Fictional Antagonism

[unspeakablehorror]

A common fanfiction trope I really like to both read and write is enemies to lovers.  This is because I enjoy tension and a certain degree of antagonism in fictional relationships.  I also like seeing change over the course of a story, and what change could be more dramatic than characters going from hating to loving each other? 

But I would also love to find the non-romantic version of this more often.  I guess people do use 'enemies to friends' sometimes as a tag. Enemies to besties?  But these labels don't also entirely encompass my interests in this respect.  Because the reason I enjoy enemies to lovers can not only transfer perfectly well to other kinds of relationships too, it doesn't need to be specifically a 'start out hating them and ended up loving them' kind of deal like with enemies to lovers or enemies to friends.  It can just be two people who loathe each other who have to work together to achieve a mutual goal.  Like, I hate that kind of group project dynamic in real life, but I thrive off the fictional drama, what can I say!  I think it's harder to find stories that emphasize this kind of dynamic if they're not about a romantic relationship, though. 

I even just like having a lot of focus on the antagonism between two characters, which fills a different but adjacent interest I have.  That's why in my fanfic Cut Strings, both my protagonist, Grievous, and my antagonist, Palpatine, are major POV characters.  It seems a little uncommon to emphasize the POV of the main antagonist in a story, but I really like to get the full perspective for the main conflict in a story, which feels more possible if I can get the POV of both characters involved, not just one (especially when they don't often encounter each other in close proximity so you can't use the POV of the protagonist to even get a sense of the antagonist's direct external reactions to them--that is, when it's long distance antagonism).  Is pure antagonism a type of relationship?  It is to me!

In fact, one of the reasons I'm fascinated by Sith as characters is that they have this incredibly close relationship with each other that's also...incredibly antagonistic.  In the canon, their master-apprentice relationship is like a tragic inverse of hate turning to love.  The whole idea of that relationship is that the apprentice eventually 'overcomes' the master by killing them.  And the only way Sith subvert this dynamic is for the master to kill the apprentice instead.  And while this is by far not the only reason I find the Sith interesting, it certainly is one of them.

I'm just really fascinated with fictional antagonism in and of itself and also with that changing or being modified by other factors in the course of a story.