Good Guy to Bad Guy

[Yassim]

Anybody reading Irredeemable? A Superman archetype has decided he's had enough, and is going to teach the people of Earth a lesson.

The appeal? It's got all kinds of interesting levels. Most obvious to me, it raises the question, why did we ever believe Kal-El would want to help us? Would spend all his time saving and helping? Isn't it a little more believable he would want *something* for himself? Wouldn't he resent people a *little*? How much human crap could he take?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I feel as though Anakin could have been a more successful character if instead of being the arrogant, egotistical teen that he became (out of no where...) he was more of a just a darker person in general.

The crucial element is that he shouldn't have been portrayed as a weakling. All the snivelling immaturity and self-pity, not to mention laughable obliviousness to Palp's increasingly obvious machinations, was very destructive to the character because it caused the audience to lose respect for him. Lose respect for the guy destined to become Darth Vader!!!! Catastrophic.

There are a number of ways to have pulled off Anakin's transformation well, but one vital element is that the audience must never lose respect for the character. Hate him, fine. Root for his downfall, sure. Laugh at him? Absolutely not.

Anakin can be someone who is deeply flawed and "fated" to become evil. Maybe because of his bad childhood, maybe because of hubris, maybe because the universe conspired against him. But he must be brave, resolute, strong, disciplined, emotionally self-controlled, as well as highly intelligent and street smart with a keen strategic mind appropriate to a military leader.

He should not only be a person who inspires fear in the troops but also admiration. Why not? It's a common enough phenomenon for soldiers to look up to strong, smart leaders, and ignore their psychotic tendencies or even revel in them. If Anakin was wildly popular with the troops, a la Napoleon, that would go a long way towards making it plausible that he and Palps could so thoroughly blindside the Republic and take over.

All those noble characteristics could still describe an evil person. A very dangerous evil person who the audience would not dare to laugh at.

The criticisms of Anakin Skywalker as a whiny, spoiled brat presume that evil is at the least a tragedy, where a noble person's flaw leads to an inevitable downfall.

Maybe other people's criticisms, but for me, I don't want to watch a character I can't respect. Good or bad, they have to be worthy of my respect, or why am I wasting my time with them? The downfall of a moron is worth watching only if it's a comedy.

The prequels seem to me to be pretty accurate about people who fall into doing evil, which is that it isn't because they're sexy or cool or their nobility is tragically undone by a single flaw.

Probably true enough about real life. Plenty of people are stupid, pathetic and contemptible, and I wouldn't be surprised if that were doubly or quadruptly true of those who get into trouble with the law. But I can see people like that in real life. I'm not going to pay good money to sit in a movie theater to be annoyed by them!

 

[Gaith]

Lucas killed Anakin's fall by giving him a basically happy childhood and a loving mother. If he'd been a war child orphan, or at least beaten on a regular basis, we might have had something. But good, sweet caring kids don't grow up to murder other kids. Lucas just didn't have the balls to deal with this, or make the first two movies dark.

An awesome "good to bad" arc is father Justin Crowe on Carnivale. He starts out seemingly pretty good, but we learn that he is inherently at least part evil, and though he fights it for a while, he learns to like it, to the point where he's gone beyond all redemption.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Londo Mollari yet...

 

[The Nth Doctor]

D'oh! I knew I was forgetting a show in my post.

 

[Amaris]

I'm not really a "good guy turned bad guy" kind of person. I believe in "bad guy turns good". I believe in redemption, that good is far more powerful than bad, that when the true test comes, most who consider themselves bad will do the good and right thing.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

^That is what makes Londo's story so compelling...he's a good guy who falls and falls HARD but manages in the end to claw his way back to being a good guy again in the end.

 

[stj]

Babylon 5 leaves a lot of people indifferent, despite its merits, because one of its "villains," Londo Mollari isn't sexy or cool. He's antisexy and he's anticool, and he's got the haircut to prove it! Actually, Mollari is one of the most interesting villains because by his own lights he is basically just a patriot doing what'g gotta be done. These rightwing buzz phrases do in fact justify many, many crimes. His villainy consists in a set of ideas instead of a set of personal traits. Again, that's the sort of thing that happens in real life, where events are not just the mystically magnified products of someone's emotional traumas.

There are television series that imagine wars happen because one person is traumatized and seeks revenge! Shows like that, that feed infantile fantasies of omnipotence tend to much more popular in certain quarters than something like Babylon 5. Generally, the resolute determination to pretend that great social/governmental processes like wars are just individual decisions spring from a reactionary refusal to examine society. At bottom, it's just as bigoted as someone forthrightly blaming everything bad on original sin. There's no significant difference.

But for a transition from good guy to bad guy, Babylon 5 also offers the Vorlons as a whole. Their noble intentions in messing around with the younger races are inseparable from their desire to reproduce their own images. Then, when this hobby gets serious, and they themselves start perishing, suddenly it's genocidal extermination with planet busting ships! This seems satisfying because it raises the issue of independence, even at the cost of failure, over the safety of dependence. It projects some of our more neurotic resentments against parents onto a safely unreal protagonist.

As for the general notion that people dislike self-pity, Julia Roberts' entire movie career, a very successful one, is predicated on the opposite. Even on this bbs, the popularity of the new BattleStar Galactica, with Starbuck and Gaius Baltar, two characters who wallow in self-pity, shows this isn't true. Of course, Starbuck is ueber-cool, and Baltar is a development of Dr. Zachary Smith, i.e., a comic villain who doesn't quite do any villainy.

(I skipped a lot of the unbearably bad BSG but as I recall, the worst thing Baltar ever did was give a Cylon a nuclear weapon. The funny thing is, he got away with it! Apparently offenses against sexual purity are so unforgivable the slaughter of thousands of innocents are acceptable retribution, a vilely reactionary notion typical of the series.)

Self-pity didn't make Starbuck unacceptable, and incompetence didn't make Baltar unacceptable. Respecting the villains is another way of phrasing the notion that villains are sexy or cool.

 

[zakkrusz]

Because it's character development and character development adds levels and facets to a person making them seem more real and interesting.

Personally, I'm big fan of the "Watch how they fall" type stuff. Specifically the Boondock Saints films. Anime also has a lot of it too Blue Gender, Code Geass, and Death Note come to mind.

 

[Captaindemotion]

No mention yet of Tony Almeida in 24?

 

[Kestra]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Londo Mollari yet...

That was one of the saddest character developments ever. It was actually done really well, which is what made it hit so hard.