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"Manfred and the Witch of the Alps": One of Byron's Byronic heroes
"Mad, bad and dangerous to know."
— Lady Caroline Lamb, before she started having sex with Lord Byron.
The Byronic Hero is a particular sub-type of Anti Hero. A character of larger-than-life flaws who is quite often placed into the story where an Anti Hero would go, he generally has very few (if any) redeeming qualities beyond panache and seldom performs any of the heroic actions that are usually required of an Anti Hero. In some cases, the "hero" part of the name seems to be there only because he tends to be a primary protagonist and thus is a Designated Hero.
Byronic Heroes often have many unpleasant characteristics, such as conflicting emotions, poor integrity, the status of exile, a lack of respect for rank or privilege, a troubled past, cynicism, arrogance, and self-destructiveness. They also have a number of characteristics which had been considered controversial by the audience of the author's time, even if those characteristics have been considered heroic by audiences during other time periods; for example, a Byronic hero is often nonconformist with a dislike for social norms, introspective, a man struggling with his sexuality, and (importantly) a loner. Prone to Melodrama. They are generally noted for, however, a vast extant intelligence.
A Byronic hero may have a vaguely suggested horrible crime behind him. This crime may never been made explicit; may indeed be so vague as to suggest that the hero is over-dramatizing himself. This is sometimes wise; Walter Scott had his Byronic hero in The Lady of the Lake commit forgery and lose his impressiveness. If a pirate, bandit, or other criminal, he may never commit the crime during the course of the work, to avoid bringing his crimes down to earth.
Though he can never ( some would say should never) leave his dark past behind him, he can still be redeemed by the Love of a Good Woman. Just be careful that it doesn't have the opposite effect on him...
Vampires are often written as these kind of characters, the definition seems tailor-made for them.
There have been examples of Byronic heroes since well before Lord Byron's time; Byron just made them famous with both his writings and his private life.
In many ways, the darker incarnation of the Upper Class Wit. Totally unrelated to Kari Byron. Or any series with a Bionic Hero.
Examples:
- The original heroes of classical mythology certainly fit this. The original definition of hero (as in, Heracles, Odysseus, etc.) was not a man who did good deeds. It was a man with the strength to do whatever the hell he wanted. Heracles, for instance, was a murderer, a rapist, a thief and a general thug. Most Greek 'heroes' were like that.
Anime and Manga
- Guts from Berserk is a noticeable example of this trope and fits most of the classical traits. It changes with the story, in particular the years after the Eclipse has Guts basically just going around killing apostles while not caring about the people he saved while hanging on to his humanity by a thread. He eventually starts returning to his original personality after he sees where his obsession with revenge has left him.
- Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass, is arrogant, has no trouble about slaughtering not only enemies, but also people that are theoretically on the same side, if he disagrees with their methods, fairly vengeful and lies to his own men all the time. After the universe screws him over a couple of times, usually just when he tries to straighten his act, he grows increasingly ruthless, loses most of what he cared about, and ends up abandoning his initial moral scruples (such as not harming the innocents and not using his Mind Control Evil Eye to permanently enslave people). While Lelouch sincerely wants to make the world a better place, his methods are so devious and underhanded that it's impossible to call him Chaotic Good. In the end, he succeeds in his noble goal of uniting the world... by becoming the evilest overlord in history.
- That last one is a case of Alternative Character Interpretation: yes, he did become the evillest overlord in history and it did unite the world... against him. And all according to plan. A plan that involves his best friend killing him at the very end of it.
- Light Yagami from Death Note certainly fits this. He's arrogant and manipulative to an incredible degree, and will often use anybody who openly supports Kira or himself as an expendable ally, even considering killing his family at one point but deciding against it for the sole reason that it would make him seem more suspicious.
- In the anime, he simply couldn't kill Sayu. Simply couldn't bring himself to do it; it had nothing to do with people getting suspicious, and was arguably a humanizing moment for him.
- But then he used his father's death as an excuse to freak out when He needed to know Mello's name
- Shinn Asuka from Gundam SEED Destiny, whose hate of ORB brings him much suffering.
- Paptimus Scirocco of Zeta Gundam can be seen as one of these. He was quite the womanizer, much like Lord Byron himself, but seemed to truly want to bring about a better world.
- Tsukihime's Tohno Shiki's split personality (Nanaya Shiki) is basically a murderous amoral lustful sociopath who seriously enjoys killing (and violating the female) non-humans. Despite all these, his killing instincts are the only reason Shiki can survive against his inhuman opponents, and it is highly likely that the entire story would not have been able to begin if it were not for Nanaya Shiki's homicidal impulse that arises around non-humans.
- Kanta, the titular Desert Punk, is on the borderline of this and an extreme form of Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. He's short-tempered, amoral, extremely cynical, and doesn't care about anything but money, boobs/sex (to the point where when he had Junko dead-to-rights for betraying him and didn't plan on letting her go until she had his kid), and saving his own ass. In A World where pretty much everyone is a survivalist jerkass he's still a worse person than most of them. The only things "heroic" he has going for him are his skills and professionalism as a mercenary and inexplicable tendency to spare his defeated opponents lives (and just steal all their stuff). Perhaps demonstrated best when he past a pair of children who he refused to endanger himself to save until he had gotten more supplies from a village—so he could sell them as slaves (though they did turn out to be con-artists). Even when the chips are down, he still cares about himself above all others, pulled a Face Heel Turn, and killed one of the few men he admired along with his wife and half his children to cover that he was still alive.
- Shinji Ikari, a Type 1 anti-hero, provides a variant of this trope. Especially when his degeneracy accelerates in The Movie.
Comic Books
Fan Fiction
Film
- Jake LaMotta from the film Raging Bull.
- Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.
- V from V For Vendetta anyone? He has a mysterious past and is verbosely eloquent, cultured, charismatic, brooding, and defiant of the authority that has wronged him.
- Tony Montana from Scarface is completely this. He's a vicious, violent sociopath who murders and betrays his way to the top of the Miami drug lord heap, who also refuses to harm women and children at pretty much the cost of his own life because it breaks his own personal code of honor.
Literature
- Edward Cullen from Twilight to a freaking T.
- Satan from Paradise Lost is perhaps the grandfather of this trope.
- Raistlin Majere of the Dragonlance books fits this trope perfectly. He's arrogant, ruthless, cynical, emotionally troubled, and ultimately evil. He's also highly intelligent, strong-willed, and capable of extraordinary bravery.
- Mishra of Magic The Gathering fame.
- Gully Foyle in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination starts out as this; he lives entirely to take revenge on the ship that declined to rescue him from his own crippled spacecraft (not the crew, mind you, just the ship; he's not that bright) and stops at nothing to do so, including raping perhaps the one completely likable character in the whole book. However, he gradually becomes more of a traditional hero and even a messiah of sorts.
- Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous Byronic Heroes. Admired by millions of people throughout the world, even though he is quite clearly a very
bad evil man.
- Jane Eyre's Love Interest, Mr. Rochester, is decidedly 'Byronic'. A taste for such heroes seems to have run in the Bronte family.
- Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage contains one of the earliest Byronic Heroes to be actually named as such.
- Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell: Jonathan Strange ends up as one for a while, although he did have a heroic motive. It was lampshaded with Strange explaining that he picked up some of Lord Byron's style from hanging out with him.
- Peter David's Sir Apropos Of Nothing, who only became a squire because he would be killed otherwise. He loathes long tales of heroic derring-do, and even became a full-fledged villain for a while.
- Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo, who one minor female character nicknames "Lord Ruthven" (see below) in reference to his pallor and mannerisms.
- And by logical extension, the Count of Monte Cristo in the anime Gankutsuou.
- Dom Claude Frollo from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, despite being the novel's primary antagonist, fits the mold of a Byronic hero. A compassionate, fatherly person for most of his life, by the time the novel begins, he, while still brilliant, is isolated by his alchemical studies and ultimately doomed by his lust for Esmerelda.
- Lord Ruthven of the novella The Vampyre as well as the Lord Ruthven from a novel by Lady Lamb above, both based on Byron. To be fair, Ruthven (and later, Count Dracula), are both stellar examples of a Byronic villain.
- Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Pechorin in Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time is both a good example and possibly a deconstruction, being very Genre Savvy and all the more miserable for it. Also, he's not even the protagonist as such and dies "off-screen". The author apparently intended to stretch the idea of the Byronic Hero to its limits:
"You will again tell me that a human being cannot be so wicked, and I will reply that if you can believe in the existence of all the villains of tragedy and romance, why wouldn't believe that there was a Pechorin?".
- Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone.
- Lord Asriel from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials takes the Byronic Hero to a cosmic scale.
- The title character of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin can be both seen as an example, a parody, and a deconstruction. On one hand, he fits the mold in his cynical, self-destructive nature, he has more than a little of the Upper Class Twit in him, and is kind of ineffectual compared to similar characters. Lampshaded when Tatiana, Eugene's love interest, visits his library, understands that he has been invoking Romantic tropes when dealing with her, and asks herself: "Isn't he a parody?"
- Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein contains a rather nice Byronic Hero in the eponymous doctor (not the monster!).
- I think that the Monster (or the Creature, as he is more often called in the novel) also qualifies. He is incredibly eloquent, brilliant, and even persuasive in his best moments. He is also filled with characteristically Byronic anguish and despair due to being cut off from humanity as a result of his unnatural birth (or creation, depending on how you look at it). Not to mention that some literary critics have interpreted the Creature as Victor's dark side.
- Tolkien's Middle-Earth has a couple of these, and the greatest of them may be Turin "Turambar." A gritty Anti Hero felled by a cruel deity's curse and his own pride.
- Denethor also qualifies as this, at least by the time we meet him. Gandalf says he was once a true hero but a lifetime of watching his nation slowly ground away and Sauron's mind games has embittered him
Live Action TV
- For a good period of some of the later series of Angel Wesley Wyndam-Price fills the the role of Byronic Hero as a cynic, self-destructive drunkard with a troubled past and horrible crime behind him and only a vast intellect to sustain him.
- The title character also fits the trope quite well.
- Averted in Blackadder where a Byronic hero is someone who wanders round Italy in a big shirt trying to get laid.
- But also played relatively straight in the character of Blackadder himself, who's got all the typical Byronic qualities... except for the charisma.
- Eddie "Fitz" Fitzgerald from Cracker was a Byronic Criminal Psychologist. Best summed up by the conversation:
Thomas: Why do you drink so much?
Fitz: I like it.
Thomas: And smoke so much?
Fitz: I like it.
Thomas: And you gamble as well?
Fitz: Yes, I like it.
- Dr. Greg House.
- Todd Manning of One Life To Live (Or So I Heard) is kind of a Heel Face Revolving Door version of this, sometimes a Byronic Villain, other times a Byronic Hero, but always Byronic.
- Adam Monroe is the Heroes character most likely to fit this trope. The show's token immortal, he helped save Japan from the feudal warlord Whitebeard four hundred years ago, founded the Company to make a better world for evolved humans, and in the show's second season plotted to give his people a second chance through the release of a supervirus. He's cultured, cunning, and a man of many vices.
- Harlan Judd (Tim Daly) of Eyes may or may not fit this perfectly. Though every episode of the show ended with the Mac Guffin back in the hands of its rightful owner and somebody justly facing prison time or worse, Judd's interest is typically only in the former; he frequently admits he doesn't really care if the kidnapper or thief get caught (unless they piss him off, which they almost invariably do). Daly described the character as "accidentally ethical."
Music
Real Life
- Lord Byron himself, of course. He was surrounded by scandal in his own lifetime - womanising, possibly man-ising as well, and rumours of incest with his half-sister to boot. He was also (as well as an excellent writer) an animal lover (almost to the point of a Friend To All Living Things) and a champion of the poor and downtrodden, who gave his life fighting in the Greek War of Independence.
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, Abyssals and Infernals are the most likely characters to be in this category, though it can happen to the other types as well.
- Any male Player Character in FATAL is expected to be Byronic, whether hero or not. Interestingly, the game's author is named Byron Hall.
Video Games
- Sol Badguy from the Guilty Gear series is often boorish, slovenly, aloof, ill-mannered, far more intelligent and well-informed than his appearance would indicate, and is the perpetrator of one of the most awful crimes in that world: being co-creator of the Gears. He might be a loose fit (perhaps more fitting as an Anti-Hero) due to his gruff concern for Dizzy, his (albeit rather violent) almost-brotherly relationship with Ky Kiske, and his deceptively high sense of self-sacrifice (In D&D parlance, he's very much Chaotic, but also most likely Good
 ).
- Travis Touchdown from No More Heroes seems to fit this trope quite nicely, being a Heroic Sociopath with more character flaws than an average politician.
- Wylfred from Valkyrie Profile Covenant Of The Plume is essentially a petty grudge seeking man whom blames the death of his sister and his mother's sanity on the fact that his dad was taken by the Valkyrie. He then goes on a plot to kill the Valkyrie.
- GTA protagonists often fit this, as the entire point of the game is to play as the bad guy, but Tommy Vercetti may be the best example of all of them. Unlike the GTA Protagonists who followed him, with their reluctance to rejoin a life of crime, Vice City's Tommy Vercetti lives to kill and steal his way to the top. He has few positive character traits and the only reason he has player sympathy is because he was betrayed and spent years behind bars. Lesser of two evils? Perhaps, until he kills the greater evil.
Web Comics
- Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance, while normally just a Heroic Sociopath, becomes increasingly Byronic during "Holiday Wars" and "Oceans Unmoving." The only part of the Byronic template he doesn't fit is the brooding part. If Bun-Bun ever gets in a brooding mood, he just beats someone up instead.
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