How to Make Your Hero As Facinating As Your Villain

In the old melodramas, you had a simple dynamic: Villain vs. Good Guy. Generally, all the characters were pretty flat. Sometimes, however, the villains came off seeming… well, just a bit more awesome. They often seemed smarter than the purported Hero, had a better sense of humor, and sometimes even seemed to be fighting for a more appealing cause.

If your villain is more appealing than your hero, that’s a problem. There are three ways to deal with it:

1. Make your hero more rounded and realistic and likable…not perfect. One of the popular ways to do this (especially in Urban Fantasy and Young Adult) is make your Hero or Heroine a “monster” — a vampire, a shapeshifter, a zombie or some other traditional “villain” of the genre, but endowed with all the attributes of a Good Guy: compassion, nobility, intelligence, humor and attractiveness. In the original fairytale The Snow Queen, the enchantress with the power to turn summer to winter was a villainess, but in Frozen, she became Elsa, an extremely appealing co-heroine. (The true antagonistic force in the fairy tale was a mirror that caused whoever to look into it to see the worst in others; an interesting version of this appeared in Once Upon A Time.)

2. Make your hero not just more rounded, but more flawed — to the point he’s almost a villain, or maybe even was a villain in the past, but is struggling to redeem himself. This is the Flawed Hero or the Anti-Hero. In Noir Fiction, Urban Fantasy and much of current Epic Fantasy, the Flawed Hero or even Anti-Hero is more popular than the traditional Good Guy. In recent Disney re-imaginings, such as Maleficent and Once Upon A Time, villains are given a chance at redemption.

3. Tell the story from the Villain’s point of view. This was the approach taken in literary fantasies Wicked and Grendel. It’s also the approach in many “post-modern” epic fantasies.

All of these approaches have something in common. They highlight certain similarities between villains and heroes. But–note–it’s not the same thing to show that a Monster need not be monstrous (the first approach) as to say that a person or creature who has done evil can be redeemed (the second approach). And the third approach is different as well…. It is saying, not only is this Monster not “evil,” but the very values we associate with Good and Evil must be called into question. Or don’t exist at all.

One thing that’s important is to recognize what kind of monster your hero is going to be. Is he simply misunderstood? Does he do questionable or even downright evil things–like the serial killer Dexter–but only to schmucks even more vile than he? Or are you calling into question another concept of Good and Evil by asking if we should accept it at face value, the way that The Dark Materials trilogy challenged the values of the Narnia series?