Characters You Love to Hate
Jun. 15th, 2014 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ankewehner wrote on tumblr about not relating to the "love to hate" phenomenon, where a large part of the audience hates a character but enjoys seeing that character anyway.I don't have the same "how could you feel this way?" reaction to it that Anke expresses, so I was pretty sure I must have felt this way about some villain at some point. But it took me a while to think of an actual example. Some counter-examples:
DC's the Joker: I don't love to hate the Joker. I just hate him and wish Batman (or anyone) would kill him. Lut was talking about watching the intro to one of the Batman video games, where Batman is escorting the Joker back to the asylum and the Joker is apologizing for not killing more people on his way out the last time and gloating about how many more he'll kill during the next escape. Me: "And the game doesn't let you kill the Joker here." Lut: "NO." Me: "See, this is why I wouldn't want to play it." Lut: "Y'know, if I were one of those armed guards standing around while the Joker was brought in AGAIN, I'd shoot him dead. And then I'd hand Batman my gun and say 'You can arrest me if you want to. But the only two people who are going to be sorry that bastard is dead are you and Harley Quinn. AND I'M NOT SO SURE ABOUT HARLEY.'" That would be AWESOME. Anyway, I know a lot of people like seeing the Joker vs Batman conflict play out again and again, but I am not one of them.
Marvel's Magneto: I don't love to hate Magneto either, but unlike the Joker, my response to Magneto is generally BE GOOD ALREADY DAMMIT. I like Erik and I want him to do good things and stop being so Machiavellian. I don't want him to be an unforgivable murderer. I sympathize with him, but I don't like watching him be a villain.
I can readily think of other characters that fall into one of those two camps: unsympathetic villains that I hate, and sympathetic ones that I want to see reformed. But coming up with a villain that I enjoy as-a-villain is much harder. The one I did produce is an actual classic:
Shakespeare's Iago: No, not Disney's snarky parrot, but the antagonist of "Othello". Iago is throughly villainous and almost completely unsympathetic, but he is very good at being a villain. It's been a long time since I read "Othello" and I've never seen it performed, but here's how I remember the play's structure: Iago comes on stage, gives a soliloquy listing his resentments and desires, and then explains how he's going to manipulate everyone in the next few scenes into doing what he wants them to. In the next few scenes, Iago uses a masterful combination of fabrications and apparent empathy and feigned good intentions to get everyone to do their part, most of them unwittingly, in his plan. Repeat until end of play. I cannot like him, or root for him, but there's a certain admiration for how well he executes his plot.
I am not sure that's the same emotion that most people associate with the phrase "villains you love to hate", but I think it's as close as I come. It's a hard category to get into, because it requires the character to be an unsympathetic, unapologetic villain, and yet have enough class/style/brilliance to make them entertaining despite that. And of course, it's subjective -- I'm sure there are people who feel that way about the Joker, or Moriarity, or Loki*, but I don't. So I'm curious -- what villains make the cut for you?
* Loki (in both the Norse myths and the recent films, oddly) is more in the want-to-see-reformed camp , although the end scene of Thor 2 was pretty awesome. Moriarity, I just hate.
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Date: 2014-06-15 11:27 pm (UTC)I forget if the Magneto of the comics I read was ever a cold-blooded murderer, actually. My impression of him is that he definitely didn't kill wantonly, a la the Joker, but he'd kill if he thought it was necessary to save mutants. I think of him as Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King. He's cynical, extremist, and too willing to resort to violence, but his goal is to prevent another Holocaust.
And yes, comic book characters especially have the TOO MANY WRITERS problem. In the comics, it felt like there was one Magneto that was ruthless but not evil, and another that was more the over-the-top villain.
The arc in the "Heroes" TV show where they were trying to redeem Sylar was definitely of the "Are we just supposed to forget how evil and murderous he is and go 'awww' now?" variety. As much as I like a redemption story, I found that hard to stomach. It was kind of a relief when he went back to just being a villain.
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Date: 2014-06-15 11:58 pm (UTC)I think there's a lot of that going on in "Once Upon a Time," too. Wait long enough, and just about every character in the series is going to be related, either by birth or by romantic involvement, and most any villain, no matter how many people he or she kills off brutally, is supposed to maintain our sympathy. Argh! (I'm not even choosing to follow that series anymore, per se. It's just that we watch TiVo'ed cable TV shows over at a friend's house, and he seems to be big on that show.)
Re: Magneto: Boy, it's been so long since I read any X-Men. That was back in the '80s or so, and I mostly relied upon the extensive collection of a cousin who had many, many different comic book descriptions and back-issue collections to follow any stories. There was a time when I pretty much binged upon going back through his collection of older X-Men comics, and then came to the realization that there were some pretty major plot points that would be dropped or apparently forgotten/retconned. In real-time (i.e., if I'd gotten these as they had been released), perhaps I wouldn't have remembered unless I'd gone back to re-read old issues, but having all these comics to read AT ONE TIME meant I had the discrepancies right in front of me. (No, I don't remember WHAT they were. I just remember that I was annoyed by the phenomenon.) For a long time, that pretty much killed the "comics magic" for me (for what little it was -- as I was no "big spender" on comics anyway) because I had the "realization" that there was no "big story" to be revealed, but that the writers were just making it all up as they went, and it would take nigh-forever to get anywhere story-wise anyway. Nowadays, if I have an interest in comics, it's usually just in graphic-novel compilations where the story is already completed and conveniently bundled together.
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Date: 2014-06-16 01:35 pm (UTC)But yes, comics and TV shows suffer from exactly the same advantages and disadvantages we had on Sinai. All that continuity and backstory gives you a rich trove of stuff to mine for ideas! But deadline pressure means you kick stuff out the door when it 'seems like a good idea', and then you're *stuck* with it. Forever. Because continuity. And retconning creates its own problems. :/
I do like waiting until a story is finished -- compiled in a graphic novel or a season arc of a show is wrapped -- before committing to it. That way you know whether or not it can sustain the momentum throughout, or if it's more "this seemed cool at the start but now I realize the writers have no idea where they're going with this." :P
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Date: 2014-06-16 05:50 pm (UTC)Yep. This is one reason why I entirely sympathize with reports that the new Star Wars movies are NOT going to adhere to "Expanded Universe" canon ... though J.J. Abrams reserves the right to be inspired by EU material. I appreciate the attempt to keep the Star Wars novels tied together with some sort of "canon," but there were just too many cases where there would be the incredibly goofy stuff and then the incredibly DARK stuff, and I'd think, "This just shouldn't coexist in the same universe."
That, and some of the EU material is just DUMB. (For the simplest comparisons, just look up some of the varied starships invented for Star Wars comics and RPGs and compare to the movie spacecraft. Between all the "*-Wings" (substitute another letter of the alphabet for "*") and ships that look like what a grade-schooler with a straight-edge and a compass might invent on some copy paper ... it just seems that a lot of these folks don't "get" the influences that go into the Star Wars look. But it's PUBLISHED somewhere, so it's CANON.
Yeah, falling back to "only the movies are really canon" seems pretty appealing at that point. (But even that's going to be a tough job; there's a lot of stuff that happens in the prequels that suddenly makes stuff in the original trilogy make a whole lot less sense.)
Re: Finished Stories:
Yeah, I've been burned so many times by a series (usually TV) that seemed promising at first, but then it was cancelled partway (often finishing off with a dark and depressing cliffhanger season finale that was MEANT to make us anxious for the new season in hopes that stuff would get better), or else it soon became evident that the writers were just making stuff up as they went, and any element of "mystery" and "discovery" was pointless. I know that ultimately "it is about the journey" when I'm following a series, but I want to at least have the fair hope of a decent payoff at the end. If I keep getting disappointed, it's going to cut into my enjoyment of the NEXT series.
Getting a complete series that I can binge on (or more sensibly pace out) doesn't promise me a good ending, but at least I can know that there IS an ending and it didn't just fizzle out partway. Plus, I probably had a recommendation that drew my attention to it, so there's that, too.
Starting a story isn't that hard. That much I've learned from GMing, because so often what I start with is the "start of a story," and only a vague idea of a good and a bad ending, and I'm greatly relying upon the players to fill in everything in between. There are too many series where I feel like the writer had a great pilot, or a great concept that looked snazzy on paper, but the DELIVERY was lacking. (I've run into that a lot with books, too -- where there's a book that has a wonderful setup premise, but I honestly wouldn't know where to go with it and ... oh, surprise, the writer didn't know, either. :P )