Times where the hero seems like the villain

MCerberus

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Isn't the plot of Ghosts that you're in the military of a nation that decided they wanted to be the people to break the rules on orbital weaponry?

Direct example: KotOR 2. Where your existence by itself may lead to the end of all things. Seriously, that game... was not a happy place.
 

Auberon

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Oh. It's Miller time, featuring All-Star Crazy Steve. Hobo who found Batsuit, kidnapped a twelve-year-old Dick Grayson and enjoys leaving everyone bleeding to death, limping forever or any other not-instantly-fatal injury.

My impressions of Mark Millar, based on his start on Authority, lean the same way to lesser extent. Or one could just call Midnighter villain, and almost be done with it.
 

Aramis Night

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Ubiquitous Duck said:
The end of the film Daybreakers.

Spoilers, but I'll try and be inspecific.

They drive away into the sunset with the whole 'good job guys' feels to the moment, but I was like 'WTF this isn't a "fix", how is this a "good" ending?!?!'

If you have seen this film, I think you will get what I'm on about!
I really did love this movie and found it to be one of the most refreshing takes on the whole vampire thing I have seen in pretty much forever. The fact that they flipped the script on the typical relationship of humans and vampires and put it in the future was just interesting. The movie itself wasn't bad either with some great actors (Wilhelm Defoe, Sam Neil). But I do have to agree that the ending wasn't much of an ending. It left me really wanting it to be much longer just to see how things would change from that point forward. I'm hoping for a sequel but I don't think that will happen sadly. It does feel very unresolved. Still a good movie and one I would recommend if only for its unique take on modern vampires. And I say this as someone sick of vampires.
 

shootthebandit

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Why has noone said breaking bad yet? Walter white is the epitome of this. He is the hero of the story yet hes so evil. As he gets more and more into the path of villainy I still found myself rooting for him.

I could say wolf of wall street is the reverse. He was an absolutely horrible evil man but I liked him. He was incredibly charming and charismatic and he had the lifestyle we ALL want
 

Lunar Templar

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Lugbzurg said:
Issei from Highschool DxD
*record skipping sound here*

o.0

Wait, you took something from a ecchi anime seriously? A major part of DxD's draw is the frequency in which the tits are gotten out (only to stay cause its well written for the genera). Seems silly to complain the lead is a pervert when the show it self is pretty much pandering toward the 'moar tits out nao' crowd.

That said, the show would probably still be better off with out Issei. If only because he's the least interesting of the cast.


Panzer Camper said:
I'm going with Gundam Wing. I've just started watching it now (at episode 4) and the good guys seem to murder soldiers in their sleep, even trainees. I'm a reservist so maybe this hits a little close to home but they seem to slaughter people for no real reason other than "they're soldiers so who cares". I don't hate it and don't want to make this some sort of weird social justice thing I just think these heroes are kind of monsters.
If your new to Gundam, then welcome to that fun moral grey area where you pretty much need to decide for your self who's a good guy or not. Cause it's in pretty much every Gundam Series.

If not and your just starting on Wing >.> first, I don't remeber Wu Fie attacking that base in ep4 but w/e not key to the point, and second >.> yeah ... Wu Fie is kinda of the biggest jerk of the five Gundam Pilots in Wing, but yeah ... get used to him being like that, cause he's not gonna get any better.
 

CBanana

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Ride to Hell: Retribution. The nominal hero Jake causes far more innocent people to die than the main villain does. I think his biggest moment of hypocrisy is when he tries to talk a young man out of selling drugs without any sense of irony but then seconds later picks up some drugs from a defeated gang member to sell.
 

ImperialSunlight

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In Death Note, I find both L and Near to be... kind of intended to be heroic in a sense, despite being antagonists. At least in the end. But they have little qualm with torture or inhumane treatment and (especially Near) treat serious cases like a game to be won. "If you can't win the game, If you can't solve the puzzle, then you're just a loser", is a rather telling quote from him. And of course Light is obvious, though he clearly wasn't meant to seem like a hero (besides, contrary to what's stated earlier in the thread, his god complex is obvious from the first episode). Really, I think Matsuda is the real hero of Death Note.
 

TacticalAssassin1

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Alex Mercer in Prototype. He just came across as a massive prick, going against the military who was actually trying to stop the infection from killing everybody. The gameplay was great in that one, but the story got me pretty mad.
 

Fox12

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Dr. McD said:
jademunky said:
Anyway, heroes acting like villains... ever read the "Sword of Truth" series? It ends with the hero sending roughly 90% of the human race into a crapsack alternate universe where they and their descendants will forever be cut off from the afterlife. And this is not intended by the author to be an act of villainy either. While doing this, the protagonist gives a long objectivist-themed speech regarding everyone else' moral shortcomings.
TakerFoxx said:
Well, there was the time when Richard Ralh cut a bloody swath through a gaggle of unarmed, pacifist protesters in the Sword of Truth books and was portrayed as being completely right to do so, because apparently the pacifists didn't have "moral clarity" or somesuch.

Oh wait, the guy above me already mentioned Sword of Truth. And that's not sarcasm, I really didn't notice until I had finished writing that paragraph. Yeah, those books have a lot of those moments.
Ah yes. The Sword of Truth, a series I consider on par with Atlas Shrugged (extremely so, if you know what I mean).

Fun fact (mainly to fit the minimum character count): I once had an idea to write a novel that deconstructed Atlas Shrugged and more relatedly (or not, giving how much like Atlas Shrugged the Sword of Truth series is it's hard to tell they aren't the same book), the point wasn't about objectivism (which I find anything but objective, especially since Rand was a shit writer) but rather about the characters.

The book would basically show what a pathetic excuse of man Galt/Ralh himself would be in real life (along with dark parodies of Rahl). A self righteous, hypocritical and idiotic shithead whose "genius" would fail.
So basically it would be the first Bioshock? : P
(actually, a fantasy Bioshock doesn't sound like a bad idea, go for it)

Yeah, I tried reading the first Sword of Truth novel, but I gave up about halfway through due to boredom. I'm glad I did now. I've considered forcing myself to read Atlus Shrugged, since it is, unfortunately, still relevant, but it's hard to make yourself read something when you already know that both the writing and the philosophy are terrible. Maybe it's terrible in a fascinating way? I guess I'll find out.
 

spiderzeter

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shootthebandit said:
Why has noone said breaking bad yet? Walter white is the epitome of this. He is the hero of the story yet hes so evil. As he gets more and more into the path of villainy I still found myself rooting for him.

I could say wolf of wall street is the reverse. He was an absolutely horrible evil man but I liked him. He was incredibly charming and charismatic and he had the lifestyle we ALL want
I think Walter White was supposed to be a anti-hero though.
 

MeChaNiZ3D

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As far as Batman goes, he's at most a grey area, he always works with the intention of fighting evil, and in my opinion the selection of villains being some for their own criminal reasons and some specifically to fuck with Batman is one of the more interesting things about the franchise. I wouldn't call him appearing to be a villain at any point, although he may indirectly be causing harm (that he is also dealing with, however).

Elfgore said:
Lelough from Code Geass is a pretty easy choice. I mean he leads a terrorist group, he does some very questionable things, and he seems very egotistical. As I watched the series, I truly thought of him as a selfish man who was doing all of this not for his sister. But to fulfill his own desire for power. Then the last episode happened and all of that doubt was blown away.
I've often wondered if the events of the last episode excuse all of his actions up to that point. My tendency is towards that they do, but at the same time he did indirectly kill a LOT of people. This is compounded by Euphemia, who is sort of a foil for Lelouch, working towards peace, and you wonder if Lelouch hadn't intervened if it would have been better.
 

jademunky

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Fox12 said:
Yeah, I tried reading the first Sword of Truth novel, but I gave up about halfway through due to boredom. I'm glad I did now. I've considered forcing myself to read Atlus Shrugged, since it is, unfortunately, still relevant, but it's hard to make yourself read something when you already know that both the writing and the philosophy are terrible. Maybe it's terrible in a fascinating way? I guess I'll find out.
The first SOT novel is actually the best of them (not a high bar). The objectivist themes are only in the subtext at this point, they are not yet being crammed down the readers throat.

The most notable thing about book 1 is that it sets aside about 75 pages for one really long, super-graphic-bondage-torture scene at the hands of a magic dominatrix. It pretty-much tells you all you need to know (and more than you would ever want to) about the author and what floats his boat.
 

the December King

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Mcoffey said:
I read a book once called "The Last Templar". It was about modern day templars trying to find the diary of Jesus Christ. The story was pretty decent adventure romp, until the very end when they discover actual proof that Christ was just a mortal man. And then the main characters throw it into the sea. This was supposed to be some turning point for the main character, who was an atheist who didn't like organized religion. After spending time in a village of christians who weren't assholes, she decides that believing in Christ is too important for people, and it's what allows them to be good. It pissed me the hell off when I read it, because it assumes that the only reason people are decent is because God expects it of them. Fuck that.
I remember that book!

Was it one of Cussler's? No, that doesn't sound right... hang on... just looked it up. Raymond Khoury.

I remember feeling ripped off by that ending as well. Or at least I think it was this book, it was quite some time ago.
 

Tiamattt

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Avengers vs X-men springs to mind

OK basic premise is the Phoenix is coming to Earth looking for a host and it's extremely obvious to every hero who that host is going to be, which is a young mutant named Hope. Now the Phoenix is a all powerful comic entity, so it's not all that surprising that the Avengers is scared about that thing coming to Earth so they want to take Hope into custody, (despite doing nothing wrong, common theme of this story) and........hide her somewhere....Anyway obviously the X-men aren't too keen on that idea since Hope is supposed to be their answer to their dying species, so to war!

Back to the topic at hand, the Avengers plan like I said above, was to take Hope from the X-men home, by force if necessary. To be fair they did try asking nicely for the X-men to hand her over, and by nicely I mean bring about 95% of everyone that was ever a Avenger along in case the X-men said no.

Now some of you might be asking: Um, what did the Avengers plan to do if they actually got what they wanted? I honestly have no idea, it feels like one of those ????? Profit!! sort of things. Maybe they were hoping if they stuck in a basement and kept reaaaaally quiet the super powerful being that can find whatever it wants would just fly away. *SMH*

The funny part is the Avengers end up looking even worse later. Through some craziness instead of Hope the Phoenix picked 5 different X-men and split it's power 5 ways. And from there they used their new powers to make the world a better place. From the wiki they gave "free energy, food and water to all humanity as well as ending armed conflicts around the globe." Wow, that sounds pretty sweet. But the Avengers has to stop them from going to far, so they kidnapped Hope since they think she's the key to taking the Phoenix-powered X-men down, which of course gets the X-Men all POed so they start fighting again, you know instead of the whole make the world a better place thing they were doing before. I bet if they left them alone for a few days longer and they probably would've found the cure for cancer,

Now here's the thing that grinds my gears, the X-men didn't do anything wrong at this point in the story or even look like they were going in that direction, all their actions were great and really beneficial to the entire world. But the Avengers took action to take down anyway despite them doing nothing wrong. Which in turn restarted their war(the fighting stopped once the 5 X-men go their new powers) and of course destruction and mayhem followed.

I'm not saying that the Avengers should have done absolutely nothing, the story was obviously going the "ultimate power corrupts" route so eventually they needed to do something. But if they've waited until that actually happened they would at least have good reason to take action, where instead they just jump in and start kicking ass with "They have to be stopped before they do something!" as their reasoning. Like seriously, imagine how screwed up the world would be if the cops acted like that? (I'm sure there's cases where they do but there's differences between those and what happened here)

Overall the writing was pretty bad for this mini-series, but man did they make the Avengers look terrible. It was even sadder when they tried to make the X-men look worse by comparison so the Avengers would still look good, but really that felt like they realized how badly they screwed up and tried to cover it up. So while I'm sure seeing Avengers fight the X-men sound great on paper, in reality it was garbage.
 

Scarim Coral

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The recent anime I'm watching (thank to someone at work mentioning about it) Chaika The Coffin Princess come to mind.

The synopis is that it has been 8 years since the eight heroes had slained the evil Emperor and with his reign over, their world had come to peace. The main character is Toru, a former saboteur who is jobless and is bored of the peaceful life. He came across a girl carrying a coffin and due to this incident with a unicorn (in this anime mystical animal are dangerous) the girl saved his life.

It turn out the girl is Chaika, the emperor daughter and her goal is to reclaim pieces of her father organs since they were taken by the 8 heroes because he was a very powerful wizard thus he was pretty much a magic fuel (he did lived for 500 years) and to give him a proper burial.

Seeing how strong Toru is, Chaikai hire him and her sister Akari to help her to steal back one of her father organs from one of the heroes and after they got it, they decideto continue their employer (Chaika) request.

Ok sure at the moment I don't view Chaikai as the villain (yet) because her "final goal" is to give her father a proper burial. In saying so there is alot of mysteries surrounding her (especially in episodes 5 and 6) because she is missing some of her memories and the fact that she is speaking in simple sentences which I believed it has something to do in the past. It's Toru and the eight heroes that I kind of viewing to be the villain.

When these other people confronted the trio, they wanted the siblings to walked away and asking why they are helping her especially when they told the two that she is the daughter of the evil emperor. He response is since Chaikai herself and her goal could reignite the war all over again (there are those still loyal to the emperor), he want it (the war) because it would be profitable for him (a former saboteur) and he just plainly got fed up of the peaceful life.

I view war to be a terrible thing to happened to anybody because of the death and suffering that assortated with war so for him to want a war make me think he doesn't care about the death and suffering it will cause to the people out there. Granted that is his initial response as something tells me there could be more to that to why he is helping her.

Also I don't view the eight "heroes" to be fully heroes. Ok sure they explained that the emperor was turly evil and they were good for killing him but to mutilation the emperor just cos his corpse is like a power magic battery? As far as I know the two heroes reveal so far don't put his organs to good use, rather for selfish purposes. The first put it inside his mansion so that he become "one" with it while the other had used it to project a hologram of herself.
 

jurnag12

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There was that one part in one of the later Eragon books where the main character beats an unarmed defenseless soldier who's begging for his life to death.
Or when one of the other main characters complains about the populace of a city not surrendering to them, the rebel movement, while actively besieging said city and having made no attempt at peaceful negotiations with said city prior to their arrival there.
 

Thyunda

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Mcoffey said:
I read a book once called "The Last Templar". It was about modern day templars trying to find the diary of Jesus Christ. The story was pretty decent adventure romp, until the very end when they discover actual proof that Christ was just a mortal man. And then the main characters throw it into the sea. This was supposed to be some turning point for the main character, who was an atheist who didn't like organized religion. After spending time in a village of christians who weren't assholes, she decides that believing in Christ is too important for people, and it's what allows them to be good. It pissed me the hell off when I read it, because it assumes that the only reason people are decent is because God expects it of them. Fuck that.
Is...is that what you took from that? I would have thought that the action was down to the fact that a lot of decent people are Christians and there's literally no reason to tear their lives up just for the sake of being 'correct'.