GET BOOKT
A guide of books to gift the people in your life and yourself!
For the people looking to put a different kind of magic into their holidays…
The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab
For the genre connoisseur with a love for high concepts in short form…
Africa Risen edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, & Zelda Knight (now in paperback!)
For the treasured party member who’s saved your character’s life many times on TTRPG night…
Bookshops & Bonedust by @travisbaldree
━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━
For those who love (or possibly are 👀) gay werewolves
Wolfsong by TJ Klune
For the mutual who devoured the epic highs and lows of Riverdale and craves more…
The Luminaries by Susan Dennard, now in paperback!)
━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━
For your brave and luckless friend, constantly trapped in transit purgatory and upset about it…
The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw & Richard Kadrey
For the true buckaroos trotting beside you…
Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle
For the friend who says “but have we considered burning it all down?” on an alarming and refreshingly regular basis…
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━
For the friend who has a hot date on Friday night (with their book)...
Fall of Ruin and Wrath by Jennifer L. Armentrout
For the avid doodler who sketches plans for their future volcanic villain lair equipped with a space laser…
Starter Villain by @jscalzi
━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━
Not enough books? We agree. Check out our other GET BOOKT guide.
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NEWS ABOUT THE BH HANDBOOK AND MORE
There was a conference recently where Alan spoke about the books, showed an animated teaser with Kaleb and why the BH handbook for villains was delayed. Link of the conference will be below!
They showed an animated short teasing the audiobook of BH's completely harmless book featuring Kaleb! See it in the conference below, timestamp 15:12.
The BH handbook for villains (and possibly also Miss Heed's book) was delayed because of the upcoming Mawrasite and Illuminarrow comic. We should first read the comic and then the books, because the comic contains things about the books and Alan wants us to follow the timeline properly. So they'll come out after the comic ends.
Here's the conference! If you wanna see the animated teaser, it's at 15:12.
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5 Tips for Creating Intimidating Antagonists
Antagonists, whether people, the world, an object, or something else are integral to giving your story stakes and enough conflict to challenge your character enough to change them. Today I’m just going to focus on people antagonists because they are the easiest to do this with!
1. Your antagonist is still a character
While sure, antagonists exist in the story to combat your MC and make their lives and quest difficult, they are still characters in the story—they are still people in the world.
Antagonists lacking in this humanity may land flat or uninteresting, and it’s more likely they’ll fall into trope territory.
You should treat your antagonists like any other character. They should have goals, objectives, flaws, backstories, etc. (check out my character creation stuff here). They may even go through their own character arc, even if that doesn’t necessarily lead them to the ‘good’ side.
Really effective antagonists are human enough for us to see ourselves in them—in another universe, we could even be them.
2. They’re… antagonistic
There’s two types of antagonist. Type A and Type B. Type A antagonist’s have a goal that is opposite the MC’s. Type B’s goal is the same as the MC’s, but their objectives contradict each other.
For example, in Type A, your MC wants to win the contest, your antagonist wants them to lose.
In Type B, your MC wants to win the contest, and your antagonist wants to win the same contest. They can’t both win, so the way they get to their goal goes against each other.
A is where you get your Draco Malfoy’s, other school bullies, or President Snow’s (they don’t necessarily want what the MC does, they just don’t want them to have it.)
B is where you get the other Hunger Games contestants, or any adventure movie where the villain wants the secret treasure that the MCs are also hunting down. They want the same thing.
3. They have well-formed motivations
While we as the writers know that your antagonist was conceptualized to get in the way of the MC, they don’t know that. To them, they exist separate from the MC, and have their own reasons for doing what they do.
In Type A antagonists, whatever the MC wants would be bad for them in some way—so they can’t let them have it. For example, your MC wants to destroy Amazon, Jeff Bezos wants them not to do that. Why not? He wants to continue making money. To him, the MC getting what they want would take away something he has.
Other motivations could be: MC’s success would take away an opportunity they want, lose them power or fame or money or love, it could reveal something harmful about them—harming their reputation. It could even, in some cases, cause them physical harm.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be true, but the antagonist has to believe it’s true. Such as, if MC wins the competition, my wife will leave me for them. Maybe she absolutely wouldn’t, but your antagonist isn’t going to take that chance anyway.
In Type B antagonists, they want the same thing as the MC. In this case, their motivations could be literally anything. They want to win the competition to have enough money to save their family farm, or to prove to their family that they can succeed at something, or to bring them fame so that they won’t die a ‘nobody’.
They have a motivation separate from the MC, but that pesky protagonist keeps getting in their way.
4. They have power over the MC
Antagonists that aren’t able to combat the MC very well aren’t very interesting. Their job is to set the MC back, so they should be able to impact their journey and lives. They need some sort of advantage, privilege, or power over the MC.
President Snow has armies and the force of his system to squash Katniss. She’s able to survive through political tension and her own army of rebels, but he looms an incredibly formidable foe.
Your antagonist may be more wealthy, powerful, influential, intelligent, or skilled. They may have more people on their side. They are superior in some way to the protagonist.
5. And sometimes they win
Leading from the last point, your antagonists need wins. They need to get their way sometimes, which means your protagonist has to lose. You can do a bit of a trade off that allows your protagonist to lose enough to make a formidable foe out of their antagonist, but still allows them some progress using Fortunately, Unfortunately.
It goes like… Fortunately, MC gets accepted into the competition. Unfortunately, the antagonist convinces the rest of the competitors to hate them. Fortunately, they make one friend. Unfortunately, their first entry into the competition gets sabotaged. Fortunately, they make it through the first round anyway, etc. etc.
An antagonist that doesn’t do any antagonizing isn’t very interesting, and is completely pointless in their purpose to heighten stakes and create conflict for your protagonist to overcome. We’ll probably be talking about antagonists more soon!
Anything I missed?
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