How to write an Antagonist that is hot, manipulative, but has good reasoning for being the 'villain'?

Question

I am writing a dark romantasy novel that I hope to publish. I have a character (the ML[male lead]), Ace, who is the prince of the shadow side. Ace is the son of the king and queen of the shadow realm and faces a lot of high expectaions from his parents. He is the love interest of the FL(Female lead). My novel is going to be an enemies to lovers, forbidden love, fantasy novel. I am trying to figure out how to make Ace seem like a misunderstood, hot, villain.

Answer 1

I am trying to figure out how to make Ace seem like a misunderstood, hot, villain.

The Bad Boy Trope

Nihilistic, angry, arrogant, destructive and wears guy-liner.
SWOOON

TV-Tropes has a page for All Girls Want Bad Boys listing the superficial traits and plenty of media examples. It also has a paragraph explaining why this archetype is nowadays called out for being un-nuanced 'toxic behavior'. It's a little short on explaining why. The dichotomy is easy to explain, but not usually discussed.

Bad boys are a shortcut to sex – not the guy you want to marry, but the guy you want to experiment with. Since he 'breaks the rules' of society, it is easy to project that he could 'break the rules' of courtship/propriety/sexual boundaries. His arrogance suggests he is a confidant 'alpha male', even if he isn't. He doesn't care what society thinks, therefore he is a free-thinker and smarter than others. He has 'big penis' energy.... None of this is necessarily true, but it sets him apart. He is thrilling.

A self-respecting female character would not admit this is sexually arousing, but those tingles are happening all the same. A teenager whose hormones are ahead of her actual experience, will misinterpret her own body's signals. She is being 'activated', her buttons are getting pushed, but she is not necessarily connecting this to pure sexual attraction. She will rationalize her own feelings, she will empathize with his toxicity, she will jump through mental hoops to make this situation explainable, and she will flatter her own impartiality in her own fantasy to makes him better than he is. What is love but seeing a better person and greater potential that's under the surface? The fact that only she can see his good qualities, and everyone else would be horrified, somehow makes it more true.

All older women have felt the same attractions, but also have the life-experience to learn that, yeah, some of that 'sexy' triggering behavior is actually just antisocial toxicity when it plays out in real life. Everyone likes a fuckboy while they are young and hot; no one wants a fuckman who is past his prime. Traits that signal precocious confidence in youth, feel immature and asshole-ish on an adult. You really don't want to spend the rest of your life with someone who has no respect for society or personal boundaries.

Similar to how a grown man would not recommend falling in love with a stripper from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, an adult woman will be waving red flags over her daughter dating a bad boy. The shortcut to sex is understandable (and probably obvious from the outside), but experience suggests this relationship can't end happily-ever-after.

"But Mom! You don't understand, we are in LOVE!", said every girl ever. Mom actually understands too well, but you can't explain what someone doesn't want to hear.

"I can fix him"

The other end of this trope which also probably isn't discussed enough, is the girl is not just some dumb victim of a pick-up artist. Indeed, he doesn't need to be aware of her at all.

She is indulging in a power fantasy where she can 'fix him'. This is her own arrogance and hubris, but also related to the urge to help stray kittens no matter how hissy. Love and nurture go hand-and-hand. The instinct to help and 'fix' may be stronger than the unfamiliar sexual attraction, certainly easier for a 'good girl' to justify.

There is a very old writing trope called 'Bitch to Simp' where a (male) protagonist encounters a hot female antagonist and 'fixes' her with sex. She immediately stops being an antagonist and becomes a devoted simp to the hero. The gender-swapped trope is that love and understanding from the pure-hearted woman can calm the beast, and the toxic bad boy transforms into a devoted boyfriend.

This trope is super-cringe but also the core of an enemies-to-lovers arc. It's probably a good idea to call it out and subvert it, or hang a lampshade on it. Bad Boy's antisocial cool is undermined by frustrating interactions with (not-so) Good Girl. Bad Boy's self-image is based on him being un-bossed and emotionally invulnerable, meanwhile Good Girl experiences a surprisingly overt sexual awakening where she will not accept 'no'. An immutable object meets an irresistible force, and sparks fly.

He may allow himself to become emotionally vulnerable. She may crave raw-dog sex. Each fundamentally changes the other, but both have ego defenses that flair up and get ugly. They surprise themselves in these interactions, transgressing their own boundaries before snapping back to their old behaviors. Each becomes the other's train wreck, capable of derailing their normal. Both characters set rationality aside in order to explore emotions neither is familiar with or in control of.

He wasn't 'misunderstood' at all, until she came along and insisted he must be! She wasn't the type to be motivated by lust, until he acted dysfunctional and wounded in leather pants! I'm not trying to write your characters, but it follows they must be getting something from the other that is so out of their normal that it is both transforming and alarming. Keeping this in mind, it should follow that they will have moments of ecstasy followed by pure hatred for each other.

Bad Boy becomes a sexy emotionally-wounded bastard in practice, reinforced by the female protagonist actually being the one that's doing this to him.

Manipulative Bastard

Ace is the son of the king and queen of the shadow realm and faces a lot of high expectaions from his parents.

Ace needs to lie and manipulate because he is not powerful enough to accomplish his goals otherwise. This helps him to be an underdog despite being a prince.

His parents are both alphas of their domain, with enough power to hold the entire realm in check. He is expected to prove himself a worthy successor so any 'assistance' he gets from his parents would be in the form of a test – they give him fewer resources and expect bigger results. He is set up to fail, with plenty of frenemies who benefit if he does.

Growing up in this environment Ace is forced to evolve into being a complete bastard – which is the parent's intent – but he can never win so openly that he jeopardizes their politics or alliances. Ace simultaneously has to live up to their impossible standards, while not taking credit for his wins against power rivals, and never showing up his parents.

Ace has a built-in reason for being a lying manipulative bastard all the time. He also has reasons to often wish he is someone else – at least temporarily as an escape.

A starting arc for Ace might involve being sent on a no-win errand (a battle?) in which he has to convince someone with more resources (a power rival) to do the actual fighting for him. The rival intends to take the glory, but somehow Ace manipulates the situation so the rival fails. In the fallout, Ace is trapped unexpectedly by Good Girl who doesn't see him as anyone important, or maybe humiliatingly she assumes Ace is one of the Dark Queen's loveboys (sexualizing him from the start). For plot reasons, Ace plays along and eventually gets away without being recognized. This sets up a pattern where Ace is shown to manipulate and lie, and not entirely by choice but survival. It's not exactly a 'win' because he has to report to his parents who are much bigger bosses than the power rival.

By the time he encounters Good Girl a second time, there can be a sense of why he might lean in to a relatively un-complicated situationship where the enemy roles are well-established and refreshingly low-stakes. Of course he would not tell her who he really is – and might tell her anything at all. This reverses the power dynamic from the previous encounter, and maybe a bit smarmy because he is getting something he wants under false pretenses.

He arranges their third encounter, but by now she suspects he is not who he said so she takes the aggressor role. He has to adjust his story to something she will believe, but this hits him that he is always appeasing someone, and it was her dumb fantasy in the first place.... By their 4th encounter he is looking to score points at her expense.... By their nth encounter he needs her help.

And so on. Each encounter should reverse the power dynamic to keep them balanced, and raise the stakes for the story. Meanwhile sewing seeds that will payoff later when the big world-sized conflict erupts. Keep escalating their power drama until you reach a peak and they take it too far. Around that time the big world conflict catches up to them – all the things they put on hold to make room for the affair come back to bite them. The big inevitable war, the political marriage to someone else, living on the lamb in a sleazy flophouse – whatever the stakes.

Answer 2

Two POV is not unusual at all, and can be beneficial in this case, because you want ACE to be "misunderstood".

So the obvious way to do that is to show ACE doing something that he feels is necessary and required, in one chapter, and then in the next chapter, have FMC hear about it and misunderstand it as inappropriate, disgusting, cruel, or whatever -- which we the reader can see is a complete misunderstanding on her part, she did not get the whole story, so she didn't understand.

Use your creativity to invent such a situation, an obvious one is that ACE seemingly kills an animal that he knows is endangering a trapped child, but the story is told to FMC without mentioning the child, so it just looks like a gratuitous killing.

Using two POV, in more or less alternating chapters, is quite common in romance; for the equivalent in movies, consider "Sleepless in Seattle", Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, 1993. The movie more or less alternates between the two protagonists in their separate lives, although they converse by phone.

You want a similar structure, alternating between them in chapters until their stories merge. They don't have to be separated by distance.

ACE is living his life, FMC is living hers.

In the ACE chapters, We follow ACE and we see his interactions with FMC from the ACE POV with his thoughts and feelings. What he thinks of her, his feelings about her, what he assumes she thinks of him. Away from her he may even express some of this to friends.

In the FMC chapters, we follow FMC and her life, and see her interactions with ACE from her POV with her thoughts and feelings. What she thinks of him, her feelings about him, what she assumes he thinks of her. Away from him she may even express some of this to friends.

(Expressing thoughts and feelings to others [friends, servants, sidekicks, pets, bartenders] is a good idea if you think this might make a good movie; in movies it is difficult and contrived [like writing voiced over diary entries] to express "thoughts", it is better to verbalize these in some way to others.)

Good luck.

Answer 3

The "Charming Sociopath" is a trope for a reason. They're evil when looked at by people who don't share their world view, which is everyone else, but the way they operate in the world is totally reasonable to them. Existing examples include the likes of Sherlock, Dexter, and House.

Answer 4

• Figure out what you and/or your readers find hot. Endow your antagonist with those traits.

• Give your protagonist interests that appear to clash with those of the antagonist because either

  • she lacks information and understanding or
  • she is in the wrong,

  and as your protagonist grows and develops during the story she eventually comes to understand that she actually wants the same as the antagonist and that he has been right all along.

• Let your antagonist employ methods to achieve his goal that appear extreme and ruthless but are actually appropriate and the only way to solve the problem once you understand what it is.

• Observe people and understand what is considered manipulative behavior. Let the antagonist act in that way.

Answer 5

The evil the antagonist perpetrates is also something the protagonist is tempted by.

A lot of examples will have the antagonist mislead the main character in some way, as surely readers won't relate to a protagonist who can allow problematic beliefs. However there are plenty of popular examples of protagonists who embody problematic behaviour only to redeem themselves as they grow.

Say the antagonist represents stealing from or conquering members of an upper class, and the protagonist initially is resistant but slowly begins to believe the upper class may deserve it. Or perhaps she maintains that what he's doing is wrong but to her surprise the violence and power she gets from witnessing these acts excites her. There's lots of room to expand both the relationship and the corruption of the main character together across a progression of scenes, and lots of directions the story arc can go.

Answer 6

If you want something less cynical than the other approaches, Ace may be good at heart but never learned how to act that out in practice. He'll feel uneasy about this but just does not know how to live a life that would make him feel better.

There are real-life examples for this:

• Colonization. "But I make sure that my slaves have a good life." Yeah, but you still punish them if they overstep their position, right? And if somebody tells you you shouldn't, they would start to boss you around, so punishment is the only option you see?
• Unequal-power relationships in general: humans and animals, police and population, armed and unarmed, parents and kids.
  E.g. I once saw a mother discuss whether cinema is the best option for the evening. Once in my lifetime. Otherwise, the adult would always somehow try to predetermine or maybe just influence the child's decision, "for its own good".
  This happens less if there are strong rules against it, e.g. most European police forces are strictly regulated in application of physical force. Still, the idea of subduing others tends to reappear whenever there's an excuse - "I had to self-defend", "he resisted arrest", "she was overstepping The Rules so I had to use force", followed by excessive application of force.
• Individualistic societies with no regard for personal weaknesses. Those who can't compete will get trampled, those who are ruthless enough can ascend to a higher tier, and this overall pattern is generally considered okay.
  Look at current-day billionaires for that mentality, but for somebody who's part of the upper layers, it's hard to even understand that a more compassionate lifestyle is a realistic alternative.
  In fact, from a European perspective, U.S. society in general is a strong example; Europeans usually find it crazy and scary that violence is so acceptable, that a lot of people become homeless or sick (even terminally sick) because they don't get help; U.S. citizens believe it's normal.

One could construct the story in different ways.

One would be that a single sentence is enough to make the ML see through the situation, turning the story into a we-against-the-establishment rebellion.

Another one would be that the ML gets swayed whenever the FL is around, but always falls back to the old, tried-and-true ways.
This could make him guilty (and an even easier target for his parents and established social norms of his caste). Or it he might start his own rebellion against his class, making horrible mistakes in the eyes both of his caste and of the FL, though for very different reasons. He might find justifications for that and become estranged to everybody, or he might admit it's wrong (to both sides). He might become torn between the two perspectives. Trying to please both sides to get their acceptance, failing miserably. Maybe become bitter and an even worse villain, that would end in tragedy (the FL might be forced to kill him). Or he might be hopelessly on the Dark Side and go back only in his last moments, e.g. Anakin Skywalker (though the psychology of the Dark Side is never quite explained in the films, which is highly unsatisfactory to many - there's an opportunity to tell a better story for you ;-) ).

In general, humans are excellent at justifying terrible behaviour to themselves and those they love. In fact the story could be turned around: The ML drawing the FL towards power play.
Daenerys Targaryen from GoT is a really good example of hero-becomes-villain based on self-justification, though it's a different setup as nobody is introducting her into being a villain, but it's a pretty good display how slippery the slope can be.

Of course, the FL could start to slide, and still turn around.
And either drag the ML up with her, or watch him fall back. Redemption or tragedy.

SO many different stories one can tell with that setup!