The Emotion Amplifier Playbook for Antagonists

We all know the importance of tapping into our character’s feelings and conveying those clearly to readers. When we do this, readers connect with our characters and become invested in the story. This is how we keep them engaged beyond the first few pages or chapters.

But sometimes our characters don’t want to “go there” emotionally. Maybe they’re resistant to change and have a death grip on the status quo. They might be uncomfortable with certain emotions and will try to hide or repress them. Un-dealt-with trauma may cause them to avoid their feelings. There are a lot of reasons a character might need an extra push to get them out of their emotional comfort zone. And the best way to do this is with an amplifier.

Emotion amplifiers are specific states or conditions that influence what the character feels by disrupting their equilibrium and reducing their ability to think critically.

Distraction, bereavement, and exhaustion are examples. Emotionally speaking, these states destabilize the character and nudge them toward poor judgments, bad decisions, and mistakes—all of which result in more friction and increased tension in the story. And that’s often what we want.

But we’re not the only ones invested in making life difficult for our characters. Villains, rivals, frenemies, antiheroes, and other morally flexible characters will often seek to undermine other characters as a means of controlling them or manipulating their circumstances. A strategically used amplifier is a great tool for bringing those devious pursuits to fruition. Here are a few examples of short-term goals your bad guy or girl may pursue and how an amplifier can help bring them about.

Manipulating Mood

Mood is a temporary state of mind—tending toward negative or positive—that is often influenced by external stimuli. It affects a character’s perception of themselves, other people, and their situation and influences their decision-making.

Someone with a vested interest in changing the character’s mood can easily do so with an amplifier. Maybe they purposefully put the protagonist into a state of exhaustion by disrupting their sleep, or they force them to endure the hardship of cold temperatures by killing their heater in winter. As the character’s mood swings, they go right where the adversary wants them: emotionally elevated, irritable, and distracted from what really matters.

Ensuring Compliance

Antagonists tend to crave compliance; after all, it’s a lot easier to dominate others when they’re not actively fighting against you. If the protagonist hasn’t yet recognized their enemy, all the adversary has to do is quietly manipulate the situation to weaken them. Then they can step in and lead the character in the wrong direction, offer self-serving advice, or magnify any cognitive or emotional dissonances already in play.

In the movie Ghost, Molly’s husband Sam is dead, and she’s in the throes of bereavement. Her good friend Carl (who, unbeknownst to Molly, was responsible for Sam’s death) is now subtly putting the romantic moves on her. His attempts are unsuccessful, so he takes a different tack by pushing her deeper into grief, deliberately using her situation to make her more vulnerable and open to suggestion—a despicable but frequently successful way to gain control and influence over someone’s decisions.

Another way a character can ensure compliance is by introducing an amplifier to create an undesirable situation, then using that situation to “rescue” the victim. Consider a greedy land baron who wants to take over a town, if he can just depose the matriarch. So he uses his considerable resources to create a local famine. Crops fail, people and animals go hungry, and the coming winter promises even greater suffering and death. Fear becomes as abundant as food once was. The matriarch, unable to identify the cause of the famine, is powerless to resolve the problem.

Then a stranger comes to town. He expresses sympathy for the villagers and reverses the famine to provide food until the next harvest. The indebted villagers begin to view him as more capable and resourceful than their own matriarch, and voilà! Through a fabricated disaster fueled by hunger and fear, the antagonist has earned the trust of the people and is on his way to claiming the village for himself.

Causing a Psychological Derailment

But what if it’s not enough to simply win people over? In extreme cases, an antagonist may need to break down their opponent mentally and emotionally before building them back up in their own image. Leveraging the following amplifiers can help accomplish this.

Isolation: Separating a character from other people and even the wider world creates an unmet need in the area of social connection (love and belonging on Maslow’s hierarchy). Isolated characters make easier targets because of their emotional vulnerability and their longing to be accepted by others.

Confinement: Trapping or restricting a character in some way makes them emotionally volatile and reliant, forcing them to depend upon their captor for release, information, or whatever they need to survive.

Forced addiction: Creating a dependency on drugs, medicine, or other substances alters the character’s mental state, tempting them to sacrifice their moral code and reconstruct their priorities as the substance becomes the most important thing.

Torture and trauma: These potent tools, applied directly to the character or indirectly to loved ones, make the protagonist more fragile and easier to break.

Brainwashing. Thought reform through altering the character’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors is the tool of a morally destitute antagonist. This subtle process twists fear and hope in a perverse way to rewire the subject’s brain to align with the adversary’s own ideas.

These are difficult notions to consider, particularly as we know these amplifiers are used in the real world for heinous purposes. As such, writers shouldn’t deploy them casually. But they are legitimate options for a corrupt character who’s motivated enough to use them.

There are so many ways a character may seek to achieve their nefarious goals, and an amplifier can be the most effective. Make your antagonist a force to be reckoned with. Arm them with amplifiers that will make them more powerful, create challenges for the protagonist to navigate, and encourage readers to keep turning pages to see who wins.

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Amplifiers are familiar to readers as these states and conditions are part of the human experience. When an amplifier brings a character’s emotions close to the surface, readers can’t help but be reminded of their own feelings and humanity. This fosters empathy and connection, and the reader becomes invested in what happens next.

Angela and Becca explore over 50 amplifiers in this second edition of The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus. If you’d like a look at the list of amplifiers and a few sample entries from the book, just go here.

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