Whenever I start a thread like this I try to come up with at least three examples, but for the life of me I can only find two.
In Pixar’s Ratatouille, the scary food critic Anton Ego turns out to be the most appreciative of all of Remy’s talents, and funds a new restaurant for him to work in (after the old one is closed down by the health inspector).
And in Men of Honor, the openly racist and antagonistic Billy Sunday turns out to be the most critical supporter of protagonist Carl Brashear. I thought it was remarkable not only that the antagonist turns out to be a supporting character, but that his racism doesn’t relegate him to a one-dimensional caricature.
I think these are examples of some pretty good writing. Are there others?
Hope you don’t mind, but I threw a spoiler warning in the title. Probably would have been obvious from the title, but better safe than sorry.
Anyway, from the TV show Avatar, Prince Zuko spends two seasons trying to capture the Avatar, and the last season teaching him how to bend fire. The scene of him practicing his “I’m a good guy now” speech in his mirror is hilarious.
I just watched Deadwood the first time, and Al Swearengen is a great example. During the first few episodes I thought he was a total creep and that the show would center around Bullock as the hero and him as the villain. Somewhere along the way that changed, and while it’s debatable whether he is a good guy (I’m inclined to think he is, although the end of the series is troubling), he is definitely on the side of the community of Deadwood. Depending on how you look at it, either the community is collectively the protagonist or it’s him.
In the category of “supportive of the protagonist”, but still definitely not a good guy there’s Loki in the Surtur Saga in the Thor comic book many years ago. He suddenly joined Thor and Odin’s fight against Surtur under the rationale that “What use is being the ruler of all I survey if all I survey is a burnt out cinder?”
In Mindkiller the antagonist who erased some of the protagonist’s memories
turns out to have done so as an alternative to killing him, and only IIRC because the protagonist’s sister asked. Normally he only mindwipes people he can’t get away with killing, as he considers it worse. And it turns out that his big plan is to hide the existence of mindwiping technology from the power hungry of the world until he can reverse the process. The protagonist ends up in a last minute alliance with him to defend it from just such a power seeker, and later the antagonist returned the blanked memories.
In Boondock Saints, Il Duce is first seen to be a fearsome assassin before being revealed as the father of the heroes. This is much to the dismay of the bad guys who hired him in the first place.
In Boondock Saints 2, Eunice is initially presented as an antagonist but turns out to be Smecker’s apprentice and thus on the side of the McManus brothers.
The entire movie toys with your expectations.
It’s about cops who flagrantly break the law, but it’s not anti-police.
It has a mayor who is blatantly corrupt, but it’s not anti-government.
It’s about problems in the nuclear industry, but it’s not anti-nuke.
And the more stereotypes you have about the actors, the less likely you are to figure out who the real killer is.
John Malkovich plays an army general, in charge of a nuclear weapons lab. So of course, he must be the villain! Nope. He turns out to be one of the good guys.
In High Deryni, in the final formal magical dual between King Kelson & allies against Wencit and allies, one of Wencit’s allies announces that he’s the fellow who’s been helping Kelson in the guise of Saint Camber. And that he’s poisoned everyone on Wencit’s side, including himself.
It’s funny, those are my favorite kind of characters, but I could only cite one and it wouldnt ring a bell in anyone. Still, my fav character of my favorite kind of characters is Bulrog from “La Quête de l’oiseau du temps”, one of the best French comic books ( La Quête de l'oiseau du temps - Wikipedia ).
P.S:I dont know why, and I cant think of any good example right now, but I am sure Pratchett’s books abound with such characters.
William Cooper (Karl Urban’s character) in Red starts out being the man sent to hunt down Frank Moses, and is quite determined to succeed. By the end, he ends up lending a hand at a crucial moment.
There’s also Grandis, Sanson and Hanson in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and Dola and her “sky pirates” in Castle in the Sky. They turn to helping the protagonists early in those stories, but they certainly look like bad guys at the start.
Also from Studio Ghibli, we have Princess Kushana in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In the anime, she’s a straightforward antagonist, although not a terribly unreasonable one. In the manga, her story is a lot more complex and her motivations explained in a lot more detail, and by the end of the story she’s fighting alongside the protagonist.
Well, there’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST where Eva Marie Saint’s character starts out as helpful, but then turns out to be an agent working for James Mason, and then turns out to be an agent working for [del]Topper[/del] Leo G Carroll …
Gael is seen several times calling a crime lord and feeding him info. CTU finds him and tortures him to get him to reveal what he knows, but thankfully Tony Almeda arrives and informs the rest of the staff that they, plus Jack, are super-deep undercover with the crime syndicate so they can retrieve a biological weapon.