Does Straw always detract from your story?

I\'ve come to the discovery that most villains in the story I\'m writing are all straw variants of their respective beliefs. I\'ve made them as well rounded as I could get, with goals, wishes, character development, and aptitude for what they are doing, yet, they\'re still straw representations of what they are due to the core of villainy. They\'re supposed to be wrong, even with their good arguments to the contrary.

How do you know if you have a bad strawmanned villain or one that\'s not? Should a story be devoid of all strawman or are they a core element in most fiction?

I think you may be misunderstanding what make Straw. It's not that they're wrong — most villains' beliefs, are to some degree, wrong. A character is Straw when the only or main reason they're there is so that someone (usually the hero or protagonist, or some member of his party) can show that they're wrong, or when the belief is so exaggerated as to become obviously wrong.

edited 30th Jan '15 4:51:26 PM by Madrugada

A strawman villain is a caricature; the personification of an ideal taken to a ridiculous extreme, like the "femenist" who wants to establish a Lady Land. An antagonist any sane person would Dope Slap rather than listen to. If you give them motivation beyond their silly pipe dream, they aren't straw any more. Basically, what you're already doing.

edited 30th Jan '15 9:34:06 PM by dvorak

A strawman is just a character that embodies a specific philosophical/political stance, included in a story so that other characters can refute their position. The whole point of these characters is that their arguments are intentionally presented in an incomplete or inaccurate form, so as to make them easier to dismantle and disprove, while making the author's beliefs seem airtight by comparison. Of course, the problem is that the author isn't actually refuting their opponent's arguments, but an unreal facsimile of such - they're arguing against a scarecrow (a man made of straw) rather than a real person.

So the question is: are you trying to make some kind of philosophical or political point with your antagonists? Because that's the only time you should be worrying about making a strawman. Just making an antagonist with a cracked worldview or faulty beliefs isn't enough. There has to be clear intent on the part of the writer towards something deeper than the story's surface-level conflict. If you're not trying to be deeper than that, then I wouldn't worry about it, especially if you've given your antagonists solid inner-lives. If the characters actually seem like real functional people, instead of caricatures who exist solely to be undone by the Logical and Rational Hero, then audiences will find their dysfunctional arguments much more palatable.

edited 31st Jan '15 2:54:46 AM by Tungsten74

If you go to war with yourself because all sides of the story are those that you respect and even believe in, and you can't decide who you want to win, and you can't see a way that everybody can win even if that means growing out of the idea that they have and discovering a new way of being...then it's probably not straw, but that's not guarantee of philosophical brilliance or even worthwhile entertainment either. I'd leave it to the readers to shred the themes.