I suppose even thought they’re largly ensemble films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Racist, too - he only carries out hits on “elves,” never on humans.
I am Legend
Should I spoiler a book written in 1954? What the Hell.
Even though the protagonist believes he is doing the right thing killing vampires, he realizes at the end he has become the monster parents scare their children with. He has been the villian all along. The title doesn’t even make sense in the Will Smith version.
Actually, I think rebels and revolutionaries would fall under a whole different literary category than “villain,” unless the point of the story is to so portray them. Robert E. Lee is no “villain” in any literary or cinematic treatment I’ve ever encountered, regardless of its political POV, which is hardly ever pro-Confederate.
Decision Points by G.W. Bush.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks pretty much blows this category away.
Actually, Solar by Iain McEwan is a good contender too.
Maybe it’s something about being called Iain?
The Sopranos
A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones
Meh, let’s make TV tropes do the work for us.
Villain Protagonist
Yuri Orlov - Lord of War.
It’s about an international arms dealer always trying to stay ahead of the hero-antagonist interpol agents.
He would have died twice if the interpol agent Jack Valentine wasn’t so ethically unflexible.
Doesn’t fit. There is no Main Character.
Screwtape letters
I think it is significant that Shakespeare usually gives his female characters actual personal names; but Lady Macbeth, even after she becomes Queen, has none but “Lady Macbeth.” It’s like she’s Macbeth’s alter ego – or, rather, neither ego nor id, but an inverted superego, an anticonscience. And it is that which finally breaks, from the contradiction between competing principles of mercy and ambition. But, by that time, Macbeth no longer needs any such thing. "I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Um… the title of this thread is “Works of Fiction Where the Villain is the (or a) Main Character.” Note the indefinite article.
On the commentary for the 25th anniversary edition of The Last Starfighter, the filmmakers mention how they picked Robert Preston to play the space swindler Centauri (“Always trust Centauri!”) because of his role in The Music Man. They wanted somebody the audience could readily identify as a con man.
Along these lines, I’d nominate Jack Crow of John Steakley’s Armor. He’s the main character (interspersed with flashbacks to the military adventures of Felix, who is nominally the book’s hero) for the last two-thirds of the book. He ingratiates himself to the staff of a federal research outpost so that he can disable their defenses, allowing a mutineer who has captured a small military vessel to land and refuel.
That he eventually joins the scientists to make a desperate last stand against the marauders when they finally arrive redeems him, though you’d have to question why - if he were planning to do this all along - would he have lowered the defenses in the first place.
Inception
THE MAN WHO USED THE UNIVERSE opens with a guy handling the protection-racket end of things for a crime syndicate; in short order he’s making his way up the ranks by handling the details of bribery and smuggling while carrying out the occasional murder – and, in his eventual capacity as a legitimate businessman, he sells classified info to the other side in exchange for commercial opportunities over there – and when his government then asks him to help out by letting spies work alongside his employees, he promptly obliges and just as promptly blows each cover identity for the folks who keep paying up. (It goes on like this for pretty much the whole book; he doesn’t get any nicer.)
He was just misunderstood and oppressed.
Frodo was a villain–aiming to destroy the one thing that could have unified Middle Earth and end the slaughter of millions of lives. In the end he was redeemed, somewhat, when he chose not to destroy it but to see to the unification himself, but not until he’d brought the ring fatally close to its destruction.
Noted
IMO, the ‘main characters’ of the series are the ones with POV chapters.
At least up to about 1/5 of the way through the third book (as far as I’ve gotten yet) there is zero overlap between them and the few characters who could, IMO, be legitimately called villains - Cersi, Joffrey, Jamie, Melisandre, a couple others.
The POV characters occasionally do real bad shit, or are on the wrong side of one of the conflicts, but they’re still not villains. They’re people stuck in messed up situations that they’re trying to make the best of…even if the reason they’re stuck there is that they owe some sort of loyalty to the proper villains.