Anti-Hero
An anti-hero is a protagonist who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, morality, or idealism. They often display flawed or morally ambiguous characteristics, making them more relatable and complex. Anti-heroes challenge the conventional notions of heroism and can be found in various literary works, adding depth and nuance to the storytelling.
3 Key excerpts on "Anti-Hero"
eBook - ePubThe New Female Antihero
The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television
- Sarah Hagelin, Gillian Silverman(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...INTRODUCTION The New Female Antihero—The What, the Why, the How The What What is an antihero? In recent years, television scholars have defined this figure (historically male) in terms of his moral ambiguity. Amanda Lotz, for example, describes the antihero as a “flawed protagonist.” She adds, “In many cases they are obviously ‘bad’ men by dominant social and legal, if not moral norms. Yet . .. the series depict them struggling with their responses to circumstances not entirely of their making.” 1 Jason Mittell takes up a similar line of argumentation, identifying the antihero as “a character who is our primary point of ongoing narrative alignment but whose behavior and beliefs provoke ambiguous, conflicted, or negative moral allegiance.” 2 Margrethe Bruun Vaage characterizes antiheroes as “morally flawed main characters” and examines audience engagement with them, asking, “How come we seem willingly to sympathize with characters in fiction we would hardly even like in real life?” 3 While these scholars are focused specifically on the medium of television, they occasionally nod to the long history of the antihero in film and literature, a history that helps us understand this figure with a good deal more specificity. John Fitch III, for example, defines the antihero by thinking through his contrast with the cinematic hero, conceived as “one delivering salvation, enacting positive change, and bringing relief from suffering or oppression.” The traditional hero possesses those traits usually associated with virtue and valor—“emotional, physical, and moral strength as well as charity and fortitude.” 4 By contrast, the antihero lacks both nobility and purpose. He is fundamentally positioned against the social order he occupies...
eBook - ePub- Margrethe Bruun Vaage(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Aesthetic appreciation seems to undermine moral responses – rendering them less relevant somehow. Rosetti’s performance gives me what I desire from a good story. The antihero can borrow something from the melodramatic villain’s performance in this sense. The spectator is invited to take pleasure in and appreciate the very performance in itself, which is often excessive and theatrical. In between a villain and a hero, the spectator’s response to the antihero borrows from the aesthetic appeal of the villain while downplaying the antipathy that traditional villains also trigger. Through various techniques, empathy with the antihero is triggered – by making him recognizably human, similar to me and part of my in-group. Equally important is the fact that the antihero is pleasantly powerful and vengeful, and often also aesthetically pleasing by offering spectacular sequences. Finally, the moral disgust often used to mark proper villains as repulsive is downplayed. 22 Why There Are so Many Series with Antiheroes In his discussion of Hannibal in The Silence of the Lambs as a Nietzschean exploration of the will to power (Taylor 2014) and of the melodramatic villain in The Night of the Hunter as our moral shadow in a Jungian framework (Taylor, unpublished manuscript), Taylor argues that villains serve an important function in that they help the spectator revalue the dominant ethics in our society, namely Judeo-Christian ethics. The villain serves as a trigger for moral reflection. Raney and Janicke make a similar point: we seek out morally complex characters because of the “post-hoc moral scrutiny” that they encourage (Raney and Janicke 2013: 164). One can thus say that at a narrative level, the spectator desires immoral characters in fiction because they give her the opportunity to reflect on, and perhaps even revise, her ethical stance. This argument emphasises the way engagement with fiction can sometimes trigger very deliberate, rational moral evaluation indeed...
eBook - ePubDramatic Story Structure
A Primer for Screenwriters
- Edward J. Fink(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...There might be more than one character who throws obstacles in the way of the protagonist (e.g., the various sea creatures in Finding Nemo), but the one who causes the most difficulty and the last one to be defeated in the end is the antagonist (e.g., humans, the ultimate bad guys, in Finding Nemo). Antagonists are usually one or more of three types: another character, an external force —such as the environment, circumstance, fate, god/s—or an internal force within the protagonist him or herself—the Achilles’ heel that he or she must overcome. Some theorists make this point by stating the three kinds of conflict between protagonist and antagonist this way: human v. human, human v. nature, human v. self. In many cases, the antagonist might be two or all three types. Human v. Human The human antagonist is the personification of the protagonist’s weakness. That is, the antagonist is the flip side, or dark side, of the protagonist. The antagonist has the protagonist’s Achilles’ heel, but he or she has it “in spades.” The antagonist is the protagonist run wild, unleashed and unchecked. He or she is what the protagonist would become if the protagonist did not have—or find during the course of the story—a moral center that keeps him or her from spiraling out of control. This serves a story’s structure well because the protagonist must face his or her own weakness in facing the antagonist. The hero sees his or her own demon in the villain and must first overcome that demon in himelf or herself to defeat the bad guy in the climactic scene. For example, in the Batman franchise of films (Warner Bros.), each bad guy embodies some characteristic of the haunted Batman, but the bad guy has succumbed to psychosis in his or her lust for revenge, while the Batman struggles to keep his inner dark side in check while fighting for the good of Gotham City...
