At times, a story calls for a David vs. Goliath conflict, wherein an everyday person is thrown up against some great antagonist (an elusive conspiracy, a crime syndicate, an undead horror, etc.) that far exceeds her ability to fight back. Most of these stories can be divided into two roughly equal halves. In the first half, the protagonist is running scared, barely escaping encounters with her antagonist as she pieces together what she needs to do next. In the second, the protagonist fights back with increasing effectiveness against the forces that had her running. Presumably, the protagonist wins the struggle with the help of allies, tools, knowledge and/or experience that she didn't have at the beginning.

My question is, how do we stage a believeable first encounter between these two? On the one hand, we're supposed to believe that this antagonist is nigh unstoppable, at least insofar as the protaganist is concerned. The protaganist/antagonist relationship is supposed to be extremely asymmetrical, and this first meeting must be handled with care to avoid making the antagonist look incompetent or the protaganist look prematurely ready for conflict.

Unlike the Police Paradox, the solutions to this dilemma are so widely varied as to defy easy categories. Some solutions appear to be totally unique, and even those that might be grouped together often contain meaningful differences. Instead of the detailed breakdown I did for the Police Paradox, I'll offer solutions in increasingly narrow groups with specific examples, ending with a few of the truly unique solutions that I've seen.

--Sheer dumb luck. As might be expected, the largest group contains the least creative and (IMNSHO) the least satisfying solutions. While "lucky breaks" can be done well, they are often thrown in as an afterthought. Daytime TV dramas are full of cold-blooded killers who inexplicably miss the first shot, thereby giving the formerly clueless protaganist the crucial information that someone is trying to kill her.

For a better example, consider the movie "FX," wherein the protaganist survives three encounters with a corrupt police force due to lucky mistakes. First, he escapes from a moving car unharmed. Second, he calls for help and is told to stay in the phone booth, but an insistent passersby demands to make a call and is gunned down in his place. Third, hit men stake out his girlfriend's flat and shoot the first person to open a window, who turns out to be his girlfriend.

For an even better example, consider the movie, "Die Hard." Here a chance opportunity to massage his feet gives the protaganist an advantage when the terrorists show up--he's outside their capture net. Yet this serendipity comes at a price, because the protaganist is now barefoot, which costs him dearly at several points in the story. This double-edged luck maintains the asymmetry by giving the protaganist an advantage and a disadvantage, to avoid only giving the good guys good luck and the bad guys bad.

--The antagonist doesn't want to kill the protaganist...yet. In the movie version of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the head vampire seeks ingenue Buffy's corruption, not her death. In Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much," the married protaganists first encounter the "asymmetrical antagonist" when their son is kidnapped to ensure their cooperation. Sometimes the villain's entire objective demands the protaganist stay alive, as in "Flight Plan." This is a workable solution if the villain is keeping the hero alive for more than sheer malice. As the lessons of the Evil Overlord have noted, shooting is not too good for our enemies.

--The first fight is with another. In the children's movie "The Land Before Time," the protaganist survives a T-Rex attack because his mother sacrifices herself for him. When the predator returns, the protaganist must not only fight without his mother's help, but must achieve what she could not. Once again, this category includes everything from the scriptless, nameless teacher killed in the first scene to give the fight meaning, all the way to the captivating and poignant death of Obi-Wan, when Luke first meets Vader.

And now, a brief foray into the truly creative and unique. There follow three solutions to the asymmetrical antagonist problem that have impressed me, for various reasons. I'd love to hear about what has impressed all of you.

In the movie "Sleepy Hollow," starring Johnny Depp, the Headless Horseman is sent after specific people, so Depp's Ichabod has little to fear from the Horseman directly because Ichabod is not among the targets. But when Ichabod and rival Brom get in the monster's way, Ichabod survives the fight specifically because he is a pathetic fighter. The horseman barely bothers long enough to stab Ichabod in the shoulder and fling him bodily out of the fight. Brom, on the other hand, is a skilled fighter, and manages to hold his own against the creature so that it finally decides to kill him. In this single scene, the tough guy is killed with barely any effort, and the protaganist is reduced far below this in the eyes of the antagonist: he's a fly that isn't worth swatting.

In "The Net," Sandra Bullock's character is unwittingly targeted by a ruthless hit man while on vacation. Eschewing all the stupid hit man tricks, the killer leaves nothing to chance: he romances his mark out to sea on a boat, wines and dines her to the point that she allows herself a giddy giggle when he goes belowdecks for a moment. The plan is so foolproof--shoot her with a silencer and dump the body overboard--that he allows his seduction to get carried away and sleeps with her. But in taking off his coat, he allows her to find the gun in the pocket, and while she wasn't yet aware of all his plans, she listens to a small nagging doubt and takes the bullets. When he tries to shoot her later, he confirms without a doubt that someone wants her dead, but he hasn't made an unbelievable mistake.

In the Greyhawk novels, Gord the Rogue gets caught up in a battlefield slaughter that is far out of his league, and on the battlefield he's turned to stone by a wizard...who he then falls on and crushes to death. When a friendly wizard surveys the carnage later, he recongnizes the statue and de-petrifies Gord...who thereby becomes the sole survivor of the battle by virtue of his reversible method of "death."

Dying as a means of protaganist survival, can you beat that?
 

In my story you could say there are three villians. There is the main overarching villian (if you haven't read any of my previous posts, I'm writing a trilogy) who I believe is not even introduced until Chapter 17. The first encounter is through interstellar communcations, and is more the result of the protagonist contacting him to say "I'm alive, and I'm coming after you" and by the end of the conversation he has a better understanding of what he's up against. There are two consecutive direct encounters with this villian, and both times he is killed by the protagonist, but in this he realizes the problem... The villian is a non-corporeal entity that can posess the body and consume the soul of an individual, and through an intricate supernatural understanding of social behavior, can influence events and socio-political standings to his benefit. (In other words he can destroy and build empires simply with the power of ideology) By the end of the story the protagonist comes to understand this entities one weakness, but it seems dwarfed not only by the power the entity carries, but the power he is seeking. In fact I guess you could say the book takes an almost "Empire Strikes Back" feel to the ending... The villian is able to destroy the homeworld of one of the most technologically advanced cultures and destabilize the government of the most powerful star empire, while the protagonist is only able to destroy two mystical items the entity is seeking, and by proxy frees a people that was enslaved by mankind.

The entity is hinted at throughout the book, but like I said, he's not even revealed until somewhere around chapter 17. The first, oh five or six chapters are completely villianless, dealing mainly with the protagonist and supporting characters and how they come to be in the situation they are in. Which is not to say they don't lack action or opposing forces, they just are more tuned to establishing the characters and setting up the mystery of the world they are about to face.

And then around five or six we get face to face with one villian who is directly on par with the protagonist. He recurs through the story until being defeated right before the main villian is revealed, and is only defeated after the protagonist has come to terms with his own demons.

The third villian resides around the midpoint of the book, and I'm not sure how much of a villian you can classify her as. Her purpose is to try and corrupt the protagonist, but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in the protagonist coming to terms with his demons.

Just typing that out I guess makes me feel ok with how I've set it up. But an element I used to write a lot but didn't with this book because I thought it was too cliche was the "Background Villian," the Dr. Claw character I guess. Where at the beginning of the chapter you have a block of dialog that doesn't involve a descriptive setting, where the villian is simply discussing his plans with some other unknown. I didn't think this form would be acceptable until I read Ender's Game and saw that Card used it, and rather effectively.

So I don't know if what I've all ready set up would benefit by that method, the whole purpose being to bring the main villian to the forefront. I guess my question is, in the situation I've described, is that even important? Do you need equal parts protagonist and antagonist, or is there room for a signifigant level of character conflict in the protagonist himself?