: People are normally 'fighting' against forces that don't exist, almost all 'knowledge' is fabricated guesswork at best. We invent reasons for things internal and external and fiction is a partially

@Holmes449

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People are normally 'fighting' against forces that don't exist, almost all 'knowledge' is fabricated guesswork at best. We invent reasons for things internal and external and fiction is a partially honest embodiment of that.

Storytelling rules are one such fabrication, the reality of many stories is that they go from word to word, moment to moment, objective to objective, interaction to interaction, and only have plot because the author feels there should be one, yet carrying the plot is so often where otherwise good prose falls down.

What is a plot? It is a project that one believes to exist engineered by characters that certainly do not exist, even if your estimation of them fits well enough for your purposes.

Fictional antagonists are a reaction in the mind of the reader to the words on the page, built largely by implication. The implication can be more or less explicit.

A Novel opens with a character being told a story with plot, protagonist, antagonist etc. The novel continues with a story of events, perhaps a war, the protagonist gets swept up in it, spending most of it as a refugee travelling across the continent dealing with looters and gangs and profiteers, avoiding the army whilst the remainder of her family try to teach her all manner of things but no longer possessing the books or the tools they find it as difficult to teach as she does to learn, our protagonist imagines she is Gara, fleeing the evil god Whatshisface, never realizing she's had a psychotic break.

A Novel opens with a character reading a news story about a russian spy poisoning some apparently random people, on the radio on the way to work there's a piece about how trump colluded with russia to influence the presidential election, at work that day she gets an error message written in cyrilic commented code when an in-house developed app crashes. She asks the guy who wrote it about the russian language in the cafeteria three days later, after the IT team haven't responded to her request for help. He seems nervous.

On a hunch, she has a look at his projects folder and finds more russian! loads of it! She votes democrat at the midterms. Damned russian spies, they're everywhere!

Sorry, I got carried away. Anyway, point is people invent imaginary antagonists that don't exist all the time. An antagonist that doesn't exist can never be known.

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