Skip to main content

How to Make Your Protagonist Have Friends and Enemies...Disney-Style

Admit it. Every Disney princess has a good share of friends and enemies. Your protagonists definitely need their share of these, too.



It’s easy to give them loads of friends and develop awesome humorous side characters. But villains? It’s harder to formulate the perfect antagonist. One method of doing this is having your character make enemies, which make life so much more exciting. Here are some tips...

For enemies, have your protagonist...

  • Be born
  • Have a magical power
  • Be beautiful and charming
  • Have royal blood
  • Rouse a deadly rage in someone unintentionally
  • Have parents with sworn enemies
  • Be a Dalmatian

For friends, have your protagonist...

  • Be beautiful and charming (yes, I realize this is also how you make enemies)
  • Have animal friends who require no effort
  • Sing nicely
  • Be naturally friendly and extroverted

And now for ideas that would actually be plot...

Enemies can be made if the protagonist...

  • Turns down someone who wants to marry you
  • Goes to  live in a jungle with a ferocious tiger
  • Makes a crocodile bite off someone's hand
  • Meets a bloodthirsty queen and challenge her to a game of croquet
  • Becomes a naive, exploitable child (preferably made of wood) in a corrupt world

Likewise, the protagonist can make friends by...

  • Forcing someone to bring them to see the lanterns (don't ask me which lanterns)
  • Being nice, and optionally passive, constantly (side effects of a soft voice)
  • Baking gooseberry pie
  • Making their dog’s leash trip someone into a lake, then helping them up
  • Having someone come with them into danger (elephant graveyards suffice)
  • Going to die in the desert and being rescued by two loners

If you’re going for realism, these things won't probably work. But as for making them friends Disney-style, being friendly is a really great start. If they are open and give everyone a chance, like Belle, adding friends into the book for them will be easy. Singing actually can help, and it’s super fun to write songs you can include in your book. Also having cute pets in your book is definitely a goal.

Signing off,

Brynbellion

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A GUIDE TO WORLD BUILDING FOR BORED PEOPLE BY A BORED PERSON

The rest of the Writing Mafia apologises for the turtle. It is not human and fails to empathise with other humans. We are not accountable for any emotional damage it causes you. I, as a perfectionist writer, enjoy nothing more than deleting everything and starting over...aside from world building of course. STEP 1  SPREADSHEETS The most important part of world building is staying consistent. ALWAYS BE CONSISTENT. Nothing ruins everything more than inconsistency. What's the best way to keep organised? A large database with rows and columns. Hey! You! Do you know a way of keeping several different graphs in an orderly way that I can access online? No? Well you're an idiot because the answer is Google Sheets. What? You want to know what to put in your spreadsheet? Well Mr(or Mrs or Ms) I can't think for myself. I have sub parts to tell you what to put in them. SUBSTEP 1 FIRSTLY there are two thing this sheet needs to do. Provide a reference point while wr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spoiler-Free Book Review - The Squire's Tales (Gerald Morris)

Okay, so it's technically an entire series, but that's irrelevant. I am reviewing books and it is therefore a book review.  The Squire's Tales , by Gerald Morris, is a series of novels that retell in hilarious fashion the lesser known tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Don't worry, you won't have to hear about the sword in the stone again or anything at all about Arthur's childhood. Because this is where the best part comes in: these stories are told from the perspectives of those that other renditions tend to gloss over, mock or forget entirely. These characters are a squire, (as the title would imply) a page, three women and a knight who is objectively terrible at being a knight. He sings and plays music instead. His name's Dinadan. He's wonderful. Over the ten books in the series, you get seven different characters from whose points of view the stories are told (plus a couple extra in the last book, but that's a spec...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slime Eels

-Guest post by ES- Looking for a strange creature to go in your book? This one's perfect and IT ACTUALLY EXISTS! Hagfish, or more commonly known as Slime eels, are a group of jawless soft bodied organisms that belong to the Myxinidae family. There are more than sixty different types of hagfish living in the midnight zone worldwide and not much is known about them. They have developed an extraordinary defense mechanism and are expert scavengers. I hope you will enjoy reading this post and find it very helpful. Food: Hagfish have an excellent sense of smell and touch but even though they have two tiny markings that could be mistaken for eyes Hagfish happen to be blind. Sight is not needed if you live in the inky blackness at the bottom of the sea, so they have adapted to the desolate landscape and have become expert scavengers. If they happen to stumble upon a dead fish, Hagfish lacking teeth have an extraordinary method of consuming their find. They use their rasping...
Post a Comment
Read more