5 - Dominator

When a member of your family goes rogue, things can get awry...

A nice small family living in a cozy one story house in the countryside. They have a little girl named Annie, and a dog named Barky, and a nice lawn with a hired guy who mows it incessantly. 

Except Annie built a giant death ray in the basement.

It doesn't have to be that extreme. Maybe Annie is crying about how someone's science project was better than hers, so she pushed it and it broke. The parents are going to defend her, of course, but who is the real bad guy here? Annie.

It's incredibly, horribly, stupidly frustrating when the good guys HAVE to do what the bad guy says. Which is perfect, a dominant, controlling antagonist is hated by all!

The bad guy doesn't even have to be a member of the hero's family, though that situation is more believable and common. He just has to hold that one card, the one option that the hero can't afford. If he chooses the option, the world explodes, the hero's sister dies, or the girlfriend is thrown into a giant lava pit full of sharks. So the protagonist has to follow the antagonist out of necessity.

Family is even easier, because no real reason has to exist for the hero siding with the bad guy. Because they are in the same family, they share a last name! They're siblings, or cousins, or blood brothers, or somehow tied to each other in a way that one cannot betray the other.

Tada! A horribly frustrating villian your readers will curse at for ages.

EXCERSIZE: Set a timer for ten minutes. Make up a fictional story about how your mom is absolutely horrible. Maybe she's a serial killer, or maybe she likes stealing people's dates and then dumping them. How do you react?