Antagonist

A couple things I'll talk about in the book:

Learning about them .....

Swordplay offers numerous opportunities to fail and to lose without injury to anything worse than the ego … yet as we know, this can be a far greater catalyst to draw out true character than physical injury itself. And it's 'truth' that we are after, the part of the person that their conscious mind has no control over, the reflexes and the snap judgments made without the interference of the higher functions. If we can access those, we can manipulate and deceive both the physical and the psychological parts of the opponent before they can gain conscious control of their actions. Once we find their 'freezing points' as Sonny called them, once we know who they are, we can use this information to beat them.

What made them blink/flinch?
Lose their cool?
Attack without thought?
Flail?
Escalate?
Disengage from the play?

How to hide who you are .....

You have to be a good actor, and it is not enough to pretend …. or to assume you are giving off an impression when you clearly are not. You have to move and 'be' the person you want them to see. This takes practice and feedback from outside yourself. You need to know what you look like and how changing how you stand, move, walk, alters what others think of you. You also have to understand the way to use facial expressions and gesticulations to express different emotions. Can you communicate -

Skill?
Bravado?
Cunning?
Fear?
Uncertainty?
Wrecklessness?
Anger?
Calmness?
Enjoyment?
Malice?
Indifference?