Heroes and Antiheroes
And Anti-Villains While We’re At It
Welcome to writing, where words mean the opposite of what they mean sometimes. This is called irony, or using words to mean something other than what they actually mean. Nothing mentioned in the Alanis Morrisette song is ironic in that sense of the word, but using the word ironic to describe the things she talks about in her song is an ironic use of the word ironic. The Robot Devil from Futurama and I are both sticklers for the correct meaning of irony. We actually have a lot of things in common. We both want our hands back.
I begin thus because you would think this is as simple as saying, an antihero is the opposite of a hero; that is, a villain. Indeed no, the antihero is not a villain. So an antihero is the protagonist when the protagonist is not the hero? Also no. Antiheroes are one of my favorite types of character.
Actually I’m going to back up and begin with hyphens because I know some people will have this question: Why is antihero spelled without a hyphen and anti-villain is spelled with a hyphen? Linguistically, when first you make a new word out of two words or a word and a prefix, they start out more separate and move closer together over time. For instance pigeon hole become pigeon-hole and then eventually pigeonhole as its second meaning—as a small compartment for storage or, metaphorically, a category for something abstract, rather than a nesting place for pigeons—became more and more commonly used in the language. Antihero is recognized by Merriam-Webster as a word because we use it so much. Anti-villain hasn’t made it yet.
Not every style manual handles hyphenation the same way but the ones that govern this type of writing mostly do. That’s a whole thing I should write about some other time.
Today’s article will cover heroes and villains, antiheroes and anti-villains, and protagonists and antagonists.
Okay actually one more time I’m going to back up and start from an even earlier point, this time in seventeenth-century Greece. It’s not unusual for me to be this scattered. Don’t be alarmed, this is normal.
The modern English word agonist comes from the Greek word agōnistēs, meaning, a contestant. Someone who competes in a game. Today, this word is used by itself in biochemistry when we talk about a chemical that combines with a receptor to produce a reaction. For example, OX40 agonists are a class of drugs (currently in murine trials) that enhance the antitumor immune response by binding with CD134 (OX40 receptor or tumor necrosis factor receptor [TNFR] superfamily member 4).
People are always telling me they want to quit their day job but I learn a lot of neat stuff at mine. Listen: That murine means relating to mice as canine means relating to dogs and bovine means relating to cows is the most useful information in today’s Shelf Life so if you’re tired you can stop now and you already learned something neat. Antitumor specifically does not have a hyphen.
Anyway, an agonist is someone or something that acts on or competes against something else. That’s where we come by the words protagonist and antagonist. It’s fitting that they have a Greek origin because those folks have a long and glorious storytelling history. The protagonist of a story is its leading or most prominent actor, the one who competes against the antagonist. The main character. The antagonist is the most prominent character that foils the protagonist or counteracts them.
That doesn’t mean that the hero is the protagonist and the villain is the antagonist. These terms aren’t all synonymous. A hero means a character who undergoes trials and tribulations and battles them with qualities that are considered heroic in context of the audience’s intended culture. For instance, in A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman, Ove is both the story’s protagonist and it’s hero. Although he’s curmudgeonly and brusque, he demonstrates many of the qualities we find heroic in the present day: He’s dedicated to his family, he is a hard worker even in retirement, he helps his neighbors even though he has a lot of begrudging remarks about it—he even ran into a burning house at one point to save someone. That’s an example of a hero who is also a protagonist.
The classic counterexample is Lolita, in which the protagonist is also the novel’s villain: Humbert Humbert, a pedophile, marries a woman to gain access to her twelve-year-old child and then, when his wife dies, he whisks Lolita away to a place where no one knows who they are so we can pass her off as his own daughter and prey on her in secret. There has never been any culture in which Humbert Humbert’s actions would be considered heroic or noble. The hero and antagonist of Lolita is Clare Quilty, a friend of the deceased wife and mother, who pursues Humbert across the country and eventually retrieves Lolita from his captivity.
The hero and the protagonist of most stories is the same character, but it need not always be so. Likewise, the antagonist is usually the villain but not always. Another example from popular culture of a villain protagonist is Walter White from Breaking Bad. He’s usually cited as an antihero but, actually, he’s an anti-villain, as I’ll explain later. He’s only the hero of the story in his own mind.
To recap, a hero is someone (in real life or in fiction) who conquers adversity through deeds and personal qualities that are considered heroic in the context of their culture or society. A villain is someone who engages in devious deeds and exhibits morally bankrupt personal qualities. A protagonist is the main character of a story and the antagonist is the character who opposes them, their adversary.
An antihero on the other hand, is a character who is allied with the hero or heroes of the story—they are acting to bring about the same positive conclusion, whatever that is, as the heroes—but does not exhibit heroic personal qualities. This is someone who is doing the right thing, but for selfish reasons or perhaps in accordance with their own ethical or moral code, which does not agree and align with the dominant culture’s ethics and morals. Note that a character in the role of protagonist and hero who is rude is not necessarily an antihero. Taking a stock hero character and giving them some strong language or a little light womanizing does not make them an antihero. Geralt from The Witcher (of page, screen, and, uh, video game), for example, is a hero in spite of his propensity for spouting the F word and falling into bed with ever sorceress he encounters.
An antihero is someone who is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. An anti-villain, on the other hand, is a character who is doing the wrong things but for the right reasons: A character who has heroic aims like pursuing justice or protecting their family or their country, but who takes villainous actions to achieve their goals. Walter White, as I mentioned earlier, fits the bill. He receives a terminal diagnosis and wants to ensure his family will financially comfortable after he is gone. That’s his heroic goal. Turning to methamphetamine production and distribution is one of the many villainous actions he takes to achieve it. This villain is also known as a sympathetic villain. For obvious reasons, I think.
Here are the Cliff’s Notes thus far:
Protagonist—main character
Antagonist—main character’s adversary
Hero—ethically good, heroic actions
Villain—ethically bad, villainous actions
Antihero—ethically bad, heroic actions
Anti-villain—ethically good, villainous actions
To wrap up, I want to share a few variations on the antihero theme from literary history. When you go to school for four years to get a degree in reading books and talking about them, as I did, you pick up all kinds of random stuff. You don’t need to pay for it though I give all that random stuff away for free in here. I not using this information for anything else. This is me doing my part to devalue college education in the United States by giving away all the interesting stuff I learned for free. Support Shelf Life’s mission by removing unnecessary bachelors’ degrees from your job ads today.
Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero in Romantic literature is so-named because he prominently appeared in the work of Byron. That’s capital-R Romantic, meaning the Romantic period in British Literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; not lowercase-r romantic, like a modern-day romance novel. Did you know that Modern, in literature, refers to the period from around 1900 to 1965 and not, you know, right now? That’s what I meant at the start by words not meaning what they’re supposed to mean. Sometimes I want to take the whole Modernist movement and just like pat them on the head like “bless your heart, well it was modern when you named it dear.”
Sorry, Byron embodied this kind of dark, brooding, educated intellectual that polite society didn’t like very much. Someone embroiled in social and romantic intrigues. He is difficult to like and has obsessive tendencies, but his actions are usually heroic at the end of the day. The Brontë sisters gave us two of our classic Byronic heroes, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (Emily) and Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre (Charlotte). There were three Brontë sisters. Did you know there was also an Anne?
Overall, the Byronic Hero is less interesting and important than Byron’s other contribution to the literary world, which was providing a workspace for Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
Gothic Double
The Gothic double is a principle that emerged from Gothic literature in the eighteenth century to refer to a character whose an internal struggle between good and evil drives them. A classic example of a Gothic double is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: A character who is essentially at war with themself, with good winning sometimes and evil winning sometimes. A modern-day example of this is Bruce Banner/The Hulk from Marvel’s comics and movies, where Banner represents the superego and Hulk represents the id.
Typically, the Gothic double appears as an antihero or an anti-villain due to the complex nature of their conflict. Taking Banner as an example, he goes to great lengths to contain the part of him that he sees as a dangerous monster, even though the actions he takes to protect others from the dangerous Hulk are often morally questionable—like shooting himself in the head or creating a potentially world-ending AI to avoid the necessity of using his Hulk side.
Superfluous Man
The superfluous man of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature deserves a spot on this list, too. This is an peculiar little character archetype. The superfluous man, like the Byronic hero, is often a wealthy, well-educated, brooding intellectual layabout who wastes his time on romantic intrigue and existential crises. He has many of the qualities needed to be a great man but can find no great cause to put them toward. This is a hero without a cause, someone wasting away their potential because their circumstances and environment don’t call them to anything greater. The best example I can think of is Pechorin, from Lermontov’s A Hero of His Time. Pechorin wretches from page to page, occasionally thinking about doing something with his life and then reconsidering, “what would be the point, nothing matters and everything dies.”
Before I go, it would be remiss not to nod to Neal Stephenson on the topic of heroes and protagonists, as the hero and protagonist of his famous novel, Snowcrash, is the pizza deliverator Hiro Protagonist. Stephenson is the only writer of all time ever to say exactly what he meant using the correct words, if only that once.
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I’m a perennial sucker for a good anti-hero.