There are no wrong answers, only your opinions 🙂
Personally, I think an anti-hero is a bad guy that does good things. He might cheat on his wife, steal, gamble, etc, but when it “matters,” he ends up on the side of what’s good.
Han Solo is an example that comes to mind.
Vegeta from DBZ after the Saiyan Saga is an Anti-hero. Fights the bad guys, but only for his own ego.
Heros and anti-heros are united in that they genuinely want to do good. They just differ in the means (or what they’d allow to use as means) to their ends. For example, a hero will vehemently refuse to blow up a street market while an anti-hero might consider it if they deem it to be sufficiently helpful to their end.
I’d rather look at it as a sliding scale with “will never do anything bad” on one end, and “a villain who has good intentions” on the other. And even those two ends are subject to the questions “What do you mean by ‘’bad?” and “What do you mean by ‘good intentions’?” Thus, I think while heros and anti-heros across stories and genres have commonalities, one story’s anti-hero might as well be a hero in another story and that the best way to judge a character being a hero or an anti-hero is in the light of the story they’re in.
If one collides with a hero, they’re both annihilated.
Han Solo? Really? Are you 5?
There is a definition of what a narrative anti hero is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihero
What is this ongoing trend of encouraging opinions to refine accepted terminology and culture? Just make up your own new words instead of diluting the meaning of existing ones into slop.
Literally.
A good guy with the affectations of a bad guy.
A character who either does the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong things for the right reasons as a kind of twisted version of a hero. Really any hero type character that doesn’t do the right things for the right reasons.
Punisher is an anti-hero because he takes things way too far.
Han Solo is an anti-hero because he is a scoundrel who happened to do the right thing a few times.
“The right thing” is also in the eye of the beholder. The killing of that healthcare CEO for example.
You’re right. I saw a mass murderer stopped for good.
John Constantine is a good example. He will do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing one of his oldest friends to eternal damnation to do it.
And his past is littered with people he’s done that to. It’s not a one off “Oh, sorry mate, only way to get this done is to… you know, infest you with a swarm of demon bugs…”
There’s a lot of overlap with villains but whereas true villains are irredeemable, anti-heroes show some humanity or empathy or ethics in some context and have vulnerability.
Great distinction.
Of course there are wrong answers, otherwise the term has no meaning.
To me, an anti-hero is a character in a story who does not try to be a hero, and is not motivated by a heroic drive, but rather is selfish, and maybe stumbles upon doing the right thing in the end.
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is an example of this.
Like Mario’s brother.
Ohhhhhhhhh. I get it.
It’s like the saying, “is it wrong because it’s illegal, or is it illegal because it’s wrong?” It’s a recognition that the law doesn’t perfectly overlap what’s morally correct.
Anti-heroes live in that ‘moral-but-not-legal’ area. Contrast that with people who bend the written law to serve immoral ends. Fascists tend to be Lawful Evil.
Although it’s often written into the story to make them more sympathetic, I don’t think an anti-hero needs to do the right thing when it matters. We can root for the thief in a heist movie even if he never really does the right thing.
Not all main characters are heroes or anti-heroes. They can just be protagonists.
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For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.
D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.
Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.
I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.
