Antagonist  

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An antagonist is a character or group of characters, or, sometimes an institution of a happening who represents the opposition against which the protagonist(s) must contend. In the classic style of story wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively.

Contrary to what people commonly believe, the antagonist is NOT always the villain, but simply those who oppose the main character.

Writers have also created more complex situations. In some instances, the story is told from the villain's point of view, and any hero trying to stop said villain can be regarded as an antagonist. Such antagonists are usually police officers or other law enforcement officials. In the film K-19: The Widowmaker, an American film about a Soviet Cold War submarine crew, the crew, enemies of the United States, are depicted as protagonists, creating something of a paradox -as very often the American film industry tends to depict the forces of the United States as the people that fight for "good" and "justice", in opposition to them being the antagonists.

More often, stories simply do not have characters that are readily identifiable as most heroic or villainous. Instead, the antagonist becomes that character, group, or metaphysical force which provides the chief obstruction to the protagonist(s) of the story. Note that the antagonist is not necessarily human; often, the forces of nature or psychological elements provide this element of opposition. For example, Final Destination features a metaphysical, though possibly sentient, personification of death which tries to kill people in gruesome "accidents" as part of some large plan.

Also, in Heavy Weapon there is a nation called Antagonistan, with others being Frigistan (a pun on Frigied) and Dictovia (A pun on dictator), as part of the game's fictional Soviet Union (called Red Star ingame.)



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Antagonist" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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