Discussion Main / AntiVillain

Sympathetic Slave Owner needs a little clarifying detail IMO since so much of the site is in American English and appeals to people who may have heard that the American South, or the Christian slavery of Native peoples here, that is, chattel slavery, contains examples of the sympathetic slave owner - and that there were abolitionists 'evil' (heroic) enough that even if they *were* sympathetic (former) slavers, they shouldn't count under the trope because they did things like give guns to Black people who they'd rather have seen as objects or beasts.

Also, Americans are unfortunately pretty ignorant of *just how much* worse American chattel slavery was than the vast majority of slavery situations around the world. I'm not excusing any of them, to be clear, but there is a huge difference between someone who reacts the way I described in the last paragraph and someone who tolerates or makes excuses for other historical situations (or [ETA: present day] brutal jails)

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Split into sections, started by Demongodofchaos2 on Dec 16th 2010 at 3:33:11 PM

I'm not sure if this falls under anti-hero or anti-villain, but is there a category for a well-intentioned character whose actions are accidentally or unfortunately predisposed to come out evil?

I'm thinking of the lead character in Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education. Dark magic is drawn to her, so she tries to light a candle, and inconveniently summons a fire demon, etc.

For example: "After the fourth attempt, I stood up and hurled the latest crumbling ancient scroll back into the impenetrable dark on the other side of my desk and yelled furiously, “I don’t want to summon an army of scuvara! I don’t want to conjure walls of mortal flame! I want my bloody room clean!”"

Mostly would appear in fantasy/paranormal contexts where a character wants to be helpful, but is genetically wired to do evil.

What's the difference between this and Well-Intentioned Extremist? The former's page emphasizes the villian's good intentions, which is the defining trait of the latter.

What's the difference between this an Tragic Villain?

Just a thought... Maybe We could adjust the page image to give a little more context? the current shot comes from this episode of Batman The Animated Series. A series of images showing Fries in his cell, Fries with the snowglobe, and Fries crying might work out better than just Fries staring at the snowglobe. It all starts around the 21:30 mark.

team rocket, harley quinn and the brain are ineffectual sympathetic villains not anti villains. they are still villains

- they have noticed that some examples are really Hero Antagonist

Is there any chance we can get rid of that ridiculous block of spoilers for Mass Effect? Between Anderson's backstory and the fact of Sovereign's ultimate nature, Saren just doesn't qualify for this trope. Either he's a bastard or a puppet, but either way, he's not really an anti-villain.