Sympathy for the Devil

[Horus]

I was having a discussion today with some friends after talking about a character of mine. Afterwards, I was left feeling... conflicted. Going to shy away from the details for now to focus on the core of what I want to know. How do YOU feel about the presentation of a villainous antagonist? The byronic heroes, anti-heroes (the ends justify the means kind), or anti-villains. These characters certainly have risen sharply in popularity in the last 20 or so years, and they often rise/fall with society's constant changes.

Black/white morality withstanding, what do you see as the place for these characters? Can they be main protagonist, even if they do unspeakable deeds? Or should they have some kind of line to distinguish them from the antagonist/villain? Can the protagonist even be an antagonist at the same time, in a traditional fantasy setting. Last, how do you feel about anti-villains/heroes as main characters?

 

[pmmg]

Well, the short answer to all these questions is yes, they can be all of those things.

How do I feel about them? Well, I've never really been a fan of Anti-Hero's, I personally would enjoy more characters who would be better role models, but that is just me.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I think with villainous protagonists, if you cross certain lines you'll find few people who sympathize with them. Then again, I find the MC from Martial God Asura abhorrent and that novel is still pretty popular at wuxiaworld so I don't really know.

 

[skip.knox]

I don't think about anti-hero or any of that. I'll let me readers put on the tags they like.

For me, I think about my main character and what she wants. I think about what opposes her, which can come from antagonists, but can come also from inside herself or from the world. I'm happiest when I can have all three elements in play.

Once I have an antagonist in mind, I think about what he wants and how my hero mucks that up. It's all about what all my main characters want, what they only think they want, what opposes them, what they think opposes them, and so on.

So far I have found that it's no so much about whether the antagonist *is* a villain as it is how he behaves. When I put it that way, it gives me opportunities to have the antagonist behave admirably in some situations and badly in others. I don't try to be balanced, I just try to be interesting.

 

[FifthView]

Last, how do you feel about anti-villains/heroes as main characters?

I think the problem, not insurmountable for villain protags, is that readers typically want a protagonist with whom they can identify, root for, worry for, etc. For this reason, those somewhat villainous characters often work better at a slight distance, perhaps as foil, antagonist, side character, or companion for the more heroic MC protag. Have you heard the saying, Every villain sees himself as the hero of his own story? I love using that as a guide when considering the internal features of villains; but the problem with placing the reader in that head and making that character the MC protag is that a disjunction might occur between the reader and that villain. Most readers can see themselves being heroic but not truly villainous, corrupt, deranged, arrogant to the point of being deplorable.

Anti-heroes are a different thing, imo. I think readers can easily see themselves doing a hero's work in unorthodox, screw authority kinds of ways.

I think that maybe POV choices would make a difference. You could insert some distance by using a third omniscient approach and still have an intriguing, attention grabbing villainous character as the main protagonist. But for a deeply intimate third limited, you might run into the aforementioned problem.

Edit: However, all this is grain of salt territory, because characters are defined by lots of features, so lumping them into broad categories might often miss the point. Ideally, no two antiheroes or villains or anti-villains will be alike.

 

[Penpilot]

There's a place for all types of heroes and villains in the writing world. Which box your villain falls into depends on the demands of your story and what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with a moustache twirling villain. It's all about the execution, and part of that execution is knowing what you want to do, and having the steady, conscious hand to follow through on it.

As for what can be done, just look at the characters from Game of Thrones and the spectrum of deeds each had done. There are characters there that have done despicable things, but we still cheer for them. We may not forgive them, but we understand their motivations.

For the most part, I think anything can be done. You just have to know what you want and figure out how to do it. It may seem like an simple thing to say, but in practice, there are always forces tugging a writer this way and that, and part of the skill of writing is figuring out when to resist and when to give in.

 

[FifthView]

As for what can be done, just look at the characters from Game of Thrones and the spectrum of deeds each had done. There are characters there that have done despicable things, but we still cheer for them. We may not forgive them, but we understand their motivations.

Interesting thought experiment: Imagine ASOIAF written entirely from the POV of Cersei Lannister, in deep intimate third.

Not that it couldn't be done, but there would be major hurdles to cross.

Having a large cast and being able to flit around, sometimes not returning to a particular character's POV for many, many chapters, means being able to have small doses, heh. One character doesn't have to carry the whole story. Plus, you also get these POV characters viewed from a distance, i.e. from another character's POV. So some of the nastiness can be inferred whereas otherwise you might have to dip neck-deep in it. Did Joffrey have POV chapters? I don't think so, but a single chapter in his POV wouldn't have hurt the tale and might have even made it a little better, who knows?

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

I'm fine reading about any types of characters, as long as the story interests me and is told in a way that allows me to suspend my disbelief. To keep my interest, the story shouldn't rely heavily on clichés or anything too gratuitous. To help me suspend my disbelief, characters should not be stereotypes and act illogically. Given a story that meets these conditions, it doesn't matter to me whether the protagonist is heroic or not, whether the antagonist is villainous or not, etc. I like variety, and it can get tiresome reading the same old good v evil type stories. Mix it up, I say. Give me something new, interesting, and internally consistent, and I'm good. Just make sure you have fantasy elements if you say the book is fantasy.

 

[Night Gardener]

Playing devil's advocate... characters are characters. Don't get hung up on the trappings of defining them into the standard archetypes. That's for literary critics and readers to debate and decide. Well, maybe marketers and publishers will want a straight answer, but for the purposes of conversation with the OP...

I think that is why we see so many MC's today that are deeply, (perhaps even contrively), flawed. Heck, classic black and white morality protagonists are usually openly mocked for their goody-two-shoe-ness and seen as more of an outlier than status quo by supporting casts of characters within the story. Villains become rather sympathetic when literally everyone is flawed. (Writing absolute black and white morality is also challenging. But, great literature comes from absolutes, too. )

Perhaps reader's expectations are changing with the times. Everyone has a motive, ulterior motives, and we generally don't trust each other with whole truths. That's a different conversation for another day. But I think we're accepting (and more easily relatable to) picking out what should be considered a protaganist's qualifications from a list of known 'lesser evils'. Ex. The guy who killed a man in a bar fight, went to jail and lost everything trying to start over while hiding his past? VS. The guy who drinks and is a serial killer abducting children for kicks, trying to keep it all a secret? I'm willing to bet that regardless of how interesting those two different character's internal struggles are, one gets the 'villain' check mark more often than the other...

There's the other part of the equation, that mostly good but sometimes bad characters are fun to write and interesting to read. Also, not to be discounted, is readers' morbid curiousity... who hasn't fantasized about acting out something uncivil from time to time? Having the ability and the drive to get what they want? etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, is that reading and writing is essentially introspective. We get to play out morally complicated situations vicariously in our own heads (which theoretically is a safe environment). We get to know ourselves. Occassionally, we need characters that go too far, so we have the moral confirmation of, "Nope. That went over the line for me. Now, I have to see what happens." But, we may also hold out against hope that the character does something redemptive, or tries to balance out their universe a bit.

As much as readers like being able to identify or sympathize with a character's motives and internal struggles, ( as we are hopefully not a lot of sociopaths and psychotics ), we tend to be unable to identify with total villainy. Or, characters beyond a 'complicated motive' that cross the line into or originate from absolute, senseless incomprehensible villainy. Primordial evil. I think that's why writers shy away from writing about total, non-redeemable, absolute primordial evil villains or forces. We can't imagine anything for a 'redeemptive option' as readers, so can only hope for 'defeat' or neutralization in some way. As authors, well, we might get creative with defeat, but that's the expectations we have to work with, which can be kind of limiting. If total evil and whatever character it embodies isn't dealt with in a satisfactory manner, it can be uncomfortable for readers. (Sometimes, that's great, to make readers really uncomfortable. I've had to put down books and come back to them later, or outright quit reading for various reasons... but finding that threshold in myself was worthwhile.)

I think I quit thinking in terms of archetypes a while back. I'm just wanting to read about characters and what they do; what is in conflict and what motives/actions address the conflict. Assigning rote classification to characters isn't the point so much, at least not for me. Characters just... are who they are and do what they do. As a reader, and writer, I like having to work a bit on deciding who's the more likeable (or agreeable) character.

 

[FifthView]

For me, there's a relativity when considering the roles various characters play, and a character can be labeled "absolutely villainous" without also being labeled "absolute evil." The role is a villainous role, the character is absolutely a villain, even if the character isn't evil incarnate. (And in fact, I wonder whether evil is even useful in this discussion; the term seems highly subjective.)

My favorite example is Dolores Umbridge. I think she's the best villain in the whole HP series. I never once thought of her as evil incarnate. She is not demon, devil, or some abstract malevolent force become incarnate, but rather entirely human. She might well have some unexplored good side, for all I know; but I don't care and didn't need to care about that for this story. The things she does don't rise to the level of a Jeffry Dahmer or Emperor Palpatine. But she's hurting the characters I love and the world I love—and that's the relativity thing coming into play.

Dahmer's actions were far beyond the pale, unforgiveable. Umbridge's were less so, except to the degree that my love for the so-called "good" characters and "good world"—let's call the latter the good life—made her actions unforgiveable. The selfish interests motivating her plus her general principles were so counter to my own, she became the villain.

Even Harry had a dark side, but this troubled him when he realized this. (Or, at least, he feared this.) Delores Umbridge never doubted herself, as far as I can remember.

For a story, beyond the relative nature of these character interactions (and identifications, for the reader), there's also an element of intransigence. Dolores Umbridge was never going to change. Her selfish pursuits and principles were never going to alter. This is probably the final seal on absolute "villainy" in a story. Compare to Draco Malfoy: hints along the way gave the impression that he had the capacity for change.

 

[Netardapope]

With regards to which roles these characters should be in, it all depends on the type of story you want to tell. I agree with some previous posters, in that there is a certain threshold that comes with regard to the degree of evil present in a character. That being said, this threshold could be different for all sorts of people. However, I think the motivations of this character while being a protagonist are more important than the actions they take.

For example, let me write a hyperbolic situation. Let's say Mr. Anti-Hero has to murder all the children in an orphanage because they carry a virus that could lead to the collapse of society. Let's say Mr. Anti-Hero makes himself dehumanize the children in his mind, so that the killing is easier for him. Taken on its own, the murder of children easily crosses the line of what the average reader is able to tolerate. However, if this is coupled with a motivation that makes sense (be it a personal motivation or a catastrophic one), that motivation has a massive influence in how we view a character's evil actions.

It is more practical to gain a clear sense of a character's motivation than to try and arbitrarily draw a line with regard to the evil actions a character can take (Because the former could grant justifications for all sorts of actions, while the other only prevents you as a writer from doing certain things.) This is mainly because trying to draw a line on evil is futile, since where the line is crossed varies wildly between readers. Either way, someone will almost always be offended.

As for my personal opinions on Anti-Heroes, I like them, but I am not in love with them. A common sentiment with writers these days is that Grey Morality is somehow "deeper" or more "realistic" than the Black/White Dichotomy. Personally, I view both of these as genuine techniques for story-telling, whose ability to convey a message depends solely on the Author's skill. I will admit though that my preferred main character is a morally-good hero that has to struggle to do what is right. This is why I like Kaladin from the Way of Kings.

Good luck with your story!