As a dedicated evil player, I've encountered a backward approach to antagonists: ignoring them entirely, without respect to setting integrity or what we could call the "reality" of the world.
Some characters will begin to walk away the moment things get scary. There are no emotes, no comments. No indications of walks away frightened or ignores you.
The player himself is saying "No thank you, I do not enjoy this kind of content". But without a "F*** off" or "Please don't hurt me!" from the actual character the entire RP becomes a surreal joke. The implication from this kind of behavior is that this is not a huge multiplayer storytellng collaboration where the actions of others are as real as our own, and we can pick which aspects of the world we treat as legitimate/canon/worthy of attention. This is not an interaction between two characters, this is a player telling a character "you are an inconvenience to my plot arc, and you do not exist. I do not engage with this sort of content."
This can be hard to deal with. You either let the character walk away and reward his completely unaccountable behavior or gut him like a hog. Essentially you as the antagonist are responding either by breaking from character (because WHY would your character let him go?) or basically being perceived as a spoilsport griefer.
Logging to avoid PVP is another very related problem. It's unsportsmanlike and similarly reality breaking. I'm tempted to consider such incidents as successful kills in my personal canon, but then I feel like I'm denying the "reality" of our shared fantasy setting and substituting my own canon, which is exactly what the player who logged was doing. On the other hand, if I accept a basic WYSIWYG approach and honor the objective realities of the world, my would be victim saw me and dematerialized. This is similarly odd and a violation of setting integrity.
I want non-evil characters to imagine an opposite scenario. Pretend I'm a necromancer actively summoning corpses near Bendir. Your paladin arrives and says "halt". I don't like PvP, or think I'll lose or otherwise find this situation undesirable. Let's just say it's not my kind of material and I'm just going to ignore it.
This is obviously absurd. I have to do SOMETHING. I may opt to just run, but this is an in-character decision. I can't just stand there saying nothing until you decide you'll abandon the RP and I can't just run for my life and send you angry tells after you butcher me.
These are the kinds of situations that legitimate robbers and evil PvP characters find themselves in all the time. There seems to be an unspoken rule among a lot of the player base that evil content is optional and that all PvP with evil players must involve a degree of consent from non-evil parties. I wanted to take some time to air this grievance and see if other evil characters have had similar experiences.