Characters You Love to Hate

[rowyn]

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.

Comments

[rowyn]

That is generally my preference! It's rare that I want to see more of a villain. :)

[xyzzysqrl]

I see it as such a waste, but then... I enjoy villains and enjoy BEING the villain.

[rowyn]

I really don't. actually. Even when I'm the GM, I have a very hard time making villainous bad guys. If you see very much of one of my antagonists, they will almost inevitably become sympathetic and understandable (even if they're still evil.) If I'm a player, I pretty much only play good guys. I don't know why.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, I can sympathize. I mean, with you as GM, not necessarily with your sympathetic bad guy. ;) If you're going to play a villain as anything other than a cardboard cutout, one who has any sort of motivation, you're going to "get into" that character at least a little bit.

Similarly, I think that there's a case where how much the reader sympathizes with an antagonist (or the protagonist!) will depend upon how much character time that character gets, and how much "into the mind" we get with that character. (Note: Sympathizing with a character and seeing a character as "cool and mysterious" generally don't seem to go hand-in-hand very well, IMHO.)

I think some folks have an easier time separating understanding the character's motivations from actually rooting for the character. I've read (or watched) quite a few stories where the protagonist was really quite the jerk and arguably the BAD GUY, and yet he'd have a following of folks actually rooting for him -- even among folks who I would presume did NOT espouse this guy's worldview or values.

(And I admit, I have some trouble at times where I'll sympathize a bit too much with a villain simply because I find the protagonists to be unbearable -- or else because the "villain" represents an authority, and the "heroes" aren't sufficiently HEROIC for me to feel that their guerrilla warfare tactics and gleeful slaughter of the main villain's minions are entirely justified. Either that, or I'm getting too wrapped up in "meta" issues.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I hadn't quite thought of it in that context. You know, when it's just a Batman-vs.-Joker "villain of the week," where he does the scheme, he gets defeated, end of episode, I don't really have much incentive to see the villain again. Too often I feel like the villain is a favorite of the writers rather than the viewers. ("Why, this would be a GREAT Joker scheme!" "But he was already defeated." "So he busts out of Arkham!" "Genius!")

However, at the same time, if there's a story series where our hero just repeatedly, time after time, clobbers villains, I'm not going to care too much about the struggle. If he finishes them off and yet there are always more ... well, after the first few times, there had BETTER be something else to the storyline to maintain my interest. Maybe it's the witty reparte between the hero and his sidekick or a vigilante or semi-heroic rival (e.g., Catwoman), maybe it's the occasional deviation from the "formula" to follow a side-story. That's the sort of thing that had me watching the Batman animated TV show -- not that I was desperate to see Joker yet AGAIN.

But if there's going to be a story where I'm going to "love to hate" a villain, I think it needs to be a story where our hero is the underdog, and the story is a long, protracted struggle against a villain who consistently has the upper hand. Sure, there might be individual battles won along the way -- some sign that our hero is, if not winning the war outright, at least achieving some goals and making some friends on the way, lest we lose all hope -- but the bad guy isn't just being repeatedly defeated and thrown into Arkham, then popping out again. If he's repeatedly defeated, I can't take him all that seriously. If he's repeatedly killing people, but going through the "revolving doors of justice," then I can't take our HERO all that seriously.

But make it an uphill struggle all the way, where there's no apparent guarantee of winning (and perhaps even our initial HERO ends up dying heroically, and the cause has to be taken up by his former sidekick*) and then any final hard-won victory is going to be a lot more compelling (and the villain's gonna really have it coming to him). There's "love to hate" territory for me.

(* Disclaimer: This is not meant to advocate the anime series trope where we have an obvious appointed hero, and a big-brother/father/MENTOR type who is doomed to die halfway through the series. If our story focus is not on that mentor rather than the "appointed young viewer proxy" then it's not going to come as much of a surprise or have much impact, considering how over-worked that trope is in anime. ;) Rather it just comes across as "clearing the field" for the hero, so he no longer has any older competition for viewer popularity.)