World War 2 prison camp?
Monthly Archives: April 2025
Understanding Antagonists
A key ingredient to a good story is to make sure your antagonist is fantastic. They need to be stronger than the protagonist, they need to evoke empathy in the reader, and they need to have a believable plan.
To give the antagonist a great plan, ask “what will the positive consequences of the antagonist’s plan be, if they are successful?”
Yes, you heard right. The positive effects of the villain’s plan.
There are several types of conflicts where this isn’t hard to answer. If the villain and the hero are competing against each other in some form of zero-sum game, then the villain will be the winner if their plan succeeds.
If you can convince your reader that the villain believe in their plan, and believe it will make some part of the world or their world a better place, the reader will believe in the villain and their plan, and while they might not agree at all, they’ll understand where the plan comes from, and that understanding is crucial to believing in the antagonist.
Of course, if you want to go into very deep water with a villain that for instance decides to solve global warming by killing off half the population, you have a much harder work to both motivate the villain’s thinking and keep them empathetic to the reader.
I think the most important function of an antagonist is to show that however evil they are, what they do falls within the boundaries of the human condition. Given the right circumstances, it could be you or me. And it is in exactly that point of doubt the greatest chills from a fantastic antagonist comes.
If you want to write a good story, convince the reader they could be the victim of the murderer. If you want to write a fantastic story, convince them they could be the murderer.
Then, of course, the final step is to use story and the story world to show the reader why they would not want to be the murderer by showing the consequences of being a villain. The villain is, after all, the antagonist of the story.
Gambling with World War III
No, Donald, you’re gambling with world war III.
Here’s a scenario.
When the US abdicates from all its alliances, most nations, with the ability, will start nuclear programs. Or restart them, or bring out the final screwdriver.
Nukes have (likely) played a huge part in creating Europe’s longest period of peace ever, with about 60% less wars in a world with nukes than one without and the number of dead incomparable.
However, if more and more nations get nukes, their archenemies will as well (just look at India and Pakistan). And the number of nuclear powers will grow exponentially until most medium-sized or large countries have them.
The next thing, we will be using small nukes in wars, because when nobody can make war with anybody, somebody will just do it anyway, threaten that nuclear power’s existence and trigger a nuclear attack. Likely a small one, wiping out a city or maybe just a city block, but still, a nuclear attack.
Next will be, every military in the world understands that nukes are now part of how you make war and nukes may even be sold like any other type of weapons, and they will be used in wars.
I’m not talking about nuclear winter, human apocalypse level of usage (that comes later) but a nuke here and a nuke there. Like a policy of mutual sacrifices of bases, towns or even cities. Think exchanging queens in chess.
Far from optimal, but we survived both Chernobyl and Fukushima, surely we can survive this… I mean, unless we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unfortunately, once nukes are used in wars they will be abandoned, lost and captured in wars. Sometimes these nukes will end up in the hands of third parties without a nuclear capacity themselves. E.g. terrorist organizations.
Sooner or later one such third party will use such a captured nuke to either set off a dirty bomb or even the nuke itself in the wrong capital with several hundreds of thousands or even millions dead.
The leader of the afflicted country will basically have two choices: Take crap for not reacting, or strike back with a vengeance. And some really big dominoes starts falling… Sooner or later the wrong one will fall, and we’ll get that nuclear winter and humanity on the brink of destruction.
Not to mention that when nukes are in every army and are being used in wars, the thing that prevented world wars are gone. Sure, we may be able to do world wars with limited usage of nukes, but even without total nuclear war, world wars will again reap hundreds of millions of lives. If not billions…..
You may think the US’s main role in NATO is to protect Europe from Russia. It’s not. The main role, the main purpose of NATO, from a US perspective is non-proliferation of nukes in Europe, and in the extension, the rest of the world.
As long as the US is a guarantee of a rule based world order where smaller or medium-sized countries are protected from larger nuclear powers, there is no need for these countries to get their own nukes and start the falling of the dominoes.
The way the US conducts security policy today. Dominoes are falling. And when the last one has fallen, America will no longer be first.
Talkwards 