Antagonist: A Closer Look At Demiurge

A while back I wrote abut the roles of protagonist, antagonist, hero, villain, antihero, and antivillain in my story, Gods Among Men. Today I will delve deeper into the role of antagonist and how my character, Demiurge, fills that role.

The antagonist is fundamentally a reactive character. It is the protagonist that initiates the action and drives the plot. The antagonist reacts to what the protagonist does. It is common for the antagonist to either be the hero or villain of the story, but Demiurge is neither.

Once, a very long time ago, Demiurge was a great hero. That was before he was killed in his war with The False Gods. In the final battle he was utterly destroyed, yet continued to exist. He is now a grotesque aberration, neither dead nor alive. He has no choice in this. The one thing he fundamentally cannot change is himself.

Demiurge's current relationship to most people is similar to our relationship with insects. If an insect annoys us we either make it go away or kill it. If an insect is doing something interesting we might watch it for awhile, but likely not interfere. Otherwise, we ignore insects. Few insects occupy our thoughts for more than a moment and all are soon forgotten.

It is this attitude that keep Demiurge from being hero or villain, antihero or antivillain. The mundane world means too little for him to either save or destroy it. He has no interest in causing harm, and makes no effort to stop tragedy.

Damon Roth, my protagonist, is another matter. Damon Roth at one point has something Demiurge does care about, and proceeds to play a shell game with it so Demiurge can't find it. What is it that Damon has that Demiurge wants? My MacGuffin, the satchel I wrote about in a previous post.

Damon Roth puts Demiurge in a unique position. Demiurge wants the satchel more than anything else in the whole of creation. He cannot ignore Damon like he does others. Nor can Demiurge kill him. Damon has arranged that if he dies Demiurge will never find the satchel. This allows Damon Roth to lure Demiurge into a battle of wits and wills, subtle manipulations and opaque strategies. A game of chess with everyone else as pawns to be used or discarded as the situation demands. A contest both know can only end in the destruction of one of them.

What does Damon Roth want from Demiurge? Demiurge is the God Among Men, and that is what Damon Roth needs to become if he is to save all life on the planet. The only way Damon can do this is to destroy Demiurge and steal his immense power, knowledge, and memories.

What Damon needs to accomplish this goal is in the satchel. He must have the satchel and be near a distracted Demiurge in order to succeed. He dare not let Demiurge near the satchel until he can guarantee these conditions.

The other character's in the story revolve around these two figures and their cosmic conflict. They follow one or the other for a variety of reasons. Their individual fates depend on which one is ultimately triumphant.

A MacGuffin Is Not Something On McDonald’s Menu.

Alfred Hitchcock described the MacGuffin as an object around which the plot revolves, something the characters care about but which the audience doesn’t. The characters fight for the MacGuffin, betray each other for it, steal for it, kill for it, die for it. It is the One Ring, the Maltese Falcon, the secret plans vital to defeating the Nazi’s, the valuable necklace someone risks prison to acquire.

In my previous post I told of how I first started thinking about my major story, Gods Among Men.

One day I was having a daydream in which I envisioned a dwarf, dressed in armor, carrying a war-axe, creeping through an overgrown forest. Any player of role-playing games can see where this goes. The dwarf is part of a diverse party, there are monsters nearby and a fierce battle ensues. The party’s wizard is isolated, trapped by an Orc warrior, with no hope of escaping. In desperation he reaches into his satchel and…pulls out a .44 Magnum Revolver and shoots the Orc.

Nothing now remains of that original daydream except for the wizard’s satchel. Not the dwarf, orc, wizard, or gun, just the satchel that the gun came from.

Why the satchel? Without going into details of my plot and mythology or the strange path I took in developing both, making the satchel magical made other problems easier to solve. Giving it special properties with well-defined behaviors made plot twists possible that would have been difficult otherwise. The more important and powerful I made the satchel the easier it became for me to write the story.

Of course, once the satchel became a powerful magical item, it became valuable to the characters. Who has it at any given moment becomes important. If the hero loses the satchel, or the wrong person seizes it, that event creates dramatic tension.

Over many years that satchel became the focus of much of the action in Gods Among Men, became the glue that tied the various plot threads together. It went from a minor detail of a daydream to the item characters fight for, betray each other for, steal for, kill for, and die for.

That satchel became my MacGuffin.