Help:What is a villain?

In every story, there are characters that hinder another person and provide obstacles for them to overcome or goals to achieve. They are called antagonists. Without them, most stories fall flat, though there are a few stories without any antagonists. Some are there to be a temporary or minor obstacle. Others play a more significant role and make things even more difficult.

And then there are the villains.

Villains are antagonists that take the extra step. They do more than simply be "not nice". They deliberately want to hurt people and be evil. The definition is "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot".

Since this is the Antagonists Wikia, we need to focus on characters that are antagonists. This page will help identify what is and is not a villain.

The Villains category
To note that an antagonist is also a villain, only add the "Villains" category to the page once. Do not change any of the existing categories and do not duplicate other categories. Example: do not create a "Pixar villains" category to match the "Pixar antagonists" category. The focus of this wiki is on antagonists, not villains.

Stories without villains
In some stories, there may not be a clear-cut villain. This is especially true of series like Winnie the Pooh, which is for younger kids. In these cases, look carefully at whether it really is necessary to pick a villain. If all you can say is, "that character is the least good", then you probably should skip trying to select a villain because you would be trying to force the story to have a villain when there isn't one.

Just doing their job
Many characters fall into the "they aren't nice" group, but that is the extent of how bad they are. Likewise, a character that is hired by a villain isn't automatically a villain themselves.

In The Incredibles, Elastigirl has a fight with two guards when she gets caught in the doors. The guards fight her because they are reacting to an intruder in the location they are employed at.

Contrast that with someone like Mirage. She actively investigates which of the Supers would be good candidates for Syndrome's tests of the Omnidroids, which were created specifically to cause destruction.

The guards are just doing their jobs. But it's likely that they would have found out at least a few details about what was going on at the island. But unless they took steps that would increase their importance to the story to that of a main antagonist, they are still an antagonist and not a villain.

In the case of animals, if they are shown to just be acting under their normal animal instincts, they are "just doing their job" by being that animal. As such, while they may be an antagonist, they would not be a villain.

Levels of villains
In order for an antagonist to be a villain, they have to take those extra steps that show they've chosen to be evil. Because of this, phrases like "minor villain" do not apply. Any character that could be described that way is an antagonist and the levels listed in Help:Antagonist levels will be used instead.