Let’s discuss four different types of enemy factions that come up in stories.
Then we’ll spin the wheel to decide which groups will hate each other when we practice writing our own!
During the last stream, the subscribers voted that we go over how to write a realistic enemy faction.
Watch a shortened version of the stream here or scroll down for what we did.
How to Write a Realistic Enemy Faction
- An enemy faction can be anything from a group of bad guys, to an evil organization, to an entire nation or planet of antagonists in your story
- When you’re writing a story that has an enemy faction in it, you have a lot of options for how to make it feel realistic, and how to have your main character(s) interact with it
- Let’s go over some of those options then try writing our own!
While there are a lot of factors that go into writing a realistic enemy faction, two of the most important ones are:
- Zoomed Out vs. Zoomed In: do we interact with the leaders (zoomed out) or the regular members (zoomed in)?
- Just Evil vs. Just Different: do they uniformly do awful things (just evil) or are they diverse/sympathetic (just different)?
When you map out the two factors, you get four different possibilities of enemy factions that look like this:
|
Zoomed Out |
Zoomed In |
|
| Just Evil | Interact with leaders and they’re awful.
Examples: The Empire in Star Wars, The Sixers in Ready Player One. |
Interact with regular members and they’re awful.
Examples: The Death Eaters in Harry Potter, the New Guard in Scythe. |
| Just Different | Interact with leaders and they’re diverse/sympathetic.
Example: The Yeerks in Animorphs, Titans in Attack on Titan |
Interact with regular members and they’re diverse/sympathetic.
Example: The Fire Nation in Avatar, dragons in How to Train Your Dragon |
- If you’re writing a Zoomed Out faction, then you can get away with your characters fighting lots of faceless/expendable bad guys, but they should meet the leaders at some point too.
- If you’re writing a Zoomed In faction, then there shouldn’t be too many faceless/expendable bad guys, and the regular members should have names/play a role in the story too.
- If you’re writing a Just Evil faction, then you can get away with just greed/power/prejudice as their motivation, but it should still be based on something unique to your story
- If you’re writing a Just Different faction, then something deeper like resources/culture/oppression should be a motivation
After that, chat voted that we write a story with an enemy faction in it based on these two images:
The bad guys: Forest ghosts and Little Red Riding Rood
(Link to DeviantArt)
The good guys: Chain ladies
(Link to DeviantArt)
We came up with four story possibilities:
| Zoomed Out | Zoomed In | |
| Just Evil | Little Red Riding Hood is the leader of the ghosts and they’re jealous of the living and want to kill them all. | Chain lady is captured by ghosts who are evil/jealous of the living and she has to escape. |
| Just Different | They’re *not* ghosts, Little Red Riding Hood explains that they’re just different creatures that the chain ladies are killing in order to expand into their habitat. | When fighting the ghosts, the chain ladies recognize familiar things about them, realize that the ghosts are *their* souls that they lost when they gained the power of the chains. |
We decided we liked the Zoomed Out/Just Different version the best.
Here’s what we wrote:
Sariel set off into the demon woods with her Chain. She was the newest link in their group of four, her first official mission as a freshly graduated lavalier. Her training had been her entire life for two years, but now heading into hell itself, she struggled to keep her childhood fears at bay.
Already the tall trees cast shadows, safe from the purifying sun. The hisses and caws of invisible, venomous creatures surrounded them. Sariel could swear she heard the curling of poison vines, excreting their toxic gas into the hot, earthy air. She clutched her chains so hard, she could feel the coolness of the metal rings through her black protective gloves.
“Stay sharp!” their leader Aria called out. “We’re coming close to the target.”
The other two lavaliers nodded, and Sariel forced herself to do the same. This would be her first real encounter with a wraith. They plagued the forests, killing innocents, ever expanding their dark domain. It was up to the lavaliers to exterminate them, using their powerful chains to drag them back to hell one by one.
Sariel had grown up idolizing the lavaliers. Today, she would prove her worthiness as one of them.
Aria thrust out an arm, stopping the Chain in their tracks. Up ahead was a clearing in the woods, a small cottage — infested with wraiths.
The creatures were slithering around the outside of the house, like long ghost-snakes, as thick as tree trunks. Sariel could see three of them, random appendages sticking out from their see-through bodies. Some had wings. Some had antennae.
The giant one peeking out from behind the house had antlers.
It was the biggest wraith Sariel had ever heard of. Just looking up at the thing, she felt like a worm beneath it. The monster stared down at them, tapping its fingers against the roof of the cottage, its pale white glow blotting out even the forest shadows.
“You three, take the small ones,” Aria ordered. “I’ll deal with the big one.”
There was no more time to be afraid. Sariel’s linkmates ran off to their targets, and she faced the nearest wraith. The monster stared her down, twitching its tail and opening its ever-hungry mouth, ready to devour her.
Sariel gripped her chains and threw them around the wraith, just like she’d trained, yanking hard enough to make the beast cry out. Her hands moved on their own, with a jerk and a snap, pulling the chains back to her hands — and banishing the demon in the process.
The wraith let out one final howl as the chains ate through its gelatinous form like blades, searing it to shreds in flashes of white flame. All that remained of the wraith was a steaming puddle of sickly white hell sludge on the forest grass.
Sariel wound up her chains, breathing hard after her first banishing. Looking around, the other two linkmates had banished their wraiths as well. With a quick nod at each other, the three of them headed inside the cottage after Aria, to confirm sure she’d dealt with the bigger one.
Inside, Aria lay on the floor, bound in chains. Standing above her was a girl dressed in a red, hooded cloak, the giant-wraith peeking in the windows behind her.
Sariel and her linkmates moved to use their chains, but the red girl put out a hand. A hand holding chains.
“Stop!” she said. “Please, I beg you.”
“Identify yourself!” barked Sariel’s linkmate Vine. “Where did you get those chains?”
She slowly lowered her hands, looking between all three of them ready to drag her to hell if necessary.
“My name’s Blanchette,” she said. “I used to be a lavalier too. Then I learned more about the ethereals.”
“Ethereals?” asked Sariel’s other linkmate Lexi. “You mean the wraiths?”
“They’re not wraiths,” Blanchette said. “Or demons. They don’t come from hell at all. They live here, in the forest. Same as the deer and birds.”
Sariel narrowed her eyes at this red-cloaked girl. This traitor.
“If you used to be a lavalier,” she seethed at her, “then you know that’s not true. We banish the wraiths, with our chains!”
“We don’t banish anything,” Blanchette said. “We kill them.”
Vine rattled her chains. “They attacked us first.”
“Only in self-defense of their homes! Homes we’re stealing and destroying. That we’re pushing further and further away as we build more and more.”
Lexi shook her hood. “Whose side are you on, you demon?”
Blanchette turned to Sariel, hope in her eyes. She was the only one who hadn’t outright rejected her yet. She could talk to her. She could go against the others.
But a Chain was only as strong as its weakest link.
Sariel whipped her chain out, and Vine and Lexi followed right behind her. The three of them bound Blanchette and yanked in unison.
She was banished on the spot. Nothing remained except her cloak, now extra red, lying on top of a steaming pile of hell sludge.
The giant wraith howled in agony from outside the window. Working together, the three linkmates quickly banished it, turning it into a white glowing puddle in the backyard. They freed Aria from her bindings, and together the four of them left the cottage as one strong Chain.
All the way back, underneath her arm, Sariel carried the stained red cloak.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Top images: Pakutaso