What to do about villains?

You need antagonists, not necessarily villains.

I did something kind of odd with my antagonist: he’s the first character I created that I would really call evil but my challenge to myself was to make him both pure evil/totally unsympathetic but also three dimensional. That might not sound like much but it’s easier said than done.

Plus, he and my main hero never actually physically fight and they last encounter each other halfway through the story and they both live until the end (sort of).
I didn’t plan for that to happen but when you challenge yourself a bit with your characters, interesting things tend to happen.

 

The thing that I did was that the villain created a problem as part of his big evil plan and the hero’s goal is to fix the problem but he doesn’t care about the villain’s plan going forward. In fixing the problem, however, he ruined the villain’s plan. The villain still continues his scheme but he doesn’t win 100%. He gets more of a 75% win.
So, at the end of the day: they both win some (kind of), they both lose some and they both continue with their lives (sort of).

The key here is that I’m calling the villain a “villain”, not an antagonist. The antagonist in my story is the problem the villain created - that’s what the hero is fighting against. He wants as little to do with the villain as he can get away with.
I’ve always found “problem as antagonists” a lot more interesting than “villains as antagonists”.

 

Here is a work in progress for a villain. You have a protagonist that is a trained assassin. The action of this person want you as the reader to hate them as their actions cause local misery, but long-term benefits. Got the antagonist (hero) that tries to stop the local misery, but ends up causing long-term suffering as a result.

The villain is all dependent on point of view. One culture sees another as an evil and vice versa. Not everything is black and white. Sometimes it white and black. Villains have to make a living too and struggle against heroes.

 

I really disagree with this moral relativist business. A villain, by definition, needs to be evil (to some degree). If it's a point-of-view thing, there is no villain. And thus, there's no hero.
You make a salient point that a hero can be an antagonist and a villain can be an protagonist and both can have shades of grey though. I avoided pointing that out because, frankly, I assume someone else would have the sense to bring it up in this thread.
I really would like to see more (anti-)hero vs. (anti-)hero stories. That could be a really interesting way to do it.

This is some good stuff. I disagree with the "red-green-blue" assertion. I think that does, ultimately, boil down to shades of grey. Nothing wrong with that though.
Also, you make a very good point about understanding your characters' morality beyond categorizing them as good or evil.

 

As others have said, you need an antagonist (or forces of antagonism) otherwise there's nothing for the protagonist to react against. The story would be static. The forces of antagonism can be internal too, but in fantasy they're usually external (both internal and external antagonism is usually more interesting for me).

 

You need some kind of opposition for the character otherwise it could make their goal far too easy. There's less conflict. The antagonist could be mother nature and even then there is usually a human opposition as well. Think of movies like "Twister" and Stephen King's story "The Mist". In the Mist they are all trapped in a supermarket that is surrounded by mist with strange creatures hiding in it looking to kill them if they tried to leave. Then you had Mrs Carmody. The antagonist inside with them. If you removed her from the story there would still be conflict but no where near as much. It heightened the dangers and the stakes because inside the supermarket was no longer safe either, because she was starting a mob mentality. She really believed it was Judgement Day, she truly believed that in sacrificing the sinful everyone else would be saved. She believed that. (I highly recommend you reading the book but the movie was better, the ending was a OMG moment. Equally to The Sixth Sense)

You don't always need a villain. I was once told that if you reversed the story, and had your antagonist as the main character people should still be able to root for them.

Try it for yourself. Try writing a book without an antagonist of any kind. It's doable but you'll end up with a book lacking conflict, stakes and depth.