Quick, think of a villain!
You probably thought of supervillain from a superhero comic, or someone in a walking cape and top hat with a pair of villainous mustachios. Why?
Answering this question will take a few steps.
At the heart of most stories, there is a conflict between good and evil. This may take a milder approach with comedy as opposed to drama, where the antagonist is merely unpleasant or unfriendly rather than dangerous, but is still almost always present. A ready exception is of course, slice-of-life, which you'll find often gets a pass from conventional storytelling conventions.
Regardless of genre or specific target audience, a story will pick a character or set of characters that it wishes the audience to side with or root for. Often, they will have a rival or character who functions as an obstacle to them accomplishing their goals, and this will be the antagonist for the piece.
Obviously, not all stories possess an antagonist given physical form. Period dramas, for example, will often focus on societal conventions as being the cause of their characters' hardships, but they will often still have a character to stand in for those values, especially if the work is political in nature. For the time being, let's focus on stories with one person or group of people serving as the primary obstacle to the protagonist(s) achieving the primary goal of the story.
Giving an example seems unnecessary. If you think of almost any story, you can pick out the antagonist or villain with relative ease, because they're almost universal, occupying a wide variety of genres. They can be found in romance, science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between. Go ahead and think of someone who doesn't wear a costume. Other specifics aren't important right now.
Then why did you think of someone wearing bright secondary colors (almost always green or purple, seldom orange) yelling their own name in a stylized font at the beginning of this article?
Think back to the character you chose two paragraphs ago. Does he, she, or it ever actually say that they are the villain of the piece? Do they tell other characters how evil they are with their dialogue or call themselves villains with any sort of regularity?
Outside of the superhero genre, the answer to this question is usually no. Why?
As with many things in storytelling, the answer lies in real life. When was the last time someone said that they themselves were evil? Does this move you ahead in your chosen profession or social circle? Does it help you accomplish your life's goals?
Again, the answer is probably no. Most stories are anchored in reality. Even if the specifics of the world are different from our own, and animals can speak, or people can do magic, the way that characters interact with one another and what motivates them doesn't tend to change very much.
So, why does the superhero genre seem to ignore this rule? Why am I coming down so hard on it if I profess to like everything?
Well, it doesn't anymore, for the most part. It hasn't for a very long time, and I do like the genre. In fact, it's one of my favorites.
In the United States, in the mid 1950s, the Comics Code Authority rose to power. Much like the Hays Code before it, its aim was censorship of the then-new medium. If you are familiar with the Hays Code, then you know its general aim (or the aim it professed) was to depict crime and other "immoral behavior" in an unappealing light.
What this meant in effect was that a character who did things the code didn't approve of (a list as byzantine as it is long) could not be portrayed in a "sympathetic" fashion.
In effect, this meant that between the years of 1934 to 1968, if a character in a movie released in one of Hollywood's big studios was a villain, the script was legally obligated to beat the audience over the head with it or be relegated to release outside of commercial theaters, instead seeking audiences in drive-in movie theaters, which were at the time synonymous with low quality movies.
Eventually, public opinion against censorship of this sort became too great and it was abolished. However, the Comics Code Authority persisted for much longer, since the medium was less prevalent, and generally regarded as being for children.
The rules between the two censorship codes were very similar, which is why pre-code comics have a very different feel to those published under it, which are decidedly more black and white.
In 1971, however, Nixon's administration asked Stan Lee to publish an issue of Spider-Man dealing with the dangers of drug use.
Despite the issue depicting drug addiction in a purely negative light, the CCA would not relax its guidelines forbidding the portrayal of drugs at all, so Marvel made the decision to publish without the seal of approval.
What this meant at the time was that with a seal of approval, a publisher could sell their comics at the drugstore, where most consumers purchased them. Without a seal, they could only be purchased at specialty comic book stores, which the general populace was leery of at the time. This issue changed that and got the general public to come to comic stores and find they were not the dens of iniquity they had feared.
Over time, since Marvel had proved the CCA's hold could be broken without financial ruin on the publisher, other companies followed suit and several decades later, the CCA's stranglehold on the medium had more or less abated.
After that point, comic books could tell stories portraying antagonists as human beings instead of evil incarnate. Storytelling techniques that were formerly forbidden came back into popularity and antagonists were portrayed at times as sympathetic, even if the narrative didn't exactly tell you to put your trust in them.
The reason I have discussed this at length is simple, though it does bear explanation. For many of us, regardless of specific demographic, these are the stories we grew up with. For many of us, a comic book was the first complete story we had ever read.
Due to the serialized format and wide array of choices available, more comics were soon to follow if we liked the first, and even if you didn't, you still remained somewhat aware of it. Children on playgrounds don't tend to act out literary fiction, they're ninja turtles or x-men. These ideas surrounded the generations within this time period, and the people who consumed the work generated then.
These are the people who went on to make art. These are our authors and directors. We all grew up with certain stories, and we for the most part still remember them.
I talk about censorship and restriction of artistry to show how far artists have come since then and how much choice we all have now.
This groundwork is necessary for the next post, which will deal with some of the things that are now possible when artists are allowed to portray an antagonist sympathetically.
