: Re: Making the antagonist a good guy? I was recently re-reading Erin Hunter's Warriors and I noticed something new, knowing what I now know; The antagonist is introduced as a hero. For those unfamiliar

@Berumen699

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This happens all the time in fiction and in real life because our goals will often align, but our motivations do not. Take the book series Animorphs. The titular human protagonists are allied with an alien race called the Andalites against another alien race of brain controlling parasites called the Yeerks. This is a case of strange bedfellows because the humans are fighting for their own freedom and right to make their own choices. Over the course of the series, we learn that the Andalites are not fighting for other races freedoms but to atone for their own sins (namely giving the Yeerks FTL technology) and their government style is a military junta with a ritulistic honor system and a heavily censored information system and they value success by any means necessary. The Yeerks are much more Democratic in nature, but as with life, Democracies and "Nice Democracies" are not the same thing. Never the less, the Yeerk's Emperor doesn't have any real power... he gets to vote if the representative council is dead locked (if it's 7-5, he doesn't get to cast a ballot) and his secret is hidden from the public in order to avoid a cult of personality... and he is elected by his peers on the council (procreation is fatal to the parents, so no heredity rule is not a concept they ever got). All of these motivations amount to the humans basically having to halt the Yeerk Invasion before the Andalites do something about it (basically, genocide without care for the humans that get caught.).

There's event the case of people having the same motivation and goals and still being antagonistic towards each other. For example, the first season of Yu-Gi-Oh creates a situation where Yugi, Kaiba, and Joey are all forced into a tournament where they have to fight each other. All three are motivate by saving a family member and the tournament means that there can only be one, so when the fights happen, they all three are playing for keeps resulting in some significant problems between them and all three bringing their A game to the front. Now, there are a few details that could resolve this, but they aren't apparent. In essence, Yugi's win could easily solve all three problems, but Kaiba doesn't know about Yugi's stake in the tournament and thinks he's only playing for glory and is too focused on the victory to be talked down. Joey on the other hand, knows from the start that Yugi could achieve his goal, but he also believes that it would be a betrayal of who he is not to give Yugi a fair fight for the win and that there is still some emotional investment in it at this point to not put up a good effort. It's a friendlier fight to be sure, but it does mean that for this segment of the story, he is forced to be an antagonist and the focus is on how this emotionally tests their respect for each other.

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