Question Why do people like evil/ruthless/a hole protagonists?

Discussion in 'Novel General' started by Ibiskool, Jun 30, 2020.

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  1. defry

    defry Well-Known Member

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    It was interesting as it challenged my perspective on what is evil & what is not. It was also interesting as it shows that humans can be monsters & we humans can become or understand such monsters.
     
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  2. evarcrazy89

    evarcrazy89 Active Member

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    I enjoy book with evil protagonist like broken empire series or any book of joe abercrombie, they are multifaceted character that grow till the end of story. Not so much with most of evil web novel mc, they are just asshole doing whatever they want and being rewarded for it by the world and writer.
     
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  3. All The Wrong Novels

    All The Wrong Novels Well-Known Member

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    I've written about this extensively elsewhere, but I notice there are a few different things people can sometimes mean when talking about evil or ruthless protagonists.

    Evil/Selfish - A true evil protagonist is one who wants special rules for themselves alone and doesn't acknowledge the humanity of others and the fact they're working towards their own goals too, but only interacts with others insofar as they're a means to achieving their own goals.

    Ruthless World - This is more where the standards of the world is that sparing someone means that they get their powerful uncle to kill your family, so good characters either learn to follow the standards of the world or get taken advantage of. There's nothing particularly evil about this, since when someone isn't open to acknowledging your humanity, you're under no obligation to acknowledge them back, and I can see the appeal of a wanting to see a world that's more high stakes and requires a lot of calculating. But its not necessarily evil as long as the protagonist is only ruthless towards those who warrant it.

    Loner MC - This is just someone who is focused on their individual cultivation and prefers not to start up too many engagements with others, as long as they acknowledge others in situations where they do cooperate though its not necessarily bad.

    I don't seek out evil protagonists so I don't know how many true ones there are, most of the stuff I read in standard cultivation novels is just Ruthless World or Loner MC stuff, although sometimes they do push boundaries a bit having characters be excessively ruthless in situations where they probably don't need to be too worried, or sometimes being selfish in minor ways, scamming random people, but not doing anything too life-ruining.

    I can see the appeal of the latter two sometimes, but in general I don't get why people people express interest in seeking out "Evil" MCs (I dunno if they actually mean Evil in the selfish sense, or if they just mean stuff that's very violent and ruthless). People have sociality built into them on a deep level, (that's why you read about humans cultivating and getting into fights, but most probably wouldn't read 1000s of chapters of two tornadoes randomly getting super big and powerful and breaking apart random mountains and stuff.) A character can form healthy relationships without being a pushover or taken advantage of, it just takes situational awareness of how to act with who, any kind of complex building of any kind of clan or sect requires healthy cooperation, taking advantage people or forcing them into help is not realistically sustainable.

    A lot of action webnovels I read suffers from not knowing how to develop interesting interactions between characters, and so you get thousands of chapters of characters being in danger and figuring a way out, and when they run through the simple patterns they just have the MC move on and meet new people rather than build on past interactions. This is why I think a lot of the endings can feel disappointing or hollow, because you're getting strung along by simple plot hooks of adding/relieving tension and in the end it doesn't amount to much. A lot of cultivation novels can write the struggle to survive and maybe protect the few close to them, but can't write what the characters would actually do if they were safe/comfortable for a moment and just had normal social interactions for a while, so you get abrupt endings where the big evil is stopped or the character reaches the highest super level, and then it ends. Everything is premised around not relaxing have anything settled until you get to the end goal, but then they can't write what's it all for, they just relieve the final source of tension and the story ends.

    If more recent action authors could establish interesting relationships between characters, the tension would mean more and the endings would be much more satisfying, so I'd like to see the genre push towards people with basic social skills, rather than evil stuff, but of course they can still have ruthless worlds and stuff if done right.
     
  4. ToastedRossi

    ToastedRossi Well-Known Member

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    I think that the answer reveals itself if you look at the "I'm Looking For..." forum. You'll see requests for ruthless/evil characters paired with ones for no romance and making logical choices all the time. Why the convergence? I hypothesize that there's quite a bit of self-inserting going on where the readers are putting themselves (too much) into the shoes of the protagonist. These readers want him to succeed at all costs and one of the main ways they imagine it is by taking advantage of people as much as possible. There's also a degree of reaction against social norms going on.

    Nope, the OP is correct. The reasoning is quite simple: villain protagonists are a lot harder to write than the regular variety so unless only the top writers tackle them, there are going to be a lot of weaker writers doing so. Combine story mechanics that are hard to pull off with weak writers, and it's inevitable that a lot of these protagonists are going to be terrible. One common pitfall is that these books tend to need reader buy-in; the reader has to want to see the protagonist succeed. But when said character is designed to be unsympathetic that buy-in is hard to maintain so the story ends up being a slog to read.

    While I'm not the biggest fan of villain protagonists, I think that they can be decent from time to time. However, because they're so hard to write even good writers can screw up the execution so finding good ones is very difficult. This is one of the reasons why I've had 欧皇崛起 on hiatus for the longest time. I keep coming back to it because it has a fascinating setting and it's full of great ideas, but the protagonist is so repulsive that I can only stand it for short stretches.
     
  5. Effugium

    Effugium [Investigator], Praise Shigure-sama

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    May i know which part of him do you think showed he is a hypocrite? I never really got that impression while reading it
     
  6. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    1. this is still subjective
    2. harder to write for writers =/= less interesting to read for readers. 'good' protagonists can often come off as more boring or dumb: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsBoring https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb, since to be 'good' they have to do as much 'moral' actions as possible, whereas eviler protagonist aren't limited like that.
    this might be the case, more skilled writers are often more daring in what they choose to write.
    redundant point because there are a lot of weaker writers writing 'good' protagonists too.
    we're only talking about the protagonist on this thread, not the story itself, so your logic isn’t really relevant: lot of readers can like a character without being invested in the story: for example, just reading to see the how amazing the character is and how perfectly protagonist accomplishes things character even if the story doesn't completely make sense by our world's logic.
    weak writers would obviously write unlikeable/boring characters whether the characters are good/evil, so this is redundant
    inevitably, a lot of stories are going to be terrible so this point is also redundant.
    sympathy & goodness =/= likability as a character
    for example on this this thread: https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/what-makes-a-good-mc-from-readers-your-perspective.102639/ there is only 1 vote for relatability (out of 56), and zero votes for righteousness.

    ...huh? I just noticed your posts on that thread while re-reading: https://forum.novelupdates.com/posts/5522944/ (I swear I wasn’t stalking you), and your points at that time strongly contradicts your points now.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2020
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  7. evarcrazy89

    evarcrazy89 Active Member

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    Personally i like protagonist that have character growth during the course of the story, growth implies a positive progression to become a better person in some way. Evil character with no moral compass don't even have a need to improve or fix their character, that is what make them boring, predictable and shallow to me, their priority just don't change just them self or at most people close to them. There's a reason why mainstream media like movie and book almost never have an evil/immoral guy as a main character, most people will root for the good guy over the bad guy, they are just simply more likable, people like story where good triumph over evil.
     
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  8. Nimroth

    Nimroth Someone

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    A character having more options within the story doesn't necessarily make them less predictable to the reader though.
    It may mean they are less predictable to other characters, but the reader has insight to the characters personality, and if that personality is single-minded towards a specific goal only(good or bad), then that often have more impact on predictability than if the character can freely chose to do good or bad deeds.
     
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  9. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    I was referring more to the means the character uses to accomplish their goal, instead of the character's eventual goal: good characters would typically use only good methods to accomplish their eventual good goal, evil characters can use both good and evil methods to accomplish an eventual evil/selfish goal: a good example is how most readers didn't foresee how dantalian would convince marbas in volume 5 of dungeon defense.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2020
  10. Nimroth

    Nimroth Someone

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    I wasn't talking about their goal being predictable though, I was talking about that the reader knowing their goal can make their actions predictable despite there being more varied options.
    Of course there are exceptions to that, but that depends on writing skill more than if the character is good or bad.
     
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  11. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    yes, obviously writing skill matters more case by case, but I was replying to Ibiskool in a general sense throughout stories because he made an extremely controversial statement in the opening
     
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  12. Kamuizin

    Kamuizin Well-Known Member

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    Wish satisfaction most of the time.

    they can’t do that in real society, so they project that dark side in the novels they read.
     
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  13. ToastedRossi

    ToastedRossi Well-Known Member

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    What? That's stupid. There's all sorts of things that good people can do given a particular situation. That he is a good person should only be a small facet of his personality and it's the totalityof who he is that should push him into action. If you think that being good means an inability to take different courses of action then you really need to broaden your horizons.

    Being harder to write means that it's a writing concept that is harder to pull off regardless of the author's skill. We can plug in random numbers so a weak writer has a 5% chance of writing a good villain protagonist, he might have a 25% chance of writing a good heroic protagonist. Given that, that writer is going to produce a lot more good books of one kind than the other. In terms of sheer proportion, we can safely say that it'd be better if he stayed far away from villain protagonists until he gets a lot better at his craft.

    So what? People like questionable things all the time. There's a reason why rape fetishes and NTR have their fans. My point is that it's just a lot less likely for a book with a villain protagonist to be a quality work.

    Did you read what I wrote? My point wasn't that such characters were less likable. It was that it's harder to write them in a way to create buy-in from the reader. And it's about empathy and sympathy more than a matter of likability to begin with.

    Where's the contradiction? My point then was that the problem with villain protagonists is that they're harder to write well. How does that differ from what I wrote in this thread?
     
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  14. Chuki Yuuki

    Chuki Yuuki *lags in reading but keep farming in games*

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    Frankly it is a fresh breath from the 'norm' of protagonists (who may not exactly be a saint or a really goody but just represents the general good) and that it reflects that evil/ruthless/ a- hole people just have their own moral compass and own views of right and wrong and they are very, umm, ruthless and decisive in stating those or putting their beliefs into action. And while those protags have an 'evil' personality, they have an aim that is for the betterment for the or their people anyway and that's what makes them all so interesting.
     
  15. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    I'm saying ‘evil’ characters have 'more variety' of choices than ‘good’ characters: even if a good person can have 8 different choices in a certain situation, an evil person would probably have at least 9 different choices: the extra choice may involve really evil things like massacring innocent people, because if a 'good' guy starts kills innocents, it would be very hard for the story to justify that they are still 'good'.

    1. writing well =/= math formula, many authors write what they know, or at least what they feel like they can write better: so many authors who write evil protagonists would probably be better at writing evil than good, or at least the difference isn't that big.
    2. I think you're misunderstanding, I was saying your suggestion 'unless only the top writers tackle them' might be accurate/partially accurate so you bringing up weak writer writing 'evil' characters is irrelevant to that comment
    Did you even read what I wrote? Did you even read what this thread is about?

    I and this thread were only talking about whether evil protagonists are likeable, not about the quality of the story. Since you're insistent on discussing something off-topic, I suggest you create your own thread to discuss it because I don’t feel like discussing it here.

    I'll leave you with these parting words:

    READ MORE CAREFULLY next time so you don't start meaningless debates again.
     
    Last edited: Jul 1, 2020
  16. Nimroth

    Nimroth Someone

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    That argument doesn't really make sense, you are kind of admitting that the good character still have the evil options but rarely used, but you could just as well say that there are some good options that the evil character would rarely use, the actual variety of choice isn't that much different.
    Seems to me like you are just conflating the use of the evil options as more variety just because they are flashier than some of the good options.
     
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  17. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    no, because if a evil person uses 'good' options often, but still have an eventual very evil goal, they are still evil.
     
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  18. Nimroth

    Nimroth Someone

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    My whole point is that just because an evil character does good deeds to benefit an evil goal doesn't mean the character has all the options of the good character.
    Or are you saying that you expect the evil character to also do all the stuff that doesn't benefit him in any way at all and are out of his character?
     
  19. JIKI

    JIKI Well-Known Member

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    yes, because of evil virtues https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilVirtues , and to make the evil protagonist seem good in the eyes of possible onlookers: if protagonist is genre savvy enough he'll know there could be someone hidden in the background who have seen his actions already

    Also, evil protagonist may believe in karma so want to accumulate some extra good deeds so when he actually goes through with his main goals, he has luck on his side, but protagonist simply doesn't think his main goals are evil (which readers would all disagree with)

    of course, as readers we can narrow the likely options down from the total options by analyzing protagonists' established character, but evil protagonists generally still have a few more options than good protagonists even after narrowing the options down.
     
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  20. Night Ghost

    Night Ghost Well-Known Ghost Member

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    I think it would be better if you read my review. and well... it's just my opinion.

    even medici said that klein is a hypocrite much later on when they were preparing to release gate/door
     
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