Villain/Antagonist

A great post on Elizabeth Bear’s LJ led me, in a roundabout way, to thinking of the difference between the Villain and the Antagonist.  She’s talking, generally, of writing characters who are “Other” from the author’s POV.  The point being, you write about people, not some collection of external signifiers you slap on a character’s forehead like some kind of cultural magnetic poetry.  When you talk about villains, in fiction, often you’re dealing with the same sort of issues and blind-spots, only more so because of the villain’s role in the story.  The villain is, by nature, an evil creature.  But, while there are certainly evil people in the world, the evil itself can become a crutch.  The villain is sociopathic even in situations that make no sense.  (Where do these guys replace the henchmen they keep killing.)  Worse, if the villain is there to espouse a belief system the author dislikes, we get a dogpile of venal character traits.  (Stupidity, corruption, hypocrisy, body odor…)

The difference between a villain and a legitimate antagonist is that the antagonist actually has human motivations, acts consistently in what they believe is their best interests and operates from some moral or philosophical framework that they try to apply consistently.  You might not agree with it, but they don’t deviate from it just to move the story along or to make one side or the other more sympathetic.

You’re a writer, and you should be able to write honest believable characters that don’t agree with you.