I hear the word 'antihero' tossed around discussing characters now and then. It seems to mean different things to different people. While I'd like to think that the term originated during the Nineties (with all the baggage that comes from that decade), according to this it originates from a few centuries back.
Some people seem to use the term to describe a bad guy who happens to fill the role of hero in the story. Other people use the term to describe a hero who isn't bright, shiny, and morally perfect; to them, the only real heroes are the perfect ones. I can't think of too many 'perfect' people in fiction, myself; basically, only Raoden from Elantris comes to mind. Maybe Superman, at least when they don't screw the character up?
The quintessential, even definitive, antihero in my mind is Elric of Melnibon, Moorcock's anti-Conan. And I like my definition for an antihero. An antihero is a protagonist that an author hasn't bothered to make likeable or engaging.
That sounds like a condemnation of the concept, and it's true. I hate the idea of antiheroes. Because I hate reading stories where I neither like nor respect the protagonist. And to me, at least, likeability isn't really a measure of ethics or morality, but just personality. The Gray Mouser and Fafhrd are arguably terrible people, just like Elric, but I find them far more likeable (what's really amazing is that I can spell Fafhrd without having to look it up).
Having such a low opinion of antiheroes, or just plain unlikeable protagonists, I tried to make one of the main characters of my fantasy novel No More Kings as engaging and charismatic as possible. Because, well, he's a murderous thug with no value on human life, at least as a general concept. So he's funny, confident, and otherwise likeable. I hope the methods I used work.
There's also talk about the idea of flawed heroes or characters, a concept I don't quite understand. The idea of character flaws only really makes sense if you believe there's some ideal mold from which all people are cast, that we're all striving towards some concept of perfection and falling far short. What would an unflawed character look like, exactly? People have characteristics, some we might like and consider 'good,' others we might dislike and consider 'bad', but I can't imagine what a 'zero defects' individual would look like.
What is this model that people are using, whenever they measure a character against it and determine them to be 'flawed?' Is it their religious figure of choice? Some other fictional character? Themselves*? Seriously, someone help me out here.
I might occasionally use the term 'character flaw' myself, just as a matter of habit after seeing it used by everyone else in the world, but I hate it whenever I catch myself using it.
*Not true. Most people don't really like themselves. Try giving someone a compliment and seeing how quickly they refute it. It's amazing.
For all the delight that the rest of your articles were, I'm afraid this one is, well, codswallop.
ReplyDeleteI'll start from the end: character flaws. Those are NOT MEANT NEGATIVELY. Like you said, everyone has flaws, and so do fictional characters. The current generation of readers wants that matter addressed, it's just simple as that. If you try to make a character that's perfect, you will (in the best case) end up with a very obvious role model, that people will find utterly boring. In the worst case, you'll end up with a character whose flaws are plain as day but never addressed, making the author seem deluded. (Kurokami Medaka... *shudder*)
tl;dr: Characters should face difficulties in life like everyone else.
Now, about the antiheroes. I've seen a lot of such examples; the earliest was a Saitou Hajime from Rurouni Kenshin. I understood the term to mean a character who has his/her own set of morals, some of which might clash with what society expects; that, and s/he's never nice even when being good.
To explain the concept, I thought of this:
Let's suppose there's a truck driving at high speed towards a toddler. Reactions by category:
-> Hero: Dives towards the toddler, saving it at the last moment while sustaining heavy injuries.
-> Antihero: Throws the entire truck in the nearby river, because "its noise annoyed him".
-> Villain: Kills the toddler to protect the truck.
-> Anti-Villain: Rescues the toddler to protect the truck.
...but really, TVTropes explains those better than I do.