Flawed Heroes and Sympathetic Villains

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow Doctor Who fan. As a hardcore Who fan I am somewhat familiar with the phenomenon that the most popular Doctor, David Tennant, is a bit...less popular amongst hardcore fandom. I actually enjoy him quite a bit, to the point where he's my second favorite actor in the role, but there's a fairly sizeable contingent of people who don't gel with his portrayal.

Fair enough.

But this conversation was interesting in that the person I was talking to didn't just dislike the performance but effectively characterized Tennant's 10th Doctor not as a hero with flaws that bothered them, but as a narcissistic villain. It's not the first time I've seen this idea put forth but this particular fan did so with a great deal of vehemence.

Again, fair enough.

I'm not here to decide how people should interpret things or tell people what they should and shouldn't like. At the same time, however, I'm not obligated to pretend I agree with the assessment or that I don't see massive flaws in how the position was arrived at.

The conversation centered around one of the final scenes of Doctor Who series 4 and the fate of the Doctor's companion, Donna Noble. In, Journey's End, the finale of Doctor Who Series 4 (spoilers for an episode 17 years old) Donna's brain absorbs a Time Lord consciousness that allows her to be instrumental in resolving the episode's dilemma but also turns out to be more than her brain can handle. It will, in fact, kill her if it isn't dealt with. Faced with this prospect, the Doctor chooses to erase all of Donna's memories of her time spent with him, effectively "locking away" the part of her mind that is killing her.

I've always found this a tremendously poignant and tragic scene. The Doctor clearly hates that he has to do this to save her life but he's going to do it anyway because he's unwilling to allow her to die. It's made all the more tragic by the fact that Donna clearly doesn't want it done to her. She values the person she's become and doesn't want to lose it, even if that means her death. To me, it's always struck me as the science fiction equivalent of seeing someone try to shoot themselves rather than live with a disability and snatching the gun out of their hand before they can do so. It's a terrible situation but one in which the person who snatches the gun does so with the best of intentions.

In this conversation I was having, though, I was surprised to find that the person I was talking to viewed this scene as one in which the Doctor was acting, not to save his friends life, but to take away Donna's agency. More than that, the person defined the Doctor's action as an act of deliberate cruelty, seeing it as something the Doctor did to Donna rather than, as I saw it, the Doctor choosing the best of bad options.

The person mentioned that, by the time the scene had arrived, due to what they saw as narcissistic actions on the Doctor's part, they'd lost all empathy for the Doctor. In short, they'd decided the Doctor was a bad person...basically a villain. Well, the 10th Doctor in particular, they made that distinction. I definitely see the Doctors as less separate than this person does.

Quite honestly, I found (and still find) that view of the scene as a bit hard to wrap my head around, let alone take seriously. It seems, to me, to be a complete misreading of the scene and of the Doctor's character. I'm not saying the person isn't entitled to have that view, just that it's one that I find extremely flawed, built out of bias against a particular character, and it got me thinking about how we regard the characters we see as "heroes" and "villains" and what the dividing line between them really is or should be.

People vs. Actions

Part of the difference of opinion I had with this person was, I think, built on how we regard the concepts of "good" and "bad." As the conversation with this person progressed, it became increasingly clear to me that this person had entered the discussion using "the 10th Doctor is a bad person" as a starting point.

They'd based this on earlier scenes and episodes where the character had started to rub them the wrong way, mostly due to what they described as his level of arrogance. I could probably do a whole separate article about the way the 10th Doctor seems to be regarded as excessively arrogant and narcissistic amongst some corners of Doctor Who fandom and how silly I find that to be. The Doctor is arrogant and, when people start claiming the 10th Doctor is arrogant on another level, I take a deep breath, remember various bits of the 1st, 3rd and 6th Doctors and wonder how the heck people have come to the conclusion that the 10th Doctor's arrogance eclipses theirs. (If anything, I'd note that the 10th Doctor era is more prone to pointing out that the Doctor's arrogance is a flaw than earlier eras were.)

To me, though, whether the 10th Doctor is more arrogant than is usual for the Doctor is beside the point. Even if I were to stipulate that point (which I'm not) that wouldn't negate the very obvious heroic aspects the character displays on a regular basis. When people espouse the notion of the 10th Doctor's arrogance being overwhelming, they often bring up his temper tantrum before he sacrifices himself to save Wilf in The End of Time: Part Two, as if him acting angry and petulant before doing the right thing somehow negates the fact that he ultimately chose to do the right thing, the heroic thing. It's bizarrely as if a sacrifice is being treated as only counting if we pretend nothing important is being sacrificed...that noble people who value life are only noble as long as they place no value on their own.

In short, some people view the Doctor's arrogance as effectively removing him from the category of a hero at all, while I view it as simply making him a flawed hero.

Part of this is something very simple: I don't believe there are good and bad people. People are too complicated for that, with complex motivations that stray so far from the binary notions of "good" and "bad" that trying to divide the population along those lines is an exercise in not just futility but stereotyping. As a species, we can't even entirely agree on what "good" and "bad" actually mean. How can we then start pretending to define people by that dynamic? If a hero is someone who acts for the good, but we can't agree on what "good" means, how can we possibly really define a hero?

No, I don't believe in good and bad people. I believe in good and bad actions. Further, I don't believe that actions themselves can be neatly divided via a simple, binary good/bad split. Context, as they say, is king, weaving a massive tapestry of grey between the two binary poles and it's in that grey that the vast majority of moral choice needs to be made.

We sometimes operate under the illusion that the tough choices of the world are between right and wrong but that's not really the case. The truly difficult choices are those between wrong and worse. They're not about saving people or harming them but about mitigating how much harm will be done and to whom and what degree of culpability one has for the implementation . That's why the Trolley Problem is the source of such debate. Is the active choice to end one person worse than the passive choice to allow several people to be ended? The debate goes on and probably will continue to do so for centuries.

To me, the scene where the Doctor wipes Donna's memory falls squarely into that "wrong or worse" category and that's what makes it compelling, tragic drama. There are no "good" choices in the situation. The Doctor harms his friend or the Doctor lets his friend's life end. The Doctor chooses the active choice (hardly surprising, the Doctor almost always chooses to act rather than be passive) and Donna's life is saved but harm is done to her. It's sad, heartbreakingly sad really, but certainly not an act of cruelty, just one of bitter necessity.

When I brought this up in the conversation, the person surprised me by effectively saying the Doctor should have been able to pull a third choice out of nowhere to save Donna. To me, that sort of misses the point of the scene, wanting to blunt the tragedy by introducing the concept that there must be a third, "good" choice when there were clearly only two. And, in keeping with the person's interpretation of the character mentioned above, they regarded the failure to do so as a choice on the 10th Doctor's part, as if there was a third option that he was aware of (but the story hadn't presented) and he must be deliberately choosing not to use it, in favor of harming Donna. The narrative/writer not producing a deus ex machina ending to save Donna was treated as a failure of the character.

As the conversation continued, the person also rolled out another complaint from earlier in the episode, the Doctor trying to save Davros, the villain of the piece, rather than let him die as the space station they were on was falling apart. Apparently, saving Davros was "wrong" because Davros was a bad person and bad people should just die. The person also seemed to have decided, based on nothing I could really pinpoint, that the Doctor's intention was to not just save Davros but to turn him loose to do what he pleased. Given that the Doctor once cryogenically froze Davros back in the classic series precisely to prevent him from wreaking havoc, this seemed unlikely to me.

So, if I apply my notion that it's actions that are good or bad, not people, to this notion, I'm left to wonder exactly what stance the person I was debating was taking: Is it "wrong" to save people from death? I mean, they seemed to think the moral thing for the Doctor to have done, in both cases, would be to let both Davros and Donna die. But...I suspect we don't really want to assume a moral position of "It's wrong to save people who are about to die," do we? In terms of Davros, was the person saying that we should allow bad people to die without saving them? That gets awfully problematic. Even if I bought into the whole good/bad people dichotomy, there's those pesky differences of opinion people have about who is good and bad anyway, and all the prejudices we bring to those opinions as well. In terms of good/bad actions, I can get behind the notion of lethal force to prevent someone actively harming or killing others but it's worth noting that Davros' immediate threat had already been dealt with by then, ironically, mostly by Donna. At this point, we're just talking about letting someone die based on the idea that we think they'll do something bad in the future...and that's got its own problematic implications.

No, in both cases, I'm compelled, based on looking at both the actions and the context, to see saving the lives as a good thing. More than that, there's a consistency to the Doctor's decisions. The Doctor doesn't like to let people die when he can save them. That's not just true of the 10th Doctor but of the Doctor in general. (It's also consistent that the Doctor tends not to spend a lot of time mourning people once they are dead but that's a whole separate thing.)

I find that, where fiction is concerned, I am more interested in consistency of character than I am in morality of character. I want a character's actions to make sense for them as the person they are more than I want them to do as I would do. In a character like the Doctor, with 6 decades of expansion to the character's baseline, that also means there's complexity as well as consistency. The Doctor is consistent...but sometimes consistent in contradiction. For instance, the Doctor clearly values human beings...but also finds them frustrating and limited as well.

Heroes are no exception to this interest in consistency. I'm more interested in a hero being consistent in their approach to heroism than I am in them living up to some heroic ideal. A hero who consistently makes the same character-driven mistakes fascinates me in way that a hero who makes no mistakes because such mistakes would make them less "heroic" does not. Flaws are what make heroes interesting (and the Doctor is chalk full of them.)

Heroism is an admirable concept but, at the end of the day, a pretty simple one. Flaws give nuance and complexity to characters who would other be bland hero archetypes.

What is a Hero?

As I've said, I don't really believe in the concept of good and bad people. That said, when examining fiction, the terms "hero" and "villain" can be useful labels for examining characters. Those terms are distinct from the wider terms "protagonist" and "antagonist" because the former two have a moral/ethical component that the latter two lack. It's perfectly possible to have a protagonist who is not a hero, based on their actions.

And that's what it comes down to, really. "Good" is a matter of action, not identity. A hero makes the choice to act for the good. A protagonist may or may not do so. I'd even go so far as to say that a character's status as a hero is divorced from whether or not their good actions are successful or not. A character who is consistently acting toward the good would still be a hero in my book, even if their actions failed. Case in point: Fox Mulder usually acts toward the good throughout the X-Files (bar the moments when his UFO obsession completely gets the better of him) but is all-too frequently stymied in his attempts to achieve a positive result. I'd still generally classify Mulder as a hero.

So if a hero's status isn't defined by success, what defines it?

To me, a hero is someone who wakes up every day, makes the choice to do more good things than bad and follows through on it. It's not a bad philosophy for real life, really, let alone fictional heroics. After all, we can't realistically hope to never do anything bad. We're only human, after all. But we can try to do more good than bad in the world.

Incidentally, when I say more good than bad, I mean in terms of affect on other individuals, not in a "my one big act of good will make all those bad things I did unimportant" way. One of the problems with moral zealotry is when people start justifying lots of “little” bad things that supposedly add up to a “greater” good, but when the math shakes out, all the “little” things did far more damage than the “greater” good made up for. In fictional characters, how many villains have we seen whose notion is that they're going to wipe out huge parts of the population in order to make life better for everybody else? As if, somehow, the mere fact that things might be better for the survivors somehow negates the unconscionable act of killing everyone else. Thanos may think he's the hero but he's wrong about that, no matter how he justifies it to himself.

It's important to note that, in my definition of a hero, it's not that heroes never do bad things. Rather that it's that they are not comfortable with doing bad things and try to avoid them when possible.

To give an example of this difference, it's why Lando Calrissian is a hero and Darth Vader is a villain despite the fact that they both act as adversaries for the protagonists of Star Wars.

When we meet Lando, he's doing something bad, tricking his old friend and turning him over to the Empire. But it's made abundantly clear that Lando is acting under duress, trying to protect a great many other people and, importantly, as soon as the opportunity to remedy the situation presents itself he takes it, acting to help his friends escape. It's no surprise that, in the next film, he's treated as an ally without reservation.

Vader on the other hand, clearly makes the active choice to do bad things, strangling people, ordering deaths, killing his old teacher. Yes, we later get background that makes it clear he wasn't always doing things like this but then we're back to what I said before, Vader's not a "bad person" from the start but he does become a villain precisely because of the choices he makes and the actions he takes. Vader wakes up every day (though, admittedly, not in the same way most people do) and acts to spread tyranny and strike out against those who have aroused his anger. That's not heroic. That's villainous.

Interestingly, though, Lando's initial actions and Vader's less villainous background mean that they're not just examples of simple heroism or villainy, but of the more complex archetypes of the Flawed Hero and the Sympathetic Villain.

Flawed Heroes

I talked above about how I define a hero so how then do I define a flaw? In fictional heroic terms, I suppose I'd describe them as "dents" in the "armor" of goodness. They're those little (or sometimes big) moments when the hero fails to be heroic.

I do think it's worth noting here, how different stories approach the concept of character flaws. In general, I see two major approaches: flaws that are treated like obstacles to be overcome and flaws that are permanent character traits.

I'm not a huge fan of flaws as obstacles. Why? Because they're not really flaws at all. Rather they're plot points, ones for the protagonist to overcome to complete their journey through the narrative. In plotting terms, there's really not much difference between a crippling fear of heights the protagonist must overcome to reach their goal and a locked door that they have to find a way through. In both cases, they're just obstacles to be removed to go forward.

As I said, I'm not particularly fond of this approach to flaws. It seems to me that treating character flaws like simple obstacles to be overcome sells the complexity of characters short, treating any negative characteristics a character has as not so much a part of them, but almost an external force that can simply be removed to make them more "perfect."

Hollywood, unfortunately, loves the flaw as obstacle. It loves the idea that one's demons can simply be vanquished permanently with the application of enough willpower.

Speaking of willpower, one example of this is the film version of Green Lantern from 2011. It treats Hal Jordan's fear as a flaw to be overcome. Indeed, it treats it as the primary obstacle to be defeated in the film, all other stakes being treated as dependent on getting past the fear.

And it's boring as hell.

First, there's the fact that we know where it's obviously going: Hal overcomes his fears and acts, well, fearless from that point on. There's no actual suspense as to whether that will happen, so the fact that the movie keeps balking at doing so just feels like dragging out something that should have been dealt with in the 10 minutes. Second, there's the more plot-problematic issue that the Green Lantern ring is supposed to seek out someone who is not ruled by their fears and yet, on a planet with billions of people, it ended up with a guy who needs a whole film to get beyond his? (A problem not shared by the Hal Jordan of the comics, I might add. The man's unquestionably got issues, but being afraid isn't one of them.)

But there are plenty of other examples in Hollywood as well. Consider the sheer amount of martial arts movies that center around the hero has to train, usually via montage, to overcome their physical and skill deficits. This is virtually always treated as if all the hero needs to is buck up, find their inner strength, work out a lot, maybe learn a "secret technique" and suddenly they'll just be an overwhelming badass, able to kick the tar out of whatever villain likely cleaned their clock earlier in the film. But such stories ignore that the villain could easily be training too, may have years more experience and might even just be the more naturally talented fighter. Martial Arts (and often other sports competition) films love to tout this "believe in yourself and train hard and you'll win" message while completely discounting the notion that the opponent probably believes in themselves and trains hard too. For some reason, though, the approach only seems to work for the hero, not their opponent. (There are exceptions, of course. The original Rocky comes to mind.)

One of Hollywood's more frequent methods of overcoming flaws is the province of romantic films: The Makeover. This particular "flaw" usually centers around the idea of a hero, or often heroine, who is not particularly attractive, getting a makeover and suddenly becoming irresistibly beautiful. Sometimes this involves makeup, or a change of clothes, or working out to lose weight. Often, and quite ridiculously, it's treated as purely a matter of self-confidence, as if all you need to do to become attractive to others is believe in yourself.

These stories also like to sell the particular notion of "Hollywood ugly," the idea that, basically, the world is solely filled with conventionally attractive people but some just don't dress or act right and that's the sole reason they seem ugly. All you need to do is believe in yourself, put on some makeup, get your hair done, trade in your paint-covered overalls for a tight dress and everyone will see you as beautiful.

Basically, no one has to cope with actually being unattractive to other people. There are virtually no actual physically unattractive people in films, just beautiful people who are dressing and acting "wrong."

Don't mistake me. I am, by no means, saying people should have to conform to societal norms of attractiveness. But those norms do exist and they impact us all. It can be incredibly frustrating when the world keeps telling you you're too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, have too many zits, are too pale, don't have the right hair color, don't have a big enough chest, have too big a butt or just generally that your face doesn't look the way it should and all the media in the world keeps saying that all you need to fix it is to get a makeover...and, of course, it doesn't work because real life isn't a rom-com. If the guy you like doesn't find your face attractive, getting a new hairdo probably won't magically change that. If the girl of your dreams only likes tall guys and you're 5'4" chances are that simply acting more self-confident around her won't change her mind.

The message of this particular instance of overcoming a flaw is particularly insidious. It disguises itself as a message of tolerance, as if it's saying that the nonconformists, the oddballs and the "ugly" people are really beautiful. But, when examined, it becomes obvious that the actual sentiment being expressed is that those people who fall outside the norms of conventional beauty will only be accepted once they start to conform to those norms.

Flaws as plot obstacles are also disingenuous because they're so removed from how flaws of personality work in real life. If all we needed was one "important" moment to overcome our flaws in real life we'd all be immensely more well-adjusted people but the truth is that many (perhaps most) people spend their entire lives failing to get beyond the "obstacles" of their flaws. Indeed, many never even recognize those flaws' existence.

So, obviously, I find the concept of the flaw as a plot obstacle problematic, but what about the other approach, flaws as true character traits? There, I think, there's a lot more of worth to be found.

Flaws that are permanent, or as I sometimes like to call them, true flaws, resonate in a way that flaws treated as plot obstacles don't. An agoraphobic person might get a brief, aspirational thrill from a story about a person completely "triumphing" over agoraphobia. It could be thrilling to see someone simply walk out of their house into the rest of the world, free of the anxieties that previously plagued them. But they're not going to be able to relate to that. It's just a fantasy because that's not how agoraphobia works. It doesn't go away the first time you venture out into the world and the world doesn't fall around your ears. It's a constant, something you have to cope with every single time you walk out the door (or try to.)

To pick a flaw/fear more close to my heart, I am deathly afraid of heights. Exposure to high places over the years has not reduced this fear. Simply learning, intellectually, that I'm not necessarily in danger if I go somewhere high enough where I might fall hasn't caused my heart rate to cease going up if I climb a ladder or curb the need for me to actively calm myself when I have to get into a glass elevator, let alone if I need to get up onto a roof or something. If anything, my fear of heights has gotten worse, not better, over the years. Not long ago, I went back to where I grew up and looked at a tree I used to climb when I was a kid and, well, let's just say I doubt I could bring myself to climb it now.

There is an old (and quite underrated) Tom Selleck film called Runaway in which his character, like me, is afraid of heights. To an extent, his flaw is treated like a plot obstacle, particularly in that he has to make a dangerous climb to resolve the situation at the end of the plot, but one of the things I really appreciated about the film was that his character doesn't just "get over" his fear of heights by the time the credits roll. (If anything, the experience is so traumatic, one suspects his height fear might be even worse.)

But Runaway is a one-off film and so it's hard to tell whether the main character's flaw continues so let's take a look at some more ongoing characters with consistent character flaws and see what it is about those flaws that makes them so interesting.

Unsurprisingly, I'm going to start the list with my favorite character, the Doctor from Doctor Who. The Doctor has quite a few flaws but I'm going to concentrate on the one I mentioned above. The Doctor is consistently arrogant.

Next up is Wolverine, the feral mutant X-Man from Marvel comics. Again, this is a character with a long history and many flaws but the one I want to focus on is his most famous, his short temper. Wolverine has an anger problem that never entirely seems to go away.

Third, I'm going to list Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the Star Trek franchise. Unlike my first two examples, I wouldn't say Picard has a whole lot of flaws, but he does have a few and I'm going to choose a consistent one. Picard is consistently distant, wary of forming close ties, even with people he cares about.

So how are the flaws of these characters approached in the respective series in which they appear? To answer that question, I'm going to turn to a different piece of media entirely, a mystery/thriller/horror film from 2005 called Mindhunters. It's an ok film, if not an amazing one, but it has a single quote I've always found very impressive, on the subject of flaws:

"You don't confront your demons and defeat them. You confront them, then you confront them, then you confront them some more, every single day."

That's the way personality flaws actually work. They're not a single barrier to be overcome, but a constant struggle we engage in every day. Often we lose. Sometimes we win, but those victories aren't permanent and the struggle continues.

And, in fiction, that struggle makes for more compelling drama than simple one-and-done triumphs.

Let's consider those above examples.

First, the Doctor. Steven Moffat, former producer of Doctor Who and one of, if not the, most prolific writers for the character, has an interesting take on the Doctor's title. Moffat's concept of the title "the Doctor" is that it's a promise, an ideal that the character himself is trying to live up to. Part of that ideal is "never cruel or cowardly." But the Doctor's often overwhelming arrogance can easily fall into the category of cruelty. When you value yourself so much more highly than everyone around you, it's easy to view them as unimportant and insignificant and, that, in and of itself is an act of cruelty.

And the Doctor is arrogant...a lot. It's not a rarely visited character trait (nor is it even vaguely limited to the 10th Doctor.) The Doctor's arrogance is baked into the character's very core, stretching way back to his condescending attitude toward Ian and Barbara in the very first episode.

But sometimes the Doctor rises above that. Sometimes he recognizes the value in others, not simply saving them as an act of benevolent charity but because he recognizes their actual value. Sometimes he notes that other people will come up with ideas he can't. Sometimes the Doctor recognizes others as his equal, perhaps even his superior.

And then, in the next episode (or maybe even the next scene), he goes right back to being arrogant.

For Wolverine, I'd like to draw from two vey specific storylines from Marvel Comics. At the end of the Wolverine miniseries from 1982, Wolverine has to fight a villain, Shingen, who has already beaten Wolverine once. Specifically, during a duel, Shingen baited Wolverine into losing his temper and then calmly defeated Wolverine by striking his pressure points. Wolverine's flaw, his anger, had cost him the duel (and humiliated him in front of the woman he loved, Mariko, who had been watching the duel.)

When Wolverine must fight Shingen again, he remains clam, exerting a great deal of self-control in order to keep his temper in check because he knows that he will only beat Shingen if he keeps his wits about him...and he succeeds.

Next up is Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, another miniseries, this one from 1984. Once more, this story ends with a confrontation, this one pitting Wolverine against his former teacher, the ninja Ogun. This fight, interestingly, goes the other way, with Wolverine only emerging victorious when he completely gives in and lets his anger reach the point of berserker rage.

But, importantly, that rage is still a thing, two years after Wolverine "conquered" it in the earlier story. It hasn't gone away. It's something the character struggles with constantly. It's a never-ending source of the conflict. Indeed, I suspect that particular struggle to keep anger in check and not let it overwhelm is one of the the reasons the character speaks to young men so much. I know it did to me when I was younger. Like many teenage boys, I had a lot of anger and it felt like it never stopped trying to get out and drive me to hurt people around me. I found Wolverine's struggle to control his anger, not just once, but all the time, very relatable at that time in my life.

On to Captain Picard and his tendency to distance himself from everyone. Star Trek: The Next Generation rather famously ends with a scene in which Picard walks in and joins the crew's regular poker game, something which had been a staple of the series and says "I should have done this a long time ago." It's a very poignant moment.

But, in Picard's very next appearance, the film Star Trek: Generations, his walls are back up, angrily dismissing Riker's offer to listen to his problems. Picard's walls are very much in place in the subsequent films, particularly Star Trek: First Contact where he uses them as a shield to cover one of his other flaws (his desire for revenge on the Borg.) Indeed, it stretches into Star Trek: Picard with a whole plotline about its origins in Season 2 and it becomes a significant barrier to his relationship with his son in Season 3.

Like the Doctor and Wolverine, Picard is able to momentarily conquer his tendency to distance himself from everyone, but it's not a lasting victory. He needs to re-engage (snicker) with that fight for the rest of his life.

For the Doctor, Wolverine and Picard, those consistent flaws are a part of them and in ongoing struggle to keep those flaws in check is part of what makes them so compelling. That conflict, that endless battle against the demons makes them feel real. It lets us, those observing their adventures, feel a kinship to them because we, too, have to fight that constant fight against our demons. Their struggles mirror ours in a very real way that simply triumphing over their flaws in a single, dramatic bound wouldn't.

Russell T Davies, Doctor Who's current (and former) showrunner has an interesting take on character flaws. I've noted that he builds significant, lasting ones into virtually all of his ongoing characters. He inherited the Doctor's arrogance, but he created Rose's selfishness, Martha's passivity, Donna's lack of self worth. But, as RTD points out, the constant presence of these flaws makes those little moments when they overcome them stand out as more impressive than they otherwise would. When Rose is selfless, that means more than it would for another character because we know she's fighting her own nature to be so. Selflessness from a character who didn't have that flaw would be less impressive. The same is true when Martha stands up for herself or when Donna recognizes her own value. We're not being sold the illusion that these triumphs are permanent, but rather the reality that little victories are both possible and have true value.

This then, for me anyway, is the value of the flawed hero. It's the ability to relate to them in a way that you can't to a more "perfect" hero. I can't relate to someone who never gets angry or who is never selfish. But I can relate to the struggle to momentarily rise above those things in order to to the right thing.

I think we all can relate to that, can't we? I certainly hope we can.

What is a villain?

What about the other side of the coin? If a hero is someone who tries to do more good in the world than bad and who, at least momentarily, puts their flaws aside to achieve greater things, what is a villain?

Well, the opposite, really. A villain is someone who either actively chooses to do more bad in the world than good or (and this is probably more common) someone who doesn't bother to make the choice at all, just going with whatever benefits them most personally, simply not caring about how that affects others.

Villains need not even be acting maliciously. Some of the more interesting villains simply seem to have their concepts of right and wrong so warped as to justify doing horrible things. Davros seems to genuinely believe that strength and power are virtues in and of themselves and that compassion and mercy are flaws (an attitude I find disturbingly mirrored by some people in real life these days.) Doctor Doom seems to genuinely believe that the world would be a better place if he were in charge of it (and indeed, there's some small evidence for that) but uses that belief to justify horrible actions to achieve that result. The Borg believe they are bringing other species closer to perfection, even as they strip agency and identity away from them.

At the end of the day, though, these motivations don't really affect whether they're villains or not, though. They're villains because their actions are evil and their actions are evil because of the effects they have on others. What defines a villain? A villain tries to damage the world and/or those who live in it.

Sympathetic Villains

Villains, like heroes, are still characters and are better if they having interesting, compelling or redeeming traits. Amongst the ways to do this, is to sometimes give them small redeeming qualities, reminders that, as I said above, they're not "bad people" but people doing bad things.

Do such redeeming qualities remove these characters from the category of villains entirely? My general answer is no. As long as they're still doing more harm than good to the world, I feel comfortable till classifying them as villains.

If anything, one can almost define sympathetic villainy as the opposite of flawed heroism. A sympathetic villain is someone who, despite having the occasional positive trait, consistently lets their flaws overwhelm them and push them toward acting in ways that harm others. Doctor Doom is a brilliant and capable leader but his arrogance invariably gets the better of him at every crucial moment. The Borg may wish to bring others toward perfection but they consistently fail to hear it when those others say they don't want to give up their individuality. Davros...well, honestly, Davros doesn't even try to overcome his bloodlust and desire for power. He just, uh, rolls with it. (Indeed, while Davros' motivations may make sense for his character, I wouldn't actually describe him as sympathetic.)

Sympathetic villains can, I'd contend, be taken a bit too far. The Spider-Man animated series of the '90s, which I generally like, went a bit overboard with this concept. It seemed as though a good 2/3 of the villains in that series were done as what most of us would probably describe as "good people in bad circumstances" (including several who were decidedly not so in the source material. Yeah, I'm looking at you Kraven the Hunter and sadly noting that they did the same thing with the recent film.) I thought that series overdid it a bit, although at least it makes the villains in it who are less sympathetic stand out.

I can, uh, sympathize with how this comes about, mind you. In an effort to build villains who aren't just mindless, cackling caricatures, you want to build personalities into them that the audience can at least somewhat relate to and finding that line can be difficult. Indeed, it sometimes leads to a phenomenon that oddly fascinates me.

Sometimes I see people doing, with villains, the opposite of what I described with the Doctor at the beginning of this article, insisting that they're heroes. They empathize with those little redeeming qualities so much that they're willing to overlook the horrible actions the villain engages in.

Back in 2006, a TV series called Heroes aired. It had an interesting (albeit X-Men-like) premise of people all over the world discovering they had super powers and dealing with those powers in different ways. The chief villain of Heroes' first season was a character called Sylar, who would murder other powered people to acquire their powers himself, amassing an impressive array of abilities by the end of the season (and making him a dark mirror of Peter, a character who naturally copied the powers of people he met without harming them.)

Sylar was, in Season 1, a darned good villain, helped along by the fact that we only really got to know him toward the end of the season. Prior to that we usually just found the results of his attacks. But, after that, the character went somewhat downhill (as, arguably, the whole show did.) It felt as if the shows' creators latched onto the idea that the character and the actor who played him were very popular and decided to make the story more about him. This led, over the course of the rest of the series, to a series of revolving door "redemptions" for Sylar where he keeps trying to reform himself but then slips back into villainy (presumably because they wanted the character to keep the "edge" that people originally liked about him.) In the show's final episode, after doing something mildly heroic, Sylar utters the phrase "I feel like a hero." It's clearly meant to be a significant moment but, after the character bouncing back and forth so many times, we've really no reason to believe he wouldn't have reverted to outright villainy 5 minutes after the credits rolled. Indeed, if the show had gotten another season, I suspect that's exactly what he would have done.

But, for discussion's sake, let's say Sylar had remained "good" for the rest of the series. Would that really matter? In story terms, possibly, depending on how it was handled. But looking at it from a more in-story perspective, does deciding to "become good" really matter after engaging in villainous acts? I suppose that the "level" of villainy affects the answer to that question. A thief or a pickpocket? Yeah, I can see that switch being meaningful. A murderer? Not so much. One of the things that made the Sylar "redemption" so unimpressive is that it treated his change of heart as the only requirement for redemption.

Because whether or not Sylar "feels like a hero" isn't really the important factor, is it? Regardless of his personal feelings, he's left a trail of death, horror and pain behind him throughout the story's narrative. Those hurt by him (either directly or through things he's done to loved ones) have every right to maintain their anger and to not care if he feels like he's changed. I found Peter forgiving him particularly irksome for this exact reason. It's presented as if Sylar's change of heart and some time to think about it are the only things Peter needs to forgive Sylar...and Sylar killed Peter's brother! Worse, the way we find this out is in such a fashion that we know Peter's forgiveness is genuine. There was a chance that he'd turn out to be wrong but not that he didn't mean it.

I occasionally run into Star Wars fans who wish that the original trilogy had ended with Darth Vader surviving and, now redeemed, fighting on the side of the Rebellion against the remains of the Empire. I'm always perplexed by this perspective. Surely, if Vader had lived through the events of Return of the Jedi, the Rebels would have put him on trial and likely executed him for the thousands of deaths he's responsible for, both directly and indirectly. As in real life, murderers aren't forgiven simply because they decide they're not going to murder anymore. We define a murderer as someone who has commited murder, not just someone who's up for doing it again.

Over in Doctor Who, there's the subject of Missy, the female incarnation of the Master. Again, I sometimes see Who fans being disappointed that, upon regenerating into another male form, the Master returned to villainy. Indeed, I actually see people who had hoped Missy would be fully redeemed and act as the Doctor's companion going forward from that.

Now, to start with, this presents the same issue as the Sylar and Vader "redemption" in that simply deciding not to be bad anymore wouldn't negate the sheer amount of death the Master has caused in the universe (including as Missy herself. Sometimes Who fans seem to misremember Missy's story as starting with her attempt at redemption, forgetting that she'd appeared before that, cheerfully murdering away.)

But there's a larger issue here too, which is that Missy's redemption arc isn't actually a redemption arc at all. It's not the story of Missy turning good. It's the story of Missy having it demonstrated to her that she's not good.

To start with, there's the question of motivation. Missy's goal throughout this arc is not to become a better person (indeed she actively resists that) but rather something much more selfish: She wants her old friend back. After years of trying to defeat and kill the Doctor, she's decided she'd like to have him as her friend again.

This isn't entirely without precedent. In some of the Master's early appearances (particularly The Claws of Axos and Colony in Space), there's the implication that, on some level, the Master would like to be the Doctor's friend again. Their childhood friendship is mentioned in The Sound of Drums and The End of Time and there are various stories in which, faced with a larger threat, they fall into an easy rhythm working together. Indeed, in some ways, the Master's life seems to have revolved around the Doctor since his first appearance on the show.

But, importantly, the desire isn't to repair the friendship for the Doctor's sake, but for her own. Indeed, her redemption arc isn't even her first attempt at gaining the Doctor's friendship. It's just the first one in which she tries to do so by changing herself rather than trying to change the Doctor. Her first try is to offer him an army of controlled Cybermen as a birthday present in hopes that using them to fight the good fight (despite the cost) will cause him to see that they're not so different from one another. Her second attempt involves trying to trick him into murdering his friend Clara to sever his connection with her (and likely to "teach him" that murdering an innocent is something he could eventually learn to live with.)

Indeed, even when we get to her actual redemption arc, it starts as a simple attempt to save her own life. She's been captured, is about to be executed and knows the Doctor can save her so she promises she'll change without really understanding what such a change entails (something she demonstrates multiple times later as we see how little concept Missy actually has of what "being good" really means.) Note how Missy talks, even in her last story, about how much self-control she has to exert to avoid killing people? Sure, I suppose we can give her some points for the attempt but there's still the larger issue: She's still of a mindset where killing people is her first instinct. That is not the mindset of someone who has reformed or is even on the verge of it.

And then, of course, there's the fact that as soon as her former, more actively villainous self shows up, she throws in with him instantly.

Why?

Because the Master, in this story, is the walking, talking manifestation of Missy's flaws and inner demons and every time they interact his perspective wins out. He's the part of her that longs to be who she used to be and he's the more powerful part of her personality.

Yes, this is playing with the boundaries of literal narrative, presenting him as more of a representative concept than a literal past incarnation but that's a perfectly legitimate way to tell the story and it's clearly what Steven Moffat, the writer of the story and showrunner of the series at the time is doing.

Note how Missy instantly returns to helping the Doctor out the second her past self is knocked unconscious at the beginning of the final episode of the arc. That's not a coincidence. Her "evil instincts" have literally been knocked out. And note also that, as soon as he wakes up again, she goes back to waffling about which side she's on at best, siding with him at worst.

Consider Missy's actual actions in that final episode. Not just her stated intentions, but her actions themselves...or, perhaps more importantly, her lack of actions. At no point in the story does she apologize to Bill, despite the fact that she (as her past self) is responsible for Bill's permanent transformation into a Cyberman. Indeed, not only does she not apologize, she stands by as her past self teases Bill about the situation. Why? Because Missy doesn't actually care about Bill as a person. She feels no guilt for her actions. Earlier in the story, she'd referred to Bill and Nardole, the Doctor's two current companions as "Thing One and the other one" or as "Pets? Snacks?", not to mention "disposables" and "exposition and comic relief." She feels no real empathy for them and empathy is one of the things that allows people to judge good actions against bad ones.

And then there's the big climactic moment when the Doctor asks Missy and the Master to stand with him against the impending assault of the Cybermen...and she turns him down. Her past self does so vengefully and she does so regretfully but they both turn him down and walk away leaving the Doctor to stand and fall on his own.

"Wait," you might say and remind me that she changes her mind later. Well, let's look at that scene, because it's the one that people seem to think is her actual redemption when it's actually something else entirely.

What actually happens in Missy's last scene, the one where she changes her mind? She stabs her past self, symbolically killing him, declares she's going to stand with the Doctor, leaves, returns to the Doctor's side and helps him fend off the army of Cybermen, thus redeeming herself.

Right?

No, wait, that's not actually what happens. She stabs her past self, yes (although not without wistfully commenting on how much she enjoyed being him), declares she's going to stand with the Doctor, yes, and then...gets shot by her not-actually-dead past self, and then she laughs hysterically.

Redemption is not just decision or intention. It's action. One has to do something redemptive, to act in a way that makes up for evils of the past...and Missy doesn't do that. She declares an intention to do so (though it's questionable if even helping the Doctor would make up for the sheer amount of death she's caused) but she never actually does it. She doesn't even get a redemptive "final act" like Darth Vader saving his son. She saves no one, she redeems nothing. In a very real sense, Missy fails at redeeming herself.

Further, if we step outside literalism and return to how the Master, her past self, is a symbol of her inner demons, it becomes even more obvious what's going on. The Master is the part of Missy that hates (both the Doctor and, to an extent, everyone), glories in death and pain, and is unrepentant in the embrace of acts of evil. The Master is, as I said above, Missy's inner demons made manifest.

And he's the part of her that wins.

Missy tries to exorcise her inner demons and, rather than let that happen, they kill her instead. They will not let her join the Doctor. They're too much for her.

And she finds that hilarious.

That. I think, is the final nail in the coffin of the idea of Missy's redemption. She isn't saddened by what's happened. She think it's hilarious. She sees that her attempt to embrace being a better person is beyond her and thinks it's a riot. Because of course it is. At the end of it all, Missy knows who she is, what choices she'd prefer to make and they're not the "good" ones. And it's hilarious to her that she'd thought she could change that.

Missy's story is not about her redemption. It's about her coming to understand that she isn't redeemable...and that she's ok with that.

Now, let's consider someone with a lot more potential for actual redemption: The X-Men's on-again/off-again nemesis, Magneto.

In many ways, starting with Chris Claremont in the '70s/'80s and stretching forward to later writers and artists, the creators of the X-Men did such a good job of making Magneto a sympathetic villain that they had the opposite effect on many readers that I described about the Doctor in the beginning of this article: Huge swaths of X-Men readers ceased to view him as a sympathetic villain and instead viewed him as a flawed hero.

To me, it seemed like the height of this effect was in the pages of New X-Men, when Magneto, who had been operating undercover as a mutant named Xorn, revealed himself and, amongst other things, destroyed a portion of New York, killing a lot of people. Y'know...villain stuff.

Some of X-Men fandom got very upset at this notion, believing so strongly that Magneto was more of a flawed hero than a sympathetic villain that they objected strenuously to this plotline, insisting that this was a level of destruction Magneto simply wouldn't perpetrate. Indeed, they objected so strenuously that some of Marvel's editorial staff allowed this story to be retconned away by retroactively turning Xorn into a real, separate character who had been impersonating Magneto, rather than the other way around, thus meaning the real Magneto was never responsible for the deaths Xorn caused. They invented a whole new character to take the blame off Magneto.

Here's the thing, though. Not only have I read a lot of X-Men comics but I'm very familiar with the early days of X-Men. Y'know who the villain was in X-Men # 1 back in 1963? You guessed it, Magneto.

And he's not sympathetic at all. He's a full on ruthless villain. Humans are his enemies. Mutants who don't agree with him are his enemies. Even allies who question him instantly become his enemies. He is not a misguided hero. He's a villain. Magneto is ruthless and uncompromising, considering absolutely nothing to be off limits in his struggle. That struggle is not, I might add, simply for mutant liberation but for himself to be personally in charge of a mutant-led world. In his early attempt to achieve this goal he shows no qualms about sacrificing innocents, human and mutant alike, viewing his own allies as disposable resources in his war. In only his second appearance he tries to blow up a country just to cover his escape and only fails to do so because one of his own allies has more of a conscience than he does.

Thus we are presented with a man who not only would kill a huge portion of the population of New York if his plans called for it, but wouldn't even think twice about it.

Now, given all that, I want to be clear. I like the character of Magneto. He's a great character and only became more interesting as the years went on and we began to learn more about his background, how he'd lost his family to the Nazis and then once more to further prejudice as the years went on. Magneto became a more interesting villain as we learned more about all the things he'd had to endure and the more we learned the more his attitude toward the world made sense.

Because that was always the twisted key to Magneto as a character. He was someone whose life had been destroyed by the Nazis and had then grown up to be just like them, treating humans the same way they'd treated him and his family. He may have escaped from them physically, but the damage they did to him as a person was permanent and he's going to visit that same damage on the world. Magneto was a supervillain based in the idea that "hurt people hurt people."

But, somehow, over time, this seems to have gotten lost. A lot of people seem to have embraced the idea that Magneto is not just lashing out but that he's right to do so.

It's not hard to see how they got there. He's presented as a charismatic leader who easily rallies mutants to his cause, particularly those who have been hurt by the world like himself. It's an easy sell, really, "Join me and we'll make them pay for what they've done to us."

Indeed, it's a much easier sell that Xavier's concurrent goal of peaceful co-existence, which frequently requires that past transgressions against the oppressed be essentially forgiven, or at least ignored. I think one of the things that makes it so easy to view Magneto as a flawed hero is that there are real problems with Xavier's approach. (And I've noticed, over the years, a concurrent trend of slowly shifting Xavier from hero to flawed hero to even not-especially-sympathetic villain recently.)

But however, they got there, I just find it hard to reconcile the guy who'd cheerfully execute the Scarlet Witch for objecting to him committing murder, who killed a submarine full of Russians and forcibly ripped the metal off of Wolverine's skeleton with simply being a "flawed" hero.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure the question of how Magneto is regarded is one I've lost. The vast majority of comics fans I've met in modern times seem to place Magneto squarely in the flawed, "edgy" hero category. Yes, his past is occasionally revisited, but it's usually in terms of justifying his actions, rather than reminding us that he's not exactly a moral paragon.

And I see the appeal of viewing Magneto as a hero. Look at the world around us. Prejudice and discrimination abounds and peaceful protest against it increasingly feels ineffective in the face of the overwhelming power and authority wielded by those who no longer even adopt the pretense of being against bigotry. I can see the appeal of someone who doesn't just object to that but physically acts against it. More and more it feels like a world that tells us that Magneto was right and that Xavier's dream was a fantasy.

In fact, between when I outlined this section of this article and when I'm typing it now, I've found myself questioning Magneto's status. I'm still not sure I can come to view him as a hero, but I increasingly wonder if he falls more in the category of "necessary evil" than that of pure villainy. It's not so much because I feel the character himself has been redeemed in any way (despite some in-universe attempts) but rather because the world he inhabits, which is an exaggerated version of the real world, has become such a dark place that pure heroism may simply not be enough to fix things.

The reason I bring up all these villains like Sylar, Missy and Magneto is not because I think villains can't be redeemed. Indeed, I feel like such stories can be deeply compelling. But I do think that redeeming a villain requires....well, redeeming that villain, having the character take actions that at least somewhat make up for the damage they've caused rather than just saying they don't feel like doing any more damage. And that's hard, often requires sacrifice and always requires acknowledgment that what they've done in the past was ethically wrong rather than trying to justify it.

We shouldn't mistake a simple attitude change for a redemption arc. There's more to it than that.

The Beauty of the Spectrum Between Good and Evil

So what does all of this add up to? I must confess that I haven't come out of writing this musing with the exact same notions about flawed heroes and sympathetic villains that I had when I went into it. The subject has lent itself to a true musing, with ideas that have shifted and changed as I've contemplated them.

A few things, however, have remained consistent throughout my journey to write this particular piece. Chief amongst those is my continued belief that the world simply cannot be divided into good and bad people, just good and bad actions. If anything, I find myself wanting to extend that viewpoint into the realm of fictional characters as well. Characters, like real people, can have a great deal of nuance. More than that, what actual use is there in assigning moral judgments to fictional characters? They don't exist in the real world, so what use is there in assigning real world titles like "hero" or "villain" to them. There may be some efficacy in using those terms to assign their roles within a given story but as actual moral judgments, what purpose does that serve? To go back to the original instance which prompted me to write this article in the first place, if one has come to the conclusion that David Tennant's 10th Doctor should be declared a villain what effect does that actually have. The 10th Doctor isn't a real person. "He" doesn't need to be "punished" within the bounds of a story that didn't actually "happen."

Similarly, if a character does something egregiously bad in a story, like Magneto, do we really need to start inventing ways to retcon those actions. He's a character, not a real person. There's no need to polish his reputation to make sure he doesn't cross any moral lines because any moral lines crossed will be fictional.

In a more general sense, perhaps we need to remember that enjoying a morally corrupted character isn't the same thing as endorsing everything that character does. If we chuckle at one of Freddy Kruger's off-color jokes before he murders a teenager in a Nightmare on Elm Street film, we're not endorsing a real child abuser/murderer. If we find satisfaction when the Punisher mows down some mobsters with a machinegun, we're not advocating for real vigilante executions of unconvicted criminals. (Heck, I enjoy the Punisher and I don't even support the death penalty.) We can sympathize with Magneto, laugh along with Missy and recognize the simple fact that Darth Vader is damned cool, without feeling guilty because they all do awful things within their fiction.

In addition, one of my other positions that has not changed is that there is value in exploring moral grey areas in fiction. Indeed, as I just alluded to, fiction is the safe place to do it, where consequences can be explored without any real world damage. Good and evil is a spectrum in real life so there's no particular need to make our fictional worlds more black and white. Fiction, even heroic fiction, can and should be more than just a didactic lesson on how "good people" should act and how "bad people" fail to do so.

It's nice to have the occasional squeaky clean heroes like Superman, Captain America or Jean-Luc Picard. But the world, real and fictional, is better for having the Punisher, Wolverine, Booster Gold, Gambit, Magneto, Jack Harkness, Roj Blake, Kerr Avon, Elim Garak and Londo Mollari in it too.

And, yes, it's better for having a hero like the 10th Doctor, even when he makes a choice that leads some of us to see him as a villain.