Thread:Love Robin/@comment-29997589-20160919042725/@comment-366087-20161005172051

It is not I who "wins". It is the Rules.

Let me put it to you this way… in the movie Dante's Peak, is the Mountain, which is a dormant volcano that erupts, a villain? Or in Volcano about an eruption in the middle of LA, is it a villain? Is the capsized SS Poseidon or the flooding waters in The Poseidon Adventure a villain? Did it even have any villains? Is the hill in the primer Jack and Jill a villain?

The answer to all of the above is, "No," because not every story has a villain. Something to overcome or defeat assuredly. Even a story about going into the kitchen to make a sandwich has something to overcome: hunger. Most stories *do* have characters or things which fill the role of antagonist, but *some* do NOT. Hunger is not an antagonist. Jack and Jill's Hill is not an antagonist. Because these things do not actively oppose the protagonist.

A story about a sports team going against other teams, the Other Teams ARE Antagonists in that they oppose the Protagonists, but they are not villains until they start to intentionally cheat and pull underhanded shenanigans. Even then they might simply be jerks and bullies which may fall short of actual villainy.

And of course you're aware that a Protagonist can himself be a villain. Just because a story, for example, might follow a day in the life of The Joker making him the protagonist and even The Good Guy for that one story (a "Pet the Dog" moment), does not reverse his nature to that of a Hero, nor would it make the police and Batman, the antagonists for that story, into villains.