Why We Love to Hate Them
On the Art of the Unforgettable Antagonist
We all know them. The figures we swear we despise, yet trail behind, page after page, our eyes peeled, our breath hitched, our hearts wary. They slip into our minds when we close the book, like coiled vipers in the corners of our thoughts, their presence so diabolical we find ourselves shouting at the print before us, ‘how very dare you!’ (no??… just me?). The cunning queen. The monster in a prince’s skin. The lover turned predator. The general whose cruelty is intricately painted in nuanced brushstrokes of charm.
A good antagonist is never just an obstacle for the main character to overcome. They are a mirror, reflecting what we most fear about the world, and more dangerously, about ourselves.
Take Cersei Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin). On paper, she’s despicable: incestuous, manipulative, a powder keg of cruelty. But what makes her fascinating is that her savagery is not senseless. It is born of a lifetime of being treated as ornamental and disposable. Cersei learned early that beauty fades but power endures, so she hoards it, clutches it, poisons her own children’s future to protect it. She is her son Joffrey’s maker, yet also his victim. When we hate her, we are recoiling from an uncomfortable truth: resentment, cornered long enough, becomes vicious survival. And what is more human than the fear of being powerless in a world that wants to silence you?
Serena Joy Waterford (The Handmaid’s Tale) is cut from the same silk as Cersei: elegant, cold, impossible to dismiss, but where Cersei wields power openly, Serena’s cruelty festers behind lace curtains and clipped smiles. Once a voice for ‘traditional values,’ she helped build the chains that bind her, then realised too late that the rules she wrote would suffocate her, too. Her bitterness is exquisite: it’s the righteous fury of a woman who traded her autonomy for proximity to power, then found herself locked out of both. She is beautiful but bitter, adored but trapped, complicit yet victimised by her own design. When she strikes Offred, it’s not just punishment, it’s a roared confession: I made this world, and it devours me, too. We hate her because we see the cruelty that blooms when a woman’s power is permitted only through a man’s permission, and the rage that spills out when that permission slips away. Serena reminds us that oppression can be built not just by tyrants in uniform but by the smiling wife standing at his side, grasping for any scrap of power that she’s allowed.
Tamlin (A Court of Thorns and Roses) horrifies in a quieter, more intimate way. He begins as the saviour, Feyre’s protector and lover. But his own trauma and fear curdle into control disguised as care. After Amarantha, and a brief honeymoon period, the cracks start to show: locked doors, keepers masked as friends, isolation and suffocating rules dressed up as protection.
His tragedy is that he’s not evil for evil’s sake; he truly believes he’s doing the right thing. In his mind, this is his duty: to protect her at any cost, even if it makes Feyre miserable. It’s that self-righteousness that makes us want to scream. Tamlin isn’t a sadist; he’s a spoiled saviour who can’t bear the thought of losing what he loves, so he traps it, breaks it, and calls it love.
But, when you strip respect from love, what’s left isn’t love at all: it’s entitled possession. In dismissing Feyre’s needs, what he’s really saying is: I love you, but I don’t trust you to choose for yourself. Or worse: I love you, but your freedom comes second to my fear of losing you.
Then there’s Maven Calore (Red Queen). He is monstrous but heartbreakingly so. A boy king twisted hollow by a mother’s manipulation. Maven’s villainy cuts deep because we can also sympathise with him; he is wounded, yearning, and starved for affection and approval. He doesn’t just want Mare to love him; he wants her to save him.
Maven is broken and wants to do better, but because of his upbringing and the absence of a stable, loving mother, he is incapable of it. With that kind of damage, he could be any one of us.
We see the ghost of the boy he might have been had he been loved, and we hate him because he makes us make excuses. Worse, we hate ourselves for wanting him to be redeemable, even as he betrays us again and again. His vulnerability and charm, juxtaposed with his darkness, make him the embodiment of the ultimate love–hate relationship. We know we shouldn’t like him, but we just can’t help it.
These characters stay with us because they don’t just push the plot forward; they draw out the protagonist’s emotional wounds. They seem to know exactly which button to press. They tempt the antagonist with something they crave: safety, recognition, devotion, power. They make the world of the story feel real because in life, the people who wound us most aren’t monsters in the dark, they’re the people we thought we could trust.
The Craft
A magnetic antagonist doesn’t happen by accident. They are built, brick by brick, from choices that aim straight at the reader’s nerves. Their look, their voice, their beliefs, all calibrated to slip under the hero’s skin and, by extension, ours.
Physicality
An unforgettable villain’s body is never neutral because the author knows appearance shapes how we judge a threat. Cersei’s beauty is written as her greatest weapon — but also her greatest liability. Martin makes us watch it slip away, drink by drink, wrinkle by wrinkle, because her physical decay mirrors the rot in her ambition. The more she clings to fading youth, the sharper her cruelty becomes. Her looks are not just a description; they are a window into her fear of losing power.
Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale works the same way. Atwood gives her a polished surface — immaculate dresses, a perfect garden — because that domestic perfection hides the ugly truth she helped create. Her crisp exterior is her shield and her prison.
Writers use physicality on purpose. A villain’s body or beauty is never just visual; it reveals their values, their desperation, their unravelling. These faces are not monstrous masks — they are familiar, respectable, almost comforting at first glance. That normality makes their cruelty land harder because it reminds usthat monsters often wear ordinary faces.
Voice
A great antagonist does not just threaten; they control the story by controlling how they are heard. Their words are crafted carefully because the author knows language manipulates more deeply than brute force ever could.
Cersei’s lines are blunt truths. When she says, “Power is power,” it is not poetry — it is fact. Martin makes her speech cold and stripped of softness to show that survival is her only logic. There is nothing to argue with because she leaves no illusions to crack.
Maven is the opposite. His voice is gentle, confessional, almost pleading. I think Aveyard writes him this way to make both Mare and the reader mistake his vulnerability for goodness. He does not sound cruel; he sounds broken, which makes us lower our guard.
Writers do this for a reason. A polished, calm, or tender villain is more dangerous than a raging one because their voice feels trustworthy. Eloquence signals intelligence and control. Softness signals honesty. We lean closer instead of pulling away.
The best antagonists are written to sound persuasive because the closer we come to believing them, the more we feel betrayed when we realise we were wrong.
Justification
Flat villains want power because they can; compelling ones want it because they believe it is the only way to survive. Writers build this logic into their backstories so that their cruelty feels earned, not random.
Martin writes Cersei’s viciousness as armour. Her need for control comes from a world that would toss her aside the moment she softens. Every betrayal she commits feels like insurance against her fear of being powerless.
Atwood does something similar with Serena Joy. Her cruelty is not mindless; it is the splintered rage of a woman trapped by the same system she helped design. Her small scraps of power: punishing Offred, controlling the household, are her last defiance against the reality she can’t admit: that she is as disposable as the women she tries to break.
Maven’s hunger for power is twisted up in a child’s need for his mother’s approval; he clings to her abuse and calls it love because that is the only shape love ever took for him. His villainy works because it is rooted in a sad logic: No one ever protected him, so he will have to protect himself, no matter the cost.
Writers give these characters ironclad justifications, so we cannot dismiss them as monsters in the dark. They do not believe they are evil, and that unshakeable certainty is what makes them so dangerous.
So yes, we love to hate them, because the unforgettable antagonist isn’t built to be monstrous; they’re built to be relatable. That closeness, that uncomfortable familiarity, makes them a threat we can’t look away from.
What about you? Who is one antagonist you love to hate?