I know The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is considered a Clint Eastwood ffilm, but Eli Wallach totally steals it. I don’t know if Tuco counts as an anti-hero, but he’s the best character in a great movie.
The Middle Ages was not that time, though. Plenty of folk heroes there ,who were less than law-abiding or unambiguouslly Lawful Good, from Robin Hood to Cúchulainn to Til Eulenspiegel to William Tell.
I think Adrian Veidt is flat-out the villain in Watchmen, and Rorschak is the anti-hero.
Well, let’s start near the end:
ARMAGEDDON, or COMPROMISE?
Jon: compromise
Laurie: compromise
Daniel: compromise
Adrian: compromise
Rorschach: put me down for ‘armageddon’
Just like Jon and Laurie and Dan, he doesn’t claim that Adrian’s conclusion is factually incorrect; he starts there like they do, and then expresses a preference for armageddon the way Jon and Laurie and Dan and Adrian don’t. If there’s a flat-out villain in that exchange, I don’t see how it shakes out how you figure; I figure we have a guy doing his best to stop armageddon, and a guy doing his best to bring it on…
What about Hawk from Robert Parker’s Spenser series? Lest he be disqualified because he’s not the main character, I seem to remember at least one novel where the primary story was his and Spenser was enlisted to help him on his quest. Apparently he also had his own spin off TV series A Man Called Hawk, that I wasn’t aware of, so not sure how he was portrayed in that one.
The guy who’s trying to save the world just killed millions of people and felt okay about it. And he’s real proud of his big idea and himself for getting it done, too. The question of Armaggeddon doesn’t matter to him as much as his clever trick and his ego being inflated and jerked off for solving the world’s crises by cold blooded murder of a sizable chunk of the population and getting away with it. That paints a pretty villainous picture to me.
The guy who was trying to get billions of people killed felt — wait, why would I care how he felt? My opinion is the same whether he was happy about it or sad about it or unemotional about it: he was for it. And if, on the question of armageddon, one guy declares ‘for’ and the other ‘against’, what’s interesting to me isn’t the emotional state of the one who looks down to whisper “no” or the emotional state of the one says “yes” — it’s, y’know, the “yes” and the “no”.
Upon further consideration, I’d also like to nominate Aiken Drum, from Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile.
That’s a very interesting choice D_D! And extra kudos for bringing up one of my favorite if slightly obscure series (meta-series if we include the rest of the setting)!
I would probably put him more in the trickster grouping than the anti-hero setting, and by the end of the series, he could be considered a true hero by the standards of the kingdom he represents (although more thanks to the good examples and love of those around him rather than any strong morality on his own part).
But that brings us to Marc… and Marc is a fascinating anti-hero which had not come to mind (and now I have to reread most of my books dammit!) about prior to your comment.