Your Favorite Fictional Character Might Be a Terrible Person

Your Favorite Fictional Character Might Be a Terrible Person

Being a great character and being a good person are two completely different things.

There is something funny about the way we talk about fictional characters. We will watch someone manipulate their friends, destroy lives, betray the people closest to them, or casually ruin an entire city, and then spend twenty minutes explaining why they were actually justified. “He had a difficult childhood.” “She was protecting the people she loved.” “They pushed him too far.” Sometimes those explanations are completely valid. But explaining why someone became terrible is not the same thing as proving they aren't terrible.

That distinction gets especially blurry when the character is exceptionally well written. A character can be charismatic, intelligent, funny, tragic, or incredibly compelling while still being someone you would absolutely hate to know in real life. In fact, some of fiction's most fascinating characters work precisely because they force us to separate those things. We can understand someone without approving of them, sympathize with them without defending them, and love watching them without pretending they would make a good friend.

We Confuse Being Interesting With Being Good

Fiction has a strange advantage over reality: we get access to people's heads. We know what a character fears, what they lost, what they want, and what they tell themselves when nobody else is around. That information changes the way we judge them because understanding someone's motivations naturally makes them feel more human.

Imagine meeting someone in real life who constantly lies to their friends, manipulates people into doing what they want, and hurts anyone who gets in their way. You probably wouldn't need three seasons of television to decide whether you liked them. Give that same person a tragic backstory, an incredible soundtrack, a few memorable lines, and hours of screen time showing exactly how they became that way, and suddenly the conversation becomes much more complicated.

That is one of fiction's greatest strengths. Stories can make us understand people we would never tolerate in real life. The problem begins when understanding a character becomes an excuse for defending everything they do. You can understand Walter White without believing he was right. You can sympathize with Tony Soprano without pretending he was a decent man. You can admire Lelouch's intelligence without ignoring the consequences of his plans. You can enjoy Light Yagami as a character while recognizing that his idea of justice eventually becomes something much closer to absolute power.

The contradiction is not a flaw. It is the interesting part.

Charisma Is One Hell of a Drug

Some fictional characters get away with almost anything because they are incredibly charismatic. Writers understand that audiences naturally gravitate toward people who are confident, funny, intelligent, competent, or simply impossible to ignore. Give a character enough presence and enough memorable moments, and viewers can start forgiving behavior they would condemn immediately if another character did the same thing.

That is why villains so often become fan favorites. It is also why antiheroes can become more popular than the traditional heroes standing against them. We enjoy watching people who know exactly what they want, especially when they have the confidence and ability to pursue it. There is something inherently satisfying about watching a character walk into a room and take control of it, even when we know that person is probably a terrible human being.

This is where fandom can get strange. A character does something horrible, and instead of discussing why the writing makes that moment interesting, the conversation becomes an attempt to prove that the character wasn't actually wrong. Suddenly every betrayal has a justification, every murder has a reason, and every terrible decision becomes somebody else's fault. The character stops being morally complicated and becomes a defendant with an internet legal team.

But you don't have to defend a character to enjoy them.

The "He Had a Point" Problem

A character can have a legitimate point and still be completely wrong about what they choose to do with it. That distinction gets lost constantly, especially when a villain identifies a genuine problem before the heroes do.

A corrupt government can really be corrupt. A broken society can really be broken. Ordinary people can genuinely be suffering. A character can correctly identify all of those things and still make disastrous decisions afterward. Being right about the problem does not automatically make every solution morally acceptable.

This is what makes morally complicated characters so interesting. They often don't begin with completely ridiculous beliefs. They begin with something understandable and gradually take that belief further than anyone should. The desire for justice becomes revenge. The desire for safety becomes control. The desire to protect people becomes an excuse to decide everything for them.

Eventually, the character can find themselves doing things they would have condemned earlier in their own story. The fascinating part is that they usually don't believe they have become the villain. They keep finding reasons why the next decision is necessary, until they are standing at the end of a very long road still insisting that everything was done for a reason.

That is far more interesting than someone who simply wakes up one morning and decides they want to be evil.

Trauma Explains People. It Doesn't Erase Their Choices.

This is probably one of the easiest traps for audiences to fall into. Give a character a tragic childhood, a dead parent, years of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, or some other devastating experience, and suddenly everything they do becomes easier to forgive.

A tragic backstory absolutely matters. It can explain why a character thinks the way they do, why they distrust people, why they crave control, or why they respond to certain situations with extreme behavior. But explaining a person's actions and excusing those actions are two different things.

Otherwise, every morally complicated character becomes a simple equation: something terrible happened to them, therefore everything they do afterward is understandable. Fiction is usually more interesting than that. Two characters can experience similar pain and respond in completely different ways. One might decide that nobody else should experience what they went through, while another decides that everyone else deserves to suffer too.

The wound might explain where the character started. Their choices determine where they end up.

That distinction is important because it allows characters to have genuine agency. They can be shaped by their circumstances without being completely controlled by them. They can be victims of terrible things while still becoming responsible for terrible things themselves.

Some of Our Favorites Would Be Horrible to Know

This might be the funniest part of the whole conversation. We talk about fictional characters as though we would actually want them in our lives, but many of our favorites would be absolute nightmares to know.

You probably don't want Homelander anywhere near your family. You probably don't want Walter White anywhere near your finances. You probably shouldn't trust Light Yagami with your real name. And if someone like Hannibal Lecter existed in the real world, saying you would “love to have dinner with him” would suddenly become a much more complicated statement.

Yet that distance is exactly what makes these characters enjoyable. Fiction gives us a safe environment in which we can spend time with people who would be terrifying, exhausting, manipulative, or dangerous in reality. We can admire their intelligence without becoming their victim. We can appreciate their charisma without trusting them. We can even root for them temporarily because watching a terrible person succeed can be incredibly satisfying from a storytelling perspective.

That doesn't necessarily say anything terrible about us. It simply means fiction allows us to explore personalities, decisions, and moral situations that would be much harder to experience in real life.

You Don't Have to Defend Your Favorite Character

Maybe the healthiest way to enjoy fictional characters is to stop treating them like people who need to be defended in court.

You are allowed to love a character and admit that they are awful. You can think a villain is brilliantly written without believing their philosophy is correct. You can understand why someone became cruel without pretending that cruelty is justified. You can even root for a character during a story while recognizing that, if they existed in the real world, you would probably stay as far away from them as possible.

In fact, admitting that a character is terrible can make the character more interesting. Once you stop trying to prove that every action was justified, you can actually examine what the character is doing and why it works so well dramatically. You can ask whether their beliefs changed, whether their circumstances shaped them, whether they crossed a line, and whether they even realized they had crossed it.

The best fictional characters aren't necessarily people we should admire. Sometimes they're people we should understand. Sometimes they're people we should fear. Sometimes they're people whose decisions we completely disagree with but still cannot stop watching.

And sometimes they are all three at once.

That is the beauty of fiction. A great character doesn't need to be a good person. They just need to make you feel something, make you think about something, or make you desperately want to know what they will do next.

So yes, your favorite fictional character might be a terrible person.

Honestly, that's probably part of why you like them.

— Sushi