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

Did you completely miss the part where I said "out of his character"?
Of course an evil character can do good deeds for the sake of it, but that doesn't mean he will be willing or able to do all kinds of good deeds.

I'm not saying that evil characters are less varied, all I'm saying they don't become automatically more varied just because they are evil.

 

sorry, I edited my earlier comment a few minutes after I posted, so you probably missed this:

I agree:
did you miss the part where I was talking about 'general sense?'

and when I stated: 'would probably have' :

 

I've read your review and i agreed for the most part, except for the hypocrite and grey fog part.

 

And my point is that you are overgeneralizing and using a double standard.
In your initial post you were talking about how good characters are more likely to be to be good all the time, while for evil characters you simply said they can be both good and evil, that is in no way a fair comparision to use likelihood for one and mere possibility for the other.
You could easily flip those two and talk about a evil character being more likely be evil all the time and how a good character can be both good and evil.

 

Incorrect, I already explained that good characters don't have the extra options of doing really evil things like massacring innocent people, because they will cease to be good.

 

Except they do have the option, for example if it is the only way to save even more innocent people.
And it is a fallacy to assume that a character must always remain good or evil throughout a story in the first place, just like a good character can fall, an evil one can repent.

 

this thread is about generalizing, I was just giving stating what

is the general trend

sorry that my wording was confusing, I meant:
good protagonist more likely as something like 80~95% good, 5~20% not too evil

whereas evil protagonist can be as in closer to 50/50, like: 60% evil, 40% good because most evil protagonists aren't complete monsters who are evil for the sake it.

saving/killing people based on numbers is rational logic, but it’s definitely not a ‘good’ logic. 'Good' protagonists don't think like this.

I didn’t make any assumption like that, but your comment has nothing to do with this thread which categorizes evil/ruthless protagonists in the same vein

 

Its kind of a bit of a clunky criteria, partially because what constitutes a "choice" is ill-defined, for example how many choices does a character have of what to name their dog? Infinite choices. For the discussion to proceed seriously we'd have to consider what sort of types of choices we're counting, because there's really no shortage of choices for any kind of character.

Its also questionable why more choices is necessarily a good thing. Generally in a well structured story, there should be fewer choices as you go on, because if the characters make sense and develop in a consistent direction you're cutting off all the options of having them do random things, which is good, because characters doing random things isn't good story. Even if there's a plot twist, there's still a narrowing of choices, it just usually involves a bit of misdirection, developing the story so 2 choices make sense, but 1 choice is what typical readers will expect, the 2nd choice in unexpected but in retrospect the readers see how all the events were leading up to it, and it doesn't feel like the writer was just using cheap surprise tactics.

 

hmmm idk about ahole protagonists but I do like somewhat like evil ones (say antiheroes or straight up bad guys) because I find them more... natural? or maybe human? than goodie two shoes mcs
Not to say goodie two shoes mcs can't be nice once in a while, but I'm not much into marie sues all the time, once in a while they are nice though, and there's a lot of "evil" mcs who don't feel that fleshed out, so in the end, both good and evil are balanced

 

Evil, ruthless protagonists cut through the crap that self-proclaimed goody-two-shoes protagonists (who, in xianxia/xuanhuan often aren't that good anyway since they're almost all murderhobos) get mired in. They don't waste time moralizing with little standing to do so, they don't get the -100 IQ+nosebleed debuff from any moderately attractive female in their vicinity, and, perhaps most importantly of all, they get stuff done.

The easy way to make people feel okay about an evil MC is to regularly pit them against people in the same neighborhood of despicable. The settings and power systems of both Warlock of the Magus World and Reverend Insanity (the two big-hyped amoral protagonist tales talked about around here) require that higher level opponents have climbed to their heights on the backs (and bodies) of a lot of other people. When Leylin or Fang Yuan victimize the hell out of somebody directly, particularly once it's into the higher weight categories, they're usually somewhere on the scumbag scale. There are definite "well that's just collateral damage/necessary evil" parts of the stories, but they're notable incidents because of that, not the norm.

It feels good to see jerks get theirs. Doing evil unto evil is gratifying when you live in a world where institutions and systems shield some of the worst actors out there, and the just/moral/good/right way doesn't seem to get anywhere in dealing with them (a reminder that the "young master gets their comeuppance" trope is in good part a thinly-veiled cathartic release for people who have to bow and scrape in front of the spoiled brat children of CCP apparatchiks in China). That's the engine that keeps evil MC stories able to churn without thoroughly disgusting their audiences. The occasional less-bad victims are something of a reality check for the readers, so you don't overuse them, but they too have their part to play.

That said, there's also an extreme minority of readers who are just pretty sick puppies. I had a reality check on that when I wrote the Orphan Electrocution Party in Devourer of Destiny and got some prods to show it in detail rather than cut away (the vast majority of feedback on the chapter wasn't like that, thankfully). So yes, that's a thing too.

 

Precisely. Books are not roleplaying games and giving a character more choices isn't necessarily a good idea. There are two main reasons for this: the first and most obvious is that the story is only really going to make use of one of them. Whether the character has an option of taking one of three options or one of three hundred isn't particularly meaningful. The other reason is even more important. Literature is about drama, and it is simply a lot more interesting when a character is forced to decide between two terrible things. Giving that character the option to avoid this dilemma is mechanically advantageous but it weakens the drama and makes the story less interesting.

 

The reason is that they are as inmature as those Evil/Ruthless characters.


To say the truth, I was asking myself that question the other day...

I was reading a transmigration-cultivation novel in which the MC; (No names, so no spoilers)
> Decides to be a hunter by his own will, even taking a favour from someone to be recomended as a hunter
> Goes into the builing, the Head welcomes him and gives him the rules of the hunters guilds
>He decides to not read the rules
>Goes to the map and sees a a forest where there is 1 hunter already hunting in it
>Goes to the area and goes apeshit killing a all the small monsters
>Runs into the other hunter
>The other hunter is totally friendly and welcomes him to the hunters, and then proceeds to ask him if he knows anything about a lot of less low level monsters
>MC says it was him
>The hunters says "WTF dude, if you kill a lot of small monsters quickly, it will atract the big ones, causing danger not only to you, but to me that was already here, it was prohibited to do so by the hunter rules" (thing he knew would happend because he thinks about it while his killing the small ones)
>MC says (and I quote): "I don't care"
>Suddenly, 2 big ones appear, just like the hunter there already said could happend because of MCs reckless and toughtless actions
>Both start running, the MC has wings and escapes into the air while the hunter has to run, being it a swamp, she is almost caught, but she jumps and a grabs the foot of the MC with a smirk so they both fly away, no hostility even tho the MC put her and him in danger.
>The MC sees shis, and slashes his most powerful attack the fellow huntress, who falls half dead by the surprise attack and is devoured by the monsters, before he goes and pillages the corpse.

All of this, while the author was furiously jerking off about how cool and badass the MC was while doing this.


And this my friends, has a 4.7/5 (1,274 ratings) in Webnovel.

What. A fucking. Joke.

What kind of psychopath piece of shit do you have to be to read this, and be: "hell yea that my dude" and keep supporting this MC through his jorney? It isn0t about my tolerance to murder or gore, if a character is worthless piece of shit when so be it, but he has to have the consecuences of what he does crash on him, he is to be hold acountable, but in this one no, the fucking author jerking off to it and hardtrying to morally justify the MC.
I was completly thrown off, the MC is suposed to be 47 at this point and comes from Earth, for someone from their world to act like this is already incredibly retarded but someone who comes from earth and should have a more developed set of morals, to come up and do this 14 y/o edgy phase shit blew my fucking mind.

And like that, I was asking myself, who the fuck reads his garbage? Who the fuck is such a worthless human being to support this? And reading some of you here, I now see who reads this, people as inmature and frustrated with themselves and their lives as the MC of that novel, who only behave because of rules obligating them to do so. Who instead of trying to strive for better, blames it on the rest of the world and tries walking a path where only they matter without a look at who they step on.

Pretty sad and pathetic people to say the least.

 

Yeah, I'm not opposed to villain protagonists in principle, and there are a few that I've enjoyed reading. But all too often it feels like these books are written by and meant for people who have no sense of empathy.

 

Catharsis and powerfantasy. Being moral is good and all and usually those "a hole" protags conform with the audiences values in one way or another, but sometimes you just want a bunch of unlikable and unsympathetic fictional people to be knocked down by a laughing OP demigod. At least to escape the complexities of real life (real life doesn't have people as 1-dimensional in their villainy).

 

Evil has multiple spectrums, I believe the one you just described was around the lines of chaotic evil... Aka dumb evil

I mean a decent evil individual would have read the rules, overhunted, keep it a secret and depending on the situation and current objectives sell her a favor and save her in order to raise their reputation as a hunter or let her die and make her seem like the culprit of overhunting while secretly reaping benefits, it could also have been an acceptable method of assassination probably, all while conscious of his actions and thinking ahead, instead that guy just sounds like a random brat not willing to accept the consequences of his actions as opposed to someone evil, I am not saying It's not evil but non premeditated evil actions are kinda meh and just feel random

 

Bear in mind though that heroic characters can still deliver the proper amount of comeuppance. The main difference is that sometimes they have to be creative about it, but being more creative is always good for the story.

 

Too bad no updates for a few days.

 

Some might get annoyed with kind mc sparing villains no matter what,some like a mc that isn't afraid to kill and if they have a op 1 hit attack thy will use it, some just wish they coild be like them.

 

Because that is what we humans are instinctually
Society and rules have curbed that part of us, novels help people relive their inner desires.
You have all these idiots who think paying taxes is a violation of humanity and want total freedom.
Humans are stupid. We are no better from the protagonists in these novels if not for rules and regulations.

I recommend reading about Rules and Regulations(Gu) in the Legends of Ren Zhu from Reverend Insanity.

I have seen people complain about it and calling it fillers. Shows how ignorant they are.