: Re: How can I make believable motivations for antagonists? I am writing a book. However, I can't quite wrap my head around making my character do bad things, while still making their actions and/or

@Rivera824

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This may seem a bit unorthodox, but if you'd like to see a very good example of an antagonist with believable motivations, the character Jack/Handsome Jack from the Borderlands video game series is an excellent place to start. This example may be a bit more outlandish/extreme than what you're going for (at least from what I can extrapolate from your House example) and is admittedly quite long, but it gets the point across pretty clearly.

The games weren't released in chronological order, so Handsome Jack is presented to the player in Borderlands 2 first as a sociopathic corporate dictator - he repeatedly tries to have the player and their allies (who have a history with him that isn't explicitly expounded upon) killed, exhibits extreme megalomania and paranoia, and displays a severe disregard for the lives of others, often finding delight or amusement in killing innocent civilians, children and even his own family members. He, however, believes he is a 'hero,' and seems to have a complex about it. It is originally not clear why he believes this.

Anyone who opposes him he considers a 'bandit,' and therefore deserving of extermination, and although he claims the mass murders are all in an effort to bring peace to planet, no concrete reasoning is ever given for his malicious obsession with the player and their allies, and he is very much presented as the 'evil just to be evil' antagonist.

The tipping point is when the player frees his daughter which results in her death after he had imprisoned and tortured her for a significant period of her life. Even though it was technically suicide and also his fault, the fear, loss, grief and rage he displays as the event plays out are genuine, showing he is literally incapable of comprehending that he has done bad things. Eventually, the player does succeed in defeating him, but not before he kills and tortures several main protagonists.

All of this is expanded upon in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, released after Borderlands 2, where the player is actually allied with Handsome Jack and aids in his rise to power before the events of Borderlands 2.

Just "Jack" at this time, he's a programmer within the company he eventually becomes CEO of in 2 and is more or less a stand-up guy; in a turn around from his rather manipulative manner of "winning" in 2, he plays a more hands-on role in his plans, willingly risks his life to save the player's and is only concerned with saving the crew on a company owned space station under attack. He frequently voices his disgust and repulsion over the loss of life occurring and focuses all of his resources in an effort to retake the station.

However, as the game progresses, he is forced to make more and more morally ambiguous/questionable choices.

After confronting the man who betrayed him by selling the security information, Jack actually lets him go free - he then attempts to shoot Jack in the back as he leaves, resulting in Jack killing him and noting that it felt "exhilarating."
The player retrieves a sentient military AI for Jack so he can control a robot army and take the space station back. After realizing that she doesn't want to kill people, the AI pleads to not be forced to integrate with the machinery and offers to duplicate herself instead, which will take several days. Jack concludes they don't have the time, forcibly installing her into the system and subsequently erasing her personality.
After taking part of the station back (for which the crew heralds him as a hero), Jack locks a group of scientists in an airlock and opens the door, killing them because he fears they will betray him, despite having no valid reason to believe this. Notably, this is witnessed by the two protagonists in 2 that Jack kills and tortures, who at this time were hired to help retake the station as well.
He is then betrayed by those same protagonists, who sabotage the weapon of mass destruction Jack had constructed in an attempt to kill him and the crew, because they believe he is a deep-seated psychopath with too much power. He survives only because he decided to activate the weapon remotely instead of manually as they had anticipated, and this becomes the catalyst for his hatred of those characters, as he vows to kill them alongside the bandits that roam the planet.
Finally, after obtaining an alien relic that gives him visions on how to become powerful on the galactic scale, one of the protagonists who had just tried to kill him arrives and destroys it. Jack's proximity to the relic in the ensuing blast results in him losing an eye and his face being permanently scarred, forcing him to wear the iconic mask seen in 2. He swears vengeance on the characters, finally shifting from the well-intentioned Jack to the violently obsessed Handsome Jack.

Why is this a good example? A noted part of any type of storytelling is that it features protagonist-centered morality; you're observing the world from the protagonists point of view, and it is very easy for their own morality and the morality of those that they encounter to be warped, e.g. the protagonist losing their love interest to someone else - even if that person is an objectively good person otherwise, through the eyes of the protagonist, they are an enemy and will be presented as such throughout the narrative.

When playing through 2 it's easy to sum Jack up as your run-of-the-mill villain taking on the scrappy underdog protagonists - and many people did. But after playing The Pre-Sequel, it was hard to look at those same protagonists and still feel like they were faultless heroes.

With Jack's story, it's difficult to walk away saying he got what he deserved and that the protagonists were completely in the right.

But it is also difficult to say Jack wouldn't have still descended into psychopathy at some later point (seeing as he had already imprisoned his daughter prior to the events of The Pre-Sequel! and had already constructed a weapon of mass destruction), and that the protagonists were completely wrong in trying to kill him before he took the plunge.

But that's the point; the reality is people are morally gray, and seldom are events as clean cut as narratives make them out to be. Your reader should feel conflicted when walking away from your work, because that shows you have portrayed a reality in which they themselves would have probably made or at least empathized with a number of the decisions made by either side.

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