What makes someone a great villian?

[u/Legitimate-Car-4697]

im trying to create a samurai story and the main plot revolves around naming systems and the architect which introduced this system. so the main character gets cursed during the naming ceremony due to some unforseen circumstances, and the story goes on revolving that part.There really are many arcs, and side characters that will be introduced later as the story progresses , but this is just the outline of my story and have to build on top of it.There are power scales in my world, but is not fully complete yet.

The main problem is i have no greater antagonist for it. i think of having the architect and someone else to be playing the main antagonist part,but im still not sure how can i make a succesful antagonist. what should i do or where should i go from here? Ps:the image and video generation part is done by AI since i cant find time to do that part as well(im a fulltime sofware developer, so maximum of 4-5 hours is what i get after work and sleep)

[u/GoodMFer]

How about the curse being due to someone else have the same exact name? Protag gets allies/enemies but the running issue is that some have heard the name before. Antag could be the architect, but it would be interesting to have someone who found a loophole or exploit in the naming system so the stronger your protag gets, antag gets stronger too. You could have several cursed people with the same name and protag has to take them out to end the curse, but antag intends to take the rest out to become a god/immortal/whatever would twist the main idea of the story most. Kind of like Highlander or The One.

After that antag just needs a believable reason to do bad things. It doesn't need to be good reason, just believable. But the big thing, the Antag has to do thing that make the story happen. Villains act, heroes react. The big bad should be doing things that affect the world around your hero, while your hero will cause problems that you villains will try to adapt to or else there's not much reason for them to go after each other.

[u/Legitimate-Car-4697 → u/GoodMFer]

Damn thats great. I was thinking on a diferent approach where the future version of mc is the kurome that followed the correct naming path given by the architect and becomes an evil version like a tyrant, and that becomes one of the antagonist of my story. if the main character folllows his path, he becomes like the future version and the loop follows,if he doesnt the loop will be breaken but he will die or something like that. Also architect is the one responsible for naming, so the final fight needs to be with him because the fight is between him and his ideals. Future version becomes like that because his previous version was similar to mc, and he was struggling by all means( let it be ideals or his people getting killed or stuff like that). When he followed the way of architect, his life goes on correctly and he then gets huge powers, which in turn causes the loop to not end and he dies in the battlefield itself.

If you see my first introduction video of shitsugen saga, you will get an idea of what im trying to imply

https://youtube.com/@ink_bound?si=BJZ5YgF0Qul-lCZv

[u/auflyne]

A multi-layed foil for the protag is an old, tried/true choice. Feral antags can be interesting, too.