So far, we’ve talked about conceptualising our antagonists in a way which would make for a good story, introducing them in a way which hooks your audience, and developing them to fit a broader narrative arc and emotional tone.
Now it’s time to kill them.
I’m talking figuratively here. Not every story needs to end with the antagonist lying broken in a pool of their own blood. Not every character introduced as an antagonist needs to end the story dead, but when it comes to most stories, the main conflict at the heart of the narrative arc needs to be resolved, which means the conceptual form of the antagonist needs to cease to exist. There are, generally speaking, three ways this might happen.
1: The antagonist is rendered incapable of opposing the protagonist, either through the intervention of an outside force (the killer gets caught by the police), the successful removal of the antagonist’s presence from the protagonist’s physical or mental presence (the protagonist escapes the killer, or the protagonist is able to overcome their traumatic memories of the killer through therapy) or the physical destruction of the antagonist (the protagonist blows the killer away with a 12-gauge).
2: The antagonist is made to reconsider their interests in a way which no longer places them in opposition to the protagonist. By no longer obstructing the protagonist, they cease to become an antagonist, much like how a gun pointed at your head ceases to be an imminent threat when it is unloaded, disassembled, and put in a locked display case.
3: The antagonist wins and secures their goal at the protagonist’s expense, thereby rendering the conflict resolved by removing the protagonist from the narrative through any of the means already enumerated in point 1. The antagonist ceases to be an antagonist because they no longer need to oppose the protagonist, who has been rendered narratively irrelevant.
But how do we know which one of these approaches to take? Well, I’m sure you’re probably tired of reading this, but once again, it depends on the kind of antagonist you have, the kind of story you want to tell, and the sort of emotional impact you want to leave on your audience.
For example, let’s start by breaking down some of those approaches in more detail, and talk about the mechanics of “killing” your antagonist, and about how the way you kill your antagonist both help define the emotional tone and themes of your narrative, and the character of your antagonist and protagonist.
A digression first: I should note here that how your antagonist dies does define the character of both your antagonist and protagonist. Just as the audience will remember their introduction to a character, they will also remember their last moment with that character. Likewise, if that character is in conflict with another, how that second character reacts to the first character’s end also makes an impact: this will be the last time their mutual conflict is addressed in the narrative after all. If a character’s introduction is an icebreaker’s prow, smashing through to get the audience’s attention and interest, this final confrontation are the icebreaker’s propellers, leaving a long wake behind full of churning emotions which stay with the audience long afterwards – if nothing else because there will be no more moments of conflict to replace them.
So how do you set up this final confrontation? The classic approach would be to go for a grand showdown: the protagonist and the antagonist meet sword to sword, or gun to gun, or spell to spell, or army to army. They fight, one side wins, the other ceases to exist. There’s a simplicity to this sort of confrontation, both mechanically and morally, which may recommend itself to concluding certain types of conflicts. For example, if your antagonist was established as a dangerous force, then showing the protagonist besting them through risk and effort will show how much stronger the protagonist has gotten, whether through training or equipment or the power of friendship, making for a satisfying arc. Likewise, if you want to end your conflict on a tragic note, a fight to destruction against a sympathetic antagonist – one which might still be redeemed – would end things with a sense of melancholic grandeur, as the antagonist chooses destruction over giving up their own doomed cause.
Of course, you could always actually redeem that antagonist, either at the end of that fight, or without that fight at all. If the antagonist in question is the one the audience is supposed to sympathise with, this makes for a satisfying conclusion as well: understanding triumphs over blind hatred, unity triumphs over division, the common good triumphs over personal ambition.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t rule out “redemption” for a character who doesn’t “deserve” it. One way to really leave a bitter taste in your audience’s mouth is to make it necessary for the antagonist to accept an alliance with a thoroughly unsympathetic character, for the sake of a greater good or a longer-term agreement or any other number of reasons. Your audience won’t like this one bit, any more than most of us like how the Americans and Soviets recruited Nazi and Imperial Japanese war criminals through projects like Paperclip and Osoaviakhim – but if that’s the emotional note you want to leave your audience on, if you want them of the ethical cost of defeating a greater evil or the moral ambiguity of the protagonist’s own allies, then this is a good way to do it.
Speaking of the Second World War, that brings us to another dimension: that the antagonist and the protagonist aren’t just individuals, but representatives of different ideas or ethos or ideology. This necessarily has to be the case, because otherwise there would be no moral difference between the two. The antagonist has to believe in something which puts them in conflict with the protagonist. In most cases, that thing is supposed to seem morally inferior to what the protagonist believes in. If this matter of morality is a central theme, then the antagonist and the protagonist also serve as exemplars of their ideologies, and their final confrontation is thus the confrontation of the results of one ideology against the other.
In such a case, it can be narratively satisfying to have a wholly uneven confrontation, one where one side has already lost – because ultimately the outcome is not about whether the individual is stronger, but whether the ideology which that individual espouses is stronger. In the leadup to the Second World War, the fascists of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan derided their opponents as weak and corrupt. They claimed that Liberalism and Communism lacked the strength of will to stand up to them and that their victory was assured. In reality, the opposite was the case: the infighting, fanatical ultranationalism, and genocidal racism of the fascist regimes not only made them weak, but sent them headlong into fights they lacked the material resources to win. The Second World War ended with the Red Army annihilating an outnumbered, outgunned, and outmanoeuvered Wehrmacht and taking Berlin – and with the United States Army Air Corps dropping two miniature suns on Japan. These were not equal confrontations by any means, but they didn’t have to be. The confrontation itself was a foregone conclusion intended to demonstrate a truth: that Communism and Liberalism (even as greatly flawed as they were) remained stronger than Fascism.
It’s very rare that history offers us so neatly packaged a narrative arc – maybe that’s why we end up making so many movies about it.
As you’ve probably noted, the emotional impact that a final confrontation has is reliant primarily on the nature of the antagonist in question, their relationship to the protagonist and to the audience, and the kind of story this has been so far. With the examples I’ve provided, you can create a simple frame of reference with which to understand what kind of final confrontation – what kind of ending your your antagonist – works best for the kind of story you want to tell and the kind of antagonist whose narrative arc you want to conclude.
This has certainly been a lengthy series – perhaps far lengthier than what I was originally intending. That being said, I still think what I’ve covered through it really only works as a bare framework which can be purposed for your own ends. I don’t know what kind of story you plan on writing, what sort of antagonists and protagonists you will create, or what sort of emotional tone you plan on going for, but you do – and hopefully, what I’ve covered these past few months will help provide some of the tools you need to ensure you hit what you’re aiming for.
Paul Wang 