The "Anti-Villain"?

[Eltharon]

I would say an Anti-Villian would be a person who is thinking they are doing good when they are doing evil (Like the above Paladin, like Javert in Les Miserables, etc). From a quick glance at them, they are good guys, but when you take a closer look, you see that they, well, arent. I think thats what most people are saying here anyway.

 

[shilsen]

A Hero is a Hero. An Anti-Hero, while a scoundrel, is still a Hero.

Similarly, an Anti-Villain must still be a villain, and that doesn't quite cover the Tragic Hero. Perhaps that's what I described, but as I said, I think my initial definition was lacking.

And while we're at it, what's a Tragic Villain?

You're into highly semantic ground here. I'd say Tragic Protagonist is a lot easier a term to use, since Hero and Villain have positive/negative connotations, and you can have tragic protagonists who are heroes, villains, or smack of both.

Macbeth, for example, is a tragic protagonist who's also a villain, as is arguably Richard III. Hamlet, I would argue, is a tragic protagonist who's a hero (though more than a few people consider him fairly villainous too). Brutus and Othello are tragic protagonists who have been viewed as having heroic and villainous characteristics.

And that's just with Shakespeare. Throw your net further afield and there are a lot of tragic protagonists who are heroic or villainous, and sometimes both, often depending on perspective.

 

[jdrakeh]

The purpose was to figure out what an Anti-Villain was.

Ah, well. . . how about this. . .

The anti-villain is the converse of the anti-hero (i.e., an individual who pursues a noble goal, though often employs ignoble means to reach it). As such, the anti-villain pursues undeniably villanous goals, but employs arguably noble methods to achieve them. Ultimately, it's the primary motivation that differentiates the anti-hero from the anti-villain.

Detective Vic Mackey from the television series "The Shield" is a corrupt policeman who seeks to illegally enrich his own life, though does so by way of incarcerating or exposing other criminals. As such, Detective Mackey serves as an archetypical anti-villain.

If Mackey's primary motivation was to protect and serve, with his illegal activities being the means to said end, he'd be an anti-hero. As it happens, though, the illegal self-enrichment is his primary motivation (and ultimate goal), with his arrests and evidence seizures being the means to that end. As such, he's an anti-villain.

 

[Kunimatyu]

An anti-villain is the authority figure just doing their job who nonetheless makes life difficult for the Hero.

Typically, the audience bonds with an Anti-Hero when he's put up against an anti-villain in the first five minutes of the movie.

Bill Lumbergh in Office Space is an anti-villain; he's not actually a bad guy, just a boss with a few annoying personality tics, but we hate him anyways.

 

[jdrakeh]

I see a tendency in this thread for heroes to be identified solely as protagonists, with villains being identified solely as antagonists. In literature and film, this is not always the case -- there are plenty of "bad" protagonists (Cugel comes to mind, as does nearly the entire cast of Ocean's 11) and arguably "good" antagonists (Al Pacino's character in Heat, for example). Protagonists aren't always heroes, nor are antagonists always villains.

 

[Umbran]

If you want a villain who really isn't a bad person, but has to do villainous things regardless, all the main characters from Villains By Necessity, by Eve Forward. In it, the forces of Good have finally won. And it turns out there's... issues that arise from this that some folks have to deal with.

It read very much like Ms. Forward played in a rather entertaining D&D campaign...

 

[rgard]

I wouldn't consider Baltar to be an anti-villain. He's utterly self-serving in everyway. He just manages to be likeable. He's more of an anti-hero.

For an example of an anti-villain, see Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series.

Spoiler:

Spoiler

Everyone loathes him, but he continues to act fairly honestly and for the good of his kingdom. Only to see people hate him for it even more. And then pretty much everything he cares for slowly crumbles around him into total failure.

We just envy Baltar his bed-mates. Seriously, he's a villian in my book.

 

[rgard]

If you think how the WW2 German general Manfred Rommel was commonly thought of by the British who opposed him, I'd say there was a good anti-villain. Maybe Robert E Lee as thought of by the US Civil War Union forces, likewise.

I like both those examples.

 

[Yalius]

I'd say an excellent anti-villain would be Satan, from Piers Anthony's For Love of Evil, in the Incarnations of Immortality series. He's a good person who fulfills the necessities of being the most evil being imaginable.

 

[Darth Shoju]

I think Ozzymandias from The Watchmen fits the description for the most part.