I always felt like Bester in Babylon 5 wasn’t the villain he was presented as- he’s a member of a badly persecuted minority fighting back against an oppressive society that doesn’t even really think of his kind as properly human. Yeah, he’s ruthless, but he’s part of a minority that isn’t allowed to even walk outside of a confined living space without wearing an identifying badge, much like Jews in Nazi Germany. He does a lot of ruthless stuff, but really he’s fighting against direct oppression and to protect people like him from outright genocide. Not sure how much I really rooted for him per se, but I definitely felt like he wasn’t significantly more bad than other characters on the show.
On Breaking Bad I wanted Gus and later Mike to take down Walter White because he was such an egotistical prick who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was. All of them are major criminals with high body counts, but I think most people were really not happy to see Mike’s final fate.
Employee of the Month was one of the failed attempts at making him a movie star. Not a lot of people has even heard of it, so you can guess how that went.
in the movie, he was a box boy in a superstore, only he was a complete slacker. The antagonist was played by Dax Shepard, who, yes, was a bit of a bully, but worked his ass off trying to improve himself.
The difference in acting ability between the two is staggering, so much that I can actually recommend the whole movie just because the editor, smartly, devotes a lot of time to Shepard’s character’s antics, which is the only watchable thing in the whole affair. And the fact that the “bad” guy is the one actually working hard while Cook’s character pretty much just coasts along until, at the end, he gets a completely undeserved victory will make it impossible for you not to root for the villain to win.
In any piece of fiction where the choices are between anarchism or totalitarianism I tend to root for totalitarianism (who almost always are the bad guys) every single time unless the anarchists have an actual plan after they unseat the evil government and they’re not just taking down the government for the sake of it. I’d rather be living in Soviet Russia than Anarchist Somalia any day.
There was one episode that focused solely on Bester and his young aides. It showed him as smart, creative, caring, and a great boss whose subordinates genuinely loved and admired him. Oh, he STILL hates us Mundanes, and would still be happy to see us dead. But in his own mind and in the eyes of his friends, he’s the hero.
In the terrible movie 2012 that starred John Cusack, I rooted for Oliver Platt’s character, Carl Anheuser, because he was right. The movie even proved him right but people still sided with Cusack’s impulsive, short-sighted character.
ETA: Sometimes while watching Game of Thrones I root for the Night King because the living are either to evil, vain or stupid to live.
Most characters even evil ones, are never portrayed as completely evil and irredeemable. With movies or tv shows that have a lot of character development we start to see them on a deeper level as our friends. I think its sort of like the exposure or propinquity effect on attraction. The more you are exposed to a person, become familiar with them you begin to like them or even become attracted to them, sometimes even in spite of yourself. Plus bad guys are usually shown to be the awesome badasses we all wish we could be, they don’t take shit from anybody.
I think ‘happy to see us dead’ is the wrong phrasing. The Mundanes have been trying to kill telepaths since they showed up, and the psi corps is formed because if there wasn’t a ‘reservation’ for telepaths people would attempt genocide against them. Bester and his kind have been under attack for a long time, and there’s an incredible amount of personal and instutional prejudice against them. I don’t think he actually wants to wipe Mundanes, he wants to end up in a position where they can’t hurt him. If the choice was ‘Mundanes or Telepaths live’ he’d choose telepaths, but probably would feel bad about it.
To get an idea of how they’re treated, look how Sheridan, the big glowing hero of the series, and Garibaldi, a more grey but still fairly good guy, treat Lyta. She volunteered to risk her life in the war against the shadows directly, and did a lot of behind the scenes work to make victory happening (getting rogue telepaths to join the Alliance). Then after that was was over, she volunteered to risk her life to save both Sheridan and Garibaldi personally. They owe her for both victory in the war and their own personal survival. But what happens after the war? She can’t get any kind of real job because she’s not part of psi corps and no one legit will hire a human telepath who isn’t, and neither of them will lift a finger to help her even though she’s about to get evicted from her apartment.
Either the now-super-rich Garibaldi or the Intergalactically famous Sheridan could have come up with a job in their organization for her, or just a dummy job as patronage, or created a charity that she could head up, or pulled strings with an alien government to get her a job outside of Psi corps, or just straight up handed her a trust fund for what she did. Either of them doing so would also give them a chance to thumb their nose at Bester by thwarting his plans for her. The fact that they don’t do something so easy for someone with their resources for someone that did so much for them speaks volumes.
I wonder how much of that ‘shades of grey’ was intended and how much just kind of happened when the script was getting written.
