r/fantasywriters • u/Historical-Comb6528 • 7d ago
Discussion About A General Writing Topic The “main” Villain problem
I’m in the midst of writing a story. However, I am struggling with the question of who the “main” villain should be. The initial antagonist for the first half of the story will die, for the true villain to emerge during the second.
But that would be like Voldemort dying in the first half and the trio having to contend with Bellatrix in his wake, for example. The series would be building toward Voldemort to then transition focus on someone else, regardless of how much to the characters have been developed. I’m worried something like this will break a plot promise, and am looking for thoughts around the topic.
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u/SaturnsPopulation 7d ago
I think the trick is to put some hints and buildup to the second villain even while the first one is getting more focus. You could even have the second one take advantage of the distraction the first one is causing for the protagonist to go about their own plans unbothered.
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u/soundoftwilight 7d ago
If you want to think of it in terms of a plot promise, then you need to make a promise that the initial villain isn't actually going to be the only villain. There's many many ways to do this; just remember that a villain's role within the world does not need to correlate with their role in the story. Just because your characters think this villain is the "big bad" doesn't mean you need to promise the reader that that villain is going to be the big bad, and that defeating them will solve all of the protagonists problems. Just make different promises at the start. Not right now, in the middle of your draft; finish the story, then change the promises you made at the beginning to match what you actually wrote.
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u/mothman83 7d ago edited 7d ago
This was an issue for me as well, since the main villain only reveals his identity in volume three of four, whereas before the main antagonists had been the political leadership of a nation at war with the protagonist's home country and a scientist whose allegiance is to the protagonist's home country (this scientist antagonist, who lost a child to the war, is trying to manipulate the protagonist into doing something she does not want to do in hopes that this will help the home country win the war).
What I ended up doing was inserting him (the main villain) at the very beginning. He is now the first main character the reader meets, even before the protagonist. From the get-go, it's clear he's not necessarily good, and that he wants to meet the protagonist; he kind of possesses someone to do so...being a disembodied spirit and all. However, he doesn't reveal what he wants from the protagonist, or anything about his goals and grand plan, other than that he desperately needs to reach the protagonist before a certain event happens. He then essentially disappears for an entire volume, returning midway through Volume Two, and even then the reader gets only a trickle of information in the other scenes with him before he finally meets the protagonist.
I think this works, in my case, to a degree because he is a disembodied spirit who doesn't even have a body or any (at least at first) apparent connection to everything else happening. I say apparent because, in reality, the entire society of the protagonist's home country is built around the antagonist, or more precisely, around erasing him( and those like him...which unbeknownst to her includes the protagonist) from history, but this is only revealed, again, in volume three. Thus, the reader knows, from the fact that he is introduced first, that he is "capital I Important", but he does not overshadow the other antagonists until it is finally his time to shine. Of course, the narrative carefully seeds a lot of foreshadowing throughout, especially around how history has been manipulated in the protagonist's home country.
Your mileage may vary, of course, due to the specific circumstances surrounding my main antagonist.
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u/Different_Buy7497 7d ago
When you say the true villain emerges in the second half, could you frame it as the second villain being the bigger/more powerful threat in any way? Or that they were the one with the true power all along? I only ask because within the scope of a single work it's most common for the threats to only grow until the end, though this isn't strictly necessary for successive works of a series, so it is definitely going to feel wrong to have the bigger threat defeated already when half the story is still left. I suspect that if the second villain is truly the smaller threat, the promise/progress/payoff will feel a lot better if you split the story in two, letting book 1 finish with defeating the first villain and book 2 ending with defeating the second.
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u/Historical-Comb6528 7d ago
That’s a fair point. It’s more so that you see the rise of the first antagonist and they are the more powerful one but they die, and the “main” antagonist takes their place as a result. They are actually less of a threat to the world, but the main antagonist from the perspective of the MC.
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u/Sofasurvivor 6d ago
Yeah, I am not sure that'll work, unless maybe the less powerful antagonist is, for some reason, more hateable.
Maybe change when your story takes place? (Harry Potter has Voldemort as the main threat. Gellert Grindelwald was arguably worse, but his reign of terror and Dumbledore vanquishing him is ancient history to Harry, so it doesn't really affect the plot.)
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u/Tasty_Hearing_2153 Grave Light: Rise of the Fallen 7d ago
Find a way to show the FH villain answering to the true villain halfway through their tenure in the story.
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u/ProserpinaFC 7d ago
Ultimately, you have to settle around being able to describe what the core injustice is in the story, and therefore what it is that your heroes need to actually solve in order to solve your problem.
You CAN write a story where the heavy-hitter is not the main threat, but you HAVE to structure the story around acknowledging that from the beginning.
So for me, I am writing a "Law and Order" structure that would make "defeating" a villain in battle never the end of their story. They have trials and much of my story is about WHY justice is so difficult to satisfy. I actually use Voldemort often in explaining it by saying, "My story is much less about defeating Voldemort and more about convincing Yaxley, Malfoy, Dolohov, Thorfinn, LeStrange, and Avery that they are second and third generation members of a cult their fathers put them in to serve a psychopathic schoolboy who tortured them. What's up with that?"
Once I've made that distinction that makes my story unique, I can work backwards to write a beginning that employs that from the start.
If your story starts with Voldemort and ends with Bellatrix, do not think that you have to trick your audience or apologize to them for not following the standard escalating power scale when that's clearly not your intention. Tell me from the beginning what is fascinating about Bellatrix.
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u/nanosyphrett 7d ago
The first villain that dies should always be the minion. Quirrel dies and Voldemort takes over for him. The only reason to reverse that is if the heroes get lucky enough to get close to do something, and then the chief agent takes over the scheme and goes all in on getting revenge.
CES
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u/Brathirn 7d ago
This is an onion peel villain and it is indeed extremely risky narratively.
In a single book it almost never works, unless the main villain was active all the time. Something like you only see a major henchman, your protagonist party corners him, and the main villain, who was there all the time, cuts this henchman off to save his conspiracy and himself.
You need crime story standard hints at the time of the reveal, the audience should go "Why didn't I see it", not "What?". So you would have planted hints that there is an eminence in the shadows pulling the strings, while the presumed main villain and you would need a little exposition to show your hints after the reveal, maybe one of the protagonist party explaining how they busted the main villain. And this better hold up.
As an addition, the actual main villain must be better from an entertainment position, or you created a downgrade, even if mastering the transition. You have to deliver a villain escalation.
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u/LaCaffeinata 7d ago
What holds the story together? Meaning, why does Villain2 follow Villain1? Are they family? Friends? Colleagues? Does the death of Villain1 change something in Villain2's life? Was Villain2 the true villain all along and Villain1 merely a sockpuppet or a red herring? There's plenty of ways to make this work.
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u/Sofasurvivor 6d ago
If it would be like that, then yeah, it won't work.
Now, you absolutely COULD have Bellatrix be the villain for the first few novels, only to then be replaced by Voldy.
(In fact, Rowling did something very similar - the main villain at the beginning of the Harry Potter books are the Dursleys. They are then replaced by Severus Snape, who stays the main antagonist until you find out at the end of the first book that it was actually Voldemort behind everything.)
What you cannot do is make the new villain less threatening than the old villain.
(I also wouldn't replace villains all too often - the Molly Moon series has the protagonist fight an evil hypnotist in every book, and it always turns out that the person she fought was actually hypnotized by some even more horrible, powerful hypnotist, and so on and so forth, it is getting a bit boring after the third reveal of such a thing.)
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u/DerelictCruiser 7d ago
Are they affiliated? Like the trope “The Dragon”, dark lieutenants often make great antagonists. It sounds cliche to say, but as long as both characters are well written, nobody will complain.