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My antagonist is a "strategic mastermind", similar to the one discussed in How to prevent seeming like a Marty Stu-ish villain is cheating? Proceeding from this kind of antagonist, my question is h...
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T09:14:29Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37254 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Mephistopheles
·
2019-12-08T09:14:29Z (almost 5 years ago)
My antagonist is a "strategic mastermind", similar to the one discussed in [How to prevent seeming like a Marty Stu-ish villain is cheating?](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/35084/how-to-prevent-seeming-like-a-marty-stu-ish-villain-is-cheating) Proceeding from this kind of antagonist, my question is **how can such a "genius" be defeated? How can I make the antagonist not accounting for something, come off as understandable?** I have often seen this problem being solved by [handing the idiot ball to the antagonist](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall) - that is, making the antagonist miss a glaring problem they should have seen, making him suddenly act like an idiot - out of character compared to the way they have been previously described. Are there other solutions - solutions that make sense, and do not break the antagonist's "mastermind" characterisation?
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-06-26T19:54:55Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: -2