Forum - View topicSympathetic villains in anime?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3 Next |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Albert Casanovas
Posts: 7 |
|
|||||
|
What about morally ambiguous characters? like Yuno Gasai for example.
|
||||||
|
||||||
louis6578
 Posts: 1861 |
|
|||||
No offense, but Yuno Gasai is poorly written and hardly qualifies as ambiguous. Future Diary is the least subtle show I've seen in a while that tried to be serious. Yukiteru and Yuno are, when you apply thought to it, just villains. If you want the perfect example of an anti-hero character though, I'd recommend Kiritsugu Emiya from Fate/Zero. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Albert Casanovas
Posts: 7 |
|
|||||
|
Well
 ... What about lucy from elfen lied, she's a sympathetic mass murderer.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
FenixFiesta
Posts: 2581 |
|
|||||
Even though Yuno has cartoonish levels of villainy, or perhaps BECAUSE her character story is so bizarre, then as such Yuno is a decent example for the OP, especially a blatant attempt at the end of the series to make her monstrousness seem sympathetic while realizing at the same time she is pretty messed up in the head. |
||||||
|
||||||
nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
|
|||||
With Elfen Lied, one always needs to be specific – are you talking about the anime or the manga (I can only speak to the anime); and as far as Lucy is concerned, are you talking about that personality or the personality of Nyuu? |
||||||
|
||||||
Night fox
 Posts: 561 Location: Sweden |
|
|||||
What is it that makes Lucy sympathetic? spoiler[The incident with the puppy, the festival, or perhaps what she did on the train?] 
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
louis6578
Posts: 1861 |
|
|||||
I'd hate to go off on a tangent, but while I agree with you, part of why I hate Future Diary is that they go really far to make characters seem sympathetic when they're really not. Someone got raped? Of course they'd be a sociopathic murder who uses and kills teenagers (and orders them to be raped as well). Someone was abused by their mother? Of course she'd become a yandere then. Your father killed your mother and then gets killed by Henchman 21 right after apologizing (which clearly is enough to redeem him, right? Right...?)? Of course you'd become a terrorist who doesn't blink at killing his friends and believing that they're betraying you because of flimsy evidence that your psychotic girlfriend (who made it clear that she wants them dead) gave you. One problem with "raped to insanity" or "tortured to insanity" motivations is that you could write just about any personality in there and it'd make sense apparently. Besides that, I'd assume that this topic is for sympathetic villains, but Yuno is all over the place. One moment she's a horror movie monster, the next she's Bad Luck Brian and that's supposed to justify her murderous ways. It also doesn't work because we never see her as a three-dimensional human. Yuno has two personality traits; "loves Yuki" and "suffers from psychopathy." Shogo Makishima from Psycho Pass and Solf J. Kimbley from Fullmetal Alchemist (particularly Brotherhood) have a far wider range of emotions and societal viewpoints that explains and in a strange way, justifies their villainous actions. As for Lucy, I feel like she's an example, but a forced one. Her actions only make sense in a terrible world where humans are as terrible as they are in Elfen Lied. |
||||||
|
||||||
yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
|
|||||
|
I have to say I feel sympathy for Johan in Monster given his background. I guess I must be alone in this opinion since he has yet to be mentioned in this thread. The other rather obvious candidate is, as has been mentioned earlier, the Lady Eboshi in Mononoke Hime. Miyazaki uses her to crystallize the conflict between "nature" and "progress" that is the heart of that story. Nor does he take the easy way out and come down on one side or the other but leaves things morally ambiguous.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
phia_one
Posts: 1657 Location: Pennsylvania |
|
|||||
|
Despite all the crap he pulled, I found Proxy One from Ergo Proxy to be sympathetic because I found the reasons for his actions to make sense though I don't condone them. He spoiler[ found out that his creators purposely made things so that no matter what he did he would die a horrible death (either by exposure to sunlight or getting killed by another proxy). That, and all Proxies were also designed to be hated by the populations of their domes because of how different they are and therefore isolated.
So what does he do? In his despair, he creates Ergo Proxy and then abandons his dome. This kicks off the events of the series since it's a result of him figuratively giving the middle finger to his creators.] |
||||||
|
||||||
|
louis6578
Posts: 1861 |
|
|||||
|
While Johan himself is a debatable example, almost every other villain in Monster can qualify as somewhat ambiguous or sympathetic. The exceptions are pretty blatant (such as The Baby and the old man who abused Dieter in his introduction).
|
||||||
|
||||||
Unicorn_Blade
 Posts: 1153 Location: UK |
|
|||||
|
The kind of symphatetic villains I do not like, are the kind of- "oh, but they had a wive and liked kids. Yeah, they did slaughter a lot of people, but they had a good heart for the people they cared about". Like Harry MacDowel in Gungrave. So at the end we are supposed to feel bad for him spoiler[because he lost his dear wife.] Well, I did not, he deserved it more than anyone else.
I can symphatise with villains who became them against their wishes or best intentions, like f.ex. Scar in FMA, although I suppose the animated families of his victims might not share that view and it's a bit of grey area. I also never got round to disliking Ray and Charles in Eureka 7- (mini villains). I actually understood their motives and felt bad for Ray more than anything. And they seemed more decent characters than Holland and co to be honest, just a shame they ended up on the opposite sides. Or Maier Link- if you can feel sympathy for a vampire who killed countless people, he ended up not begin the main villain after all. It is all relative, but I suppose to relate to a villain, they need to have enough redeeming features to be likeable. The likes of Yagami Light never did that for me. |
||||||
|
||||||
Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
|
|||||
It was quite important that neither Ray and Charles nor the Gekkostate could occupy only a single side of a moral binary. The viewer was never given the convenience of identifying an obviously righteous side of the two, unlike the wider and cleaner conflict against Dewey. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Unicorn_Blade
Posts: 1153 Location: UK |
|
|||||
True that, but Gekko, despite that, is the team we root for most of the time, despite having a chaotic leader with self-esteem problems. It is them with a plan and a mission to save the world and in charge of Eureka. As for Ray and Charles- people initially root against when they attack Gekkostate. And then it sort of turns around when we see Ray's flashbacks. Shame they could not just all get along. |
||||||
|
||||||
omar235
 Posts: 1572 Location: Florida, Jacksonvile |
|
|||||
|
I find Darcia from Wolf's Rain to be one of my favorite sympathetic villains. Tragic love always gets to me, and most if not all the wrongs he commits are done in the name of spoiler[ reuniting himself with his wife. ] . Admittedly they don't really elaborate too much on his character out side of his cold violent exterior due to his depressing motivation and I'm sure that made him less likable. I think it would have helped to contrast just how much he changed due to past events compared to the present and thus allow people to feel for him more.
I do feel for Johan on some level because monsters aren't born they are created, and his innocence was stolen and replaced with something colder and harsher. I think there is plenty to sympathize with in the end, though any pure sociopath is going to be hard to feel bad for. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
louis6578
Posts: 1861 |
|
|||||
|
After rewatching Princess Tutu with some friends, I have to stress how great of a sympathetic antagonist Rue/Kraehe is. Sadly, I can't without going into second-half spoilers, and I know this is an underappreciated masterpiece.
|
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group