: Re: Creating an incompetent antagonist I'm in the early stages of developing a fantasy story. At a high level, it involves the tried-and-true, if cliched, plot line of "Scrappy group of rebels fights

@Correia211

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You're concerned about things being "unfulfilling if I simply make the Empire regularly make mind-boggling logical errors".

And you're absolutely right. It will be unfulfilling if they make mind-boggling errors. But the emphasized point is important. It's only unfulfilling if it's mind-boggling to the reader. Which suggests an obvious answer: don't just have deus ex machina stupidity, but make sure that the reader understands why the empire makes the errors.

Which is to say, you can't have the empire make "logical errors" - at least from their own perspective. Sure, from the perspective of the omniscient narrator they can make some obvious howlers, but from the perspective of the Empire and the people in it, there should be a clear rationale. The reader might not 100% agree that they would make the same mistakes if they were in the same situation, but they should at least understand why the people in the empire made the mistakes they did. The "stupidity" shouldn't come out of nowhere.

You're already have a good base for this -- the Empire is stolid, fossilized and over-confident in their position. They're inefficient and wasteful. Like practically everyone else, they've bought into their own propaganda and aren't considering that there's anything that they can't handle. When they do act, they're overconfident and do it dismissively.

A good way to present understandable mistakes is to get into the mindset that the Empire isn't filled with idiots, but instead is filled with people who are acting rationally, but in pursuit of goals which are different from "crush the rebellion at all costs".

For example, take the military leader for a raid on the rebel's compound. If he was concerned about crushing the rebellion, he might have very different tactics. But he isn't concerned about the rebels. (After all, how would rebels be an actual threat to the glory of the empire?) Instead he's concerned about promotion and glory. Which in today's Empire means boldly marching in full dress uniforms to the front of the rebel's hideout and making their presence known - not skulking up in the middle of the night and having plain clothes officers covering the back entrances.

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