What Lies Within

An M or an upside down W?

Once upon a time, I fell in love with my villain...

I wrote pages and pages from his perspective, and my whole story landed on it's head. Or not.

Had he become the protagonist? Per an uber agent's suggestion, he became a she. (Just to mix it up a little more!)

She wasn't the protagonist, and yet something about the way I wrote her made her likeable, even with her flaws. She was the hero of her own story (like every good villain). I wanted my readers to understand how she ticks- to see what lies within her hard shell.

I realized then that she was no longer a simple villain.

Something I uncovered when interviewing the bad girl: the authority figure is only a representation of the popular will to deny a particular truth. She was only acting within the accepted framework of her society.

Was she a sympathetic villain? Was she the anti-hero because she searched for something too?

Her quest was tied to my protagonist, but for her, the end justified the means. And in the end, she too came away with something (which leans her toward anti-hero, I think). What that is, you'll just have to wait and see.

Here's an excellent clip on the anti-hero from TED ed.