Books where protagonist is the most morally vile character

[Larry of the Lawn]

On 8/3/2021 at 9:29 AM, SeanF said:

One protagonist who @CTPhipps mentioned as absolutely vile a few years ago is Mike Harmon, from Paladin of Shadows.  Now that I have read THAT SCENE I would agree. 

OH JOHN RINGO NO!

[C.T. Phipps]

4 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

OH JOHN RINGO NO!

John Ringo's protagonists in a number of books he does are pretty awful but I'm not sure the author knows it.

WATCH ON THE RHINE (by Ringo and Kratman) has the Waffen SS revived by Germany in order to fight alien invaders because...reasons.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/524866.Watch_on_the_Rhine

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

John Ringo's protagonists in a number of books he does are pretty awful but I'm not sure the author knows it.

 

His response to Oh John Ringo No suggests he definitely does know it.

However, his actual behaviour at cons and things since suggests he doesn't know it hard enough, or thinks it's a good thing.

[SeanF]

4 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

John Ringo's protagonists in a number of books he does are pretty awful but I'm not sure the author knows it.

WATCH ON THE RHINE (by Ringo and Kratman) has the Waffen SS revived by Germany in order to fight alien invaders because...reasons.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/524866.Watch_on_the_Rhine

That has a kind of basis in fact.  Operation Unthinkable was a plan contemplated  by the British High Command to revive the Waffen SS and the Heer, to drive the Red Army out of Poland and Germany in 1945, in conjunction with Allied forces.

[SeanF]

9 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

OH JOHN RINGO NO!

The protagonist is supposedly a rapist who keeps his urges under control, only to beat and rape a 15 year old girl in the the most brutal manner.

[Larry of the Lawn]

28 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The protagonist is supposedly a rapist who keeps his urges under control, only to beat and rape a 15 year old girl in the the most brutal manner.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3751991

 

[Mentat]

I think that, other than the moral character of the protagonist (which is obviously important), it's interesting to observe if their arc (that which they set out to do which drives the plot or narrative) is that of a villain or a hero.

 

A protagonist on a quest to save the world from a Dark Lord is very clearly playing the role of a hero in the narrative, regardless of how poor their moral character may be. Protagonists who are villains should ideally be attempting to do something villainous (murder Charles de Gaulle, become a successful mobster/drug kingpin, rob a casino, usurp a throne, avoid lawful retribution) as well as being of poor moral character. Protagonists who are villains (as well as actual villains) may still be portrayed sympathetically (noble thieves, assassins who only take contracts on 'bad people', drug kingpins attempting to do right by their families, abused psychopaths).

 

Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels are a great example of a villain protagonist, as well as books I very much enjoyed and I recommend to the OP.  

[Maithanet]

2 hours ago, Mentat said:

A protagonist on a quest to save the world from a Dark Lord is very clearly playing the role of a hero in the narrative, regardless of how poor their moral character may be.  Protagonists who are villains should ideally be attempting to do something villainous

I guess I just feel that if you're writing historical fiction or more grounded fantasy that the whole concept of villains is pretty questionable.  Gregor is a villain in aSoiaF, because he essentially never does anything redeeming at all.  But what about Tywin?  Jaime?  Tyrion?  Arya?  Virtually all of the POVs  are at times pretty morally vile (to quote the OP), but what makes someone a villain is so often in the eyes of the beholder. 

Or if we use actual historical figures, is Napoleon a villain?  What about Winston Churchill? 

[TheLastWolf]

Kubrick/King collab?

[Mentat]

30 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

I guess I just feel that if you're writing historical fiction or more grounded fantasy that the whole concept of villains is pretty questionable.  Gregor is a villain in aSoiaF, because he essentially never does anything redeeming at all.  But what about Tywin?  Jaime?  Tyrion?  Arya?  Virtually all of the POVs  are at times pretty morally vile (to quote the OP), but what makes someone a villain is so often in the eyes of the beholder.

 

I'm not sure I agree. Hero and Villain (to me) represent roles within a narrative as much as (or, actually, more than) moral qualities. Whether Jaime is redeemable through his later heroics or the attempted murder of an innocent child damns him forever, is secondary to the role he's playing within a specific narrative arc (when he jumps into the bear pit to save Brienne, we'd normally root for him, rather than wish him dead).

 

The fact that two people with different moral compasses may disagree about what is morally reprehensible doesn't really matter either. It just means the same character might appear to be a hero or a villain at the same time to different people (as I'm sure is the case with Napoleon and Churchill).

 

Obviously, when a book is as complex as ASOIAF or if we're speaking of real people and the effect of all the deeds they ever did on their life and legacy, it becomes much harder to speak of heroes and villains, but that's because we have so many criss-crossing narratives.

[IFR]

6 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I guess I just feel that if you're writing historical fiction or more grounded fantasy that the whole concept of villains is pretty questionable.  Gregor is a villain in aSoiaF, because he essentially never does anything redeeming at all.  But what about Tywin?  Jaime?  Tyrion?  Arya?  Virtually all of the POVs  are at times pretty morally vile (to quote the OP), but what makes someone a villain is so often in the eyes of the beholder. 

Or if we use actual historical figures, is Napoleon a villain?  What about Winston Churchill? 

It is an interesting thing because as I see it there are two factors at play. The first is that art is a vast simplification of life, and one of these simplifications is we are presented with individuals to identify with. The manipulations of the author tends to clarify the direction of our emotions, so we can more easily find the "good" and the "bad" characters. Some authors work to obfuscate morality, so it's less clear, but that is something that varies by author.

The second thing is a statement that may receive some controversy, but I feel like it's a pretty clear nature of our reality: there's actually no such thing as morality. It's make-believe. To cite a basic example, you don't want to die, I don't want to die, so we collectively agree that it's wrong to kill each other. Except in some arbitrary circumstances where we decide it's acceptable to kill (war, for food, etc) - really it depends on what the collective believe works at the given moment. It's ridiculous to think the universe itself is opposed to murder since the universe is out to kill everyone.

So using one's individual, arbitrary moral compass to view a story through the filter of the author's machinations is what produces the heroes and villains. Of course, it can present weird results where, as has been mentioned in this thread, authors believe they are writing heroes but the subjective views of their audience end up twisting those heroes into villains, and so forth.

So yes, endless debates can be had on this subject. But hopefully people here have enough of a common, agreed sense of "right" and "wrong" that there isn't too much ambiguity in these recommendations. It doesn't bother me personally if I don't entirely agree with a recommendation's characterization of a protagonist as a villain. I feel like most of the recommendations will be fairly on target.

[C.T. Phipps]

I think that if you think of a villain as someone who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and not humanized then you possibly are stretching the definition beyond its breaking point.

[Jaxom 1974]

Isn't villainy ultimately contextual though? Particularly in a multi perspective setting?

[C.T. Phipps]

Well it's a storytelling trope. Whether it reflects the values of the writer or not, it is merely a storytelling device.

The antagonist may be well-developed and three-dimensional but they are to not have the audience's sympathy as a part of his efforts.

[TheLastWolf]

Morals exist? 

[SeanF]

17 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I guess I just feel that if you're writing historical fiction or more grounded fantasy that the whole concept of villains is pretty questionable.  Gregor is a villain in aSoiaF, because he essentially never does anything redeeming at all.  But what about Tywin?  Jaime?  Tyrion?  Arya?  Virtually all of the POVs  are at times pretty morally vile (to quote the OP), but what makes someone a villain is so often in the eyes of the beholder. 

Or if we use actual historical figures, is Napoleon a villain?  What about Winston Churchill? 

A lot of fantasy writing is set in worlds at war, and if one is to write honestly about war, the good guys are bound to do very morally questionable things, however justified their cause.

 

[Werthead]

On 8/4/2021 at 10:40 PM, C.T. Phipps said:

I always liked the take on it that was similar to LIFE ON MARS and its sequel.

The new heroine is imagining the delusion of another.

But I may be reaching.

That's not what happened in Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes:

Spoiler

Gene Hunt created this sort of shared-consensus reality in what appears to be a form of purgatory, and lots of real people found their way into it over the years. Sam Tyler was just a visitor, as was Alex Drake. Ashes to Ashes gives Gene the opportunity to move on and - presumably - collapse the reality, but he chooses not to, and the show ends with him welcoming yet another new arrival.

There's also a new series coming which will - presumably - investigate this further.

 

Quote

Or if we use actual historical figures, is Napoleon a villain?  What about Winston Churchill? 

Napoleon was a villain in the sense that his ostensibly noble original intentions - to keep France strong in the face of external threats and the internal chaos following the Revolution - gave rise to a more selfish form of grabbing and holding land and power for its own sake, and empire-building for resources and political dominance over Europe no matter how many lives (including those of his own countrymen) it cost. He was different to, say, Hitler in that he wasn't prepared to massacre millions of civilians on racist grounds to prop up his ambitions, but his own suggestion that he was merely trying to strengthen his country to exist alongside others in a stable Europe was doubtful at best, given his arrogance and his constant inability to get on with other rulers or believe they were his equals.

Churchill is a good example of someone who was very much a villain on some occasions but a hero on others (most notably in WWII) and everyone remembered the hero bit and either forgot the villain stuff or believed it was outweighed by his positive achievements. There is also the point that to beat Hitler you needed someone who was at least part-bastard, which both Churchill and Roosevelt were, or a complete bastard, like Stalin.

Quote

Whether or not Kellhus in Bakker's books is the most morally vile character depends somewhat on how you interpret the metaphysics/afterlife in the series.  He's unquestionably a force for harm, but it's debatable whether other antagonists are even worse.

Not really. The Inchoroi/Consult/sranc and what they want to do to humanity are far worse than Kellhus for most of the series, to the point it's really not up for debate.

The only argument against that are the last-minute revelations in the last book of the series 

Spoiler

where Kellhus seems to be setting up a deal with one of the gods to gain access to his power in return for allowing him to feed on human souls

but it's clear that was kind of going on anyway. There's also the argument that 

Spoiler

Kellhus's realisation that at some point the No-God and Consult will win because of how time works on Earwa, so at that point it could be argued that Kellhus's attempts to fight the Consult are self-defeating and he might as well have imposed peace on the Three Seas and simply hung out and let humanity have a few more decades of peace before the apparently-inevitable end, not pushed them into a war that will kill millions and trigger the Second Apocalypse earlier than would otherwise be the case.

 

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

That's not what happened in Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes:

  Reveal hidden contents

Gene Hunt created this sort of shared-consensus reality in what appears to be a form of purgatory, and lots of real people found their way into it over the years. Sam Tyler was just a visitor, as was Alex Drake. Ashes to Ashes gives Gene the opportunity to move on and - presumably - collapse the reality, but he chooses not to, and the show ends with him welcoming yet another new arrival.

There's also a new series coming which will - presumably - investigate this further.

 

Napoleon was a villain in the sense that his ostensibly noble original intentions - to keep France strong in the face of external threats and the internal chaos following the Revolution - gave rise to a more selfish form of grabbing and holding land and power for its own sake, and empire-building for resources and political dominance over Europe no matter how many lives (including those of his own countrymen) it cost. He was different to, say, Hitler in that he wasn't prepared to massacre millions of civilians on racist grounds to prop up his ambitions, but his own suggestion that he was merely trying to strengthen his country to exist alongside others in a stable Europe was doubtful at best, given his arrogance and his constant inability to get on with other rulers or believe they were his equals.

Churchill is a good example of someone who was very much a villain on some occasions but a hero on others (most notably in WWII) and everyone remembered the hero bit and either forgot the villain stuff or believed it was outweighed by his positive achievements. There is also the point that to beat Hitler you needed someone who was at least part-bastard, which both Churchill and Roosevelt were, or a complete bastard, like Stalin.

Not really. The Inchoroi/Consult/sranc and what they want to do to humanity are far worse than Kellhus for most of the series, to the point it's really not up for debate.

The only argument against that are the last-minute revelations in the last book of the series 

  Reveal hidden contents

where Kellhus seems to be setting up a deal with one of the gods to gain access to his power in return for allowing him to feed on human souls

but it's clear that was kind of going on anyway. There's also the argument that 

  Reveal hidden contents

Kellhus's realisation that at some point the No-God and Consult will win because of how time works on Earwa, so at that point it could be argued that Kellhus's attempts to fight the Consult are self-defeating and he might as well have imposed peace on the Three Seas and simply hung out and let humanity have a few more decades of peace before the apparently-inevitable end, not pushed them into a war that will kill millions and trigger the Second Apocalypse earlier than would otherwise be the case.

 

I think any good commander or wartime politician has to be a bit of a bastard.

[C.T. Phipps]

On 8/6/2021 at 1:19 AM, The_Lone_Wolf said:

Morals exist? 

Yes, unless you don't believe ideas do. Frankly, if you remove consciousness from the equation, we can't prove the material world exists.

[TheLastWolf]

53 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Frankly, if you remove consciousness from the equation, we can't prove the material world exists.

Everything is subjective. But I agree.