On villains and sympathy

HuffPo counts Cersei Lannister as one of the most sympathetic literary villains. Really? To quote a TvTropes sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly, "The Cersei chapters of A Feast For Crows are so packed with her arrogance, smugness, paranoia, self-satisfaction, willfull blindness and most of all blatant stupidity that it's almost nauseating."

Before we continue, some essential music:

Now, then, what makes a villain sympathetic?



Okay, wait, first of all, I need to define "villain." For the purposes of this piece, I am going to equate "villain" with "antagonist." So Michael Corleone, who is a very bad man, will not make an appearance, because he is the protagonist of The Godfather.

Now, on to the question of what makes villains sympathetic.

Well, for my money, the easiest way to make your villain sympathetic is to make them a noble demon. Make them have a good goal. Villains are going to have an "ends justify the means" mindset, simply because our culture has determine that such a mindset is evil. They are probably going to have to suffer for their crimes, because that's what villains tend to do. And while I've argued elsewhere (primarily with regards to Theon Greyjoy) that suffering does not automatically ensure sympathy, it does help.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to Ozymandias. He's the villain behind the comic book Watchmen, and his evil plan is to ensure world peace by killing half of New York. Amusingly, it works. Noble goal? Check. Horrific means of attaining it? Check. Does it work?

...meh.  This is a problem I have with both the film and the original versions.  He never really pays for it. He has one line about making himself "feel every death" that he caused, but what on Earth does that actually mean? 

Next up is Luther Sloan from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He's the head of Section 31, an unaccountable agency dedicated to the defense and preservation of Starfleet.  Over the course of the show, he destroys the career of a friendly Romulan in order to get one of his moles placed up high in the Romulan government (by the way, that episode, "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," - translated, "In Time of War, the Law Falls Silent" - was written by Ron Moore and is basically a test run for the moral grayness of Battlestar Galactica), and also engineers and releases a virus designed to kill the Founders, the leaders of the evil Dominion. Stopping this war, good. Planning for the next one, good. Means? Atrocious.

In his final appearance, "Extreme Measures," Dr. Bashir lures him to DS9 in order to get a cure for the virus. This leads to a Matrix-esque chase through Sloan's mind, where we see a scene  of him apologizing to the family he never had time for. I'm not going to call Sloan the most sympathetic villain Star Trek ever had... wait, actually, maybe I am, because Star Trek didn't really go for shades of gray. My point is that at least we get one scene that shows us something he actually had to sacrifice for his objectives.

Hey, I just though of a more sympathetic Star Trek villain: Annorax, from the Voyager two-parter "Year of Hell." He's built a weapon that can erase whole species from existence, which he's doing to alter history in order to restore his own civilization. Of course, it eventually transpires that he's not going to stop until he's restored 100% of his own civilization... and wouldn't you know it, that last 0.5% happens to include the colony that his wife lived/lives/never existed on.  Captain Ahab in space, to be sure. They do that a lot: Khan in The Wrath of Khan (sympathetic qualities somewhat reduced by his utter insanity), Picard in First Contact (not a villain), and so on. 

Did I mention that Annorax has been doing this for two hundred years?  You kind of get the sense that he's the Universe's whipping boy by this point.  The irony here is that Annorax doesn't really pay for it, either. After he's defeated, history is undone and he somehow ends up with exactly what he wanted in the first place: his wife's colony intact.  (Of course, all his crimes are undone as well, which is what separates him from the Ozymandias example.)

All right, let's look at the Illusive Man in the Mass Effect series. He's the head of a pro-human terrorist organization called Cerberus, which does unspeakable things in the name of "the defense and preservation of humanity." He'll gleefully trample everyone in his way in order to get what he wants... and by the time the third game rolls around, what he wants is control of the Reapers. And as you'll discover, the Control Ending is the only one which a) guarantees that some aspect of Shepard survives, b) doesn't create a huge whirlwind of chaos, and/or c) doesn't blow up the Citadel and all the people living on it. 

It's not too difficult for Renegade Shepards to sympathize with him right out of the bat.  After all, Renegade Shep callously sacrificed the alien Council at the end of the first game to give humanity more power. Now, to get the most sympathetic ending for the Illusive Man, interestingly enough, you have to shoot him. You have the option, if you've used persuade options on him throughout the game, of making him shoot himself, but if you do that, then you miss his last words. "There... Earth. I wish you could see it the way I do, Shepard." Yeah, it's not the Tannhauser Gate speech, but still.

Speaking of the Tannhauser Gate speech, you really think Roy Batty from Blade Runner is a villain?

Roy Batty is an escaped slave. He is extremely intelligent, and do you know what his agenda is? It's not revenge; he's reached the end of his four-year lifespan, and he just wants to live longer. (This is another one of those films where the "hero" more or less mouthrapes the female lead, and unlike Goldfinger, this one doesn't have the excuse of being made in the 60s.)

So that's what I think of when you say "sympathetic villain." I don't think of Cersei and her vain paranoia.