This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asked reviewers to discuss villains we'd root for instead of the protagonists.
It's an interesting way to read about lots of books and movies you might not have heard about before.'
What stuck in my mind was those top-secret reviews I did for an "inside" web site. One of the books that was a challenge to review featured an antagonist who created her world's biggest problem, apparently, by being a typical HSP who doesn't like people creeping up behind her to "surprise" her. Once I realized that THAT was being cast as the great original sin, yes, it was easy to root for that character against the whole rest of her fictional world.
I finally thought of stories where it is possible to root for the villain...to reform. Not to root for the villain against the protagonists, but to root for the villain against the conflict.
Silence of the Lambs, e.g. In both the book and the movie Hannibal is smart, snarky, and helpful to the protagonists. He has only one flaw--being a sociopathic cannibal. In real life people with that form of mental illness don't reform, but in fiction I could root for it to happen.
Or the whole Superman plot...I've read fanfiction where Lex Luthor became a supervillain because he had a hopeless crush on Clark Kent, when they were schoolmates. Getting the superhero to defeat him was the only way he could get Clark's attention at all. Well, too bad, Clark likes Lois. But Jimmy Olson can admit he admires Clark Kent, so why couldn't Lex admit that too? Stop being a supervillain, go with the flow, join the winning side, and play nice? These days, if that was all he wanted, he could even find a boyfriend who looks a bit like Clark and live happily ever after. Though I'll admit I never cared what Lex's problem was...I just wished the "Superman" TV series would reach an end so that that show wouldn't be competing with one I liked better, the year my brother and I had a lot of time to kill watching TV. If Lex had reformed, that would have put an end to the series!
Quite a lot of fictional series rely on the idea that the protagonist has an antagonist who resents the protagonist just because the antagonist envies the protagonist. While this doesn't really become a plot so much as it provides reasons for the protagonist to have adventures, and if the antagonist could become less hostile the series would end...ends to some TV series ("Lady Lovely Locks" comes to mind) could have come sooner than they did.
In the Archie Comics books Veronica, at least, was an interesting character study, but other characters made it clear that the producers of the spin-off series did not just prefer blonde hair. They were positive bigots. Lady Raven Waves and just about all of Sabrina's antagonists were hostile, resentful, and envious entirely because they weren't blondes. It would probably have destroyed the whole Lady Lovely Locks world, and turned Sabrina's world upside down, if anyone had admitted that other color types can actually be more interesting even to look at than blondes are. And that would have been an improvement.
Talking of Olsons, why was Nellie Oleson so nasty in Little House on the Prairie? In the books her nasty family seemed to be stalking the Ingalls family on their travels. There was a real-life reason for that: whenever Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered an encounter with fellow "settlers" as unpleasant, she fictionalized the other people as the Olesons, giving Nellie and Willie and their parents another chance to show their disagreeable personalities and bad manners. There was apparently a lot of tension among "settlers" who were all living on the edge, resentment of the ones who had a little more than the others, so the Olesons got lots of lines in the books. They weren't based on a real family, but written in to obscure the identities of real people, some of whose identities weren't known and some of whom became family friends. In the TV series, Alison Arngrim was pretty and Katherine McGregor was a natural clown, so viewers loved to watch them behaving badly and producers gave them even more lines. Episodes and stories were written just for them! In real life, Alison Arngrim and Melissa Gilbert admitted they bonded by acting out all those quarrels; growing up, Melissa wasn't always nice any more than Alison was always nasty; they were just kids, and they became friends, The TV Nellie matured from being consistently mean and nasty to being the quintessential Worst Friend, consistently tacky, stupid, and pathetic. It's easy to understand why that was as much of an improvement as the TV show could allow her character. Viewers were at least thought not to want Nellie to become a good friend. It would have been a different TV series if she had. But would that series have been fun to watch, in its own way? Maybe.
The clear winner, in any survey of villains who readers wish would just reform, has to be Dracula. Consider all the vampire stories that reflect readers' and movie-watchers' wish that some vampires could be nice people! In the novel Dracula is pure evil, his quaint good manners a parody, but in the movies his being played by, well, movie stars made him attractive to some movie fans. What if vampires didn't rely on sinister hypnotic powers to attract victims to what would normally have revulsed them? What if they really were attractive people with the option of using their powers for good, being friends and having friends who could donate enough blood to keep the vampires alive without harming their friends? This trope has never really fascinated me but it made Twilight a bestseller.
