There is a terribly thin line between an anti-hero and a straight-up villain. It’s a line that Craig Schaefer admirably straddles in his Daniel Faust series. Faust is our protagonist in the books, and he reads a bit like a knock-around hero at first. As time goes by, though, you realize that this guy is no kind of hero. He’s a magic-fueled criminal. And he’s not some soft-shoe criminal who only commits crimes that don’t hurt anyone.
He’s a sometimes grifter, sometimes street hustler, sometimes thief, and occasionally a thug for hire. He’s routinely violent, up to and including murder. In other words, this is the guy you expect your hero to fight. So, how do you take a guy with his moral compass pointing due west and make him a protagonist? Just as importantly, why would you want to?
Making a guy like this sympathetic takes a bit of dancing in terms of plotting and character development. The antagonist or antagonists in the story must be demonstrably worse than him. Their demonstrable worse-ness must generally happen on the page. Their goals must either be sufficiently evil in themselves or require a level of evil that makes your protagonist’s misdeeds pale in comparison. In essence, you need to set up the conflict in such a way that readers look at the protagonist and think, “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to invite that guy to a barbecue, but I would gladly dump high-proof liquor on the people he’s squaring off against if I saw them on fire.”
The trickier question for a lot of writers is why you would want a central character like that in the first place. Why not pick a more traditional hero? It comes down to latitude. Book and film storytelling has progressed enough over the decades that we’re generally willing to accept a certain level of violence from heroes. Heroes can beat people up. If necessary, heroes can even kill. On the whole, though, we expect a certain degree of restraint from heroes.
With a small handful of exceptions, Superman could kill most of his antagonists out of hand. Giving him that extraordinary level of power means balancing it out with an extraordinary level of restraint. If he just offed every bad guy he ran across, he’d look abusive and tyrannical. We wouldn’t see him as a hero. That dramatically circumscribes the range of actions available to him. It also limits the ways a writer can resolve the central problem in the story.
When your protagonist would be the bad guy in literally any other story, those limitations largely vanish. Your character can be charming and even kind in some ways, but you can also have them shoot out someone’s kneecaps to get information without violating the reader’s expectations. You can have them throw someone off a building as an object lesson. They can commit crimes for personal enrichment as part of the plot and readers will just nod along with it because, hey, he is a criminal.
It also frees up the protagonist to say things that you just cannot have a legitimate hero say. If someone is rude to a hero, we expect them to just take it or try to defuse the situation. An anti-hero, on the other hand, can shoot off at the mouth with something like, “If you speak to me that way again, I’m going to gut you with a nine iron.” It’s kind of amusing, kind of horrifying, and upends the expected social conventions. Plus, it’s sort of entertaining for writers to dream up these kinds of lines. In short, using an anti-hero as your protagonist creates opportunities that you don’t get with more traditional good guys.
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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.
SHAMELESS ADVERT: If you like Harry Dresden or John Constantine, you’ll love THE MIDNIGHT GROUND. READ IT NOW!
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