Protagonist and antagonist in fairy tales are commonly presented to have extremely distinctive quality in term of psychology, personality and even physic. Protagonists in most fairy tales are presented as heroine; they have good personality, innocent, and good looking. Whereas antagonist are commonly presented as villain; they are wicked in personality as well as psychology and they are commonly presented as the’beast’. In describing the quality of the characters, an author relies on a set of language to negotiate their feeling, judgment toward character, and appreciation toward a value. Such language is technically perceived as Appraisal System. This system also accommodates the linguistic resource as the means to measure the intensity of attitude negotiation and explain the source of attitude negotiation.

Under the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics as an approach to discourse study, this descriptive qualitative study atempts to reveal the characterization of protagonist and antagonist in 8 famous English fairy tales rewritten by Charles Perrault (i.e Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood) and Brother Grimms (Rapunzel, Briar Rose, Jorinda and Jorindel, Ashputtel, Snowdrop, and Hansel and Grettel) through the framework of appraisal system. The data employed in this research are therefore any discourse unit realizing the negotiation of attitude (affect, judgment and appreciation), graduation of these attitudes and the engagement of the attitudes. The data were analyzed through ethnographic method with domain, taxonomc, and componential analysis as the procedures to discover the cultural meaning.           According to the analysis, it is found that protagonists are depicted as innocent, good-looking and virtuous. This interpretation is supported by the findings of discourse units realizing the effect of misery and judgment of normality and propriety that numerously negotiated to these characters. Those kinds of negative affect are mostly found in the stage of complication; the stage where they get problems caused by antagonists. Those feelings are respons for the oppression committed by the antagonist. Furthermore, the effect of inclination/desire is found to significantly unfold the conflict of the story. In some stories (Cinderella, Ashpittel, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Jorinda and Jorindel, Briar Rose) the desire of the protagonists is the point where the conflict of the story unfolded. In the rest of the stories (Snowdrop, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood) the antagonist's desire is the point of the unfolded conflict. Their good appearance and virtue are proven by the negotiation of positive judgment on normality and propriety. Moreover, discourse units realizing positive appreciation of the quality and valuation of the physical appearance are also supportive of direct linguistic evidence of that interpretation. Meanwhile, antagonists in some stories are depicted to have a bad appearance (Jorinda and Jorindel, Sleeping Beauty in the Wood) and in some stories are depicted to have good-looking (i.e Cinderella, Ashputtel, Snowdrop). This interpretation is supported by the discourse units realizing negative judgment on the aspect of normality. Furthermore, in all tales, they are depicted as diabolic and evil figures. It is supported by the negotiation of negative judgment on the aspect of propriety. The dominant highly intensified attitude negotiated between the protagonist and antagonist implies that there is a clear-cut characterization between protagonist and antagonist. It is also supported by the findings that most of the attitudes negotiated to them are monotonically negotiated; which also implies that the storytellers’ voices dominantly describe the traits of the characters  Therefore, they are aligned with the characters they construc