The Villain is Key
I ’ve heard that some actors prefer playing the villain to playing the lead character. I won’t go into why they prefer that role, but as writers it might do us good to pay attention to this. So many times, it seems like we give the most attention to the protagonist, but I would like to suggest that the most important character in any story is the antagonist or the villain. For our purposes here, we need not go into the finer points of the differences between an antagonist and a villain and we’ll simply focus on the villain, though I suspect those finer points are part of the reason we don’t more readily see the antagonist as the most important. To demonstrate my claim, let’s consider a simple comic book story in which we have a Superhero and a Super Villain. In this story, the villain is bent on taking over the world. He has commandeered a fleet of ships and is on his way to Washington D. C. Our hero discovers his plot, swoops in and saves the day. Now, let’s look at the next issue of ...