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Does Anyone Else Hate Sympathetic Villains?

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
To get to the original topic of this thread--no, I don't hate sympathetic villains. I also don't hate villains who are just evil for the sake of being evil. Each has its place, depending on the type of story being written. I feel a good writer can handle either approach well.
 
Well, having read the amount of HP fanfiction that I have, if that was her motivation it certainly did not reach everyone. But really, Voldemort is who he is because Harry Potter is a children's book series at heart. Yes, the latter books were a bit more mature as the readers grew a bit more mature but it started as a children's book series and the characters basically remained as children's book characters. That's why they're all one-dimensional. Except Ron.

Sincere question: Have you read the books yourself?

Whenever I see people characterize children's books as cardboard and simplistic due to being childrens books, I die a little inside.
 

TheKillerBs

Maester
^like what's happened with Snape and Draco, you mean? But I think that's more because they were played by attractive actors in the movies...
Snape was not a villain. A terrible teacher, a jealous berk, an unlikable dillyweed, yes. Villain, no. I'd say he even falls into the line of hero more than anti-hero. Snape was pretty complex, actually. Probably the other exception, together with Ron. But for the most part, the characters of Harry Potter do not have much depth. Dumbledore falls deep (heh) within that category.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
Sincere question: Have you read the books yourself?

Whenever I see people characterize children's books as cardboard and simplistic due to being childrens books, I die a little inside.

I don’t die inside, I just assume they’re speaking from ignorance. And since I’m right, I grow livelier inside :)
 
Hi,

My thought - and not on the Order of the Stick since I've never even heard of it before - is that I want my characters to make sense. I don't have a problem with my villains being evil simply because that's who they are. We have sociopaths in the real world and it can be argued for eternity whether they are born or made that way. And I don't have a problem with villains that are victims etc. Again it happens in real life. The abused become the abusers. And one of the best of these is Steerpike from Peake's brilliantly twisted works.

I also don't have a problem with people being born evil. I've written some of these characters. But if I do I will always have an explanation for it - such as born with the ability to control others absolutely. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyone born with such a gift unless it was extremely limited, would be destined to an evil path.

If I have problems with villains it's for one of two reasons. The first is that they have to for som unutterably stupid reason, show everyone how evil they are. I watched the first couple of epps of the reboot of The Tomorrow People and hated it for that reason. The bad guy / uncle kept killing people for no reason save obviously to show the audience what a bad man he was. (I hated the show for other reasons too, to be fair.)

The other problem that comes up sometimes is when villains don't make sense. When they do things contrary to their nature. Magneto from X-men is one of these. He has a clear goal, defined objectives - mutant rights etc - and then when things go wrong as they usually do, always seems to violate them.

Cheers, Greg.
 
I'm a big fan of the Order of the Stick, and I don't have much sympathy for Redcloak, potentially because I've never actually read Start of Darkness. I more or less view him as I view nearly every other major character: as someone interesting.
 

Peat

Sage
I don't have a problem with sympathetic villains.

But I do have a problem with authors hitting me over the head with their version of things. And I think some of Burlew's pokes at the alignment system are just that. Some are spot on, thought provoking satires of one of the oddest parts of the D&D system in fairness. But not all. And I think Redcloak is the main tool for both, accounting for both his widespread popularity with readers and OP's reaction. I'm not overly fond of Redcloak myself either for similar-ish reasons. He's a cool villain with some great moments, but he's still a guy who uses violence and deceit to get everything he wants. Still a villain.

I do kinda wish that not every villain had to be sympathetic and explained. I know everything happens for a reason, but not every cause needs to be examined.
 

Scribble

Archmage
I remember watching He-Man when I was a kid and liking the Merman character. I don't know why I liked him. It had something to do with him sometimes helping Skeletor and sometimes helping He-Man. I don't know why that appealed to me. I guess I liked that Merman did what was best for Merman. He was manipulated by both sides really.

In the case of this Redcloak character, perhaps it's an instance of the readers and writer suggesting that it's a matter of perspective if a character is good or evil. If a character is getting any sort of positive reaction, then I think the writer is doing their job. And from what I gathered Order of the Stick is a comedic parody so it's not really intended to be serious.

In this case I'd say, yeah, feel free to hate him. But if other readers like him, then more power to them.

I don't so much mind sympathetic villains as long as they are not cast as the main villain. I usually like to have a villain I can love to hate.

I agree about Merman. Here's more He-Man theory for discussion: Grayskull is a skull-faced house and Skeletor is a skull-faced guy. What if that was his house and these jokers stole it? What if the whole premise of He-Man is that He-Man and his pals stole Skeletor's skull house, and all he's doing is trying to get it back while this holier-than-thou, over-powered prince in a Speedo (and his whiny cat) are simply being a pain in his royal Eternia? If you re-watched He-Man with this idea in your head, it would make a lot more sense.

Why is the villain doing all this - because "evil"? I enjoy Game of Thrones, Orange Is The New Black specifically because everyone has a story, BUT the downside is that you can't hate the character who was previously the antagonist. It is impossible to hate them. Why am I rooting for Jamie Lannister that child-killing, ********?

I agree that in heroic fantasy you want your character to want to kill the dark lord. These days gray fantasy has taken the lead. My favorite villains have me understanding their motivation and the very best ones have me "wiggling" on the edge of sympathy. but ultimately putting me on the side of the protagonist.

I think a sympathetic villain is a challenge for the writer to ensure we are rooting for the hero else the end victory can feel a little flat - in a heroic fantasy.
 
Hi Scribble,

I disagree slightly with your idea that in grimdark where all the guys have stories / reasons for being who they are, we can't still hate the villains. I can still loathe and despise them and want them to come to a sticky end. That's not the danger of grimdark in my view. The actual danger is you might not be able to support the hero. GOT has come perilously close to this with every "good guy" either killed off or contaminated in some way and I don't really want any of them to win. I'm fairly much at the stage of shouting "A plague on both your houses" and going elsewhere.

Cheers, Greg.
 

Scribble

Archmage
Hi Scribble,

I disagree slightly with your idea that in grimdark where all the guys have stories / reasons for being who they are, we can't still hate the villains. I can still loathe and despise them and want them to come to a sticky end. That's not the danger of grimdark in my view. The actual danger is you might not be able to support the hero. GOT has come perilously close to this with every "good guy" either killed off or contaminated in some way and I don't really want any of them to win. I'm fairly much at the stage of shouting "A plague on both your houses" and going elsewhere.

Cheers, Greg.
I didn't mean to say we can't hate the villains, I was trying to point out a difference between being sympathetic - that is, having a feeling of rooting for the villain versus simply understanding their motivation as being something other than "a will to evil". The genius of GOT is close to Breaking Bad's genius, where we slowly descend into an ambivalent sympathy with the protagonist. So yes, your point is right on, that it can become difficult to identify with the protagonist if they seem too "dirty" by their past actions.

Woody Allen example. I personally still think Woody Allen's work is comedy genius and can enjoy it - even if I think Woody is not someone who's relationship choices I would recommend. I can understand he is a complex person, a mixture of impulses - some constructive, some destructive, some selfish, some altruistic, and ultimately subject to the judgement of the world mostly because he is a public figure. Some people feel an impulse to distance themselves from anyone who has done something socially reprehensible, and if that happens with your own character, that can seem bad, but maybe that isn't your audience.

Game Of Thrones SPOILER/Rant
Despite the challenge of the grayness or grimdarkness? of GOT, the last season's departure had me less than satisfied. We have "good people" and "evil people" now. Dany is good, John Snow was always good, everyone is good, except for the evil people. When they killed off Littlefinger so stupidly, I just about lost interest. The special sauce in GOT, for me, has always been the realistically motivated characters. I hope they can reel it back in and avoid the Good Guys Win Because They Are Good ending.
 

Chessie2

Staff
Article Team
I agree with Dragon about villains needing to be sympathetic. I've heard advice before on how writers shouldn't make villains TOO likeable because they'll take away from the hero and to that I say: "*^#*&*!" :whistle:

Anyway, this discussion has really made me mull over things with the protagonist in my WIP. Call me stupid, but I've always preferred villains who were slimy and sneaky and all around bad. Like the villains in the Batman comics of earlier days. They had back stories just harsh enough to justify their shitty behavior but whacked enough to make the reader understand why he was crazy. I love bad guys like this.

The antagonist in my current story is somewhat like that. I do need to make his motives a bit more clear in the beginning (since I pants, character motivations become more clear to me past chapter 5 or so). About the only thing making him sympathetic is the way other people (the heroes) treat him. He's ridiculed. Mocked. Talked down to. Treated as if he were stupid. There's some other things bubbling underneath the surface for him but this thread is a good reminder readers want a real human being as the antagonist, not a dark lord without a story.
 

Gurkhal

Auror
Hi Scribble,

I disagree slightly with your idea that in grimdark where all the guys have stories / reasons for being who they are, we can't still hate the villains. I can still loathe and despise them and want them to come to a sticky end. That's not the danger of grimdark in my view. The actual danger is you might not be able to support the hero. GOT has come perilously close to this with every "good guy" either killed off or contaminated in some way and I don't really want any of them to win. I'm fairly much at the stage of shouting "A plague on both your houses" and going elsewhere.

Cheers, Greg.

That's an interesting perspective which runs very differently from my own. Personally I love the GOT/Asoiaf because of the reasons that you name. I actually feel freer in reading GRRM's works because I don't feel like the author is forcing me to support one side or set of characters. Its more like:

"This is the situation and now you can like or dislike whatever characters that applies to you in a positive or negative way. I'm not going to force it down your throat. You decide for yourself who are your heroes and why."

And also personally I have no need for characters to hate or want them ill. I'm more interested in the interaction between characters and learning about them than to pass judgement, or see the author pass judgement on them. Grey characters are what I like and the more black-and-white the conflict is and the more the author is trying force his vision on me, the less interested I am.
 

Scribble

Archmage
I like the space to come to my own understanding of the events, the motivations, the situational factors, and ultimately of the choices made. We live in a world that tends to judge and condemn people based on one choice, one pivotal moment. I have lived for a long time and have done good and terrible things, some of the good I've done might be seen as terrible by another, less so the terrible things, but the experience of them led me to be a better kind of person, as I see it. The "sum of me" is not drawn from one column or another, if summing the deeds of a person makes any sense outside of some fantastical omniscient Accountant keeping track of things. When I encounter characters in stories with no room for any of this, they feel, to me at least, like the characters lacking real humanness. I can surely enjoy more two dimensional characters in the right setting, for fun or entertainment. Every novel is not The Grapes of Wrath or The Brothers Karamazov, we are talking about entertainment fiction. James Bond is a professional murderer, possibly a psychopath, but he's still fun to read and he is the protagonist. We happily put our tuxedo on and start shooting "bad guys" along with him. So, obviously, this isn't absolute, but I'm just trying to get at what it is about GRRM's characters specifically in contrast to the Orcs/Thugs/Aliens=Evil scenario we see so often in our favorite genre.
 
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Peat

Sage
Am I the only one who's always found SoIaF to be pretty clear-cut on its good guys and its bad guys? The bad guys are well fleshed out and humanised, but they're still straight-up selfish users. The good guys are far from perfect paragons, but they're still clearly the people who care and try to be good. There's a handful of people genuinely travelling between the two but I'd say they're a minority, and a few faked shots aside, everyone set up as a protagonist in book 1 remains one and vice-versa.

At least, that's how I see it.
 

Gurkhal

Auror
Am I the only one who's always found SoIaF to be pretty clear-cut on its good guys and its bad guys? The bad guys are well fleshed out and humanised, but they're still straight-up selfish users. The good guys are far from perfect paragons, but they're still clearly the people who care and try to be good. There's a handful of people genuinely travelling between the two but I'd say they're a minority, and a few faked shots aside, everyone set up as a protagonist in book 1 remains one and vice-versa.

At least, that's how I see it.

I don't think that you are alone but its a perspective that I really don't share.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
"This is the situation and now you can like or dislike whatever characters that applies to you in a positive or negative way. I'm not going to force it down your throat. You decide for yourself who are your heroes and why."

I did find characters I liked and disliked. He killed them all, leaving me with characters I didn't care much about one way or the other. If I want realism, I'll put down books and go outside. I want a good story. GRRM gave me one. Then he shattered it into (for me) meaningless pieces.
 
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