Hero vs. the AntiHero
In recent months I’ve begun to see a lot more articles talking about the antihero (which initially I confess I thought was meant to mean the villain). I had never really considered the concept of the antihero, there were protagonists and antagonists, but what did you call that middle ground? That character who wasn’t exactly always good, but maybe wasn’t really the villain?
As soon as I read the term anti-hero and got a proper definition for the word I realized that almost all of the characters I had written were antiheroes. If being the ‘hero’ meant you always did the right thing to reach the goal you wished to accomplish I had a sneaking suspicion that the only real hero might have been the ones dreamed up by Disney. While Harry Potter may have seemed like a selfless hero throughout the series, a lot of the ways he went about doing what he needed to do, didn’t exactly follow the letter of the law. Breaking into the Ministry and Gringotts for example. Does that classify him as antihero? Or is there a certain line at which as long as most of what they do is for the greater good, a few broken laws here doesn’t really count.
More to the point… at what point can the antihero be considered a villain?
In the last book in the Secrets of Witches trilogy, Elizabeth and Margaret’s mother is both the antihero and the villain. Initially, it would appear that she has the best of intentions with regards to her daughters, but in the end it suddenly becomes clear that perhaps she’s more evil than one might have initially thought.
I like to think that what separates our antiheroes from our villains is that while the antihero may not exactly follow the letter of the law to accomplish their ends, they do so with the best of intentions, the villains however, have no good intentions.
In my experience, the more interesting characters, as noted by this PubCrawl article on the subject, are the ones that seem to toe the line between villain and antihero, all the while leading you to wonder where they will fall.
