The protagonist of H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking kills round about 100 million people in the course of avenging his wife’s murder.
Also, Paul Atreides knowingly unleashed an interstellar jihad that kills billions of people.
montressor in the cask of amontillado.
Um, okay, well, I guess I read different types of literature than the rest of you guys, but I’d offer Oedipus as pretty much the exact paradigm of what the OP asked for…
(Not until page 3? Really?)
Eh. I’d kind of lump him in the “he really, really wasn’t intending to do anything of the sort” category, so I don’t see it as quite as strong an example. It’s not like he killed his dad and married his mom knowingly as some kind of way to, say, save his city. He was told he’d do that by the Oracle so he fled his “hometown” to attempt to avoid his fate, and killing his real father was in self-defense. It ended up being a horrible result but not a horrible act.
And he’s good how?
I don’t know. He knew what Bothari was like when Bothari was serving his mother; he tended to mirror whatever was desired of him. Want a loyal retainer, you get a loyal retainer; want a monster, you get a monster. Bothari liked serving her so much in the first place because he liked what she made him be. I don’t think Miles realized what he was doing just unleashing him like that - it’s made pretty clear also that Miles was under the delusion that a lot of what the Barrayarans really did was just war propaganda.
The OP said, “characters with whom the audience is intended to think heroic and/or feel identification or sympathy,” and the first one that popped into my mind was Nick van Owen, the Vince Vaughn character from The Lost World. Nick is Mr. Environmentalist, and he runs around with the heroes, trying to Save Nature from Evil Corporate-Funded Greedy White People. It is clear that the writers and director wanted the audience to view him as a hero.
But, damn near every death in the whole movie is attributable to him. The hunters had caged and subdued lots of dinosaurs (which were their property, being that InGen Corp. had created them). Nick crept into the camp and set them all loose. So, the dinos hurt a bunch of people and destroyed a lot of equipment, turning a controlled situation into chaos. That rampage forced the surviving humans to go on that trek to the heart of the island to call for help, and of course a few dozen more people died on the way, thanks Nick. Finally, Nick actually sabotaged the lead hunter’s big game rifle, meaning that, when the big T-rex walked into the middle of the camp, he couldn’t shoot it. So, since no one could stop it, the T-rex killed a few more people, thanks again Nick. And of course, had he shot the T-rex, that whole rampage through a populated area at the end wouldn’t have happened.
Moral of the movie: Nick is a douchebag.
BRAVO, Sir, and well said.
Well, it is based on a Michael Crichton book. Therefore, the environmentalist is an evil douchbag, who hates humanity.
I’m not sure if we’re meant to entirely sympathize with Nick; his absence from the mainland sequence is instructive, as it makes it entirely clear that Ian Malcolm & Sarah Harding are the go-to-guys for Truth & Justice here.
I don’t know ANYONE who likes Nick. I went to see that movie with my best friend from college, an ardent animal-righter who has very little sympathy for hunters, and she liked the Pete Postlewaite character much more than Nick. Nick’s essential assholery is made clear when it’s shown that he stole the hunter’s bullets. (I am pretending not to notice the hunter’s egregious mistake in holding his rifle as he did during the rain.)
And now I just remembered that Pete is dead. 
And Vince Vaughan is still alive for some stupid reason. :mad:
I agree with all that; I’m just quoting it so that I’m not misunderstood. It’s like Grendel killing the two guards when he brings Unferth back safely.
Really? I thought he was… until he failed (and/or she did). Didn’t Ista say she could feel the crack in the curse after the first death?
Well, yes. But the fact remains he did something abhorrent, and that if he hadn’t done it odds are things would have been much worse doesn’t really make him feel a whole heck of a lot better. It is kind of like Sophie’s choice, right? So I think it is exactly what the OP is asking for.
I think you’re right. The whole “dies three times” thing wasn’t a prophecy, it was a condition. Carazel was the first person who was able to fulfill it, but it doesn’t mean he was the only one who could fulfill it. Later, in Paladin of Souls, when Ista meets one of the gods during a vision, she asks why it took them so long to send someone to break the curse, and the god replies that they had been constantly sending people to break the curse - but they kept falling by the wayside before they could complete it.
Two more from the same series:
In Paladin of Souls, Ahrys’ wife wanted to save her husband’s life, or at least keep him alive long enough to bear her a child. Instead, her efforts to keep him from passing from this world almost led to the destruction of his soul.
In Hallowed Hunt, Wencil has spent centuries cannibalizing his own children, but not through any deliberate agency of his own. An ancient ritual, half-completed, keeps his soul tied to the world. Every time he dies, his soul jumps to his nearest male relative, subsuming that person’s being into his own, effectively eating their soul. And he can’t do anything to prevent it. It’s suggested that, at times, he has physically murdered his most beloved children, just to spare them from that fate.
How about every main character from the Engineer Trilogy by KJ Parker? One of the things I liked best about that series was that there were no “good guys” or “bad guys”, everyone was morally grey.
I’ll need a ruling on this one but how about Superman when he lobotomizes Doomsday out of frustration? This is a guy who can throw missiles into the sun but can’t come up with a better option to deal with Doomsday who does not possess the power of flight for all his extreme durability. That creature had been held captive for several thousand years without incident, given Supe’s powers he SHOULD have either dragged him off into space where the collateral damage would be nil, or done away with him for good. Instead he cooked the brain of an admittedly malevolent, but intelligent being when he had plenty of other options.
I don’t recall any Superman doing that but the Justice Lords version, who was hardly a good character at that point.
Anyway, I wouldn’t call that evil, any more than killing Doomsday was. I can’t see how it’s any worse than imprisoning him.
Did you find any of them sympathetic? I sure didn’t.
(Actually, this was the thing that boggled me most about that book – I didn’t find a single character to be sympathetic, except (sometimes) Valens (but only sometimes), which is usually the kiss of death for me and books. And yet I was enthralled through all three volumes.)
Elizabeth Swann, at the end of Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Veronica Sawyer from Heathers. I’m trying to figure out if she fits in or if she is exempt because of the criteria posed in the first post (basically acting deliberately of her own free will.) From what I remember she helps JD compose a suicide note for Heather Chandler because then she believes it was an accident, but when a teacher is reading the suicide note in class, she starts laughing, then quickly disguises it as crying. The scene with the cow tipping jocks, she actually shoots one of them (though she is in a bit of a daze at that point). Though most of the killing is done without her complete knowledge, there is some gray area about how she handles it for a while.
Sue Snell in Carrie (book or movie). She takes part in humiliating Carrie in the locker room in the first scene, though she spends the rest of the story trying to make up for it. That it backfires is not due to any of her actions.
Prospero in The Tempest by Shakespeare. Treats Caliban horribly.
As I recall it, I don’t think she actually shoots one of them. Slater’s character feeds her this line about special German tranquilizer darts that make it look like someone’s really been shot, as part of a prank they’re going to pull on the two jocks. When they get the jocks in the forest, Slater shoots his, but Veronica deliberately misses, because she thinks it’ll make the “prank” funnier. Slater runs after the guy and kills him, while Veronica finally realizes how incredibly stupid the whole “tranquilizer” thing was, and that Slater had handed her a gun with real bullets.
Nathan Brazil, from The Well Of Souls series by Jack Chalker. Easily the highest body count of anyone else listed in this thread.