[process] Do we need Sauron and Voldemort?

[jaylake]

A day or two ago, I asked the question on this blog, "Do we need Sauron and Voldemort"? By which I meant, do we as writers need strong antagonists to make a story compelling?

Obviously, that's a storytelling modality that works very well. One can hardly argue with the commercial success of either Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Either of those

Comments

[twilight2000]

From a reader's perspective, either work - it's about the writing and the depth of characters for me.

I suspect for many, if they can view the "antagonist" from the eye of the "protagonist", they'll see a "bad guy" - but flipping that around in the middle of the story, or even opening with the "bad guy" from *his/her* point of view makes that antagonist much more interesting...

[a_cubed]

They can all be good. It can be very hard to write from a "bad guy's" point of view, though when done well it can make a really interesting story. I like well-written dualist plots and also complex multi-protagonist plots where no one is "good" and no one is "evil". One of JMS' comments when he was writing Babylon 5 was that "no one gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says 'I'm evil'". Everyone is the hero of their own tale. Well, mostly. THere are weak people who know they're doing ill but can't resist. Glen Cook wrote in one of the Black Company books that "It's as hard to remove the last shred of light from ourselves as to remove the last shred of evil". The Black Company series, although it has Saruon/Voldemort types twice, also has lot of people who are at best anti-heroes, which I really like. When I think up plots to maybe write fiction someday, I tend towards the complex "apparent bad guy who turns out to be a good guy in an imossible situation" or a hero facing a variety of actors, some of whom are heroic by their

[swan_tower]

Thumbs-up to both of these points.

[madrobins]

I think you need both kinds of books: ones with stark moral distinctions, and ones with nuanced continuums of morality. They scratch different itches.

[jimvanpelt]

One way to think of this topic is the controlling metaphor you use for plotting. If the metaphor is "war," then the other side is more likely to be a villain. The plot, then, is a struggle between two forces at combat with each other, and wars often demonize the enemy.

But if there is another controlling metaphor, like a story is a birth, then there's no need for an identifiable enemy. The story is a record of the character becoming something else.

"War" is a perfectly seviceable metaphor, but so is "birth" and dozens of other ways to think of a story (and all their combinations).

Martin is a great example because the story is filled with war, but "war" is not the plot metaphor. His metaphor looks more like Brownian motion to me. Characters vibrate and move on their own agendas, and they bump up against each other on their separate routes, very much like life.