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Let’s talk about stories for a moment here.  Specifically  Let’s talk about a certain class of story.  A story where there is a protagonist aka hero and antagonist aka villain.  Where the story is told from a single perspective of following the conflict between the hero and the villain. Although the concept of protagonist and antagonist don’t necessarily mean one person. A hero or villain can be a group of people or even the entire story worlds.  We are simply talking bout two opposing forces in these stories.

Let me propose something for you regarding these types of stories.  The hero aka protagonist defines the nature of story you are writing.  But your hero is defined by the villain aka antagonist.  And your villain is defined by the nature of story.  And the type of story is…

In short a hero and villain define each other and the difference between them defines the story.  Now before I get into the meat of this proposal let me define two terms as they relate to heroes and villains.

Competence
The first term is competence.  This is the measure of a characters perceived ability to achieve their goals not a measure of how talented they are.  For example a zombie horde is very competent since they want to kill people and they manage to achieve this goal even though simplest tasks such as walking tends to be quite challenging for them.  Where on the other hand the greedy scientist that created the zombie horde is very incompetent since he wanted to make money not zombies.

Malice
The other term we need to define is malice.  Malice is the propensity of a character to do something that the audience finds reprehensible to achieve their goals.  Say a character got his wallet stolen.  If the character then hunts down  the thief, kills them, but not before raping and murdering their family in front of them we say the character has high malice.  On the other hand If the character hunts down the thief and then writes him a very sternly letter expressing disappointment in the thief’s actions but letting the thief know if they really need the money they can keep it the we can say the character has low malice.

Another example of malice: a doctor is very knowledgeable and saves many lives.  Unfortunately, her knowledge was gained through drugging and experimenting on hobos and urchins because she feels they would be infinitely more “useful” to society this way.  In her mind, she’s helping them achieve something more.

So when i say the difference between the villain and the hero defines the story what I am talking about is the relative difference in competence and malice.    Added together you get what we will call the story vector.

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