Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

All Those Evil Villains

Antagonists in the Grimms' tales are mean-spirited, greedy, and calculating. We're talking real monster-material here. Sometimes we know why they make the protagonists' lives miserable—wanting their own kid to inherit the riches instead of the step-kid, for instance—but sometimes they seem like they're just being cruel for its own sake. These are pretty one-dimensional characters, which is awesome because we feel less bad when they meet inventively gruesome deaths at the tales' ends.