Good vs Bad - Too One-dimensional?

Most of us know that every good story must have an outstanding villain or two – how else can the characters be challenged and drawn out accomplish, overcome and attain happiness for the readers?   And if not a person, then certain circumstances act as the obstacle, problem and challenge for characters to overcome, otherwise there would be no story to tell.  But I believe readers have moved on from the fairy-tale basics of plain good versus plain old evil, and villains (or problematic circumstances) can no longer be one-dimensional to satisfy today’s readers.

This is good, because real life is anything but one-dimensional, and people are hardly ever completely good or totally evil, so unless you want to escape into a fairy-tale world for a while, characters and/or circumstances should also have various layers and dimensions.  The classic definitions of protagonist vs antagonist have become blurred, but rather than confuse readers by undermining what is “good” and what is “bad”, a good story nowadays leads the reader to come to his or her own conclusions, and this is a much more rewarding and satisfying result.

I’ve been reminded of these points again just recently after watching a couple of my favourite TV series again, namely Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Haven.   In Buffy, for example, the traditionally evil vampire called Spike goes through many ordeals and transitions until he comes out as the hero and saviour of the world in the final episode.   Haven has the winning formula of three characters which each brings something different into the mix according to their own perspective.  One of them is Duke, a petty criminal but actually not such a bad guy when you get to know him better.   Like Spike, he, too, sacrifices his life to save everyone else in the second-last episode of the show.

Without directly thinking about such shows or books with similar storylines, I found myself also creating a “bad guy” who ends up saving all the “good guys”.   His name is Goram, and he first appears as Beacon of the Night, his formal Atlan name, in the first book, Rhuna, Keeper of Wisdom.  He’s already showing signs of rebelling against the Atlan way of life by trying to grope and seduce Rhuna, but some 20 years later she meets him again in Ancient Egypt where he has switched sides completely and is the leader of the Black Magic followers of the Dark Master.  But by the end of book 3, Rhuna, The Star Child, however, Goram has actually saved the Atlan people who had to flee Egypt, and at the end of book 4, Rhuna: new Horizons, he does something even more extraordinary to rid the ancient world of the Dark Master’s influence.  Needless to say, just like Spike in Buffy and Duke in Haven, their actions didn’t come about on the spur of the moment, but rather developed subtly over time with a series of challenging events. 

So, we are seeing deeper dimensions and layers of the antagonist who, in many cases, turns out to do a particularly good or heroic deed.   Maybe it’s much more rewarding to see the ‘bad guy’ do good in the end out of love or some other deeper motivations, than seeing the good guy do the predictable heroic stuff!

Villain vs Antagonist

Long before I started writing anything, I heard the saying that "every good story has a good villain" - or perhaps that should be "...a bad villain"?!  In any case, I took it to heart as I planned my first novel, and this is what I came up with:

The Dark Master, as he is called, who wears a black robe and causes ripples of terror to pass through the idyllic and utopian communities of Atlan, where the heroine and protagonist of my novels resides. 

Although The Dark Master sounds like a Fantasy cliché, I decided early on that he should be a real and complex character, like the others in my story, and not just a "bad guy" for the sake of having a villain.

In the world I've created for Rhuna, my protagonist, the Dark Master has a name like everyone else, and was a normal citizen of a peaceful society.  His name was Gatherer of Sage, and he was a Herbalist who began to dabble a bit too much in Alchemy and other unknown elements.

His quest to achieve things believed to be impossible or unattainable drove him to rebel against the restraints of society and the criticism by his peers, and before long he was no longer a respected Atlan Master wearing the traditional white robe, but rather a dark one to express his defiance:  hence the moniker, "the Dark Master."

At some point I began to think of the difference between a plain, outright villain, and an antagonist, and realized that some of my other characters, who were basically "good guys" were also antagonists because their viewpoint, opinion or actions brought on a conflict, a new situation and consequences that my heroine, the protagonist, had to deal with.

Now that I've decided what motivated The Dark Master to become such, and what still drives him on, he is no longer a faceless, menacing villain, but a formidable personality that can even be respected or understood to a degree. 

What do you as a reader think about a villain/antagonist you can relate to, or who has depths and dimensions like the good-guy characters in the story?