Have you tried these worksheets yet? Some intersting questions lead to surprising answers...
Author’s name _Dawn Dunsmore_ Character’s name __Gordon P Domine, Junior_
Antagonist Questionnaire (from the scriptfrenzy writer's resource pages)
For High School Students
1. What is your antagonist? A person? An animal? Something else?
Gordon P Domine is a person, nominally.
2. Where does your antagonist live? Does he or she like it there?
He lives in the town of Little Cypress, Texas; 4 miles north of the city of Orange. It is not a suburb in that the town was founded sometime after the civil war; both the 1990 Census (the first recorded) and the 2000 Census show 1050 residents. Facts are from The Handbook of Texas Online http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/LL/hjl23_print.html . the town is 21 miles east of Beaumont, TX which hosts the Southeast Texas Regional Airport.
About another 8 miles north east of town, three and a half miles down a white dirt road past the water treatment plant and ponds, completely surrounded by the marshes of Indian Bayou, is a bit of high ground (10ft above sea level) where GP Domine, Sr. built his homage to Roissey, as he believed it would be profitable and a suitable source of intel on powerful and rich men. Most members arrive by helicopter, but a few prefer the rough ride over unimproved and dirt roads.
He finds the place suitable for his little experiments. Like or dislike – he never considers such.
3. What does your antagonist look like? Hair color? Height? Distinguishing features?
His hair is an undistinguished brown, worn short except for an artful lock that he constantly adjusts over his forehead. He is five feet five inches and slender. His grandfather openly debated whether the woman he used to get a grandson left an effeminate stain on the boy. But was pleased when his grandson’s will matched and mated with his own. His son was physically closer to the ideal, but was nothing more than a sycophant weakling.
4. What is your antagonist’s favorite outfit?
He never wears anything but a full business suit, vest and tie and all. He prefers pale colors and often wears lilac and pink shirts. The shirts are a subtle rebellion against his grandfather who held any shirt but white was effeminate and offensive. He didn’t start wearing them until his grandfather’s funeral. All his suits are hand-stitched from raw silk. The only exceptions to this attire are his tuxedo used for the charity events his prestige demands and the leathers he wears when training new staff or new property of the club. Blood is impossible to remove properly from silk.
5. What clothes would your antagonist never be caught dead wearing?
He abhors the casual wear of the common men around him. Heat and comfort are not acceptable excuses for dirty tank tops, Bermuda shorts or Hawaiian shirts. And this introduction of sandals as fashion for men should have landed someone in his playroom.
6. What is your antagonist’s biggest pet peeve?
Casual attitudes and improper respect for his dignity and obvious superiority trigger simmering rages. On occasion, when particularly insulted on a trip, he has arranged for that person to be brought to his playroom to learn proper attitudes. He follows his grandfather’s dictum never to foul the waters of home, so he is left to fantasize what he would do for those insults. Sometimes he has complete strangers with similar physical attributes brought to photograph the best of those fantasies. He then replaces the faces with those who have insulted him using a photo manipulation program. Sometimes he sells those images overseas. Mostly he adds them to his personal albums.
7. What is your antagonist’s fondest memory?
The day his grandfather let him direct the training of new property all on his own. He did not follow his grandfather’s script; he used his own. It worked. It worked better than the one his grandfather had created. His grandfather praised his efficiency.
8. What does your antagonist do in his or her spare time?
He devises new perfections to create, and new punishments for failing his demands. He will page through his albums to remember past moments of perfection.
9. What can your antagonist do better than anyone else?
He is a master at breaking and reforming people. He alters their perceptions of pain and pleasure and loyalty until he is absolute master of them psychologically, emotionally, and physically. He once bested his grandfather in a contest by using his method on five people selected for the experiment by his grandfather, training them, and then having them all obey his commands to torture, kill, and suicide. His grandfather had chosen for strong will and weak stomachs, but Junior still succeeded.
10. What is your antagonist insecure about?
His obsession with status and respect hide the legacy of self-esteem issues his grandfather instilled in him. After all, GP didn’t want true competition; he wanted someone to carry out his will on command.
11. What makes your antagonist angry?
Anything that impinges on his self-image or on his scenarios of perfection triggers his rage. He spends most days obsessively reliving insults no one else would see.
12. What are your antagonist’s parents like? How about the rest of his or her family?
His father was a weak man completely dominated by his grandfather. He found the amusements of his father and son disgusting and frightening. He withdrew into alcohol and drugs. He died when Junior was nine. He made a mistake while drunk that GP decided was unforgiveable. He had Junior help him punish his father. His heart stopped while being punished. It gave Junior an unmatched sense of power to have his father die under his knife.
His mother was a society orphan chosen by GP because he wanted her assets and a grandson. GP started her training on the honeymoon, which was held at the newly built Mansion at Indian Bayou, which GP already had plans to turn into the Club. He forced his son onto her until she showed pregnant. He pampered her while she carried; then once Junior was his, he made her into the first of the Club’s properties. She died before Junior was out of the nursery. At least he felt she was useful in amusing a particularly demanding Parliamentary member who enjoyed killing during sex for the ultimate orgasm. The pictures and other evidence GP kept from the incident moved his plans along considerably in establishing international sources for Club properties.
If there were ever any other members of the family, GP never mentioned them to Junior.
13. What's one secret your antagonist hasn't ever told anyone?
He had fantasies of being normal with parents and siblings and going to a proper school. He gave those up when his father died. After that his fantasies involved domination, power, pain and perfection.
14. What do people think when they first meet your antagonist?
That he is arrogant and picky and probably gay.
15. Describe your antagonist in three words:
1. _obsessive_
2. _perfectionist_
3. _sadist_
16. Pretend for a moment that your antagonist is really nervous. What does your antagonist do with his or her nervous energy? (Tap his or her toe against the floor? Hum a song?)
He gets really still. His breathing gets extremely slow. This is a legacy from his grandfather’s rages. If he attracted attention during them, he would become the object of relief for his grandfather. He hated those sessions where he was helpless against his grandfather, he hated even more when his grandfather rewarded others by giving them power over him. So he tried becoming invisible every time his grandfather made him nervous.
17. Write a sentence describing how your antagonist walks.
He takes short, mincing steps. Normally, he fusses with various parts of his appearance – hair, jacket, watch, collar, tie – with every step. When he isn’t constantly adjusting things to obtain perfection, he is at his most dangerous because he is either nervous or infuriated.
18. Write a sentence describing how your antagonist stands. What’s his or her posture like?
His posture is rigidly square. Any rounding of back or shoulders merited punishment in GP’s eyes.
19. Is there anything likeable about your antagonist? Does he or she have a soft spot or a good side?
He likes cats. He funds a number of charities, not all of which are recruitment fronts for the Club. One such is the big cat sanctuary, where he visits at least once a year. On very rare occasions it is possible to glimpse what he might have been without GP. He has an artist’s eye with the camera and will donate landscapes and still lives to charity auctions.
20. What do you dislike most about your antagonist?
He constantly reaffirms the choice of being cruel to others because he has power.
21. What is your antagonist’s greatest weakness?
His need to affirm his status and superiority.
22. What is the one thing your antagonist is afraid of more than anything else? Is it your main character? Or is it something unexpected, like being alone?
He fears being weak in his grandfather’s opinion, no matter that GP has been dead for fifteen years. GP instilled the criterion of perfection early and unforgettably in Junior.
23. What does your antagonist want more than anything else in the world?
He wants complete control over himself and everything in his environment.
24. Now, look back and see what your protagonist wants more than anything in the world. How is the antagonist preventing your protagonist from getting what he or she wants and why?
Jeremiah wants to be free of the effects of his kidnapping. All he can remember, even in his nightmares, are those eyes flinching as he fell onto and into her. So he believes making amends for the pain he caused her with his struggles will free him from the obsession of them.
Junior could give Jeremiah what he wants, but that would be rewarding someone who broke his illusion of control at the most crucial place and time. That destruction of perfection, of his control, is unforgiveable.
Even More Questions
If you finish with all the questions above, and you want to answer even more questions about your antagonist, give these a try!
1. If your antagonist could change his or her name, what would he or she change it to?
He would be called GP and usurp his grandfather’s power.
2. What is your antagonist’s favorite band? Song? Type of music?
He prefers the classics of the Romantic period. He will often request particular programs from the orchestra in Houston that contributes to. Then he will play the recordings of those programs while arranging his tableaus.
3. What is your antagonist’s favorite book and why?
His absolute favorite book is his tableau album. But the book he re-reads most frequently is the 1899 biography of the Marque de Sade by Iwan Bloch, in the original French of course. He has read as much of de Sade’s work as is available, publically or privately, but prefers the scholarly analysis of the times and works of the man rather than the works themselves. He keeps his albums and journals so that someday he can be the subject of such an analytical study.
4. What is your antagonist’s favorite season?
He prefers early spring, before the pine flows and before the mosquitoes really emerge.
5. What places, other than where he or she lives now, has your antagonist lived or visited on vacation? Which one was his or her favorite and why?
His favorite non-work vacation is the visit annually to the big cat sanctuary. He likes feeding them. His favorite place to go for recruitment purposes is Prague. It is very easy to find new property for the club there, and he enjoys the cultural opportunities there.
6. What does your antagonist’s house look like? What is hanging on your antagonist’s bedroom walls?
He lives in a turn-of-the-nineteenth century mansion in full Victorian overdone-ness. Much like the Stark House in nearby Orange, which was once described as having a roofline of nothing but weathervanes and chimneys poking up from endless gables.
7. What is the best thing that ever happened to your antagonist?
He received recognition for his photographic talent outside of the Club. He donated a few generic pictures of the view from the Club and a still life centered around the riding crop kept at hand on the side table in the front entrance of the Club to a charity auction to benefit the Opera House Renovation Project. They received endless complements, the highest bids of the auction, and a new Member for the Club.
8. What is the worst thing that ever happened to your antagonist?
Finding the detailed records of what his grandfather had done to his mother, for all he called himself a sentimental weakling at the effect it had on him. The next day, he destroyed all the Classical period recordings his grandfather preferred, and ordered two hundred of the Romantics. He also ordered a dozen non-white shirts.
9. Think about your antagonist’s different moods. Now, try to imagine what your antagonist does with his or her body during these moods. (For example, some people pound their fists on the table when they are angry, or they whistle when they are happy.) Write a few words describing your antagonist’s body during these different moods:
Happy –
He hums bits of his favorite Wagner operas or Verdi’s Requiem Mass.
Angry
He gets very precise. But will have wild little gestures of his fingers as if holding a camera shutter button. His eyes may lose focus as he invents a tableau.
Sad
Thoughtful
He rubs the point of his chin with the first knuckle of his right hand. He smoothes the lock of hair kept artfully over his brow into place with his left.
Curious
His head tilts to the right and he will frequently squint the right eye as if to frame the object of curiosity in an imaginary viewfinder window. In extreme cases, he may even make a frame with the fingers and thumbs of his hands.
10. Is your antagonist superstitious? If so, how?
11. What makes your antagonist most uncomfortable?
Being confronted with unannounced changes to his plans. Perfection is necessary, but unannounced changes threaten the planning perfection demands.
12. Describe how your antagonist speaks. Does your antagonist have a lisp? An accent? Does he or she use a lot of slang, or end every sentence with “okay,”etc.?
He refuses to use contractions. He prefers Latinate words where possible and is very precise in the choice of words because it makes others aware of their inferiority.
13. If a song played every time your antagonist walked into a room, what song would it be?
The music of Verdi’s Requiem Mass without the vocals.
"An important truth that seems not generally to be grasped is that great art is CONSCIOUS art." -- Maren Elwood from Characters Make Your Story
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