I am perhaps one of the few people who likes it when the villain wins. One of my favorite films of all time is No Country for Old Men and I like it for this very reason. The villain does atrocious things and gets away and even kills the main hero of the film.
For some reason I cannot appreciate characters unless they are depraved and this especially goes for fantasy works where characters are given super human powers yet retain their moral behavior which I find to be utterly ludicrous.
Am I alone on this?
Ah i find that the villains are always far more interesting characters in general than the heroes. They so often have fascinating psychology and backstories that lead them to where they are.
Heroes are so often just 'dumb and good-looking', having a very naive simplistic moral sense.
Having said that, the villains still need to loose
. What makes them so interesting and appealing is their decent into darkness, loss of who they once were, the 'normality' of their past life left behind them. Their very life story is a metaphorical 'death' in itself, which makes their ultimate failure/ actual death befitting/destined to all that they are.
I mean a 'happy ever after' for the villain is just paradoxical, and not possible
There is always an 'ok so what next?'. They are self-destructively persistent such that the only true end to their story must be failure/death.
I am reminded of that Dark Knight quote '
you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain'.
The villain always therefore has a good and interesting backstory, often with them beginning as heroic. It seems such 'classical heroes' are rooted in innocence and youth, whereas the villain is forged out of long experience.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about what traits are generally presented as heroic or villainous, and why they are.
Why is the hero so often young, good-looking, naive etc.? Sometimes I think we place desirable/attractive human traits onto the hero, and confuse them with what in fact defines ‘heroic’.
With generations of kids growing up thinking that what makes a hero is muscles, a strong jaw, white teeth smile, charisma with the ladies etc. This ‘confused’ stereotype portrayal of a ‘hero’ is why I so often dislike them. These traits are given to the character so that he is ‘liked’ by the readers/viewers, making him not much more than a popularity contest winner. This shallow character make-up always annoys me a bit. We deserve a better class of hero!
