Hot villains, bad boys, and narrative lies

I guess I’m on a villain kick lately. I’ve got at least one more post I want to get up about hard to write villains, but this came along my radar and I wanted to touch on it.

Heroes and Heartbreakers recently posted an article called, If He’s Hot, He’s an Anti-Hero; If He’s Not, He’s a Villain. The title sums it up perfectly, but go check out the full thing, it’s a nice, brief exploration of the topic. We’re willing to cut an attractive character so much more slack than an unattractive one, and it can shift our perceptions when it comes to good-looking bad guys with a few not-so-bad scenes.

It’s the end I particularly love, where Kinsey Holly looks at the eventual arcs for her case study characters (Lonesome Dove’s Clay Mosby and Robin Hood’s Guy of Gisbourne) and the ways both shows start to lean their villains towards redemption near the end despite all evidence to the contrary. If the characters weren’t hot, we wouldn’t be yearning for a tiny silver lining with them. We’d just hate them, and they’d be villains, and we’d be content.

But if the character is hot, he can’t be that bad, and we start making excuses for him. We want reasons to like him, as Holly says, otherwise it means we’ve fallen for a villain. Where I find this interesting is in comparison to bad boys.

Bad boys are always hot, it’s part of the package. And bad boys, unlike villains, are supposed to be a catch. Secretly, deep down (sometimes very deep down) in the dark recesses of their hearts, they’re heroes, and love interests, and all those wonderful things.

Except 99% of the time they’re not.

They’re actually just awful people…cruel, inconsiderate, aggressive, controlling…and then at a point the narrative flips a switch, and they become good lovers. It doesn’t undo all the bad things they did earlier in the story, or guarantee against more cruel, inconsiderate behaviour in the future, but the entire course of the story has been setting this bad boy up as someone to love, or lust over, and dammit, that’s what’s going to happen!

I will totally root for (and lust over) awesome, intriguing, bad characters with a Past. I’d just rather do it with villains, because the bad boy narrative doesn’t ring true for me. It’s too much artifice to justify appeal in the midst of an unappealing character.

I’ll pick the awesome traits out buffet style, and enjoy the hell out of a character, but with bad boys the narrative has been trying to say they were always secretly good, and paints over the jerkass things they did earlier for the sake of tension. With villains, even hot, borderline-anti-hero ones, you can still sit back and enjoy them as strong, compelling characters while also enjoying their non-period-accurate head to toe leather attire. Yes, they’re horrible even as I’m maybe swooning over their sporadic touching moments, but I’m also totally aware they will be abusive bastards if they get what they want, and I’m not rooting for that.

I’m just rooting for them to have more scenes swaggering around dominating the story and being badass, and that’s no bad thing!