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I wrote that because often a religious or political leader, or occasionally a social queen, is used as a concretization of society. Just like your santa claus example, something must be ok if the grand high mucketymuck says so, even if all the peasants were opposed to it yesterday.

In general this is an elementary form of representing society, where the people are no more than the followers of the leader. This representation is elementray because it is uni-directional and one dimensional. What you are looking at as a 'Society' is no more than a king and the representation of the king's power.

In the Veteran example, society is not representation of power owned by some leader. To change the sociey is to change the people. For example, in the story, the vietnam veteran can meet some kind of pacifist film director who wanted to make a pacifist film condemning the war, and the veteran was somehow involved. As the production continued the veteran and the director became connected and the director became empathetic. On one hand she was to finish the anti-war documentary, on the other hand she had grown away from her view. The director wished that maybe the veteran would quit the work, giving her an excuse to stop the production. But the veteran never did, and told her that he would not quit because this was what he fought for.



You are correct that it is easier to show the main character changing the king of vietnam instead of vietnam itself. But that just dumbs down the story.

Estok - I agree that using a leader to represent society would be elementary and dumbing-down. But, how does your vetran, by making a pacifist war movie, change vietnam? I don't want to change what anyone thinks about society, I want to change what society IS.

MSW - Uh, do you have any happy ending exmples? I would see your examples as the problems, not the resolutions of the problems.

Technogoth - A wedding as the antagonist? That's a hilarious idea. ;) The wedding of Murphy's Law maybe. or a more serious example might be an impending wedding to the wrong person, hmm...

The Veteran example was not about changing Vietnam. It was about changing the US. This transformation is presented through the changing view of the director. The aspect being discussed is prejudice. Changing how the people think about the issue is changing the Society.

In my point of view you can't have an exciting story without the antagonist.
That would mean you live in a perfect world where you don't care about anything.
You don't have to worry about getting something to eat, you don't have to get some cigarettes (the antagonist would be the closed store e.g.), nobody or nothing tries to kill you ... you don't have conflicts you would have to solve, try to overcome..

Someone mentioned earlier that Forrest Gump has no antagonist: It has.
It is the prejudice (or rather the fact) that everybody thinks Forrest is dumb. He tries to ignore it when he says: "Dumb people do dumb things." ... and as a matter of fact he actually did not do dumb things on second guessing because everything worked out for him ( even shrimp fishing :) ). He actually does'nt know he fights his antagonist.

Quoted from Estok

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Quoted from sunandshadow Quote: An antagonist contributes to plot by causing a problem for the protagonist to struggle against and a target which can be battled and defeated decisively, making for a dramatic climax. An antagonist is a concentration, manifestation, or personification of a set of believes or a point of view in an argument. In your statement, the Force is what causes the conflict, not the Representation of the Force. An antagonist is a choice of representation for the Force.

[Edited by - hoLogramm on June 3, 2005 1:01:25 AM]

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You read the posts wrongly. Prejudice is a Force. The natural existence of this Force involves characters.



The general definition of Antagonist:

The principal character in opposition to the protagonist or hero of a narrative or drama.


"Stories without antagonist" refers to stories where there is no principal character opposing the main character. Forrest Gump does not have any antagonist.

I agree on the classical side.

Don Quijote doesn't have a classical antagonist either then (if windmills don't count).

But i really would incorporate the abstract antagonist too because i think that what makes a story identifyable with oneself. It gives much more depth to a plot than a physical person.

Fighting an abstract antagonist is useless .. you will loose, but the main challenge is the ability to cope with it.
e.g. everybody picks on when you're fat or ugly. You can't stop them of doing so but if you can cope with it you look for weaknesses in your opponents and use it against them or at least walk away with a smile because you know that you are better than they ... or if you can't cope with it you would probably commit suicide or become a serial killer.

I would say MSW had a good definition for it.

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um...Sure, the classic interpretation of antagonist is of an seperate opposeing character to the storys protagonist...However antagonist in general means more then that: Quote: Quote: an·tag·o·nist (n-tg-nst) n. Something, such as a muscle, disease, or physiological process, that neutralizes or impedes the action or effect of another. for example Hamlets antagonist was his inability to take early action leading to his infamous "to be, or not to be" monalogue..the "fatial flaws" found in most of shakespears tragities were antagonistic in nature.

[Edited by - hoLogramm on June 3, 2005 7:52:40 AM]

When you are in a discussion, you discuss using the meaning within the frames set by the original poster. When the OP used the word Antagonist based on a certain definition, you supposed to communicate using that definition.

The intention of the post is to identify ways to create a story when a certain device is missing. The word Antagonist was used to delineate the missing device.

You are correct that there are other ways to define what an Antagonist is. But none of such discussion benefit the discussion because this thread was clearly not about the definition of Antagonist.

'Antagonist' was used as a classifier to define the subject of the topic. You are diluting the problem statement.

Maybe you are trying to say that an antagonist must exist in order to have a plot. In some sense that is true, depending on how you expand the definition, to a point where any conflict is defined as the crash between an protagonist and an antagonist. For example, for a character who is enjoying life, you could describe the story as a "protagonist [struggling] against and [the absence of enjoyment] which can be battled and defeated decisively", where the 'absence of enjoyment' is the 'antagonist'.

I don't think the goal of this thread is symbolically flatten all the definitions to eliminate the discussion. If you do that, you are just going to force poster to (unnecessarily) rephrase the problem.

This was why I would choose to call the rest of it the 'Force', so that there is no conflict of notation.

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Original post by Estok The Veteran example was not about changing Vietnam. It was about changing the US. This transformation is presented through the changing view of the director. The aspect being discussed is prejudice. Changing how the people think about the issue is changing the Society.

Ok, but if you were going to come up with an example that was about changing Vietnam, the very essence of Vietnam, how might the vetran cause a transformation like that? Maybe by releasing a virus that killed all the mosquitoes he hated when he was there the first time or something like that?

what exactly do you want to change about Vietnam?

Well, if you want me to get into details the Vietnam example isn't very useful, so I'll switch back to the specifics of my story.

I want a team of 4 characters, whose strengths are creativity, strategy, loyalty, and leadership instinct, to use these strengths and some (non cheesy!) magical means to change a society of aliens from rejecting a homosexual family to accepting them. So, thwir group psychology is the specific thing I want to change; and I want to change it dramatically and all at once, not gradually like the pacifist movie woulf change the US's group psychology about Vietnam.