Analyze the confrontation between Antigone and Creon as a genuine conflict between two defensible principles, and state each character's position as a fair, arguable claim.
Antigone is caught in the act of performing burial rites over Polyneices and brought before Creon, and the scene that follows is less a villain scolding a rebel than two people arguing from two entirely different sources of authority. Antigone appeals to what she calls unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods -- an obligation to family and the dead that she believes no mortal king has the power to overrule, whatever the political cost to her personally. She does not deny what she did; she denies that Creon's decree had any real authority to forbid it in the first place.
Creon appeals to a different, equally real concern: a city that just survived a civil war cannot survive if loyalty to family outranks loyalty to the state whenever they conflict, and a ruler who cannot enforce his own decree, even against family, has no real authority left to keep the peace at all. Read generously, Creon is not simply drunk on power -- he is a new king making an order-over-chaos argument that many real governments have made in the wake of real civil wars. The tragedy is not that one side is obviously right and the other obviously wrong; it is that both principles are genuinely defensible, and the play forces them into direct collision with no clean way to honor both at once.
Mastery looks like: They can state both Antigone's and Creon's positions as fair, defensible one-sentence claims and explain why the conflict resists a simple hero-versus-villain reading.
Common stumbles: Flattening Creon into a cartoon tyrant instead of engaging with his actual argument; treating Antigone's certainty as simple stubbornness rather than a coherent principle she is willing to die for.
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