kid. As it was, I had to settle for enjoying it in my 20s, which frankly was more than enough. What makes Redwall work so well is the feel of it. It simply feels like one of the old-fashioned yarns, the kind of book you'd pickup secondhand for mere pennies at a car boot sale, the pages already yellowed from being read and reread twenty times, and you'd evade your homework to go and squirrel yourself away into a hidden corner of the back garden surrounded by the smell of grass and just while away the hours lost in a story. And it really does have that intangible quality of a bygone era about it, even if it was only written in the late 80s. The simplicity of 'good is good, bad is bad', the ever-so-slight air of well-intentioned preachiness to it, and the motley crew of quirky characters...if you have never read Redwall it will still feel like that well-thumbed book from your youth that you have long since forgotten. And because of that, what faults you could level at Redwall actually work in its favour. What's the scaling of the creatures here? We have a badger and a mouse talking, so is that to scale as in real life or are they the same size? Or how about the fact that the adventures of Matthias, while exciting and varied, are a little bit too episodic in nature and feel rather 'solved this challenge, now onto the next'? The answer to these kinds of questions is answered in the same straight way a child would: who cares? It's fun! Now you know me: in most circumstances this is the kind of detail I would want from my books, but Redwall pushes past the cynical adult and speaks to the inner child. We live in an age where, thanks to modern technology, old classics of all mediums from our youth that were once soon to be consigned to the void of hazy childhood memories are now safe and secure, easily accessible and given a new lease of life where it is unbelievably easy to indulge our inner child. But Redwall is a little different. More than just being a tale of yesteryear, it is an idea crystallized, capturing a certain precious atmosphere that would delight absolutely anybody. I mentioned this in passing last week, and when I did it occurred to me that Stakes Creep is actually a topic important enough to warrant its own entire post.
So what is Stakes Creep? It's not so much of a buzzword as it is a social phenomenon in the realms of storytelling, similar to the loudness wars of music. Incidentally, if you don't know what the loudness wars are, go and look it up, it's fascinating and it is in many respects the music industry equivalent of Stakes Creep. Anyway, Stakes Creep is the supposed need to elevate the stakes in a story, both within subsequent installments in a franchise as well as on a macro level across all stories, mediums and genres. More action, more adrenaline, more...well, everything. Was Part One about saving a loved one? Then Part Two will be about saving the town, and Part Three will be about saving the world. It's this assumption that a story's stakes must escalate in scope and increase the number of lives on the line in order to escalate the tension and sense of threat. Now, you don't need me to tell you that this is nonsense. Let's look at the Rambo movie series as an an example. Through Rambo one to four the kill count swells: it is 1, 12, 33 and 83 respectively. And yet Rotten Tomatoes scores put the movie scores at percentages of 87, 28, 36, 37. No correlation whatsoever: in fact Rambo - this poster boy of macho badassery - is most well received in the movie where he kills just one person. Look to at how the battles grow exponentially in Lord of the Rings movies: the battle of Minas Tirith is 10 times bigger than that of Helm's Deep, and while that battle is awesome many people still prefer the battle of Helm's Deep in terms of sheer impact. I could go on, but you get the point. You can probably think of some of your own examples of creeping stakes. But it's clear to see that bigger doesn't mean better, and it has been clear for a while now. This inflation of stakes without any real feel of true increase in impact on the audience doesn't just happen within the cycle of a single story but on a macro level as well. It seems that you cannot move these days for movies, TV shows and books where the stakes creep has been maxed out for so long that the danger is "The world is going to end!" half of the time. And we've become so desensitized to an impending apocalypse in fiction that I don't think any of us have felt a sense of fear or danger from it for a long time. And yet it we still find our stories reaching for this ultimate high stakes. So why? Why do we continue to insist that our fiction must have antagonistic forces that inflate a crisis far beyond the point where the stakes matter and to the point it becomes meaningless and ludicrous to the point it's actually detrimental? Of course, there's the simple explanation that Hollywood in general has always equated bigger with better. But I think it's more complicated and entrenched than that. Here's my theory: if you rewind several decades, by most accounts the villains in pop culture were absolutely undesirable. They were cruel, conniving, lacked any realistic features or humanity...and they were roundly trumped by the forces of good time and time again. Even if the bad guy was supernatural - be it an evil witch or dark overlord - the story is already preset to push a moral, and the villain will scarcely use their powers in their clash with the good guys, making them appear incompetent. The stakes were pretty low, from beginning to end, with the villain bungling and failing at every turn. The message of the day was clear: being the bad guy doesn't pay, isn't fun, and you will never be better than the forces of good. But then, as the world grew smaller and the last world war faded into memory, the enemies in our midst became less obvious, more difficult to put a face to or to pin down geographically. Who was good and bad in this new world order? Shades of grey started to appear. One man's terrorist, for example, is other man's freedom fighter. With this new and more complicated world, audiences wised up the fact that villains can actually be powerful, charismatic, have fun, be complicated...and outdo the protagonist. This is how we ended up with this swing in the balance of power. Antagonistic forces became increasingly powerful and omnipresent, to the point that they could even hold the fate of the world in their hands. The trouble is, this escalation to incredible stakes doesn't speak to us, for two reasons: first, as an audience we respond better to what we can relate to. The end of the world? A disaster of that magnitude is something that none of us have experience in, so there's no emotion invested in watching a CGI planet Earth burn, only empty spectacle. Now to this, you could argue that there are many excellent war movies out there where you are on the edge of your seat during the battle scenes, truly invested in what is happening, even though 90% of the audience have had no first hand experience of war. And you are right, absolutely. But why is that? Therein lies the key. Because talking about stakes creep is one thing, but having bigger stakes isn't the problem. The problem is what high stakes is mistaken for. And we're running out of time here, so it looks like this going to have to continue on in another post. Next week we'll cover the second failure of Stakes Creep, and take a look at the differences between these vacuous high stakes and meaningful high stakes, how you can avoid the former and aim for the latter. And don't worry, Part Two of this post won't feature any more explosions than this one! So we've talked about types of antagonists, how to make them meaningful and well-rounded, and how to make them understandable without being sympathetic. With that, you'd think we're all set to create the ultimate antagonist, right? Well, not yet. There's one more important thing to bear in mind. The fact that they shouldn't be, well...ultimate.
You see, so far the whole character build of the villain has been internal. In other words, creating the bad guy by thinking about the bad guy. But there is no doubting that the antagonist is defined by their relationship with the protagonist - a least in terms of how it serves the plot. The dynamic between these two forces basically defines your story. And the surest way to kill any potential tension and excitement? By making the skill, intelligence and power between the forces of good and evil completely unequal to the point of disbelief. There are two ways in which this can play out: when the antagonist is clearly far more powerful, smart and all around greater than the good guy, or when the antagonist is a gibbering mess that has absolutely nothing on the good guy. Let's start with the first type. Please don't mistake this with classic underdog stories: in all of those stories, sure the good guy may be out of his depth in a technical sense, but the gap between good and bad is not insurmountably huge. What the protagonist lacks in sheer skill she makes up in spirit and effort. And if it's a sports movie, plenty of training montages. But that's the thing: after going through trials and tribulations, the protagonist finally gets into a position where they have a fighting chance. Any victory to come will feel well-earned. But it's when that gap becomes too big that it ceases to be an underdog overcoming the odds and more about sheer luck and catching the all-powerful antagonist out on a fluke. The bigger that gap, the more you as the author will need to stretch to find that chink in the armor that brings down the nigh-invincible villain. And because the protagonist is then put into a position where they have to work to exploit a weakness, such victory feels poorly earned because it is not down to the protagonist's force of will and gumption, but rather using a kind of cheat to bring down the bad guy. In fact, it can even put the protagonist in a bad light, as this whole business of stooping to find a weak point and rip the bad guy apart with it is something many feel should be beneath a protagonist with a strong moral compass. And on the other end of the spectrum are the stories where villains are sniveling, hopeless fools who have ideas above their station and clearly no chance to achieve it. From the get go, it's immediately clear that the antagonist is going to fail - indeed, you often feel that even if the protagonist were completely absent, the antagonist would fail anyway because their plans would implode on their own accord, from classic reasons such as incompetent henchmen who bungle everything to simply not having the resources. It's true: how many stories have you known where the protagonist accidentally helped these antagonists out in a bank robbery or launching a missile? Of course the problem with this approach is immediately apparent: a victory for the protagonist is clear to see from the beginning, so why should the audience bother reading or watching on if there are no obstacles to overcome or tension to push against? An example that springs to mind is Mossflower by Brian Jacques: Tsarmina may seem to be a wicked and intelligent foe at first but she is thwarted time and again by nearly everyone she comes into contact with, even the lowly woodland folk. Her henchmen are beyond useless, and her lieutenant must've changed at least five times because they kept getting killed - in the space of this one book. And this leads on to another problem: we are hard-wired to feel sorry and sympathize with those who have it tough, and dislike anyone who exacerbates that. By the end of Mossflower I actually felt a bit sorry for Tsarmina, who had to put up with a staggering level of incompetence and grief. I swear she was suffering from PTSD by the end. On the flipside, this made the heroes, especially Martin the Warrior, seem self-righteous, pompous and cold by comparison. This kind of useless, bumbling antagonist who has absolutely no advantage on the protagonist whatsoever is quite an old-fashioned style, which is why the modern audience doesn't have as many examples of it to pull upon (Mossflower was published in 1988). The message was quite clear: being a villain doesn't pay, isn't fun, and has no redeeming features whatsoever. But over time we saw what I like to call 'Stakes Creep' (which I'll elaborate on next week), resulting in villains that are actually so insurmountable that defeating them is literally unbelievable. The simple fact is that the heroes should meet their match in the villain, not an unclimbable wall. Even if you do want to have an all-powerful antagonist, there should be at least a proxy that the heroes can be at odds with on a face-to-face basis and feel that they keep each other on their toes. In Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, omni-powerful villain Lord Ruler is served by proxies in the form of Inquisitors, who aren't as powerful as the Lord Ruler but certainly give Kelsier, Vin and crew something to worry about. Protagonists and antagonists who can square up to one another and fight fair makes for a more honest and meaningful fight, and the end result more believable and satisfying. I promised way back at the reboot that I would be showcasing my books now and then, mixed in with others. Forgive me if this seems a little overindulgent, however unlike standard showcases which are more like reviews, showcases on my work are going to be more like retrospects where I take a magnifying glass to the story and try to assess it as honestly as possible. So let's get started, shall we? Today's showcase, then, is 'Tick' by P.J. Leonard. Tick really came about from two things: my unending love of cats and my admiration for Erin Hunter's Warriors series. It had always amazed me and dismayed me, too, when I would hear just how bad a reputation animal fiction had, especially that involving cats. For an industry of book lovers who are by definition trained to look past the surface layer and see the beating heart of the true themes of the messages beneath, this round critique of a wide-reaching sub genre that is rich with possibility seemed short-sighted at best. So when I set out to write Tick, not only did I actively want to put together an animal fiction story to prove a point, but I also made that one of the underlying themes of the story: that there is more than meets the eye. The other major theme is that of redemption: the loss of humanity and empathy through blind ambition, redeemed only when Tom literally loses his humanity and becomes a cat. This literal transformation, this stripping away of his material possessions and his ability to pursue his ambitions exposes him to a painful truth, of just how little compassion he has for others. This exposure to his selfishness is laid out very frankly at the beginning: the way he follows the signs with his name is representative of how he is interested in only following his path, without care for the consequences. When he reaches the end of the line, he is transformed into a cat. It dovetails in nicely with the old saying of "Curiosity killed the cat", except in this case it very much gave life to a cat. Does Tick provide an effective redemption story? Overall, yes, I believe so. Not as well as I'd liked, though: I'd say that I am 65% satisfied with the result. I do feel that Tom's growth as a character and the changes he goes through are believable and come from real incident as rather than out of nowhere. Looking back, though, I feel that one of the issues of Tick is that the plot kind of run aways with itself in the final third: the subplots swell to the point where I ended up creating extra viewpoints from the secondary characters so we could cover important developments that were out of Tom's vision. This, I feel, is where Tick is at its weakest. At the time, I reasoned with myself that the multiple viewpoints were like the ensemble style of The Lord of The Rings. However, there are some key differences: whereas the constant shifting of viewpoints in Lord of the Rings is not that jarring because all of the characters are working towards the same aim - defeating the evil of Sauron - in Tick the characters have very different motivations. Oh sure, Tom was as engaged in defeating Muezza as much as all the other clan cats, but the reason why is very different to, say, Tips, Twig, or Pipes. The jumping may enrich the world and expand the narrative scope of Tick, but ultimately the extended subplots and viewpoints were to the detriment of Tick overall Because it is Tom's story, and it was strongest when it stuck to the spine of that story. In the end, I still would declare Tick as a first novel I can be proud of. I set out to achieve something with Tick, and while it meandered its way there, using language that I will be the first to admit is rough around the edges at times, it got there, and like any good cat, it landed on its feet. Last week, we looked at how making your antagonist's motivations meaningful and their personality well rounded maximizes the impact of the clash between them and the protagonist and makes any victory feel more hard-earned and satisfying.
But what happens if you go too far? What if you end up making a antagonist who is sympathetic to the point that you actually care more about their plight and agree more than their point of view than the supposed good guys? It's a tricky one. And I will say right off of the bat that this is not always a bad thing: having a plot develop in a way where the tables are turned and the reader begins to identify more with the villains than the goodies makes for a fascinating and challenging read. But, in conventional terms, titling the reader's sympathy in favour ultimately harms your reader because when it comes to the resolution and your villain is defeated, your reader will feel deflated, that true justice was not meted out, and the so-called protagonist ultimately ends the story with blood on their hands as a result of damaging the desires of a sympathetic character. Now again, that may be something that you're aiming for, and it would certainly make for a clever twist. But for the sake of argument let's say that we're putting together a story with a standard protagonist-antagonist dynamic here. The key thing to bear in mind is that there is a big, big difference between liking a character and sympathizing with them. Ultimately, your antagonists can be likable, dynamic and even understandable, but the reader should never, ever really sympathize with them. Your antagonists may claim to be freedom fighters who serve the interest of the common people, and their leader may be charismatic and sport a great sense of humour, but if they stoop to murdering the people they claim to protect and frame the murder in a way that they can blame it on the evil Empire, then you have just created an effective antagonist. Understandable? Perhaps. But never, ever sympathetic. An excellent example of this is Die Hard. Hans Gruber and his band of terrorists hold the Nakatomi corporation siege, with the aim of teaching them a lesson about corporate greed. Okay, now so far we have a protagonist that we might fall into the danger of sympathizing with. After all, isn't the idea of bringing a greedy business to its knees something that is darkly appealing to most us? We may not like the way Hans does it, but in theory it's an idea we could get behind. But then the movie takes steps to rectify this. The first, minor step is when Hans reveals that the whole 'terrorism' thing is just a front, and they are just trying to steal the money. So, we have stripped away that concept of them being terrorists with a conscience: they're just straight up theives. But hey, they're still stealing from a big corporation, aren't they? And we have no reason to like corporations. So we can still just about sympathize with Hans and his crew. And then it happens. Hans straight up murders Joseph Takagi, the 'face' of Nakatomi in this movie. In this one stroke all possibilities of sympathizing with these antagonists is gone. Because all effective antagonists need this moment: this 'Point Of No Return'. The point where they do something so abhorrent, something so I relatable to the audience, that their comeuppance from the protagonist will be justified. Because just imagine for a moment of Hans and his team had remained those terrorists bent on teaching Nakatomi a lesson in corporate greed all the way through. Imagine if Hans had not killed Takagi. Suddenly we don't want to root for John McClane quite so much because, deep down, we kind of want the terrorists to win. They have not hit a Point of No Return so their motivations can still be sympathized with. In this new version of Die Hard, McClane's victory will feel off, because the story is longer about a guy who fends off a group of hypocritical theives and murderers, but is now a story of a cop dealing cold hard justice to a ragtag bunch of people who had a sympathetic, if radical, aim in mind. And that just would not have worked. When an antagonist passes a Point of no Return, they are beyond redemption. They could be remorseful of their actions, they could try to repair what they have done, but the damage a Point of no Return does is irreparable. It's the reason why so many people, myself included, take issue with Anakin Skywalker's cold-blooded murder of the Jedi children in Revenge of the Sith: killing one child is unforgivable, let alone a whole room of them. This effectively sours Darth Vader's redemption in Return of the Jedi, because it is a redemption that he, quite frankly, does not deserve. Antagonists can be many things. There is no singular template for one. But in order for your protagonist's quest to have meaning, and for the reader to sympathize with their plight, a key factor is to make sure that the protagonist isn't one they can side with. Achieve this by giving the protagonist a Point of No Return. Even if they ooze charm, it will be a antagonist that the reader loves to hate. This Showcase is another first for the show, on two counts: firstly, this was a book that I only finished recently. And secondly, even now I cannot decide if I like the book or not. And unfortunately, the more I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards dislike. This book is Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. This is the story of...Fitz? Boy? A name is never really settled upon. Well, Fitz is the illegitimate child of Chivalrly, King-in-waiting. The story starts with Fitz being handed over to the royal household at the age of about six, and is all about Fitz' formative years until the age of about fourteen-fifteen. His father Chivalry goes into self-imposed exile almost from the very beginning, so Fitz is left nearly to himself to find his place in this world of courts, political maneuverings, and the rumbling storm of an oncoming war. The concept is exciting, sure, and I was actually pretty taken with Hobb's first-person style, told as if Fitz were now an adult and recalling events from his childhood. But there are a number of issues with the novel that hurt it for me. First, this book seems to exist purely for setup purposes. Just as Fitz' attention is drawn from one interest to the other, so is the reader, as we experience this world of the Six Duchies purely through his eyes. There is a lot to take in here: a vast ensemble of characters, locations and storylines are introduced. But in almost every single case, that's as far as we get: introduction and set up. As the reader, I was unsure what the central pillar to this story was, for two reasons: first, there are multiple plot strands put into play in Assassin's Apprentice, and none of them really stand out as being THE story: the main backbone around which the other subplots gravitate. Oh sure, you have that business with the Red Ships brewing, but that stays as nothing more than a distant concern. In terms of Fitz' story, the story meanders from one new character to another new training session, with none of them developing enough to really make me care that much. Only the relationship between Fitz and Burrich seem to really evolve into anything meaningful and complicated. The second reason is the story's lack of effective antagonistic force. I know it may seem strange that after talking about this in my Off The Shelf series that the last two showcases suffer from Antagonist problems, but it really is true: for most of the time, I found myself moving through the story more out of idle curiosity rather than an genuine locked-in engagement to Fitz' plight. This seemed to stem form the lack of a foil for Fitz to bounce off of. The weird thing is that we hear so much about how being a bastard is a sign of embarrassment for the Royal household, about how Fitz' mere presence will bring about tension and conflict, but apart from Chivalry's brother, Regal, everyone else actually likes Fitz or couldn't care less. And Regal is not really an effective antagonistic force anyway: he's barely around until the final act, and his hatred of Fitz feels just a little bit too pantomime, with a lack of justification for his disdain. Only in the latter third of the novel is Fitz faced with someone who he can really lock horns with, someone who really puts the boy's resolve to the test, and these are the books finest moments. Sadly, this section of the book is tragically brief. I read it through to the end thinking to myself "OK, I get it: this is all building up to a big finale. It's setting the stage." And do we get a big finale that satisfies? Well...kind of. Sure, we do get some action and dramatic tension after what what has been up until now a fairly ponderous novel, but again, it is hampered by the need for set up. Rather than playing off of the characters and stories set up already, the narrative literally moves to a new area entirely, with a whole new set of characters, stakes...and even a new culture. When you're reading about the finer workings of a foreign society with mere pages to go before the end, you know something is up. So all of that build up had ultimately been set aside, the climax set around a subplot that had only really been introduced in the last quarter or so of the novel. Assassin's Apprentice isn't a terrible novel by any means: what it does it does well, the characters are vividly drawn and the world well realized. And I can fully appreciate the fact that Assassin's Apprentice is setting the stage for an altogether bigger story that will continue into the sequels, which would surely answer a lot of the questions that this book left hanging. I just wish that Assassin's Apprentice had done more to make me care enough to read on in the first place. Now, last time we talked about the three broad categories that antagonistic forces fall into. We also mentioned the fact that external forces (ie. another physical being is the bad guy) is by far and away the most popular.
The trouble is, despite the fact that making the evil presence in a story a person is easily the most popular choice, far too many would-be authors resort to stripping away the human side of an antagonist. In other words, the antagonists exist only to make the protagonist’s life a misery. Which, frankly, is stupid. Seriously, any time I read a book or watch a movie where the villain’s goal is simply to end the world or blow up a city, at best I lose half of the respect I had for the story, at worst I give up on that story and move on. Why? Well, that antagonist is one of the most key players in any given story. They, along with the protagonist, clash against one another and drive the plot forward. The protagonist, of course, is motivated to achieve something. So an antagonist who simply gets in the way of our protagonist’s goals for the sake of just getting in the way, just doing some big bad evil thing because hey, that’s what villains do, right? Well, those kind of bad guys are big turn offs. Because let’s get one thing out of the way: protagonist does not equal evil. Indeed, one of the most important qualities of a solid, believable antagonist is that they truly believe they are doing the right thing. They believe they’re the good guy, and they think the protagonist is actually the bad guy. So when your supervillain is aiming a nuclear missile at New York, stop and say to yourself: can he justify this to be the right thing to do? Let me give you an example, from the movie Kingsman. Now, warning, there are spoilers for that movie ahead! So, Richmond Valentine is administering a dastardly plot that will see over 90% of the world’s population culled. Now, had it been left there, Valentine would’ve been a cardboard cut-out villain who is just simply being an inhuman roadblock. But then we have his justification that it’s for the good of the planet, which is seeing it’s resources depleted at an alarming rate from overpopulation. Now, with this justification, Valentine’s character becomes much more believable. Who wouldn’t care about the state of Planet Earth? This relatable motivation, this idea of making your protagonists human, with human foibles and, yes, even good points, has a dual benefit. First, it makes us, the audience, feel much more deeply connected with the theme of the story. After all, there is a good chance that your story will have certain themes running through it (such as coming of age, destruction of the environment, materialism etc). The protagonist will offer one point of view on these themes, and that’s all well and good, but with a well-rounded and believable protagonist you are able to offer a more well-rounded, three-dimensional view on a topic. For example, Rowling has stated that the overarching theme to the Harry Potter series is death. Now with Harry, you have him dealing with the death of his parents from the beginning, culminating in him accepting his own death and facing it. On the flipside of that, you have Voldemort, who is doing everything he can to conquer death. These two opposing forces taking different, yet understandable stances on a topic is what makes for a high-impact story. The second benefit is within the story itself. A protagonist being victorious over a mindless maniac of a villain who has no motivations beyond wanton destruction doesn’t feel like a satisfying victory, because the motivations of the antagonist do not clash with the protagonist. So while the good guys may be tested on a surface level, they aren’t having to call their own beliefs into doubt or face their own human shortcomings, so it all feels hollow. However, humans winning over other humans is altogether more meaningful. Seeing that good nature of the protagonist tested and questioned by a protagonist who themselves may raise good points, but ultimately win through, feels like an emotional, well-earned victory. A well-rounded protagonist with meaningful motivations can have huge knock on benefits for your story. Consider well how you develop them, as they are just as important to your character roster as your main protagonist. |
Off the ShelfHere I share my ideas, musings and advice on the writing process. I also analyse some of my own writing for examples to show how I work. ShowcaseHere I will show off of some of my favorite good and great stories, gushing lovingly over why I adore them and why you should too. I will also show you the other side of the spectrum: bad examples of stories and what we can learn from them.
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January 2019
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