Describe how a 'good' TV or movie character was actually a villian. Show your work

Cafe Society
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One doesn’t wish to be unduly negative in a lighthearted thread, but the sad truth is that the above is at least as big a fantasy as Harry Potter. UK social services regularly fail to deal with much worse abuse than Harry ever suffered.

As Rowling knows - her excellent adult novel The Casual Vacancy is an unflinching look at how easy it is for neglected kids to fall through the cracks. But Potter is a kids’ fantasy, so it is unfair to criticise it for not engaging with the realities of mid-90s social care provision. It’s like asking why a chess player doesn’t just pick up the opponent’s king and put it in a checkmate position. Because that’s not the game, that’s why.

However, within the game of kids’ fantasy, it does become increasingly obvious that the wizarding world is riddled with bigotry, not just individual but structural and ideological. House-elf slavery is accepted by almost everyone, including moral mentors like Lupin and Dumbledore. Even beyond that, it’s clear that the treatment of other non-humans is also appalling - they are pushed to the margins, written out of history and when they push back against this treatment this is taken as evidence of how dangerous and uncivilised they are. The last two or three books actually do a pretty good job of showing Harry realising that it’s not a case of Voldemort and the Death Eaters as the only villains - there are deep-rooted problems in “good” wizarding society too.

And then he defeats Voldemort and… nothing else happens? In the final flash-forward chapter there’s no sense that anything else has changed, Harry is an Auror who, yes, is still hunting down Death Eaters but isn’t noticeably taking on any of the other problems he and we have noticed and there’s no sense that e.g. house-elves are now free, or other species’ rights are recognised etc.

So from the perspective of, say, house-elves the Wizarding War is just a question of which faction of the oppressor is going to have its boot on their neck, somewhat analogous to the import of the French Revolution for Haitian slaves. A glimmer of hope that things might be about to get better, followed by the cruel realisation that all these fine words about Equality, Liberty and Fraternity don’t extend to you.

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It’s been years since I read them, but isn’t it acknowledged in at least one of the later books that Dumbledore is aware of the fact he has completely manipulated Harry ‘for the greater good’ and is pretty guilty about it? And a brief mention of whether what Dumbledore is doing in this regard is really any better than Grindelwald/Voldemort? So I don’t think this is completely swept under the carpet.

In terms of Harry being left in an abusive home, this is explained away by the protection that living with a blood relative supposedly gives him. I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to insist he can’t stay at Hogwarts year-round, as this would entail at least one or two of the teachers doing the same to provide protection, effectively making them his foster parents. But I guess you could certainly criticise Dumbledore et al for failing to do more to encourage/force the Dursleys to be more pleasant to Harry during his childhood. Definitely an issue, but a minor one as far as I’m concerned.

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Walter White in Breaking Bad is an obvious choice (perhaps too obvious).

Walt starts off as a loving, devoted husband and father. He’s an all around good guy, a caring teacher, a pillar of his community. He’s a bit low-key, passive, even kind of boring. He’s a nice, dull pussycat.

But, then Walt gets sick and slowly turns into a monster. He breaks bad, transforming into a murderous, megalomaniac drug kingpin who amasses vast sums of money and absolute power—until it all comes crashing down. He still loves his family and friends, even though they come to hate him—with good reason. The transformation is breathtaking and brilliantly done.

Breaking Bad, IMHO, is the greatest TV show ever produced. Bryan Cranston gave a stellar performance as did the rest of the cast. The writing and directing is second-to-none. Ozymandias (season 5, episode 14) is the greatest, most gut-wrenching television episode I’ve ever seen. You simply can’t watch that episode with a dry eye. TV at its finest.

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Actually, this isn’t the best example of what I had in mind. I was thinking of characters who are typically considered unambiguously good through the entire course of whatever show or movie they’re in, yet if looked at more closely or through a different perspective, can actually be seen as “bad guys”. Jim from The Office and Glinda from The Wizard of Oz being my two examples to start things off.

I recently did a full series rewatch of BB, and it was even more clear the second time around how, very soon after starting to make meth, almost every decision and move Walt made was out of pure, naked self-interest, and his claim that he was doing all of it for his family became an increasingly tattered, transparent falsehood.

I will wholeheartedly agree with you that Breaking Bad is one of, if not THE, greatest show ever made. The performances were fantastic. The cinematography was amazing, from the sweeping panoramic long shots showing the New Mexico landscape to the sly little visual puns, like one opening scene that was an extreme close up of what looked like a glass beaker scooping up some crystallized chemical. Walt’s making meth again…but no, the camera moves back and it’s Hank salting glass rims for making margaritas. The story was modern Shakespearean tragedy, with little bits of humor expertly woven in.

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Lots of examples on TV Tropes.

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Except Walter had an undiagnosed mental illness so you cannot really blame him for his actions. He had split personality disorder and Heisenberg was another personality.

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So, the “bad” terrorists are actually good, and the “hero” cop is actually bad, if I follow your point properly. I never watched Continuum.

Kind of on the other side of the coin, Red Dawn (the original of course, not the garbage remake) is one of my favorite cheesy movie watches- if I’m flipping channels and come across it, I always have to watch.

The teenagers defending their homeland against the Commie invaders are clearly meant to unambiguously be the “good guys”. And mostly, they are. But on my most recent watch, after seeing countless acts of terrorism in the news over the years, watching a scene where two of the girls plant an IED in a store that the occupying soldiers frequent and blow it up, I had the uncomfortable realization “woah, they’re terrorists”. Not that it’s a movie to take all that seriously, but the fact is that in war, there are no unambiguous “good guys”; every soul gets stained to some degree.

WOLVERINES!!

I think this is supposed to be a whoosh…?!?

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Nope. I outlined my whole theory a while back in another thread on TV/Movie theories and I am 100% convinced Walter suffered from split personalities.

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Yes, exactly. The show cast as a typical, “Of course the cop is the good guy!” story, and the cop actually does do some good things when pretending to be a local cop in the past, but in her overall story arc, it’s clear she’s on the wrong side of history vis a vis the “terrorists”.

Another good twist on this is the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. There’s one season set in a Cyclon concentration camp, where the humans use a suicide bomber to strike back at the Cylons, and the human traitors helping them. And this was at the same time that the US was being attacked with IEDs in Iraq. Showing a “terrorist” as the good guy was quite the artistic statement.

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There’s the coke/heroin addict who demeans and insults everyone around him, including his best friend on a regular basis. But all is forgiven because he is a master detective in Merry Olde.

The main character in The Rifleman was a merciless serial killer, never content to shoot someone just once, but rather to empty his modified lever action into anyone who crossed his line. He killed 120 people over 168 episodes.

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The witches, as they appear in the Hollywood movie, are a result of the conservation of characters. That is, the more actors you need to hire for speaking parts, the more expensive a film gets, so characters in movies are sometimes composites of characters in books.

OPEN SPOILERS FOR A CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHED IN 1901:

The Witch of the West doesn’t pursue Dorothy across Oz, and the Witch of the South, Glinda, doesn’t appear until the end of the book. The Witch of the North does, but she isn’t Glinda, she isn’t beautiful, and she doesn’t suggest to Dorothy the she wear the shoes of the Witch of the East-- which are silver, not ruby. Dorothy finds that somehow that have been taken from the witch’s feet, and placed inside Dorothy’s house as she readies herself to walk to the Emerald City. She thinks silver will hold up better than old leather for a long walk, and so tries the shoes on, and they fit perfectly.

When Glinda tells Dorothy she could have gone back right away if she’d known how to use the shoes, immediately, the Scarecrow says “But then I should not have had my wonderful brains!” and the other two pipe up similarly.

Dorothy concurs, and says she is glad for the way things worked (she’s a lot pluckier in the book than in the movie), but ready to go back to Kansas now.

The whole broomstick quest is wrong. The group is ordered to destroy the witch and bring proof.

And Glinda doesn’t serendipitously appear at the balloon launch. When it fails, someone suggests that Dorothy go to see her, so Dorothy heads South.

So, the whole “Glinda knew all along” is just a side effect of rolling the Witches of the South and North into one character, which may have been carelessness more than anything.

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No, uh-uh, sorry, it might make for a fun alternate fan theory, but plot-wise I ain’t buying it a bit.

The seeds of Heisenberg’s rage and megalomania were always in Walter White. He angrily walked away from partnership in Gray Matter, then later convinced himself the other partners robbed him of the wealth and success he rightfully deserved. Bitterness and frustration percolated away under the thin facade of mild-mannered family man and high school science teacher. He just needed an excuse for all that to come out.

And I don’t know if by “split personalities” you mean true dissociative identity disorder or fictional “multiple personality trope disorder”, but the real thing involves memory loss and other obvious mental issues that would have hampered the whole “criminal mastermind” thing. Walter White / Heisenberg clearly acted with full awareness and knowledge of his actions at all times. At its core, Breaking Bad was a classic story of how power corrupts. Giving him a split personality disorder lets him off the hook and kneecaps the whole story.

Yep, and as an avid reader of the stories as a kid, I was always angry at the way his sidekick was often portrayed in movies and TV as a bumbling fool. The detective clearly had some sort of antisocial personality disorder coupled with Savant Syndrome. His sidekick was a highly successful “normie”. He was a doctor, fer chrissakes. Even back then I’m sure it took a lot going on upstairs to earn a medical degree. Also, as the chronicler of their exploits he was a pretty riveting writer.

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Then there’s Frasier, a pompous ass who is also a predator when it comes to women. Funny series, but a “good” guy he wasn’t.

I also don’t understand the Punisher series, which is basically a guy going around killing people because reasons. Why are we rooting for this guy? Actually, I guess he isn’t supposed to be a “good guy”, so I’m probably outside the thread parameters.

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To be fair, if we added sexist views as a condition for inclusion, that’s a lot of characters and “Hawkeye is a sexist asshole” has been done quite often already.

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The Empire was just trying to bring order to the galaxy and demonstrate their newly refined ore extraction process on Alderaan when a bunch of terrorists blew it up.

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The only other performance that I recall that gripped me with as much dramatic intensity as Ozymandias is that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A truly painful movie to watch, but impossible to turn away. Taylor, Burton, Dennis and Segal gave a masterclass of acting in that film—not to mention the brilliant direction of Mike Nichols and the stark cinematography.

Another fun parody tidbit: when people recall Bette Davis’s iconic line from Beyond The Forest, “what a dump”, they are usually thinking of Elizabeth Taylor’s over-the-top parody of the line in WAoVF (or remembering an impressionist’s version of the way Taylor delivered the line):

Davis’s deliverance was was actually quite subdued. Bette actually gave credit to Taylor for popularizing the line:

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There’s a whole novel, The Last Ringbearer, written around the premise that Mordor is a peaceful kingdom on the verge of an industrial revolution, while Gandalf and the Elves are aggressive racists intent on destroying Mordor to keep the world under their control.

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And, in fact, his ‘fugue state’ was him pretending to have a mental disorder to explain/dismiss his recent behavior.

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It was actually the professor who was the villain. As Russell Johnson (the actor who played the Professor) said ‘If I was stuck on an island with Dawn Wells and Tina Louise, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to fix the boat either’.

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Predator? People are allowed to pursue sexual relationships. It’s a part of life. Cite some specific objection other than “he tried to get dates with women” or I’m in complete disagreement.