On the Antagonist Competency Clause.
Again, the standard caveat, blah blah, opinionated, blah blah, should not substitute for any of your own logical and critical thinking, blah blah, make up your own mind, blah blah, note the context of speculative genre fiction, blah blah, etc., etc., so on and so forth.
This is going to be a little disjointed, since I have to sort my thoughts on the topic. It’s sort of hard to put this into words.
Good. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, today we’re going to be discussing the Antagonist Competency Clause. I’ve mentioned this clause once or twice before in my earlier articles, and in this article I’ll be expounding on its significance in the course of your work.
We’ve all been exposed to the stereotypical Dark Lords (and occasionally, Dread Ladies) in speculative fiction, right up from the time we were watching children’s cartoons. (My particular case was the Red Wizard Ommadon.) We’ve tolerated them for various reasons: perhaps we didn’t know better, or knew they were bad but the show was a guilty pleasure for us all. Perhaps there was a point being made, an Issue being addressed, or the trope was subverted in one way or another. Perhaps the Dark Lord was cast in a more sympathetic light, or was being played for humour. Perhaps they were just right for the medium, or we were just content to grab at whatever scraps mainstream culture threw our way.
We’ve gritted our teeth at them, laughed at their stupidities, thrown books across the room at particularly silly actions on their part. Which brings us to the Antagonist Competency Clause:
The antagonist will not be stupid or cheesy. He or she will exploit every possible advantage within his or her reach, and will utilise them to maximum effect.
In a particularly long piece of e-drama in one of my dissections, a certain commentator stated that it was not necessary for characters to behave in a logical or intelligent manner in order to achieve an entertaining story. This is, of course, true, for a given value of ‘truth’. We do know of complete idiots like Dr. Evil, Dr. Drakken and The Amoeba Boys who are antagonists, and yet, horrendously cheesy and ineffective at anything they do. The difference here is not only in the medium, where novels and other prose are often expected to be more ‘serious’ than visual media such as films and cartoons, but the contract between author and reader is completely different from ye olde typical fantasy story.
In the above three examples, the audience is perfectly aware that the antagonist is supposed to be inept, that said inadequacy is being played for laughs, and that the characters, in one way or another, are parodying the stereotypical antagonist to be found in their genres. (Interestingly, in such cases more often than not the conflict is not provided by the incompetent antagonist him or herself) Compare this with most Dark Lords, who are supposed to be credible threats to the protagonists and very clearly not intended to be laugh fodder.
I’m sure you can think up more examples where the Antagonist Competency Clause can be circumvented, but I hope I’ve made my point clear. The author’s intentions are clearly conveyed to the reader, and in the above examples they aren’t betrayed, whereas in the case of, say Galbatorix, they are. The latter case makes up enough of fantasy works that I can make a generalisation about them, so there. If you want to be a complete ass about things, then yes. Anything can be justified, anything can be explained away, and all of these so-called rules and guidelines have exceptions to them. Happy now?
Now, let’s go into why the Antagonist Competency Clause is important.
Firstly, tension. All stories can be summed up as one or more premises and complications. Eragon—Premise: dragon rider fights for justice. Complication: Evil Empire. Twilight—Premise: young woman and vampire fall in love. Complications: the supposedly dangerous nature of vampires and the evil vampires/werewolves. Hmm…a good example…_Maskerade_—Premise: A third witch is needed to replace Magrat. Complication: Agnes Nitt has run away to the Ankh-Morpork Opera House, where strange events are afoot. Your antagonist will be, at the very least, part of your complication, and therefore integral to your story. If your antagonist is weak, your story is weak, and we can all agree that that is a Bad Thing™.
Of course, I’ll know that at the end of the day, your antagonist will be overcome one way or the other. That being said, I’d like the believe that he, she, or it might just manage to win the struggle. It’s like taking candy from a baby. If one side is so incompetent as to be walked over by the other, all tension drains from the story, and it ends up feeling flat. There’s no point staking, say, the fate of the world, if there’s no chance of it actually being lost. No one likes foregone conclusions for their main conflicts.
Next, we’ll be moving onto the point of earned victories. If the Antagonist Competency Clause is not followed, then the protagonist has not earned his victory. Instead, it was handed to him by the author, (the flip side of this, of course, is the antagonists being punished) and the strings attached to the author’s fingers making the characters dance like puppets are very, very obvious.
That’s not the main problem with the earned victory issue, though. What is is that as a result deeper themes you may have had are undermined or invalidated, so your story is devoid of, for lack of a better word to describe it (although there’s probably some literary term for it), Truth.
Take for example the recent book I began dissecting, Bitterwood. While there were various “serious” themes in the book, such as racial tensions, atheism, genocide, blah blah blah, the sheer cheesiness and stupidity of the antagonists crumples any chance of any of the themes being taken seriously. As one commentator mentioned: “I don’t think they’re being taken seriously.” Hezekiah is a caricature of Christians. Sensible people know that most Christians are normal, well-adjusted people. Similarly, Albekizan and his underlings have been confirmed by the author to be blubbering incompetents with the most irrational of motivations. Religion and racial tensions aren’t as simple as that. As a result, the reader is hard-pressed to create a link between the Issue as we know it, and the Issue as is presented in the novel, with the simple result that any arguments or prompts to deeper thought fall flat on their face.
Another way to look at the “Truth” issue is to consider what happens, say, if you want resourcefulness and ingenuity to prevail, à la McGyver. So Vendevorex escapes capture by a group of idiotic and uncoordinated guards WHO ACTUALLY SUPPOSEDLY KILL EACH OTHER IN THEIR ATTEMPT TO CAPTURE HIM, which stretches neither his resourcefulness nor ingenuity to its convincing limits, resulting in an unearned victory. Not only are you shooting yourself in the foot with regards to your message, but you’re implying a whole lot of other crap—that military/police training is worth shit, that setting up guards is a waste of time, that experience, experiment, and systematic endeavour is pointless in the face of a few tricks.
Wow.
And it’s this lack of “Truth” that makes the story feel thin, and the lessons fallacious and potentially dangerous, such as “religious people are religious because they are dumb” (which may not have been the message that was intended, but I damn well got that vibe from Hezekiah).
Next comes the worldbuilding aspect. Antagonist incompetence can seriously hinder with the believability of the worldbuilding, which can then easily seep into other aspects of said worldbuilding. The most common question here is “if the Dark Lord is an idiot, how did he become a Dark Lord and start repressing the people?” I raised the question when we first saw Albekizan, and I still raise it. And remember the whole “oh, I based the whole dragon succession on that of lions” issue? (Despite the fact that the male of a pride doesn’t have to do much else besides, eat, sleep, drive off other males, and have sex. I think running a country is more than that.) Supposedly, that method of succession was supposed to produce competent rulers, and the prose claimed it had. Well, it didn’t, and broke a large hole into the believability of the worldbuilding.
I won’t deny it—I would have been a LOT more forgiving on the geography and the “it’s really SCIENCE!” if the antagonists had been convincingly presented.
Finally, Perhaps the most important (and succinct) point I want to make here is that if the antagonist is stupid, we stop believing in him or her. When we stop believing in him or her, suspension of disbelief flies out of the window, and we are thrown out of the story. In short, we don’t have verisimilitude . Perhaps that was the word I was looking for, and which summarises the whole bloody article. The Antagonist Competency Clause promotes verisimilitude.
By swenson
on May 31, 08:44 PM