Anders Ämting
Auror
How do you define a hero or heroine? Literally, what does that word mean to you?
Likewise, how do you define what a villain is?
Debate!
Likewise, how do you define what a villain is?
Debate!
Simple, The hero is the person your book portrays as right and the villian is the one your book portrays as wrong. Then their are books like mine that are a little more complicated . . .
But there are stories from the point of view of the villains.
Not so simple, actually... There are plenty of stories with a Villain Protagonist working against heroic antagonists. Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a great example, with the rivalry between the eponymous supervillain-in-training and his superhero nemesis, Captain Hammer, over the love interest, Penny. Dr. Horrible is proud of his villain status, having "a Ph.D in horribleness" and aspirations to enter the Evil League of Evil, headed by the dreaded Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin.
That's a good question. If someone calls themselves the villain, does that make it so?
All my characters are both.
For example, in one chapter a female mercenary cannot pay her rent and loses her apartment. One of her friends takes her in. A mutual friend discusses this condition with her host, and states, "Don't worry about her, she can always find someone to kill."
The female character in question is depicted as a jovial train-wreck, who doesn't always clean her firearms and usually has butter and remnants of Texas toast oozing down her chin. The people who have read my story like her, and the comedic lines she has. But make no mistake, she's not from The Welcome Wagon.
So, is she hero or villain?
Well, see, while Dr Horrible identifies himself as a super-villain and admits he's partially in it for fame and money, he still seems to mostly regard himself as more of a revolutionary. He's very bitter and misanthropic, basically thinking he should rule the world because mankind doesn't deserve to rule itself, but he still has good qualities - he displays friendship, capacity for love, and mercy or at least serious qualms about killing innocents. I'd say that makes him a pretty typical anti-hero - he is a protagonist with noble intentions but is very flawed as a person.
Depends. Being an untidy or somewhat irresponsible person doesn't really have anything to do with being a hero or a villain. That's really just ordinary personality quirks.
I think villian or hero is in the eye of the beholder,
the hero can be the lesser of two evils, or the villian could be the lesser of two good.
As in war, also to the victor goes the valor.
The winner gets interviewed by the historians, the losers get buried, at least in the official version.
This discussion presupposes the existence of "true"heroes and villains, and by extension the existence of absolute good and evil.