Draco In Leather Pants - Television Tropes & Idioms

In Bleach, there are a disturbing number of legions of die-hard Szayel-Apollo Granz fans, some of whom justify his hideous sadism with Fanon that he was the abused Arrancar, and more who found his demise at the hands of fellow Mad Scientist Mayuri Kurotsuchi horribly unfair, rather than fitting. And look at his pretty pink hair!
- ...Why would anyone want to justify that? Hideous sadism, combined with fiendishly good looks and androgyny, is exactly what makes him so attractive in the first place.
- Gin does kinda give the feeling that he may not be too bad a guy and he may have good reasons. It helps that there's little hint as to whether those are good or bad reasons.
- This troper has been finding an increase in this amongst fans of the espada Ulquiorra, who are jumping to his defense in lieu of his admittedly touching demise, excusing and even outright denying that he's even a wee bit of a Manipulative Bastard. This is despite the fact that he made Orihime have to choose between her friends' lives and her freedom and later makes her pledge her existence to Aizen. Instead his pondering about emotions is amplified and his attempts to manipulate Orihime is made into him being the one to make Orihime stronger, since she doesn't end up playing along in doing what he expects and continues to stand by her friends. I guess you can't be a Manipulative Bastard unless your plot actually works.
  - Your Mileage May Vary This troper believes that if Ulquiorra is, in fact, a real Manipulative Bastard, then he should have tried harder. Aizen's plan doesn't exactly equate to Ulquiorra's plan, as he (Ulquiorra) was merely following the instructions. Yes, you can be a Manipulative Bastard even if your plot doesn't work, that is...if you actually have a plot to begin with.
  - Ulquiorra's segunda etapa gives him thin, black legs that easily resemble leather pants. Make of that what you will.
  - This troper believes that Grimmjow is a Draco In Leather Pants. While not at the level of Szayel's draconess, he did do some bad things. He beat the tar out of Ichigo twice, nearly killed Rukia twice, and attempted to attack Orihime while fighting Ichigo so he would block the attack and get injured in the process (though whether he did to gain an advantage over Ichigo is debatable). Yet, Grimmjow has placed as high as 4th in the popularity poll.
  - Hello! Permanently shirtless. Junichi Suwabe. Do the math...
  - And who could forget Nnoitra? Fangirls don't seem to care that in addition to being a male chauvinist, he attacked a defenseless Grimmjow and beat Ichigo to a bloody pulp. Then he made Orihime watch in horror as Ichigo was beaten up again.
Being a bishoujo series as well as a Gag Series that depends on Character Exaggeration, Galaxy Angel wouldn't be Galaxy Angel if they didn't do this intentionally. We therefore end up with a bunch of McDucks who are marketed by their creators as lovable characters that the audience should want to be with. The most obvious example is Mint, whose scheming makes use of her odd pint-size cuteness for fraud — she once claimed that she and Vanilla were destitute and suicidal to get money out of a semi driver, despite her already being loaded. Even her more selfless videogame persona, which the anime parodies, is shrewd and selfish to a point.
Dark Magical Girl and self-professed lone wolf Nao Yuuki is a frequent recipient of the "leather pants" treatment in Mai-HiME fandom, and is often paired with Natsuki, the girl she blames for putting out one of her eyes! Must be something about the claws...or the red hair.
- Nina Wang still manages to retain some degree of sympathy from Mai-Otome audiences, who are willing to downplay her accidentally killing Erstin Ho, and then killing tens of thousands of innocent people to please her father by stating that she was merely a pawn of the Big Bad when it happened.
  - Mai-OtomeZwei indicates that "this degree of sympathy" is now more or less Canon. Whether that's due to SureWhyNot, RunningTheAsylum, or those who have that sympathy being spot-on in their evaluation of Nina's motivations is left as an exercise to the reader.
- Shizuru Fujino's original incarnation in Mai-HiME took her lesbian crush to obsessive and possibly predatory extremes. Nonetheless, being The Ojou and an Onee Sama meant she was the most popular character amongst the show's female fandom.
The four members of Schwarz in Weiss Kreuz serve as the protagonists' Evil Counterparts and spend most of their time unrepentantly organizing mass murder and social chaos when they're not tormenting the main characters or, in the case of one member, torturing priests to death for fun; but somehow, they manage to have as large a fan following as the series' protagonists.
Despite being the cruelest character after Naraku (who really doesn't count because he's just a terribly characterized villain), Sesshomaru from Inuyasha remains the most popular character in the series to the point people will excuse his hate-fueled mass murder because of his supposed "hotness".
Hot Gimmick: A lot of fangirls are willing to overlook Ryoki's near-sociopathic behavior because of his good looks. Although, unlike this trope, Ryoki actually does have some redeeming qualities. Heck, compared to Azusa, Ryoki seems downright decent.
- Debatable- Though Azusa may nearly cross the Moral Event Horizon, he at least had a reason to be angry and seek revenge. Ryoki's just a selfish jerk because he's a selfish jerk- merely being a Lonely Rich Kid just doesn't compare to what Azusa went through.
This trope has been applied to nearly all of Ranma 1/2 's characters, depending on the writer's well-intended rationalization of a character's comedy-prone, ridiculously over-the-top personality. The mildest, but still pervasive, application is usually on Nabiki Tendo; since she is a relatively levelheaded and cerebral character, most Fan Fic writers downplay her selfishness. Naturally, Rumiko Takahashi — her creator — describes that flaw as the reason she is funny.
- Mildest? Nabiki is the by far most extreme example. She generally goes from the most over-the-top-no-trace-of-any-good-qualities-whatsoever genuinely evil, and extremely cheerful while being that way, character in the series, who routinely manipulates and breaks hearts for fun&profit, ruins her family or sells members as prostitutes, and lets people fight each other potentially to the death for her amusement, to a tragic altruist who needs love&comfort to melt the chilly ice queen facade. Almost every other character at least has both good and bad qualities that the writer can focus on. In this particular case they simply invented someone new from scratch.
- Some Fanon takes on characters such as this have gotten so bad that a lot of people remember them as canon. For instance, people will remember Shampoo attacking the attempted wedding at the end of the series, but will somehow conveniently forget Ukyo's taking part in it... or even claim that she was defending everybody from Shampoo! Even a cursory glance at the manga will tell anyone this isn't so, and yet the Lionized Ukyo Who Defends Ranma and Akane's Love persists.
- Let's put this straight - basically, each and every Ranma 1/2 character applies. The series is populated almost entirely by thoughtless, selfish, violent, manipulative, borderline insane (and, somehow, still likeable) jerks. Of course, all of them have fans who are quick to forget their faults and, given that all the cast is equally bad, this is enough to make their favourite character into a crystal-clear hero. For an example of this, one should just read a random fanfic. ANY fanfic.
- This series comes quite close to subverting the trope by mixing pretty good characterization with a number of undiscussed years in which character development may have occurred.
  - Except that he doesn't care for anything bad that happens around him, even if it happens under his jurisdiction (see: Mai, Jou and Rishid falling into near death situations during the Battle City finals). More to the point, many of his fans will excuse and applaud his misanthropy, but heaven forbid anyone else gives him the same kind of treatment, even if it's somewhat justifiably coming from one of the protagonists.
Light Yagami from Death Note, the sociopathic manipulative Knight Templar Villain Protagonist who has no qualms about brutally murdering anyone who stands in his way (including the police and his own girlfriend), kills God knows how many people every minute, and whose stated goal is to make himself God of a new world where everyone will bow to him. Needless to say, he has hordes of fangirls both in-universe and out who think that he's a just misunderstood visionary who really does intend save the world, nevermind the fact that by about half way through the series, even Light himself doesn't believe this anymore.
- Mello gets his fair share of fangirls, seeing as he's also an incredibly diabolical sociopath... and he's the only one of the characters who actually wears form-fitting leather.
- Misa Amane also has her following of devoted fanboys who seem to think that adorableness somehow excuses near-indiscriminate mass-murder.
  - Mikami also gets this due to his sympathetic backstory. This treatment ignores the fact that he's one of the most blatantly insane characters in the series.
Seiichi Yukimura and Keigo Atobe in The Prince of Tennis, and by extension, their teams (Rikkaidai and Hyoutei Gakuen).
- It's not that Keigo Atobe is a horrible person. It's just that he's a Magnificent Bastard who can be ruthless on the courts and has the biggest court presence in the series, but also has genuine Pet The Dog moments (like the "Atobe kara no Okurimono" movie). Some of his fans take their love of him a bit too far: they scream "OMG ORE-SAMA YAAAAAAAY!" at the sight of him, mindlessly gush over his good looks and twist him into some sort of selfless, gorgeous White Prince who shall be adored and loved, while bashing whoever looks at him wrong (specially Ryoma, and sometimes Yukimura if they're Atobe/Sanada fangirls). Basically, they strip Atobe of what makes him fun and enjoyable and try to pass their version of Atobe as Better Than Canon.
Akito from Fruits Basket, despite being an obsessive Control Freak that liked torturing his family members and planned to lock one of them in a cage for the rest of his life, was treated sympathetically by the fans almost entirely because he was a cute bishonen. When it was finally revealed that Akito was not a bishonen, but a girl, those fangirls turned on Akito.
- For what it's worth, Akito does become a more sympathetic and less openly evil character when the backstory and motivations are fleshed out in the plot, but that was after the big reveal. The fan girls had based their opinion on the abusive psycho Akito; they thought the Moral Event Horizon was crossed by Akito's only pretending to be male. Most of us reading here would probably disagree with that idea...
  - And Akito's gender charade was not of her own choosing - she was raised that way. And very clearly resents those responsible for it. Hell, Aki-chan probably wouldn't be a crazy abusive shut-in if it weren't for the gender abuse courtesy of good ol' Mum. Natsuki Takaya either planned this from practically the first volume or painted herself into a corner and managed one hell of a save.
  - Word Of God says that Takaya had the Bridget dropping planned since the beginning. So she played a huge Batman Gambit on her audience... and the results were special.
"Host Samurai", a vampire who was forced to join the Gantz team, is in danger of becoming this. Never mind that he's killed numerous people including both the main character and his brother.
There are several villainous and anti-heroic characters in Dragonball Z who receive this kind of treatment from the fans but perhaps the most egregious example of all is Vegeta. Despite displaying largely jerkass behavior that can either be seen as evil or self-centered, Vegeta has gone on to become perhaps the most popular character in the series, second only to Son Goku. Despite committing genocide against entire worlds(Planet Arlia in the anime), beating up young children who can barely defend themselves(Gohan and Dende), slaughtering innocent people(the Namekians he encountered on Namek along with those spectators during the Buu Saga), endangering the earth because of his pride(allowing Cell to become Perfect so that he could enjoy his fight more), and generally having an unpleasant personality, Vegeta has become so well-received that Akira Toriyama even had to resurrect him after he was initially killed by Frieza.
Parodied in Pokemon. Meowth of Team Rocket has this with Giovanni, even though Giovanni frequently mistreats him and is shown to be ruthless. Meowth imagines him as simply a nice guy with a gruff exterior who likes to go shirtless. Played straight with Harley and Paul in the fandom, however (and even Gary, to some extent).
It has been done with Zagato from Magic Knight Rayearth — treating him as the hero of the first story arc... despite his being willing to lie to, manipulate, and casually destroy his underlings. He may have had motives we can sympathize with, but still... he was going to kill the only genuine, complete innocents in the entire affair. And he was going to destroy the world.
- Keep in mind, however: after The Reveal at the end of season 1 turns the entire story upside-down, we never do get a clear picture of Zagato's goal. It's possible that he was acting as a Trickster Mentor, throwing difficulties at the Magic Knights so as to give them the physical and mental hardiness to do what needed to be done. It's also possible that he anticipated the events of Season 2, and that his true goal was to bring down the deeply flawed system that Cephiro was operating under.
The Varia, specifically their leader Xanxus, from Katekyo Hitman Reborn, further enforced by the fact that they really do all wear leather pants. Even the robot.
- Every single villain (and even one Wild Card protagonist) in Reborn is subject to this, including Byakuran who cruelly ordered the death of one of his followers, who treated him as God, when he was no longer of use. Taken to ridiculous lengths in Japanese fandom when Ax Crazy Hibari and Nietzsche Wannabe Mukuro ranked #1 and #4 respectively in a poll for who people would most like to marry.
Quite a few fangirls of Creed from Black Cat excuse his actions of stalking Train, murdering Train's first (and at the time only) friend Saya, trying to murder Train's other friends, and murdering countless innocents for world domination because he was picked on when he was young.
Prince Schneizel el Britannia subjects emotionally-unstable girls to More Than Mind Control to use them in his agenda, is the major cause of Lelouch's expulsion from the Black Knights, and becomes a borderline Omnicidal Maniac with a God complex. His victims are bashed by the fandom (especially Nina, but she was The Scrappy for most of R2 anyway) and he gets off scot free. Take that as you will.
- A less frequently noted example would be Cornelia li Britannia in the first season (and in her years in the military leading up to that, as evidenced by her character entrance as she, inside her Gloucester, steps through a curtain of flames following the destruction of the Saudi Arabia base that leads to the establishment of Area 18), who is all too happy to enforce Britannia's MO of Social Darwinism, preferably with an excessive (if not outright sadistic) amount of violence. She'll slaughter entire ghettos just to recreate the conditions in which Zero first appeared (to challenge his ego, and it did work), gladly sacrifice hostages rather than negotiate with terrorists (unless her beloved little sister Euphemia is among them, in which case she'll at least try a rescue attempt), and even chews out said sister for desiring to stand up to the rule of discrimination against Numbers by selecting Eleven Suzaku Kururugi as her personal Knight. Being a Bad Ass, having nice threads, and caring for her sister seems to deflect a lot of the bad publicity this would otherwise garner.
  - Euphie isn't the only sibling Cornelia cares for; in episode 16 of R1, she expresses genuine regret over the deaths of Clovis, Lelouch, and Nunnally (who aren't dead, but she doesn't know that), and hopes to end the conflict that claimed their lives (not that she intends to do so subtly, mind you).
  - Which is still a Freudian Excuse, certainly no more than that of Lelouch himself. And if that of the latter doesn't fly in the face of the destruction he's been responsible for, then neither does Cornelia's.
- Lelouch Lamperouge/vi Britannia likewise commits some rather chilling atrocities in the name of his cause, but fans seem to completely forget and/or cheerfully hand wave that he's a Byronic Hero and paint him as some sort of perfect, angelical victim who never ever did anything wrong in the series. NOTHING that happens to him is either his fault or responsibility in their view, end of story.
  - Conversely, many viewers also paint him in an incredibly negative light, even favoring characters that do less good throughout the series. (Oh, and a Byronic Hero is by definition not perfect in the least. It pretty much describes what Lelouch is: a character with both good and bad tendencies.)
- The same is also true of Suzaku Kururugi, whose patricide and complicity in genocide most of his fans tend to gloss over.
  - A lot of it has to do with him having his heart in the right place, yet being tragically oblivious to his side's own problems, though he does tread into Knight Templar territory in R2.
  - Knight Templar or not, Suzaku was well aware of Britannia's problems. His entire character in R1 is based on this principle of fixing the problems from within, and even in final episode he argues with Kallen/Karen on this exact principle.
  - When you remember that his main objection is with Zero's methods, and before his Motive Decay he refused to achieve a good end through the wrong means, it makes his entire argument with Kallen in the Final Battle either "hilarius" or "annoying".
  - Consider that the most rabid Lelouch fans still often take pleasure in making Lelouch into a flawless angel and then bash Suzaku to the ground for barely looking at Lelouch wrong. In this wiki, This Troper has seen some blurbs that paint Suzaku in a more or less better light being deleted without any advice or discussion, purely because the troper/s who delete them rabidly hate the guy and can't seem to withstand others's liking or tolerance of him.
  - On the flipside, various Suzaku fans too eager to "woobify" him just won't let up on disproportionately chastizing Lelouch while overlooking his troubles. The Jerkass Dissonance cuts both ways.
  - In the Nightmare of Nunnally manga, he didn't kill his father; C.C. did, and he also tends to make fewer morally questionable decisions while part of the Britannian military.
- Given the shows ubiquitous moral ambiguity, nearly every character who isn't The Scrappy suffers from this. (Characters such as the aforementioned Lelouch and Suzaku have been concurrently DILP and The Scrappy / Ron The Death Eater at times, depending on the fanbase and circumstances.)
  - And the fact that almost every major character in the show (and even several minor ones) is very good-looking, good or bad. This troper's currently planning out a way to test just how many characters the fans don't hold to be beautiful, cute, or handsome (when the resident Psychopathic Manchild is a White Haired Pretty Boy...)!
- Jeremiah Gottwald is perhaps the best example. Becoming the poster boy for Ensemble Darkhorse is a quite amazing career for a character who identified himself as blatant racist in his very first appearance and eagerly massacred unarmed civilians in the second.
- Clovis also deserves some mention. He openly admits that his nice guy personia is an act, orders the slaughter of thousands of civilians to find a single girl (to cover his own ass, no less), and pathetically begs for his life when Lelouch finds him. Despite this, characters and fans both like him and feel sorry for him. This troper sees him as a spoiled, pompous prick, and feels no sympathy for him.
  - In side materials, most notably Sound Episode 0.884, Clovis is depicted as "someone too gentle for the world of politics", and Cornelia and Schneizel love as much. Nonetheless, his sorrow over the apparent losses of Lelouch and Nunnally is what beckons him to become Area 11 Viceroy, where he decides to make it an appropriate resting place for his presumed to be dead half-siblings. His belief that Elevens are responsible for their deaths makes him prejudiced towards them, and after so many years, he loses sight of why he originally became Viceroy. It's no surprise then how shaken he is when the secret project involving C.C. is sabotaged in the first episode in the Shinjuku Ghetto, and especially when Lelouch appears before him.
Enishi from Rurouni Kenshin can sometimes be seen by fan(girl)s as this misunderstood little boy who only wanted his sister's love and wished for her to smile upon him no matter what. While one is certainly justified in being traumatized and scarred for life by his sister's death, it doesn't quite excuse a lot of other stuff he did AFTER his sister Tomoe died. For example, brutally slaughtering the kind family who took him in just because he couldn't stand their "happiness," becoming a crime lord in Shanghai and being responsible for numerous crimes and deaths, selling weapons to known psychopathic revolutionaries who wanted to create a brutal society where the strong live and the weak die(Shishio), and psychologically tormenting a sympathetic and almost saint-like character who's tried to do his best ever since Tomoe's death to atone for his crimes and help others.
Ali Al-Saachez from Gundam 00 has a lot of rabid fans who bash the people whom he's murdered just For The Evulz ( Intrepid Reporter Kinue Crossroads is still called a "dumb whore" for trusting Ali and then being murdered by him in cold blood) and cheer when he thrashes the Moral Event Horizon. His numerous evil actions make him one of the biggest Complete Monsters in the entire Gundam franchise; and yet, many of his fans love to downplay these to play up his impressive piloting skills and his rugged good looks. The infamous "Prince Ali" meme says it all in a single song parody. "Prince Ali, Mighty is He", etc.
- While Nena Trinity was the Scrappy of the series for a long time, and while several of the fans she did have at the time were fully aware she's a crazy Yangire and didn't downplay her acts of villainy, the recent airing of the English dub on the Sci-Fi Channel seems to have given her a new fanbase that finds her utterly cute even when she's blowing up weddings out of boredom. She did get Rescued From The Scrappy Heap somewhat by helping Setsuna out of a pinch just to spite on her "mistress" Wang Liu-Mei, an even bigger Scrappy in season two, but that doesn't really excuse the wedding massacre.
  - When Nena was killed in battle by Louise in episode 21 of season two, she either lost her leather pants completely or had her DILP status escalate, depending on who you ask. On one hand, even some former fans stopped liking her after she revealed her gloating (and at least partially underwent Character Derailment by losing what few standards she had); on the other, she's had rabid fans coming out of the woodwork and bashing Louise Halevy to pieces, accusing her of crossing the Moral Event Horizon and being an even more loathesome bitch than Nena, despite the fact that brutal as the battle might've been, she was quite justified in killing the girl who murdered her entire family AND crippled her physically and emotionally for no reason other than boredom.
- That, and some rabid Louise fans have apparently made her a borderline DILP, bashing Nena and her fans of all kinds (even those who are aware of her flaws) while forgetting that, even with her justification, poor Louise did cross the Despair Event Horizon... though she wasn't that far gone and managed to return from both of them, thanks to Saji and Setsuna. Because in their minds, no one has any right to like Nena and everyone who does is a shallow drooling fanbrat who only sees the tits.
  - Unless they simply enjoy physically attractive CompleteMonsters like Prince Ali up there. You can like characters as characters without approving of their actions.
- Let's not forget Hallelujah, Allelujah's Superpowered Evil Side. While Allelujah himself is a decent, mild-mannered guy, Hallelujah is a big bastard who enjoys killing his opponents in slow and painful manners and causing Alle a lot of angst. The fangirls? Woobify him and make him into a sex god in their fics. Go figure.
  - Figurable. Fans like actions and Stuff Blowing Up. Allelujah himself is very reluctant in blowing things up, and when he's in control, fans see his strength unimpressive. But Hallelujah? Being a big bastard who enjoys killing only means that the fans will be offered a lot of actions and Stuff Blowing Up that they are looking for, not to mention when Hallelujah is in control, he is a very formidable fighter and is more prone to awesomeness in that method. See where the preference over Allelujah come from?
Outlaw Star has Harry Macdougal, who gets love from fangirls despite being an Ax Crazy Stalker With A Crush. This troper has heard them justify pairing him with Melfina because, and I quote, "They look so cute together!" Yeah, it was really cute the way Harry slapped Melfina around when she turned down his advances and tried to kidnap her.
- And considering their first "meeting" when he hacked into the Outlaw Star was shown to be frightening and disturbing to Melfina while he just laughed and enjoyed it... yeah. He crossed the Moral Event Horizon before he even learned her name.
  - It probably has a lot to do with the end of the series, when Harry, reduced to his last legs from the effort of getting to Melfina, says a very tender farewell and gives his life to wake her up for the climax, and Melfina, for her part, is more broken up about it than any real person with their history ever would be. Draco In Leather Pants because of Death Equals Redemption. They're starting to recurse...
You all know Johan Liebert, right? Classy, attractive, and utterly inhuman psychopath willing to devote an exorbent amount of time Mind Raping and driving Innocent Bystanders to kill themselves just for the sheer hell of it? Turns out that a small but vocal fraction of the fandom has decided to glaze over every bit of that description that came after "attractive" and fangirl him with no irony whatsoever. Yay for Completely Missing The Point! Most of the fandom is thankfully more sane than that, but there is still a surprisingly large percentage of, "Yes, he's a total sociopath, but he's a sexy total sociopath."
- Just goes to show that a quality Freudian Excuse^*
  ^{Nazi eugenics experiment plus Nazi psychology experiment}
  will let you get away with murder. Maybe that was the point.
  - Except for the fact that it was his sister who went through the experience while he just heard about it.
  - Well, if you discount Sadistic Choice, Parental Abandonment, and Kinderheim 511. Whether adding it all up makes the Freudian Excuse work is another issue.
Despite being one of the least sympathetically portrayed of all the Akatsuki, Hidan from Naruto has some of the most die-hard fangirls. Yes, that Hidan. Apparently it's okay to sadistically murder people if you have white hair and walk around with your midriff exposed. As long as you're sexy enough, the Fangirls will go to any lengths to justify your sociopathic behavior, up to and including: inventing sympathetic backstory where there was none; pulling Freudian Excuses out of their asses; and coming up with lame excuses to vilify your victims. And they won't stop harassing the Shikamaru fans.
- Itachi Uchiha is widely liked even though he killed his entire family and is a member of Akatsuki who is personally tasked with capturing Naruto, and that was before we learned that he was forced to kill the Uchiha clan by Danzo to prevent them from launching a coup against the village, joined Akatsuki to keep an eye on them, and planned it so that Sasuke would become a hero for killing him and get the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. Sometimes Draco in Leather Pants justifications do become reality.
- Speaking of Uchiha, there's Sasuke. Some of his fans think he's actually justified in planning to destroy Konoha and everyone in it (including his former friends) even though only a handful of people there were responsible for ruining his life.
In Fushigi Yuugi, Nakago is pretty much permanently camped out on the wrong side of the Moral Event Horizon, while Suboshi crosses it in a shockingly horrible way about halfway through the series. However, a combination of tragic childhoods and Pet The Dog moments have earned both characters enough fan sympathy that Nakago shows up in slash fics all over the place, while Suboshi is a more popular match for Yui than her canon boyfriend, Tetsuya.
Cain from God Child and Count Cain is pretty much this trope even within the universe of the manga. He goes to any length to get what he wants, kills people, digs up graves and is known as a womanizer but he's still lusted after by the women(and men...)of the series. It doesn't hurt that he's pretty. He's got a tragic past etc etc and the fangirls love him!
- Similarly Dr. Jizabel Disraeli who really IS a villan seems to have a lot of fangirls. He's crazy, tries to kill Cain and Merry Weather and steal his eyes along with wanting to hurt Cain because their father didn't pay attention to him instead of Cain. Yet he too is loved by the fangirls.
Dr. Muraki from Yamino Matsuei(Descendantsof Darkness) is this trope. He rapes Hisoka and kills him, tries to rape Tsuzuki and wants to transplant his dead brother's consciousness into Tsuzuki so he can kill him yet in fandom he's either loved because he's an asshole or made up to be a pitiable creature who just needs love.
Souther/Thouther from Fist Of The North Star could basically be described as the Noble Demon Raoh, with the word 'Noble' thrown to the trashcan. As a ruthless tyrant, this guy has committed many many crimes that by any time's standard is very unforgivable (including brutal torture of children, poisoning the foods of said children, threaten Shuu with an ultimatum that results his tragic death), for one Freudian Excuse of going batshit after killing his master to be the successor of his branch of Nanto Seiken. His possession of said skills, combined with the fact that he's one of the more powerful people in the series and the fact that he's not doing all those purely For The Evulz gives him a bit of a charm towards many fans and some, like seiyuu Yuko Goto, ends up having him as their favorite characters.
This troper has reason to believe that Tetsuo from Akira may be becoming one of these. She's encountered someone who not only holds him to be the real hero of the story, but actually thinks anti-hero is the wrong word to describe him.... This is in spite of the fact that (granted, inferiority complex, loneliness, and childhood issues aside) he is practically the poster child for With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, and that at least in the anime all he uses his power for is killing people and destroying things! Either it's a misinterpretation of the words "hero" and "anti-hero" or it's Draco in Leather Pants-ing. There's also a surprising number of people who seem to find him very cute or attractive, in spite of the fact that he clearly isn't meant to be that way (though since he's always been illustrated in both manga and anime form that's sort of out of his creator's hands).
Within the female fanbase of Kodomo No Jikan, Rin's cousin, Reiji. This is probably not only because of his Dark And Troubled Past, but because they find protaganist Aoki Daisuke plain-looking◊ compared to him◊. Thus, Fan Girls will overlook the fact that he's trying to raise Rin to be a replacement for her dead mother (who he was in love with). Or worse, they'll just plain not see anything wrong with it and ship him and Rin together.
Happens regularly in Black Butler. His urbanity, manners, and good looks cause many people to overlook the fact that Sebastian is an utterly amoral (if not outright evil) and incredibly predatory demon. Some fans also overlook the fact that Grelle is a sadistic serial killer, perhaps because of his comedic traits.
As shown with the page quote, Boa Hancock, Pirate Empress of One Piece is an in-universe example. Whether she's literally kicking puppies(and other cute, fuzzy creatures), attacking her allies, or throwing old ladies out of towers, (most of) the world will readily forgive her...because she's beautiful.
- Boa also has a considerable fandom in Real Life for this reason. Irony. (In their defense, she was largely considered a Complete Monster before they learned of her Freudian Excuse.)
- Believe it or not, Spandam has a small Draco In Leather Pants fandom. He even wears a large amount of leather on the show, which may or may not be part of the reason.
Oddly averted (or inverted?) with Russia from Axis Powers Hetalia: he's got a canon Freudian Excuse for being a mentally unstable Psychopathic Manchild and some strips show that he's still capable of moments of sanity and has a soft spot for his sister Ukraine. You'd expect fans to pounce on the opportunity to invoke this trope with him and they occasionally do...but more often than not, they happily embrace his status as the local psychopath/stalker and love him for it. Many of them even seem to exaggerate his psychotic tendencies, turning him into a Memetic Molester who rapes and tortures other nations at every opportunity (admittedly, some of this is due to Die For Our Ship reasons, but not all of it, and portrayals of Russia in a Mind Game Ship with another nation are almost always done by supporters of that ship), and there have actually been complaints in the fandom about the lack of depictions of Russia as at least somewhat sane and sympathetic.
- There have been instances of Russia being either woobie-fied or portrayed as a completely normal guy to facilitate a pairing - while the other half of the rival pairing is portrayed as the creepy {{Yandere}} or dominating JerkAss (poor Poland and England).
A Claymore example. This troper has noticed quite a lot of fans of Rigaldo, despite the fact he had a short lived appearance, and he was a Blood Knight, they love him fully.

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Lampshaded in Miracleman with the "Bateses", a subculture that identifies itself with the supervillain Kid Miracleman/Johnny Bates. This idolization occurs after Bates personally murders most of London and the surrounding country side in grotesque and grisly fashion. We're talking solid grade A Nightmare Fuel here, easily. This is likely a parody of real-life skinheads/Neo-Nazis, who became quite popular in Britain and greater Europe a generation or so after WWII.
Jhonen Vasquez seems to have an accidental habit of making these: His first creation, Johnny C from Johnny The Homicidal Maniac has an insane amount of fangirls (usually among the Gothic, Hot Topic-loving crowd) who claim that he's just misunderstood and lonely. They seem to overlook that Johnny is schizophrenic, psychotic, sociopathic, and Ax Crazy; that he killed an entire restaurant full of people because someone said he "looked wacky"; he has entire torture chambers in his Torture Cellar that contain God-knows-how-many people; he tried to murder the one girl who really liked him and drove her to become a recluse and hide in her apartment almost 24/7 out of paranoia; and he has killed numerous people for various insane reasons. Interestingly enough, Jhonen does portray Johnny as a sympathetic character a few times in the comics; and Johnny does live in a Crapsack World...
- Not just fangirls, my good troper; he's also either canonized by the Hot Topic/baby-bat subcatoegory of "NICE GUYS" (read: the emotionally manipulative sad sacks who make us all look like failures) as an exemplar of...I don't even know, it varies from "he's just misunderstood - like meeeee!" to "OMG HE REPRESENTS MY DARK AND VIOLENT INNER SELF and therefore must be sympathetic (because if he isn't then that means I too am an asshat)!" Batshit does not discriminate by gender. They also like to brush off his attempt to shank Devi and imply that she is a giant bitch for not loving him the way he is. ...I did mention the attempted shanking, yes?
- To get into even weirder territory, one-shot character Jimmy has a surprising number of fans who adore him (as well as sometimes pair him up with Nny). They of course, completely ignore the fact that Jimmy killed people to imitate Johnny's "murderous style" as well as try and get his attention. Not only that, but he was the person who brutally raped and killed a cheerleader that Johnny was accused of by a victim in a past issue. And there's also Johnny's complete distaste for Jimmy and what he's done, as one can tell by his infamous statement, "You fucking idiot!! Admire me?!! You shit!!! I'm the villain in this fucking story!"
- It doesn't help that his target audience consists predominantly of Goths and similar "outcasts" marginalized by mainstream culture; and that most (though certainly not all) of those who Johnny kills are the crapsack people well known for bullying, ostracising, and otherwise tormenting the "freaks" who make up the majority of Vasquez's pre-InvaderZim fans. Nny himself lampshades this in one killing spree by announcing the various "sins" of his victims as he's killing them; said spree being triggered by a Jerkass bystander offhandedly referring to him as a "fag". Of course, Nny has absolutely no qualms about killing innocent bystanders, a fact that many fans seem to miss. In fact, the only person who seems to be safe from the titular character's murderous psychopathology is Squee, who is himself portrayed as an embryonic Johnny, due to his crapsack parents and crapsack life. The Squee spinoff series strongly supports this interpretation.
Dr. Doom can receive treatment of this nature from the fans; although he's a complex Evil Overlord with a strong (if warped) sense of nobility and a tendency towards frequent Bad Ass Crowning Moments Of Awesome to begin with, there is a tendency for some to create an over-exaggerated ideal of just how noble and benevolent he is, leading to some of his fans forgetting that he's still ultimately supposed to be the villain. His vanity, insecurity, egomania and brutality tend to be underplayed or ignored by these fans. As such, he can often get reduced to a benevolent but misunderstood genius who only wants to take over the world because he knows what's best for all of humanity, with little acknowledgement given of his negative qualities. Curiously, he is notoriously scarred and disfigured; his fan-worship is based more on his Bad Ass nature rather than his looks (although some tellings of the tale underplay the scarring he received). Writers who attempt to stress Doom's less-attractive qualities can be rejected quite vitriolically. (See Mark Waid's "Unbreakable" arc for a good example of this).
- The image of 'Doom as benevolent dictator' partially stems from a one-off book, Emperor Doom, in which Doom actually manages to conquer the Earth and begins to make numerous improvements in how things are run; this book is often used to reinforce the impression that Doom would be a great and benevolent leader if he managed to take over. It's worth noting that he manages this largely by brainwashing literally the entire planet into accepting his rule (goodbye, freedom of thought and dissent); and he ultimately gives it up and lets the heroes defeat him because he gets bored, suggesting that he's ultimately not as interested in 'making the world a better place for all' as many would like to think.
- Doom's heroic villain-type schemes are frequently used to test the convictions of the heroes and to increase the story complexity, so under the circumstances, this one isn't surprising.
Venom and Carnage from Spiderman. Made worse that the alien symbiotes "costumes" are ~~High Octane Nightmare Fuel~~ Fetish Fuel.
Let's just say that in general, a lot of the really iconic comic book villains (Joker, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, etc.) receive so much love from the fans that they're no longer these wicked, irredeemable people you're supposed to root against. Nowadays, people root for some of these villains just as much as they do the heroes, if not moreso. And when said fans start Running The Asylum...
- It definitely hasn't helped any that the Marvel Universe's hero community started getting Darker And Edgier. In a world where Tony Stark spent a couple years earning the Fan Nickname 'Der Eisenfuhrer' and Cyclops currently leads a black ops kill squad going around assassinating 'enemies of the mutant race', some fans tend to get a little cynical over who allegedly has the moral high ground on who.
The White Queen, Emma Frost of X-Men fame, has definitely gone through this treatment in recent years. During the 80s she was played as a character who got her kicks from torture of prisoners, mind-rape, brainwashing of either her students as personally proclaimed toy soldiers or to let loved ones kill each other, and heavily involved in very corrupt bussiness dealings, with a very strong S&M dominatrix undertone, and a self-stated absolutely entitled completely amoral arch-libertarian attitude of being either a slave or a slaver. Her creator Chris Claremont, who was a pretty hardcore feminist for the time, by all appearances constructed her as the darkest side of feminism, someone gone so far past the moral event horizon that even he considered her as debauched pure evil. Yet nowadays she's somehow usually played/retconned as always being a well-intentioned fighter for the little guy, and a firm supporter of her students, which is the complete opposite of what she was introduced as, and was even voted as the greatest American comicbook heroine by Empire magazine. A major leather pants and Karma Houdini to say the least. At least a few writers have sneaked in little snippets of her old personality, like when she killed a police officer who was looking itno the murder of her sister, or in all seriousness prepared to destroy every happy memory in the mind of an already traumatized and temporarily unhinged student.

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Prince Nuada of Hellboy II has quite a fan following, probably because he has long anime-ish hair and practices his energetic spear techniques without a shirt. Despite his wanting to kill or subjugate all humans, he's regarded as being just misunderstood. They tend to ignore (or even celebrate) all his creepy twincestuous subtext.
- It doesn't help that he wants to conquer the earth to save his people, which are on the brink of extinction because humanity broke the truce/pact between them long ago. This obviously excuses it all, right?
Hordes of fangirls of David Bowie [and his pants] change the antagonist of Labyrinth, Jareth the Goblin King, from a baby-napping, tantrum-throwing, drugged-peach-wielding, creepy guy interested in a barely teen girl into a misunderstood romantic whose one true love is Sarah.
People who worship Sarah Connor of Terminator 2 Judgement Day as a paragon of feminist virtue tend to be the ones who ignore the fact she is a cruel, violent, emotionally unstable bad-mother who is actually deconstructing militant feminism rather than celebrating it. Point in fact, according to Audio-Commentary of the 3-DVD Definitive Edition Director's Cut, Linda Hamilton (the actress who portrayed her) and James Cameron (Hamilton's then husband and the creator of the Sarah Connor characters) repeatedly stressed on multiple occasions that she is a messed up horror-of-a-human being rather than someone who is meant to be admired.
- Granted, her INTENTIONS are noble given the circustances that she is facing, but fighting a war to stop humanity from being exterminated by evil robots is still not a justifiable excuse for being a cold-and-unfeeling mother who is for all intents and purposes emotionally non-existent in her son's life. It was even stressed in the running-subtitle-commentary that John was a better human being (and hence messianic savior) than she is because he valued the soul, emotions and heart that came with being a true human being; values that a messed-up wreck like her most certainly did not teach him.
- Also consider that her foil is in a way, the T-800 who goes from being a cold, calculated killing machine to learning the value of the human heart, in his words at the film's end: "I know now why you cry." While Sarah undergoes an opposite character arc, almost killing Dyson before coming to her sense.
  - The best example of how they intended Sarah to be seen is watching John's face right after they first break her out. He's elated that he's again with his mother, and is smiling broadly as she looks like she's going to hug him. Then watch his face turn heartbroken as she just coldly checks him for injuries, and yells at him for coming to get her. Mother of the year she ain't.
Red Eye fanfic likes to apply this to Jackson Rippner, a murderous sociopath with no serious objection to killing children. He threatens to torture the heroine to death in front of her father. There is a certain amount of sexual tension between him and Rachel McAdams' character, but it's less Will They Or Wont They than fear that he's going to rape her. And yet there is Shipping in which he is presented as just misunderstood. It may have something to do with the seraphic countenance of Cillian Murphy.
- Similar to what happens in mainstream Batman Begins fic. Androgynous sexiness must equal goodness, too. Cillian's portrayal of Jonathan Crane and Red Eye's Rippner would get along famously if it weren't for Crane's utter insanity. Some of the fans get around it with heavy medication. Some just ignore the portions of the film where Crane acts typically villainous and psychotic - most of his screen time, in fact - and make him a surly, slightly manipulative but otherwise well Deadpan Snarker.
  - Not only do they think Crane and Rippner would get along, some people actually ship them.
- And people have begun giving The Dark Knight-verse Joker this treatment... What the hell? Though he may have had a sympathetic origin, those origin stories he tells you? Are lies.
  - Apparently most fanfic is written by Harley Quinn.
Lash, one of the school bullies who joins up with the Big Bad in Sky High, has a surprising amount of steamy fanfics written about him (usually involving him and Layla Draco-and-Hermione-style).
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, who is referred to by some as "Hannibal Lecter's evil twin," gets steamy fanfic.
- Brain Bleach, please.
Natural Born Killers is basically a parody of this trope. Not surprising that too many who saw the film ended up seeing the protaganists as true badasses.
Col. Landa from Inglourious Basterds already seems to be developing this sort of following based on message board postings this troper is seeing. Obviously intended to be a Magnificent Bastard, too many are admiring his politeness and cunning, ignoring the fact that he is a sadistic and sociopathic SS officer shown to even possibly have mysognistic tendencies and is extremely self-serving rather than simply doing what he does out of a manner of duty.
As Clive Barker, creator of the Hellraiser series, put it:
"You've got Pinhead, who hasn't done a single decent thing in eight movies, and still gets mail from women who want to have his children."
The Repo The Genetic Opera fandom is terribly prone to this, but that may be because every single male character under the age of fifty is both played by someone incredibly sexy and seriously messed up in the head. Pavi, Luigi, and Graverobber seem to have the biggest followings, despite the fact that being involved with any of them would be seriously detrimental to their partner's health.
- Not to mention that Graverobber is a hobo who also, as his name implies, robs graves, and probably smells like death, hookers, and garbage. He also seems to be given a more understanding nature for fics that pair him with Shilo, which at least can be extrapolated from canon (he does save her from the cops twice after the first time he leaves her with them, and generally seems to be extremely perceptive.) Terrance Zdunich is also incredibly foxy, and many fics focus on how Shilo's innocence leads her to believe Beauty Equals Goodness. It's when this trope is applied to the Largo kids that it gets extra creepy.
In the film version of Watchmen, the Comedian played by the talented Jeffrey Dean Morgan has gotten himself some disturbingly devoted fanbase who seem to forget stuff like trying to rape his teammate while laughing all the time, and gunning down a woman pregnant with his child in Vietnam. And many of them are women who think he's sexy (maybe it's the Porn Stache).
- Hell, some people even enjoy those aspects of his character.
- To this troper, it seems that this has resulted from the film itself giving the Comedian this treatment. In the scene where he kills the aforementioned pregnant woman both he and the movie place the blame on Doctor Manhattan for not intervening, the woman whom he tried to rape speaks of him fondly (and had at least one consensual encounter with him afterward), Nite Owl refers to him in reverent terms even in a flashback in which he's firing on unarmed protesters, and his killing by Ozymandias is treated as a combination Heroic Sacrifice and Redemption Equals Death. Of course, this being Watchmen it's entirely probable this was intentional as part of the deconstruction and was simply overwhelmed by Misaimed Fandom.
  - All of the elements cited were present in the comic book too. I seem to recall Word Of God that it was in fact intentional, the goal being to create a character who is despicable but still in a way sympathetic.
- Rorschach before the film: he had a Misaimed Fandom that viewed him as a total badass, but never found him sexy. Then the movie came, along with a legion of fangirls who want to "make him better".
  - "Cut 'em till they don't look like women."
Freddy Krueger has a pretty strong female fanbase. Yes, that Freddy Krueger.
- And with Jackie Earle Haley (who also played Rorschach in Watchmen as seen above) playing Freddy Kruger in the upcoming remake, chances are that the number of fangirls/leather pantsing are going to increase tenfold.
Cesare. Not only is he a Brainwashed And Crazy Knife Nut Serial Killer, but ladies, he's like in a coma.
Dr. Frank N Furter, oh, where do we start? Let's see...he brutally murders Eddie out of sheer jealousy, tricks Brad and Janet into sleeping with him for no other reason than because he wants to, creates Rocky for the sole purpose of being a sex slave, and forces Brad, Janet, Rocky, and Columbia to do a floorshow/orgy with him after he has them turned to stone. Not to mention the fact that he's completely and utterly insane. And, yet, the fans practically throw themselves at his feet. Must have something to do with his charms and good looks.
- Likewise, Riff Raff has quite the fanbase as well. Never mind the fact that he killed Columbia, Frank, and Rocky out of pure spite. Fans tend to make him far more sympathetic than he really is.
- Tim Curry in general inspires this in fans, making is somewhat of a bad idea to cast him as a villain since it means that fans will prefer him more than the protagonists.
Deliberately played with in William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus. The title character is quite similiar to a pre-Fail Polish Phantom of the Opera (driven insane by a disfigurement, searching for love, etc.). Reportedly, two endings were filmed: a Good Ending where Sardonicus is cured and redeemed, and a Bad Ending where he dies. This being a William Castle movie, audiences were allowed to vote on whether they thought the character deserved mercy. Every damn time, they killed him, and it looks like the mercy ending is lost forever, if it ever existed. Sounds harsh? It turns out that a guy who looks like this◊ is easier to forgive than a guy who looks like this.
Tavington in The Patriot has no shortage of swoony fans. (The shaving scene!)
- Indeed, the section for that movie on adultfanfiction.net is composed almost entirely of fanfics of Tavington romancing the writer's self-insert character. (And a couple of him molesting Gabriel. ... Ew.)
I've seen some fangirls do this to Darth Vader, even after Mustafar. Of course, they also do it to his son, grandson, and any other Skywalker that spends even a short period on The Dark Side.
The Joker and the Scarecrow seem to get this a lot in Dark Knight Trilogy fanfiction. Leave it to crazed fangirls to pick the two most evil characters in a series that actually has several sympathetic (or in the case of the ordnary mobsters, understandable) villains to crush on.

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Murtagh from The Inheritance Cycle is loved by both fans and anti-fans alike. Anti-fans tend to dub him as "the only likeable character in the entire series" while he has a vast following in the fandom as well, mostly among Fangirls who endlessly repeat, "Murtagh is so hot!" He is even frequently referred to as the "real hero" of the Cycle. Please note this did not apply until after his Heel Face Turn. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary, about everything.
- It helps that the heroes of the series aren't very well liked. Eragon has no issues with torture, and likes killing people.
- Galbatorix and Sloan have been embraced by much of the hatedom as heroes. Galbatorix has barely done a single heroic thing in the whole series. He appoints sociopaths as his generals, and has human-eating beasties run around and do his bidding - but of course since Eragon's apparently irrideemably evil, his nemesis Galbatorix must be a good guy.
- Since Galbatorix himself has not yet appeared in the books, and, indeed, pays very little attention to the running of his Empire, it is hard to determine exactly what he is and isn't responsible for. The only thing he ever did during the story was order his minions (we assume it was him, anyway, as it happened offscreen) to destroy the Varden.
Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish in A Song Of Ice And Fire. He's a Magnificent Bastard with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. His ultimate goals are rather unclear, as is just how much of the anarchy and war that dominates the books has been orchestrated by him. Corners of the fandom treat him like a divine saviour whose goals are all working to the benefit of the small folk, the people the wars have screwed over the most.
- As it turns out, there is also a small portion of the fandom that has decided, against all evidence, that Cersei Lannister is a tragic heroine trapped in abusive relationships with Jaime and Robert. While it's true that her life has not always been a bed of roses, and Robert was undeniably an abusive husband, this doesn't even come close to absolving Cersei of guilt for the monstrous crimes she herself has committed; it is at best a Freudian Excuse.
  - It should also be noted that in her relationship with Jaime, she is the abusive one (emotionally, at least).
In addition to Draco, Harry Potter also gives us Severus Snape. This seems odd considering how he's described in the books as greasy-haired and hook-nosed, though Rowling herself suspects it's mainly a product of the attractiveness of the actors playing them in the movies.
- In that case Rowling just may be wrong, since Snape had a load of admirers before Rickman played him (and who nowadays prefer to think of him as not looking like Rickman in any way).
  - Rowling said people who liked Draco only liked him because of Tom Felton. It's highly unlikely she would ever complain that Snape was cast too Hollywood Homely, considering Rickman was her personal choice for the part.
  - This troper is fairly sure that the epilogue describes Malfoy as going bald as a Take That to the fangirls. Likewise, she was a little disturbed to see that parts of the fandom nickednamed "Voldemort" Voldy and this is probably why the term is used to mock Voldemort after the showdown at the end of the last book.
- This is particularly disturbing because, in the canon, Snape is revealed to be The Atoner who doesn't seem to ever forgive himself (even if he is still a Jerk Ass).
- One self-proclaimed "unrepentant Snape fangirl", Makani, on Deviantart had at least a slightly more realistic notion of what Snape's opinion would be of a fangirl; in one brief comic her self-insert Hogwarts student persona was acting up in class, so Snape nearly gave her a detention-whereupon she finished his sentence with an eager cry of "Detention?!" Snape hesitates for a moment. "...No. No detention. Ever," he replies, to a disappointed Makani.
- JKR has also spoken out against people who think "Voldy" just needs to be understood.
  - Which is odd, given that the series is supposedly about "love". Shouldn't something like pity be shown?
  - Unfortunately, while the earlier books make a point to try and show how everything is about your own choices, and no one is inherently evil, the last couple ignore that and show that Voldemort was evil from the get go, removing any hope for pity.
  - It was slightly more complicated than that. Voldemort was clearly a troubled child with makings of a future serial killer, but the fact that younger Dumbledore pretty much decided to forget all that after Tom put on his Stepford Smiler mask and paid no attention to his upbringing was called "Dumbledore's biggest mistake" for a reason.
  - Harry tries at the end of the final book. He doesn't understand.
  - Also, didn't Dumbledore give him decades to reform? He only gave up when Riddle came looking for a job at Hogwarts.
- My Immortal, in addition to fitting this Trope to a T, at one point does, in fact, feature Draco in leather pants.
  - Naturally, My Immortal takes this to an absurd degree. So many fanfic portray Draco as a sensitive guy, basically the opposite of his canon personality, that it's a cliché in itself, but My Immortal goes so far as to make him so ridiculously needy that it seems he would fall straight into Wangst without encouraging words from Ebony.
- Averted though with his dad Lucius, whose fans tend to appreciate him for the aristocratic, pimp cane accessorized bastard that he is without giving him the "Awww, he's really just a sexy Woobie!" treatment.
  - In fact, Lucius provides an easy way for fanfic writers to portray Draco sympathetically. After all, if Lucius is an Abusive Parent (which isn't too far out, really) then Draco has a nice Freudian Excuse. And your story has a built-in villain, too!
  - The problem with that, though, is that in canon the entire Malfoy family's Pet The Dog trait (it's not really a single moment) is that they genuinely love and care about each other, even if they're callous and cruel towards everyone else. So Abusive!Lucius is still a twisting on canon to make Draco more sympathetic.
- Bellatrix Lestrange. But that may be related to Helena Bonham Carter's huge tracts of land.
  - Some people even see her as some sort of "feminist icon" for her Dark Action Girl credentials and her mocking Molly Weasley for leaping at the defense of one of her kids and being upset at the recent death of another. They even say that Bella should have killed Molly, and not the other way round. Because being a House Wife is some sort of sin and excludes you from coolness or being a good example for women, or something.
  - Which is rather odd, given that Bellatrix is not even remotely feminist. Her DEFINING CHARACTER TRAIT is her mindless loyalty to a man who doesn't give a rat's ass about her.
- Inadvertantly done in the film adaptations with Narcissa Malfoy, mainly due to the Quidditch Cup (which established her as well-bred yet unpleasant and elitist) being cut. Her first appearance, in Half-Blood Prince, is now entirely sympathetic—that of a terrified mother attempting to keep her only son from getting killed.
This troper is interested to note that the image of Mr. Malfoy at the top of the page is almost identical to Steerpike toward the end of the BBC Gormenghast mini-series. Steerpike is, of course, an excellent example of this trope and was even slightly derailed somewhat in the series to be more sympathetic.
Puddy from Tales Of MU. Despite knowing pretty much nothing about her backstory or inner thoughts, her fans on the story's forum seem absolutely certain that she had a rotten home life and that this makes her a poor wonderful Woobie who just needs a hug. Don't mind her various assaults on the hero, her attack on the series' actual Woobie, or her abusive and bigoted attitude... HUG!
- It's been a while since this troper caught up with MU, but given that somewhere in the first couple of chapters Puddy claims that her mother has allowed her to subsist entirely on pudding pops and beer for several years, I would think the evidence for her backstory points to her actually being spoiled rotten.
- Or completely ignored by her uncaring parents?
- See also "The Man". This character has only appeared in three short flashback stories involving the protagonist's mother as a child. In the first one, he nearly drowns her. In the second, he tries to seduce her (she's 12). In the third, he impregnates her at the age of 15 and is confirmed as a Man Eating Demon. The reader reactions range from "Damn, he's smooth!" to "Let's wait to see some real evil before we judge him."
- Of course, a lot of this may stem from the fact that the audience Tales of MU has attracted (and seems designed to attract) are the extremely hardcore BDSM set. We're not just talking a bit of naughty with a riding crop, or calling someone "master" in the bedroom... the fanbase has a fairly large representation of the "24/7 completely control your life terrorize you if it makes me happy and I consider that love" sort, like Gor but more equal-opportunity. So finding out that they might think Rape Is Love isn't exactly a shock when you take that into account.
Joren from Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quadrilogy got this for a while - in canon, he's radiantly beautiful to the point of being a White Haired Pretty Boy but also petty, bullying, sadistic, rich, conservative and homophobic. (You'd be surprised how the last two'll get ya in a young adult series by Tamora Pierce...) He exists to bully the heroine, stage a few hazings, half-assedly attempt to befriend her and die in a closet. He's received the Draco Malfoy treatment in fanfiction quite a bit, when he's written about at all. Despite how this would probably disturb the author resoundingly, he's usually paired off with the heroine.
Raistlin Majere of the Dragonlance novels may qualify as this, although he has been a protagonist in some of the novels. He is definitely evil, and creepy-looking to boot, and yet he has a massive collection of slavering fangirls who write endless Mary Sue stories pairing him off. Which isn't to say that he isn't awesomely badass, because he is, but he's not somebody any sane person would be writing a fluffy romance fanfic about.
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights has received this treatment over the years, having become something of an archetype of the tortured-but-dashing Gothic Romantic Hero With A Heart Of Gold, up there with Mr. Darcy from Pride And Prejudice and Mr. Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre. This completely overlooks the fact that, within the novel, he is presented as a repellent, violent and obsessively vindictive bully who spitefully destroys everyone who ever looked cross-eyed at him... and then, when they're dead, immediately does his best to destroy the lives of their children instead. He's not entirely unsympathetic, but neither is he in any way a hero or admirable / romantic figure, and Emily Bronte never intended him to be. Stephanie Meyer doesn't know this.
- For that matter, Rochester has received some of this over the years as well; however, whilst he's certainly no saint, he is arguably presented with enough Karmic Retribution for his misdeeds and expresses enough genuine regret for his actions to at least slightly redeem himself in the eyes of the reader, unlike the largely unrepentant Heathcliff (whose karmic payback, whilst present, is a bit more oblique).
- Emily Bronte may have foreseen this reaction when she created Isabella Linton, a silly teenager, who insists on perceiving Heathcliff as a Gothic Romantic Hero even though everybody around her tells her he isn't. It takes him hanging her pet dog before their elopement and then a few months (or was it years?) of an abusive marriage to get this idea out of her head.
All over this very wiki, you'll find postings about how the protagonists of the
- The Data Vampires?
William Hamleigh in Pillars of the Earth, a spoiled and sadistic noble, whom, when his peasants cannot pay their taxes, rapes their wives and daughters as compensation. For some reason, certain fangirls wish that their fathers couldn't pay the taxes, so they could be brutally raped and tortured by William.
- A few boys at this troper's school had read the book and were arguing about who could be William and Walter. When the two were reported to the principal, they explained rather blatantly they had plans to give a girl her favored rape fantasy. Draco In Leather Pants indeed.
Dracula pretty much popularized the "Sexy Vampire".
- Which is thoroughly disturbing considering in the original novel he was never portrayed as anything other than a hideous monster devoted to killing everyone and everything.
  - Subject to debate, as he managed to come across to many people (in some versions) as a horrible monster with an uncomfortable sexual appeal. Even though he was ugly as hell.
  - Dracula was essentially a Victorian metaphor for sex; expressing the simultaneous aversion to and fear of sexuality combined with the pervasive underlying obsession with sex that was consistently repressed in Victorian culture. The description of Dracula himself as physically unappealing bordering on repulsive, yet posessing a hypnotic, almost irresistible, personal magnetism, fairly well sums up the mindset.
- Thank goodness for Orlok, who has managed to dodge this treatment. For now.
Cthulhu.
- Got referenced in this Irregular Webcomic strip (with link to this page, of course), when Cthulhu has problems dealing with fans wanting his autograph.
Most of the males in the Black Jewels series fit this trope. Daemon and (his father) Saetan are literally written to be walking sex (moreso with Daemon, since Saetan is, well... aged) and are given sympathetic backstories and (generally) valid reasons to be total bastards. But think about it: they're both murderers (whether the people deserved it or not is debatable, depending on who it was. Some were caught in the crossfire, some didn't know better, some deserved worse, etc etc).
- Saetan, for instance, scared the SHIT out of people and used the memory of the event as a warning for what would happen if they sufficiently pissed him off. What did he do? In response to their butchering his newborn son because he didn't accept their trade demands, he made an entire island and people cease to exist. Not killed. Not destroyed. Cease to exist. As in wiped them from the land, made the island, people and history never happen and wiped all record of them from the breeding lists and record that were kept by THE FREAKING CREATOR OF THE JEWELS. His own friends needed to change their shorts. Daemon and Lucivar only kill people (who usually do deserve it).
  - In his defense, he did it because receiving the dismembered body of his infant son drove him insane.
  - And these are the heroes!
  - Hell, even some of the bad guys are written this way.
  - In defense of all the good guys, all three of the planes in this world are pretty much Sick Sad World's
Ashfur, just... Ashfur. Especially after he tried to murder the main characters because the cat he assumed was their mom chose another mate instead him over a year ago. To the point where people add completely pointless things to the short list of tragedies in his life to try and justify his actions. There are even some people who believe that every bad thing he did was the author changing the plot in order to appease Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw fans. Seriously.
- Ashfur fans believe that every single thing Ashfur has done is Squirrelflight's fault because she used him (even though this has been flatly contradicted by Word Of God, and in the books she seems to have a genuine interest in being friends with him until he started acting like a sullen jerk towards her), and think that a little manipulation (that never actually happened in canon) apparantly justifies trying to kill several innocent cats in cold blood. In Fan Fic, he is constantly portrayed as sweet and innocent (completely ignoring his relatively agressive, tough love personality in the third series), and as a victim. Because apparently, the guy trying to kill the protagonists in a fire is supposed to be seen as the victim because he had his heart broken. The fact that the cat who murdered him was insane and will possibly be a villain in the next series certainly didn't help this.
  - Also expect to occasionally see an Ashfur fanfic (sometimes set just before of just after he is murdered) where he randomly tries to repent for his crimes (even though he showed absolutely no signs of hesitation or remorse in the books, and the main characters' attempts to appeal to these feelings failed) and is portrayed as a tragic hero. Oh yeah, and usually you'll see stuff about him abandonning his evilness to confess his love for Whitewing even though she already has a mate, and they've only been in two scenes together..
  - Ashfur fans will ship him with anything and anyone regardless of lack of evidence, or just sheer randomness.
- Also happens a bit to Scourge ever since Rise of Scourge. This is a case of readers Completely Missing The Point since Rise of Scourge was supposed to detail his early life and show why he turned down such a dark and blood-soaked path, not excuse him from his reign of tyranny and the uncountable number of murders he committed throughout his life. This is especially painful because the author's note in Rise of Scourge even says not to treat him like this and that the author wasn't trying to excuse his actions.
To a certain extent, Thrawn from the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Yes, Zahn made him and the other Imperials a lot more complex and generally admirable than the boring and formulaic Card Carrying Villain types that a lot of the lesser authors use in the 'verse. He wasn't evil, not quite. But he was very ruthless, pragmatic, and above all, Imperial. He wasn't above You Have Failed Me, even if he needed more of a reason and was more forgiving of crew who weren't at fault. He lied, he was willing to hand Leia and her unborn twins to an insane Dark Jedi, he tortured, he did have a temper and showed it. Often, though, he's portrayed purely as someone who did what he had to do and chose to become a Necessary Evil. It probably helps that he is a mysterious alien Grand Admiral in an Empire prejudiced against aliens, and he has pale blue skin and glowing red eyes.
- Anakin Skywalker is pretty much Draco In Leather Pants. There's also a surprising amount of Kyp Durron slash fic out there. (Not quite the same thing, but he blew up a couple stars with inhabited planets.)) This troper has also seen a few Luke fangirls on theforce.net fetishize the Imperial uniform from Dark Empire, which can be seen on In The Blood.
- In a way, the Leatherpantsing of Thrawn is sort of his author's fault. Later-written books handling a younger Thrawn do hint that he saw something coming and wanted to prepare for it, and generally he's not totally unsympathetic; the more recently a book was written, the less evil he seems. But even in Outbound Flight, where he is relatively outspoken to his Ishmael and has a brother and a people, he is pragmatic, ruthless, a terrible enemy, and has plans involving letting friends who saved his life get captured. He doesn't tell them about those plans, either. He lets them think they've been abandoned to die.
This troper is really rather disturbed by the existence of Teatime fangirls. Yes, that Teatime.
The author of The Pendragon Adventure may have made Saint Dane too magnificent for his own good. While he isn't described as particularly attractive in his default form, it has become strangely common for fanart to depict him as a lithe White Haired Pretty Boy. Add that to his indisputable charisma, and a disturbing amount of fans have turned him into a figure worthy of support and admiration, despite his active attempts to drive all worlds to destruction so he can remake them to his liking, and the thinly-disguised sadistic pleasure he takes in doing it. This might explain why the later books stress those parts.
The majority of Twilight Hatedom, as well as a number of literary critics, consider the portrayal of Edward Cullen as an immature, mentally unstable, predatory stalker seen through the eyes of a DILP-worshipping Mary Sue fangirl.
Luke from Percy Jackson And The Olympians.
Ironically, it was partly due to the Leatherpantsing of Raskolnikov on the part of one Friedrich Nietzsche that we got Nietzschean philosophy.

Close Literature

Adelei Niska from Firefly. This sadistic crime boss is known for torturing his nephew in one episode, along with (Mal and Wash in another episode). However his wincing torture techniques are contrasted by a unique personality and accent.
(Pre-souled) Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Inadvertedly Lamp Shaded in the episode Crush when Dawn lists "he wears cool LEATHER coats and stuff" as a reason she likes him.
- This Troper also had a long-standing feud with a (female) friend of his over Angelus. He prefers Troubled But Cute, "soulful" Angel, she likes Complete Monster Angelus. It's all about the attitude, apparently.
  - And the fact that Angelus actually DOES wear leather pants.
- Speaking of 'in leather pants', a lot of guys seem to see season-3/4 Faith as this. "Oh sure, she's a psychotic murderer helping a warlock ascend into a demon who would eat all of Sunnydale, and when she stole Buffy's body she did everything except hack Joyce into kibble, but she's HAWT!" She got Character Development and got better, but still...
  - But she IS hawt. And she was never really inherently evil... she just got turned that way by a really charismatic evil guy (it happens all the time. Remember Anakin Skywalker?). And then when she stole Buffy's body, it turns out that she had some deep self-hatred issues that sort of explained why she fell so far from grace. But most importantly... she's hot.
  - What convinced This Troper that Faith was redeemable was her confrontation with Angel in "Five By Five" - after spending the entire episode torturing and laughing maniacally, she ends up mindlessly slugging it out with Angel, begging him to kill her. Complete Monsters just don't give a shit. Here's where you realize that the girl's just a sick, sad, pitiable wreck of a human being who just wants the whole mess to be over. Instead, she crash-lands right into Angel's Redemption Quest.
Billy Mitchell was introduced to Eastenders as an abusive bastard who beat the living hell out of his nephew Jamie. For some unfathomable reason, fans liked him, and he was slowly turned into a gentle, nice and weak man, who was given all the "touching" plot-lines about a nice man with a hard life, totally ignoring the earlier child-abuse plotlines.
- It's occasionally mentioned by his family and even by himself sometimes as a warning not to let his temper get the better of him, especially after he winds up with custody of a child, again.
Sheriff Donald Lamb, who some fans loved even though he was a petty, self-absorbed himbo/slacker who ignored heroine Veronica Mars when she attempted to file a report on being drugged and raped. While series creator Rob Thomas and actor Michael Muhney acknowledged that they went overboard in the pilot in order to make Lamb an unlikeable jerk and even gave the character a sliver of sympathy by way of revealing that Lamb was abused as a child by his father, Thomas refused to humanize Lamb or negate the events of the pilot (as many fans of the character had done via fanfictions), via having Lamb tell Veronica he still didn't believe her claim of being raped and to further taunt her over the issue during season three. Thomas then promptly had Lamb largely absent from season three's rape storyline and promptly had his head bashed in during season three's second arc, at the hands of a crystal meth addict.
The Master from Doctor Who, particularly in his Anthony Ainley and John Simm incarnations. In fan fiction, he's usually not portrayed as the murderous psychopath he is (he wiped out a whole portion of the universe!), but as just a mischievous, quirky, sexy guy who just wants to have some Foe Yay with the Doctor.
- It is possible that the only reason the Delgado Master gets less of this is that most fans don't think the Third Doctor deserves Foe Yay. It's not a cute couple unless both halves are cute. Which is not only somewhat irrational, but also not entirely fair to the Third Doctor, who had hardly suffered a beating with the ugly stick.
- A weird example is with the Daleks. You'd think what are essentially tentacled flesh-lump space-Nazis in salt-shaker-shaped mechanical bodies wouldn't have fangirls, but there is an inordinate amount of fanart portraying said fangirls hugging, kissing, and/or stalking Daleks. Most are played for laughs, but some seem quite serious. Hybridized Dalek Sec having fangirls is a bit more understandable since he is at least humanoid and played somewhat sympathetically, but he isn't really what most would define as a hottie.
  - Up to including Katy Manning posing nude with a Dalek. For real.
  - It might have something to do with the shape and texture of the Daleks' power armour body.
As Gaius Baltar has his cult of rabid, beyond-reason believers in the new Battlestar Galactica, so does he have his cult of rabid, beyond-reason believers in the real world. It helps that no one on that show is cut-and-dry good or evil; but as evil acts go, Gaius has performed many of the most shamelessly selfish ones.
- But unlike some conventionally morally superior characters, Gaius has never deliberately harmed anyone in a manner more serious than sleeping with someone else. His mixture of bad luck, gullibility with pretty women and unthinking selfishness just tends to lead to very, very bad results. But as Lee Adama would say, evil would require deliberateness, and Gaius never intends for the bad things to happen.
  - Although his deliberately not revealing the Cylon sleeper he'd discovered (Boomer) came pretty damn close to deliberate harm.
  - I'm pretty sure that giving a nuclear warhead to someone that he knew to be a Cylon counts as deliberate harm. Either that or it was his turn to hold the Idiot Ball.
Gul Dukat of Star Trek Deep Space Nine was rather too well-liked by fans, given that he was essentially a Space Nazi. The writers kept trying desperately to give him Kick The Dog moments to cement his villainy once and for all, and even tried to send him past the Moral Event Horizon, but it never seemed to matter. It probably didn't help that the show was about Black And Gray Morality and deconstructing The Federation, which meant most of the ''protagonists'' were occasionally kicking puppies, too (we're looking at you, Sisko).
- Consider that Dukat did indeed have several Pet The Dog moments, and that he claims to have made attempts to make Terok Nor a better place for the Bajoran slaves (possible; though there is no proof, he may indeed have been better than most of the other overseers); he really did appear to be a character capable of salvation. The show even Ship Teased him and Kira. This makes his crash HARD when he pledges to kill all Bajorans and then attempts to end all life. Yah...
  - But when you remember he had a relationship with Kira's mother, that Ship Tease becomes a bit creepy, no? Something the Expanded Universe is capitalising on to give him all-new Moral Event Horizon moments with Kira's duplicate.
  - But the relationship with Kira's mother was a 6th season Ret Con which apparently was introduced as a replacement for planned Dukat/Kira storyline, thanks to Nana Visitor's relentless insistence that Kira would never and under any circumstances enter a relationship with someone who was basically her universe's version of Hitler.
Alex Krycek from The X Files. Krycek has betrayed (and tried to kill) Mulder and Scully on numerous occasions, but some fans think he and Mulder make a cute couple.
- It doesn't help that in a later season (and a very odd scene), he actually kissed Mulder....
Jiro from Kamen Rider Kiva is a sociopathic Wolf Man who regularly kills and eats random women on the street, but this does not stop fangirls from drooling over him.
- Then there was Ouja of ''Kamen Rider Ryuki", real immoral Ax Crazy Blood Knight Sociopath who some are wooed by his evilness and sinister agenda out of pure personal reasons, something that was absent from the older Kamen Rider series.
Guy of Gisborne in the BBC's Robin Hood is a truly despicable human being with no real redeeming qualities, at least at the beginning of the show. He has, for example, abandoned his own bastard infant in the forest and then beaten the mother when she confronted him about it. But damn it, he's hot. His actor, Richard Armitage, said in an interview that his objective was to make the viewers' skin crawl during Guy's interactions with Marian. As the shipping demonstrates, he was rather unsuccessful.
- The costume designer must surely be aware of this trope. Why else would she have dressed him in actual leather pants?
  - Because leather has always been a common clothing material, especially among people who you'd expect to fight on a regular basis, since it's tough and can be used as armor?
  - Especially in Medieval Europe.
The character of Detective Ronnie Gardocki, on The Shield, developed a major cult following amongst fans of the show in spite of not receiving much screen time or character development during the first couple of seasons of the show outside the occasional nerd moment and Butt Monkey-style physical abuse moment. As such, many fans of the character began promoting the notion/belief that Ronnie was a nerdy and all all-around good guy who simply fell in with the wrong crowd at work and not an rotten to the core corrupt cop who's soul was as black as the rest of the team. Needless to say, even when Ronnie is hauled off kicking and screaming for his crimes committed as part of with the Strike Team (which has to be spelled out to him by Dutch, when he reacts in a confused fashion when he's arrested) at the end of the series, fans of the character argue that Ronnie was the victim, having been screwed over by Vic Mackey, who ratted out Ronnie for immunity for all of his crimes (including murdering a fellow cop) and a cushy new job with the Feds.
- Ironically, even David Rees Snell is aware of the trope that his character on The Shield suffers from, as seen in the following interview.
Gabriel Gray (a.k.a. Sylar) from Heroes is a ruthless serial killer who murders many people (including fan-favorite Ted) so as to take their powers... by taking their brains. He feels no remorse for his actions and has a soul that is truly blacker than a moonless night... but look at that wet, delicious shirtless chest! And look how much fun he has with his powers - if all the characters whose powers don't require bloody murder had as much fun with their powers as Sylar does with his, this series would be much more fun. Cake?
- Elle moving from "You killed my father you MURDERER!!" to "oooh you're sexy, let's snuggle" in a single episode may be a rare in-show example of Draco In Leather Pants-ing.
  - Could possibly be excused by the fact that Elle was a diagnosed sociopath.
- Noah Bennet - legitimately loved as a Badass Normal and Magnificent Bastard - is nevertheless often happily excused of abducting and experimenting on people (including children) for about 17 years. And what convinced him to stop was essentially an extreme case of Protagonist Centered Morality focused on his daughter. Bennet's moral ambiguity is an unquestionable part of the character's appeal; the Draco In Leather Pants-ing comes in when fans use "but he's morally gray!" to handwave away any suggestion that Bennet might have crossed any ethical lines.
Cole Turner/Belthazar in Charmed. Let's see. He's a demon, but "Cole" is his human half so, hey, he's not all that bad, right? He repeatedly plots against, deceives, considers killing, and attempts to kill the Charmed Ones, but he's really just misunderstood, see. Even when he becomes The Source, essentially Charmed's version of Satan, he's still just a big ol' softy to some viewers (and Phoebe, whose intelligence could be questioned). Part of the dangers of casting Julian McMahon for your villain, I suppose.
The new show Lie To Me actually lampshades this with an episode where a serial killer, locked up in jail - that too, an unrepentant asshole - has a bunch of fanboys who attend his trials and act like they're witnessing the second coming of Jesus.
Scorpius from FarScape, despite his numerous Kick The Dog moments. It doesn't help that wears a bloody full body leather suit and is the embodiment of Affably Evil (until you really annoy him). In fact, he became so popular, that by the end of the third season he'd gotten his own sympathetic background and eventually joined the main cast as a pseudo-protagonist.
- Arguably, since his motivation, laid out from the beginning, was to find more effective weapons to defend known space against the aggressive Scarran Empire, He could be seen as a Well Intentioned Extremist rather than truly evil.
- It's also easy to confuse Scorpius with Harvey, Scorpius' neural clone in Johns head. Superficially the same character, they're quite different, and for a about a season his only goals appear to be 1) keep John alive and 2) don't let the Scarran Empire get wormhole technology. And throw around some pop culture references while we're about it. It's arguable that when some people say they like Scorpius, they really mean Harvey.
Todd Manning from One Life To Live. Gang-rape, terrorizing a blind woman and beating his teenage daughter´s friends without any provocation (and still not being in jail for it!) haven't stopped him from becoming favorite among some aggressively protective "He´s so hot!" fans. It is very much case of Perverse Sexual Lust.
Anyone who attempts to turn you from a person who eats sentient beings into a person who does not is interfering with your civil rights, right? Michael Kenmore from Stargate: Atlantis thinks so, and it appears much of the fanbase agrees. Obviously, anti-Wraith genocide, Wraith worshipping, living like a cow herd, or Dying Like Dangerous!Defiant!Animals is the better way to go. Keep in mind that at this point, the replacement food research was going absolutely nowhere. Being brainwashed and lied to is reasonably enough to make a person cranky and get some sympathy, but a lot of fans act like the Atlanteans did this to prevent Michael from performing his favorite folk dance out of spite. Why, yes, Michael, we DO think being a Wraith is a disease-how many people have died from you being a Wraith so far? Could we get some sympathy and righteous indignation for them?
Two words: Chuck Bass.

Close Live Action TV

Professional Wrestling fans often latch onto a Heel and start cheering for him; oftentimes this can reach levels where the booker/writer has no choice but to perform a Heel Face Turn on the character. Examples of this include the nWo, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, The Rock, Eddie Guerrero, and Batista. In other words, the polar opposite of X Pac Heat.
- This isn't Dracoing. When wrestling fans start cheering a heel, it's usually because they like his character and/or schtick and find him entertaining. Dracoing would only take place if they ignored his actual character and ran with their own interpretation of it.
- In wrestling Fan Fic, John Cena and Randy Orton get hit with this one a lot, but not as much as the Little Black Dress of wrestling fandom, Shawn Michaels. You can pretty much count on his various addictions and personality quirks to be RetConned. Then add in the fact that he wears leather pants as part of his character...
  - Wrestling fanfiction?? Dear God...
The internet fanbase generally orients themselves towards wrestlers who are good workers. Sometimes, though, a wrestler who's just plain bad in the ring starts getting over. Maybe he got some good writing behind him, maybe it's just the weird X Factor that causes things in pro wrestling to catch on when they shouldn't or not catch on when they should. Cue internet fans doing somersaults trying to figure out ways to explain why, say, Big Daddy V is a superior worker.

Close Professional Wrestling

There are several examples of women swooning over (and even marrying) convicted murderers because of their notoriety, good looks, or badass reputations. The most egregious example was probably Ted Bundy, an unrepentant serial killer who not only raped and murdered over 30 girls, but who also had sex with some of their corpses. And yet he had no shortage of fangirls, because he was charismatic and handsome.
- According to That Other Wiki, even the judge who sentenced him was sorry to see him go.
- Spoofed in Dilbert, where the title character goes to jail for murder and is inundated with marriage proposals. He comes to quite like it in jail.
- Considering how utterly horrific Josef Fritzl is, and how old he is, AND how hideous he is, AND the victim was his own family, serial killer fanism may actually come about BECAUSE of the killing and the raping. Fritzl may not be a serial rapist but in a way he's worse as he tormented a single victim for decades and separated her from the children they had.
Jesse James fits this to many very well. So much in fact that many encyclopedias and historical programs on him go out of their way just to emphasize that his actions only benefited him and his gang and that he was not a type of Robin Hood-esque folk hero. Notable Brady Bunch episode about this even.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Whether he should be considered as one of history's biggest heroes or worst villains is still a hotly debated topic, but the more-or-less recent appearance of his visage on T-shirts of angsty teens and twenty-somethings in America, most of whom have little idea of what he actually stood for or what he's done, but just like him because he was a revolutionary and therefore cool, definitely puts him in this category.
- The book Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? calls Che "everyone's favourite facial-hair-motorbike-stood-for-some-stuff-but-I-don't-know-what-it-was-and-don't-really-give-one-check-out-the-beard-man revolutionary".
- Parodied in an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei where Chiri Kitsu goes around making sure people know everything about the stuff they wear, own, or talk about. She meets someone unfortunate enough to be wearing a Che Guevara shirt, who promptly receives a lecture and slide show of Guevara's life and exploits in grueling detail.
- Likewise any dictator who looks good in a suit, especially among women in his native country, or an uneducated dip from the Americas.
- Of course at least most latinos do know his story and some do think of him as a hero.
- There's also Filiberto Ojeda Ríos. Everyone in Puerto Rico views him as a hero and patriot.
There's Mary Sue fanfic for That Wacky Nazi Josef Mengele.
- Though standard nazis fall under Evil Is Sexy, this troper will bank on it being a DILP metrosexual mad scientist thing instead.
- After the fall of Nazi Germany, many letters were found - written by German women who adored their Fuhrer and wanted to carry his child. Now that is a kink that definitely doesn't need supporters.
- It might seem a bit tasteless, but the career trajectory of the Holocaust-denier David Irving is similar to that of a stereotypical fan who does this. He started off as a fairly respected military historian who specialised in Nazi Germany (sane "just because I like watching this character doesn't mean I don't know he's an evil bastard"), then began arguing that Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust and the other Nazis did it because they thought he'd approve (an Alternate Character Interpretation that makes people look at you funny but is still slightly defensible), and then finally crossed the line into full-on denial (all out deranged villain-woobifying).
  - This troper new a girl back in high school who had a thing for Hitler. She had a notebook full of drawings of Chibi-Hitler, and expressed disdain for Eva Braun, the "nude-sunbathing whore." Oftentimes, this polite to a fault troper would often be roped into awkward conversations about how Hitler actually did this or that which improved Germany or the world or whatever.
  - Do a google search for the term "Hitler-chan", 'nuff said.
Vlad Tepes for the girls and Elizabeth Bathory for the guys. Two of history's worst serial killers (by some accounts), but since they received a Historical Vampire Upgrade, everyone still thinks they're hawt.
- Vlad Tepes is also a folk hero in Wallachia bacause he fought off the Turks... using his own people as horrific public sacrifices, HOT!
- In sliiiiight defense of the guy (whom this troper still thinks was rather BATSHIT *rimshot*), many of the stories about him apocryphal German 'tabloid pamphlet' rumour-mill gleanings (the medieval equivalent of "OMG I know this guy who knows a guy who has a cousin in Wallachia, and THEY said..." etc.), a vast majority of his victims were Ottoman Turks (see: The Night Attack, and no, that doesn't make him less creepy, but he wasn't quite an indiscriminate killer), and he was arguably not as big a dick as the Ottoman princes tended to be. The latter may well be a case of The Devil You Know (again, *rimshot*).
- Hey, queer DILP fans exist too - though more guys seem to want to BE (the DILP version of) Tepes than woobify him. it does happen, though!
  - In this Troper's neighborhood, there is a barber shop with a portrait of Vlad Tepes prominantly dispayed on the wall. Talk about nightmare fuel!
A lot of Russians still think that Stalin was hot stuff - many Soviets did while suffering in his work camps in Siberia, under mistaken notion that he would save them if he only knew. Likewise, you still find a plenty of admirers of Mao from China, Cultural Revolution be damned.
- When Stalin was in power, he had hordes of fangirls who wrote him love-letters.
- Many in the Western World were strong fans of communism and Stalin's regime. This was especially true after the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, with songs being written about him, and Americans calling him "Uncle Joe". Also many Westerners, due to the Great Depression, immigrated to the Soviet Union, falsely thinking that the USSR was some sort of workers' paradise. Unfortunately, many of them instead fell victim to Stalin's genocidal policies.
There are people who feel that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were heroes and martyrs. Yet they murdered a dozen of their fellow high school students.
- Although certainly not heroes or martyrs, they were certainly victims just as much as villains.
- This is almost certainly due to the huge swath of self-righteous Moral Guardians that sprung up afterwards, and a misplaced use of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
  - The true Wall Banger is that the demographic that DILP fans tend to ignore the fact that they were diagnosed sociopaths who took pride in bullying the sort of people who now proclaim them heroes. This troper has heard far too much admiration for Dylan and Eric from "baby-bats", despite the fact that Goths, emokids, and "fags" were often attacked by the two.
  - I was under the impression that Reb and Vo D Ka were the ones who were bullied by others, and that this was what pushed them over the edge.
- At least a handful of these people have gone on to murder as well. Hell, there are Leopold and Loeb fangirls, though admittedly it's mostly because Leopold and Loeb come across as pitifully fucked-up and mutually devoted rather than rage-inducedly homicidal.
Self-proclaimed "controversial" cartoonist Carlos Latuff appears to admire Seng-Hui Cho, the Viginia Tech killer.
Pick any well-known celebrity who's known to be a spousal abuser. The recent example; and the one that baffles this male troper is R&B singer Chris Brown. After beating his (ex)-girlfriend Rihanna to a bloody pulp and leaving her with scars, there were no shortage of women claiming either 'it was stress, 'it was a misunderstanding', or my personal favorite, '"She" must have done something to provoke him'. A-maz-ing.
The late Black Metal guitarist Dead is subject to this, with plenty of girls swooning over his good looks and musical talent. Let's not forget the fact that Dead was a very disturbed man who would cut members of his audience, go without eating to get starvation bruises, bury his clothes so they'd rot and lend him a corpse-like appearance, and even keep a dead crow to sniff before shows to get the "scent of death" on his breath.
Depressing Real Life example unfolding right now: Roman Polanski, child rapist extraordinaire, who is on the record as justifying his actions because, and I quote, "Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!" is now finally being brought to something resembling justice. The general reaction? That he should be left alone, to the point where celebrities like Harrison Ford, Natalie Portman, Guillermo Del Toro, Jeremy Irons, and dozens, dozens more are publicly signing petitions to get him off the hook. Un. Be. Lievable.
- Jaime Foxx was one of the few people in Hollywood to speak out against Polanski, then had to immediately recant for fear of being blacklisted.
- It's not difficult to understand why some celebrities want him left alone. His pregnant wife was gruesomely murdered by the Manson Family, which could easily happen or could have happened to any of them. This does not excuse Polanski, but it may explain the reaction to his arrest.
Mumia abu-Jamal killed a police officer in 1992 and is currently on death row. On a daily basis, thousands of people protest for his release, despite the overwhelming evidence against him.
Eric Clapton, at a 1976 concert, went on a drunken rant about how foreigners, coons and wogs needed to get out of England so the country would stay white (particularly galling considering how heavily his music drew from black artists). You will find no shortage of music fans making excuses like "he was drunk, he didn't mean it," or "he can't be racist, he plays the blues."

Close Real Life

Possibly the phenomenon started earlier than Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of Phantom Of The Opera, but Gaston Leroux would not recognize the Erik currently celebrated by the "Phandom" as the title character of his novel Le Fantome de l'Opera. The original story is an early 20th-century potboiler about a deformed psychopath who is tragic because of his pathetic nature. He has a monstrous appearance and an utter lack of conscience (until the very last moment), but he shore do write some purty music. It's a "beauty killed the beast" story like King Kong, and thus already had the potential for this...
- Particularly after the release of the 2004 film version of the 1986 musical adaptation, the story has developed this strange following of people who honestly do believe that the heroine of the story should have chosen to live in the basements below the opera house with the unstable, homicidal madman who stalked and kidnapped her instead of marrying her aristocratic fiance because... um... Well, mostly because Andrew Lloyd Webber is a sly fox who gave these people who tend to be in a place in life where they feel isolated and misunderstood a hero who is a brilliant, misunderstood, romantic outcast just like them. (And it would be okay to live in the dark with him forever because "face like a skull, missing a nose and everything" has been demoted to "Two-Face's long-lost ancestor" at worst and, in the film, "hot guy with an inconstant and easily covered patch of radiation burn", so it isn't like he's ugly or anything, which, of course, begs the question of why he lives in the basement at all). This troper used to be in Phandom, and the amount of venom other fans vented toward the Viscomte simply for existing is amazing in its volume and nastiness. If they acknowledged at all that Erik (the Phantom) killed people and was generally not a nice man, then they had multiple explanations for why it wasn't really his fault. That the relationship between Erik and his protege was really, really not romantic, nor even a healthy relationship, tended to be entirely ignored because Erik is a giant Woobie with a good voice and a secret heart of gold, and that's that.
  - Oh god, this troper agreed to watch the 2004 movie with her friend and then had to listen to said friend scream that Raoul was a fop and Christine was a tease for not choosing the Phantom. Meanwhile, this troper wondered what sort of relationship came from kidnapping, stalking, deceit, blackmail, and fear. This troper's friend also insisted, after the scene when the young Phantom strangles a gypsy to get free, that everything the Phantom did, he did to survive. I decided not to ask if that included the previously mentioned kidnapping, stalking, etc.
  - Strangely, most of the people this troper knows personally find Erik much less sympathetic in the 2004 film because he was just too attractive for the amount of angsting he does. They still feel for the stage version and many of the other adaptations, but, for the most part, they've got no love for Gerry!Phantom.
- This troper actually understands why the Phantom ended up Draco In Leather Pants to some. He was the most interesting character in the entire book; Christine came off as shallow, and as for Raoul... Why am I supposed to be cheering him on again? Oh, yes, he's not bad like Erik is. Who is the most interesting and well-developed character in the entire story. No wonder he gets fans!
A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley Kowalski. People tend to blame Blanche for being a passive-agressive weirdo and kind of leading him on, but that doesn't change the fact that Stan is an evil bully and a rapist. Within the story, Stella shelves the rape incident under her own Dis Continuity.
- What really hurts Blanche's case is establishing herself as a bully and a racist in one line to Stella ("I let the place go? I let the place go?! Where were you?! In bed with your Polack!") before Stanley first appears. This combined with Stanley countering the same epithet later by saying he's a full-born American right before his assault surely makes a lot of people want to justify his actions, even though they can't.
- And, of course, this is the role that made Marlon Brando a star on both Broadway and Hollywood and an international heartthrob. So Yeah.
Deliberately invoked in many productions of The Doll House, where the actor playing Torvald Helmer has to be ridiculously attractive for Nora's actions to make sense. Unfortunately, it's easy to miss that he's also an ungrateful sexist bastard.
Assassins is this, to a certain degree.
There are people who woobiefy both of the Macbeths.

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Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth was a sociopathic madman in a leather coat who killed one member of the main cast, burned down the main character's hometown, betrayed his trust in a glorious way, and led the main character on a wild goose chase all across the Planet simply to manipulate him into bringing him a magical doomsday device, which he then used to attempt to destroy the world. There is not even the faintest hint of sympathy portrayed for him by any of the game's characters. However, this doesn't stop the fandom declaring him simply a Hive Mind puppet of Jenova, and relegating him to the level of innocent commonly reserved for the The Woobie — even though this theory was not at all implied in the game, and was blatantly disproven by the Word Of God and the supplemental materials. This seems purely an effect of his good looks, as similarly bad but creepy villains in the story get no such sympathy.
- Some may actually be a little more sympathetic towards Sephiroth after playing Crisis Core...except that the Fan Dumb didn't want to see Sephiroth as a developed character and would detest the sequel to Discontinuity while at the same time bugging Square-Enix to remake Final Fantasy VII...some people even want...oh surprise surprise...Sephiroth Character Development...
- This troper remembers a forum thread about what the forumer's favorite Final Fantasy hero was, and one poster kept insisting that Sephiroth was the "real" hero of Final Fantasy VII because Zack and Cloud had bullied him and driven him to evil.
  - Apparently no one remembers Hojo...
- And let's not forget his avatar, Kadaj, from Advent Children, and the other two Jenova's Witnesses.
- The Turks (at least to my recollection) also get this treatment, particularly Reno. Nevermind the whole "dropping one section of a city onto another to kill a six-person terrorist group", they look good and like to goof off!
  - Of course, considering how chummy AVALANCHE and the remaining Turks seem to be in Advent Children it may not be completely baseless....
- Sephiroth's DILP status is lampshaded in Dissidia by Penelo, who doesn't understand the appeal.
Seifer Almasy from Final Fantasy VIII. Many fanfics have him coming back to the Garden and being easily forgiven for betraying Garden and helping Ultimecia at every turn, making out to be a heroic Jerk with a Heart of Gold instead of an immature, selfish jerkass.
Organization XIII from the Kingdom Hearts series gets this because of their seemingly sympathetic motivation of regaining their hearts so they can become complete by regaining their lost hearts. People tend to forget that, in pursuit of this goal, they manipulated Sora and erased his memories, they tried to corrupt Riku, they kidnapped Kairi, they unleashed the Heartless, and they messed with many worlds. Even with the ruthless villainy, it's unsurprising, considering the strange disconnect between the stated nature of the Organization — "They don't feel anything" — and the repeated contradictory emotional displays, starting with the member you play as for several hours (though he, admittedly, was always somewhat of a special case.)
- What bothers this troper is how some of those Organization XIII fans like to demonize Sora in an attempt to justify their fangirlism. This troper has actually seen a picture of Xigbar about to shoot Sora at point-blank range, followed by a scathing rant about how evil he is, and how wonderful the Organization was. Fangirl goggles, much?
- 358/2 Days not only shows that Roxas was the only member with any real redeaming qualities (aside from Axel, but he only got those redeeming traits due to his friendship with Roxas, and there were still a helluva lot of negative qualities about him to counter these), but also outright states that Xemnas doesn't care about getting his heart back and that his goal is to become a "great being" by using Kingdom Hearts' power.
- What is surprising is that this treatment is given to The Heartless! In the game series, they are mindless, evil creatures born from the darkness in people's hearts who attempt to invade and destroy the hearts of all worlds. Some fans - especially those that create Heartless fan characters - portray them as cute, intelligent monsters. Just searching for "Heartless" on deviantART is enough to make this troper Face Palm.
- To be fair, many of them (Shadows, Mushrooms, the floaty spellcasters) are adorable-looking, but they're definitely not creatures you'd want to squeeze and take home and call George.
  - White Mushrooms are literally harmless and completely belevolent, play charades with Sora or ask him to make them comfortable (it's ambiguous which one it is), and their relatives the Rare Truffles exist solely to ask Sora to juggle them in the air and reward him depending on how high and how long he keeps them airborne. Their Black Toadstool cousins, however, are lethal if unprepared.
Leon Magnus in Tales Of Destiny. In the first game, he is one sadistic Jerkass who even laughs in the face of death. But fans latched into him due to his cuteness and his background... and he ends up becoming an Ensemble Dark Horse who got brought back in the sequel as Judas.
- The developers seemed to pander to this fanbase in the Japan-only PS 2 remake of Tales of Destiny, giving him a less antagonistic personality and making his death more honorable. They took it a step further in the Director's Cut of the remake, wherein the option to play from Leon's side of the story exists. This scenario culminates in Leon actually winning his final battle with the heroes. Unfortunately, however, he still ends up dead as the story goes back normally.
- He's also become an icon for the entire Tales series in Japan (not so much in the US, where the series didn't get much attention before Talesof Symphonia came out). In Namco's official Tales character popularity polls (of which there have been four), he has always been ranked as one of the top two and has been number one twice.
Kristoph Gavin from Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney...apparently. Note that after this exchange, the Forum Guy continues to write as if the character is, er, an actual person. Not a fictional character the writers can do with as they please.
Forum Guy: please... if capcom just intend on pinning more things to krissi and torturing him further, then don't bring him up at all.
This Troper: ...so, you think he's, like, a good guy, or something? I've never seen someone consider a person written as a cruel, completely heartless bastard to be "tortured". And "pinning" things on him? So he didn't kill someone (and intend to kill another) in cold blood? Please tell me that post was some sick parody of the Draco In Leather Pants phenomenon.
- This may be an isolated case. Most of his fangirls seem to find his evilness itself appealing.
- Luke Atmey from the same games is like this for some people.
- Don't forget Matt Engarde, easily the most cold-hearted, manipulative bastard prior to Kristoph. This troper has seen nothing but fics where he suddenly turns over a new leaf and falls in love with the first girl he sees.
Dark Link, a boss who never even speaks or has any defined personality, from The Legend Of Zelda has a fandom at DeviantArt. Some even ship him with the regular Link. Also a case of Self Fanservice as the actual Dark Link is a faceless shadow that can be mass produced.
- And if deviantART is any indication, Vaati from the Four Swords games and Minish Cap has gathered the same following.
- Ganondorf. He kills innocent people, plans hostile coups, makes people suffer, and generally passes the villain test with flying colors. However, he does have his fangirls, due to his rugged good looks, high intelligence, and charisma.
Erol from Jak II. He tortures people for the sheer pleasure of it and isn't picky about whether he kills members of the Underground or Metalheads. In Jak 3, he's driven completely insane and desires to kill everyone by blowing up the planet. Yet fangirls are drawn to him, especially to pair him up with Jak or Torn.
Ghost Widow of City Of Villains generally has her fanatical loyalty to Arachnos (along with the fact that she's physically bound to its existence) downplayed when discussing her, mostly because "She's so pretty...".
- Although there is a storyline that reveals she has a sympathetic backstory, and even a stone cold assassin feels sorry for her after learning of it.
- She's also the only character in the game with MOVING HAIR (or have they implemented that as a costume option now? Honestly, haven't played it in years). I think most of the fandom surrounding her is based on how hot the actress the devs hired to play her at one of the conventions was. With that in mind, I feel as though you can hardly blame the fanboys.
- Ghost Widow's loyalty is officially downplayed because it's not really loyalty so much as inescapable obligation. That said, her being "a hot goth chick" does tend to give her Dark And Troubled Past a lot more mileage than, say, a an ugly fat old man would would have.
Pyramid Head of Silent Hill 2 has one of these fandoms, due mostly to all the Fetish Fuel surrounding him.
- As does Walter Sullivan of the fourth game, although due to physical attractiveness and a Freudian Excuse instead of Fetish Fuel.
Baldur's Gate has this to spare - there are mods and fanfics centered around romances with Sarevok (Big Bad of the first game, and your frigging brother), Irenicus (Big Bad of the second), Edwin (Smug Snake), and more. And yet the only romance the game gives to female characters is Anomen.
From Super Robot Wars Z, we have Asakim Dowin. To describe this guy as a monster is being too lenient. He takes one of the main characters, kills her entire team, beats the hell out of her, takes the form of one of her friends to give her hope before blowing her mech apart, and leaves her alive, just to piss her off enough that she'll awaken her latent power and kill him. Yeah. However, even he has his fans. It may be in part to his incredibly kickass theme song, his absolutely vicious way of fighting, or the fact that he's basically an evil version of Masaki, but he's surprisingly well liked for a complete and utter horror of a human being.
- Another justification was due to how much of a Magnificent Bastard he is. See, he comes off pretty amiable in the end, during the course of Rand's story, presumably due to how the latent power to kill him also exists in Rand's lolicious partner Mel, and it's activated in a different way than Setsuko's latent power, so he doesn't need to act like a Complete Monster to them (he does occasionally torment them, but not as extreme as he did to Setsuko's). Hell, you even get to RECRUIT him in Rand's scenario! Thing is, Asakim knows what he wants and to achieve it, he doesn't mind being manipulative like hell, and play the Complete Monster part when necessary, which is why he is almost like Ali Al Saachez from above, a stylish (although depraved) villain
- Simply being a Death Seeker is reason enough for many fans to Woobify someone like him. Just look at Shu Shirakawa, who killed countless people, helped start at least one war, and was willing to destroy the Earth to achieve his only-a-little-bit-sympathetic goals. Needless to say, fangirls squeal in his presence.
Albel Nox from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is one of the most popular characters in the game, despite the fact that he tortures some NPCs for fun, treats his own soldiers like crap, does nothing but insult everyone from your party members to his own king, and bitches at length in practically every cutscene and PA about how the protagonist and everyone else needs to be more ruthless. It does help that he's incredibly attractive, and is voiced by Crispin Freeman in the dub and Isshin "Dio Brando" Chiba in the Japanese version... and to his credit, the game does give the option of having him join your party and help save the universe, which can also unlock a PA that shows he's very aware of his flaws. He's still a sadistic Jerk Ass, though.
- The most annoying part of Albel's DILP status is the Double Standard that comes out in the fandom as a result: Maria Traydor is often bashed by fangirls for being bitchy, angsty and self-centred. Said fangirls also tend to worship Albel... who has all the aforementioned traits they bash Maria for, and actually has the "bitchy" and "self-centred" parts in much bigger spades. Apparently, the fact that Albel is male gives him a free ticket to be that way.
Sync the Tempest from Tales Of The Abyss is quite a depraved character, wanting the destruction of the world and all, without much care of the others and wouldn't think twice to break a character's emotion whenever necessary. He is also one of the more popular God Generals thanks to his huge woobie points, and the fact that he is a much cooler (and evil) version of Ion, the resident Non Action Guy and James Bondage. The fact that there are shippers of Sync/Arietta must be caused by Sync's awesome leather pants (he'd probably just break Arietta for the lulz...)
Albedo from the Xenosaga series has a good amount of fangirls (this troper included as well) who claim that he's "just misunderstood", despite the fact that he put Cute Realian Girl MOMO through horrible Mind Rape, tortures his twin brother Jr. with mind tricks and taunts, destroyed an entire Federation battalion with Proto Merkavah for a warmup, his merging with a space-time anomaly that he would put to use by wiping out the world, and the fact that he is a Psycho For Hire, Magnificent Bastard, Complete Monster who's a Nietzsche Wannabe with A God Am I complex. This results in him getting paired with MOMO (albeit sometimes an older version, but sometimes not), Gaignun Kukai (a.k.a "Nigredo"), and even Jr. himself.
Dr. Loboto from Psychonauts—and his extremely myopic underling, Crispin—have their own disturbingly large legions of fangirls, who draw them bishie-fied and with Relationship Sues. This may be due to the combined factors of sultry and/or scary voices, straightjackets, mental control, and amputation, they're pretty much a two-man walking fetish factory.
Specter from Ape Escape. The fact that he is a monkey may have something to do with it.
This editor has seen this trope done in Tsukihime fandom to Nrvnsqr Chaos and Roa. True, they are complex villains with personalities who go much beyond the cookie-cutter bad person (and actually get sympathetic on occasion in Roa's case), but the writer seemed to have forgotten that, in the end, they were still villains.
Quite a few villains in the Suikoden series have aquired quite a fanbase, usually because of the complex and realistic portrayal of the characters. That still doesn't stop villains such as Yuber, an inhuman and clearly malevolent Psycho For Hire who spreads chaos for his own amusement and Luca Blight, essentially, quoting a reviewer, a finely tuned sociopathic machine of sadism who's favorite hobby is to slaughter innocents indescriminantly, from being the most popular.
Though not a villain per se, Jin Kisaragi from BLAZBLUE qualifies somewhat. An arrogant Jerkass who really wants to kill his brother and really hates the face of someone who's attracted to him. Also quite insane.... Being an easy-to-master character also tremendously help make his pants shinier too (or best character for scrubs to use thanks to his Spam Attack special).
- His pants get even shinier with the 'Justification Badge', when his past is revealed whereas he's pretty much a sane, hardworking boy with huge following and at least despite him having a bad feeling on Noel Vermillion, he tried to get along fine with her. Until the reappearance of Ragna, in which all hell breaks loose on Jin and he suddenly turned into the Yandere Jerkass the audience always know. Perfect justification to ignore his psychosis indeed...
Vamp from the Metal Gear Solid franchise: Fan Fic writers (particularaly of the female variety) tend treat him as this utterly tragic figure who just wants to be loved, all the while conveniently forgetting that he's a terrorist and a blood-drinking murderer who killed an innocent, defenseless girl for no discernible reason. This treatment seems to be from the effect of his good looks and bisexuality.
- "Vamp?????" Not in this troper's opinion. I mean, look at him in that fight at Act 2 of Metal Gear Solid 4-so much hairiness and his face is full of veins. Do people actually find that attractive or something??
- Also, Colonel Volgin. A mass murderer and sadistic rapist, the Leather Pants treatment is mostly due to the yaoi fangirls squeeing over his canon lover and Bishounen Morality Pet Raikov. (For the record, this troper unashamedly counts herself among them.) The electric powers may also be a factor.
- Big Boss himself, although his is a special case - his Backstory in MGS3 painted him as a genuinely sympathetic character, causing fans to go so far as to excuse, if not outright defend his less than admirable actions in Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Some have even gone so far as to call Big Boss the true hero of the series for his intention to rebel against The Patriots' control, never mind Big Boss himself calling his son, Solid Snake a better man than he ever would be.
- It gets nasty when fanboys get their own personal politics into their interpretation of the canon. Word Of God is that, when Gray Fox was fighting in Mozambique as a child, he was fighting for the FRELIMO - the Communists. This repeatedly gets changed on the Metal Gear Wiki to claim Fox and Big Boss were both fighting for the RENAMO - the anti-Communists - when, in reality, only Big Boss was. It gets even weirder when you understand that Big Boss, at that time, didn't care about who he served for as a mercenary, and that Gray Fox was ten years old and certainly hadn't made a choice as to which side to fight for. But how dare anyone say that Gray Fox used to be a Commie!
- Ocelot probably counts as well; some people overlook the fact that he's a sadistic torturer, possible rapist, and unrepentent mass murderer because he did it all to end the Patriots and for Big Boss.
  - He is also a very Magnificent Bastard, so really, he was asking for it in a way.
  - Considering that it's young Ocelot who gets this treatment more often than old Ocelot, it's probobly less to due with his Magnificence and more to do with "WOMG he's a bishie!".
In Killzone series people like Hellghast as much as they like Sith in Star Wars.
Revolver Jesus in Persona 3.
- How is Takaya an example of this trope?
- Adachi in Persona 4. Though he was intentionally made this way.
M. Bison may be gaining this due to how goofy the American adaptations portray him. Never mind that he's a sadistic dictator who apparently kills people's fathers (and his own) just for the fun of it, brainwashes innocent teenage girls to use them as slaves, and killing his henchmen for failing to do the job... Though on other portrayal, he's very much quite the epitome of Magnificent Bastard.
OF COURSE!!!
Three ~~words~~ PEOPLE: The Lich King, Illidan Stormrage, and Kael'thas Sunstrider
Albert Wesker from Resident Evil 5 every Resident Evil game he's appeared in.
Vile from Megaman X. Yes, that Vile. Even though the character's face have never been seen from under his Boba-Fett helmet, fangirls like to imagine that he's secretly sexy and handsome underneath. They also like to ship him with X, forgetting that he loathes X in canon and tried to kill him. Repeatedly.
- Also Dynamo, who admittedly has a cool design, a double-sided beam saber and awesome boss music. Too bad fangirls forget that he tried to drop a colony on the planet, was creepily subservient to Sigma, tried to stop the heroes from saving the planet, and had a cheerily fun time doing it. Yet people like to write him as a lovable goofy prankster who joins the Hunters and has a relationship with someone, usually Alia or sometimes even Signas.
- Lumine is also showing signs of this. Despite being a creepy semi-androgynus megalomanic with some angelic overtones (keeping with the 'Paradise Lost' theme), some fanworks like playing up his angelic symbolism, making him look like a cute little angel snuggling with his 'brother' Axl.
Kerrigan. 'nuff said.
- Not really the best example, since Starcraft allows you to play as all three sides, and who's a "hero" and who's a "villain" depends a great deal on what scenario you're in at the time. Even from the point of view of the Human side, she's arguably more likable (and certainly less treacherous) than Mengsk, who really is evil.
Pick any Spyro villain, any at all. It's really severe with Ripto, Red, and Malefor.
ZEX from Star Control 2 is not exactly a nice guy (he does try to add the Captain to his menagerie, and all), but for certain reasons a startlingly large portion of the fandom sees him as a poor, misunderstood, mistreated woobie who just wants to live happily ever after getting it on with the Captain.
- It's more that that portion of the fandom just wants some characterization with its Naughty Tentacles porn.
The Eldritch Abomination Zero of the Kirby series gets this due to its rationale of wanting to spread misery as a result of jealousy towards those who experience positive emotions. Many fans have interpreted this as it just being lonely and wanting friends.
Saren Arterius of Mass Effect fame is occasionally a subject of Leather Pantsing... though this might also be because he got little to no development in the actual game and some haven't read or didn't like Mass Effect: Revelation.

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In Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire, minor character Lord Siegfried, a.k.a. "Siggy", is noted for his uncontrollable temper, his willingness to substitute convenient scapegoats for his wrath, and his extreme racism against orcs. Despite this, he is very dedicated to his duty as a knight, and as long as he can keep calm, he's polite, well-spoken, and sensible. He is also, conspicuously, one of the most "manly" characters in the series. Probably for those reasons, Siggy's fangirls are easily as devout as those of more traditional Bad Ass types such as Celesto and Jacob, even going so far as to set up websites devoted to Siggy fandom, and posting lengthy defenses of his quality of character against those who malign him for the traits the author clearly uses him (and less frequently his father, Lord Damaske) to represent.
- Some readers gets the impression that Mookie knows this and keeps adding character flaws just to make Siggy more unlikable; he's gone from being a violent bully, to a violent racist bully, to a violent racist genocidal demon with a penchant for turning on his friends.
Belkar from Order Of The Stick is a Villain Protagonist who has slaughtered innocents, harvested kidneys from innocents, turned a fistfight between friends at a bar into a bloodbath with 15 people dead, voted to sell a captured female enemy into slavery, attempted to kill allies for experience points, professed a desire to return home to kill his family and childhood friends in their sleep for mocking him, left taunting messages written on the walls of prisons he's escaped in the local guard's blood, and has two shoulder demons because he gave his shoulder angel a nervous breakdown. But because he's a member of the good guy group and is funny, there are fans who argue that he's not evil - despite Word Of God, his being unaffected by a spell that only damages Good and Neutral characters, an angel in the comic itself measuring his evil in kilonazis and Belkar himself saying "I'm Chaotic Evil!". It's possible that he might shake this (as the author delights in making him do even more pointlessly evil things), but then again, maybe not.
- Don't forget that he once removed the top of a Kobold's head to make a hat. Killing the Kobold wasn't so bad, but removing his head for a hat he would lose not long after?
- Also, Redcloak from the same comic, as seen in some recent forum posts, some of which went as far as to say that he is Lawful Good. His plan may indeed be noble, but come on, it involves endangering or destroying the world. That's scarcely good. Besides, he gets magic from the appropriately aligned Dark One.
- A few fans still don't believe Vaarsuvius did anything wrong following their Deal With The Devil. Said fans tend to be much less kind to V's mate, Inkyrius.
Red String has Kazuo's father Kenta, the emotionally abusive patriarch who rules his home with an iron fist and constantly belittles his son and controls his life. Some of the fans tried downplaying this into him simply being a good father setting a strong example for his son, up to and including the numerous times he described his son as "worthless" and even his manipulative and dismissive attitude toward his own wife. One can only wonder how they reacted when Kenta actually blacked his son's eye in a recent page when Kazuo refused to break up with someone so his father could arrange him another marriage.
Black Mage of 8-Bit Theater. This is someone who makes casual referrences to brutally murdering his family and considers stabbing people in the head to be the answer to all problems, yet there are those who give an inordinate amount of focus to a literal handful of scenes where he shows actual human empathy and attempt to portray him as simply a Woobie lashing out at a cruel universe that has designated him to be its Butt Monkey. Do note however that the majority of his fans like him precisely because he bases his existence around killing everything For The Evulz and reject any other view.
Luke from Freakangels is a hobo that has trouble locating a pair of pants and mostly uses his psychic powers to manipulate women into sleeping with him, but has gained a little fan following because he's handsome, intelligent and constantly putting himself as the poor innocent victim of his mean, mean friends.
Miles from Las Lindas is by far the most unashamedly Jerk Ass character in the series, and yet he is absolutly adored by over half the fanbase. His huge Kick The Dog moment in the Harvest Festival arc has done nothing to stop the constant fangirl drooling.

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Mozenrath from the Disney's Aladdin TV series. For many fangirls, his hotness outweighs the fact that he's a sadistic psycho, turned his father-figure into a zombie, devoted his life to ruining Aladdin's, and wants to take over Agrabah just because it's there. Oh, yeah - and the fact that, as Iago put it, he's married to his work. (Mozenrath: "It's so true! I love it!")
- Also, the belief that Mozenrath was intended to be Aladdin's brother seems to be an unfortunate (and persistent) side-effect of this trope.
Frollo in Disney's The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. There are people who think he should have ended up with Esmeralda instead of Phoebus. It doesn't help that he's WAY more sympathetic in the book.
- Or that he was voiced by Tony Jay.
- Or that he has ties with the Church, however tenuous they be.
Not old enough to make it you know what, though it is Older Than The NES: in the old Voltron cartoon, many girls adored the self-proclaimed evil Prince Lotor, despite his attempts not only to kidnap Princess Allura, kill the Voltron Force and raze her planet to a smoldering pile of ash, but also (and repeatedly) to force her into marriage, brainwash her, or commit various other despicable acts; he has never shown an ounce of remorse for any of this. Many fans will attempt to argue that he was forced to do this by his father, even though he hatched and enjoyed half these plans, and even though he continued making them after he usurped his father. Others will say it's all out of love for Allura, even though he was willing to throw her away for another princess that looked just like her. But he's just so pretty...
- This Troper wonders how his perception might change if Voltron had been a bit truer to the original - Sincline (Lotar) apparently kept a decent-sized harem even before setting his sights on Farla (Allura), and in a slightly squicky turn, he mainly was obsessed with Farla because she reminded him of his mother, herself an Altairan woman that his father raped and killed (presumably after she gave birth - not intimately familiar with the series.) Then again, in Japan Sincline is voiced by Akira Kamiya, a voice actor responsible for bringing life to such lovable heroes like Roy Focker and Ryouma Nagare, evil bishonen Ashram, and no less manly a man than Kenshiro.
  - This troper knew he was evil and vicious and lusted anyway; she freely admits her kink is not everybody's kink.
Both Scar from The Lion King and Steele from Balto have received this treatment in the Furry Fandom; many, many fanfics depict them getting the girl or dominating the protagonists sexually... and, of course, several of those fans would love to submit to them, as well.
- This Furry Troper doesn't doubt that such things exist, but stuff involving the Star Wolf team from Star Fox is MUCH more numerous in the Furry Fandom, especially when it comes to them trying to seduce Fox and/or Krystal... In fact, Krystal herself suffers from this when people write fanfiction based on some of the alternate endings from Star Fox Command...
  - Considering that Wolf is literally wearing leather (sort of) pants... and leather vest... and collar... such a bad boy!
Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda ~~may be well on his way toward~~ has achieved a similar status, based on the fact the vast majority of Fan Fics this troper has read all deal with redeeming him. Aside from being practically a walking testimonial to the Furry Fandom's love of the dominating Badass (never mind the restraints at Chorh-Gom that would probably be an S fan's wet dream—yeah...in the concept art, he was depicted with all kinds of armor, spikes, and bracers!), he's also a good example of Evil Is Cool, Evil Is Sexy, and probably (to some folk) the Heroic Sociopath. This editor is even guilty of writing Fan Fic in which he does a Heel Face Turn and is redeemed at least partly due to the love he once shared for Shifu and an overture of friendship from Po.
- This status is somewhat confirmed, sadly, by Word Of God: in the director's commentary it was pointed out that, in trying to make sure Tai Lung would not be a flat, one-note villain, they went too far in humanizing him and making him sympathetic, to the point that many viewers felt so sorry for him they forgot he was the villain. End result: the flashback sequence of his rampage was added in expressly to remind people why he was in prison in the first place. Yet the fact the backstory (complete with cute cuddly baby Tai Lung) was still included, as well as the emotional confrontation between him and Shifu, suggests the makers aren't completely averse to a Sympathy For The Devil tendency in fans. And this editor at least, unlike most Draco lovers, has not forgotten or tried to explain away the bad things the snow leopard did. Redemption does not equal a Get Out of Jail Free Card.
Transfans have quite a few of these; Starscream (who they feel is correct in becoming the leader of the Decepticons), Ravage (especially after his upgrade in Beast Wars), BW Rampage...
- Starscream's fanbase is somewhat justified thanks to Transformers Armada, which portrayed him in a more sympathetic manner with inner conflicts, a quasi-romantic relationship with Alexis and even a Heroic Sacrifice.
  - Armada's Starscream is justified in receiving fan sympathy but all the other incarnations of Starscream have no excuse, considering almost all of them are bad and treacherous to the bone. One can certainly view them as badass Magnificent Bastards (if that) but seeing them as these fluffy and cute characters who deserve a hug is kind of taking it too far.
  - It is also justified in the case of Movie Starscream, who's primary goals are the repopulation of the Cybertronian species and to minimize harm to the Decepticon people from Megatron's madness as much as possible- basically, a hero undercover as The Dragon, albeit one who has a scathing hatred (or at least utter apathy) for us filthy organics.
Vlad Masters/Plasmius from Danny Phantom is the fandom's second most common sex object; he isn't first only because he isn't the main character. Suave, handsome, charismatic, obscenely rich, relatively competent, with an alternate form heavily resembling a vampire and superficially sympathetic motives (he wants to make his old love interest his wife and his arch-nemesis his son): a perfect object for fangirl lust, if one ignores inconveniences such as multiple attempts at murder.
- Dark Danny (AKA: Dan Phantom) also applies. Apparently, his numerous fangirls are so in love with his buff body and hypnotic voice (and his being an orphaned alternate-future version of Danny) that they forget he's a psychotic mass murderer who cares nothing for anyone except himself.
Scarab from the morning cartoon series Mummies Alive!. Never mind that he was something like a cross between Mr. Burns and Mumm-Ra; Fan Fic still has him suavely boinking Mary Sues and the heroes of the show alike. Considering that relatively few people even remember the show, the sheer amount of Slash Fic it generates around an aging Corrupt Corporate Executive who powers up into an insectile monstrosity is rather disturbing.
- Not to mention Norm, who some insist was just an innocent victim to Timmy's abuse and "enslavement" even though Timmy just put Norm back in the lamp in the end because Norm forced Cosmo and Wanda to take his place (while he was apparently planning to destroy Canada).
The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in X Men Evolution. Though they were portrayed more sympathetically than in other continuties, they still were jerks to almost all humans no matter what stance they had on the conflict and often caused lots of trouble that the X-Men had to either solve or cover up. But fangirls insist that the X-Men were evil and stupid and cruel towards them all the time and that the Brotherhood always were little angels. Unless we talk about their temporary female member Boom Boom, because she's OMG A WHORE.
Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. While his intelligence, menacing aura and highbrow / Deadpan Snarker attitude, combined to the perpetual clown-like mishaps to which he's subject, make him a cool and funny villain, there is a not inconsiderable fanbase determined to overlook the fact that his life pretty much revolves around murdering Bart and others, instead making him into an angster hiding his suffering under an antisocial exterior. Extra annoying in that they overlook the canonical explanation for any angst (his being Krusty the Klown's Buttmonkey for years), instead giving him a depressingly cliched tragic backstory.
- Some even go as far as to slash him with Bart. You may reach for the Brain Bleach now.
Lahwhinie from the Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Gadget Goes Hawaiian" is Gadget's Evil Twin. Period. At least in canon. But for some fans she is Gadget minus her quirks and geek attitude and lack of social skills, but plus a dress and make-up and actual passion, and sometimes have her do a more or less spectacular Heel Face Turn. This troper is guilty as charged of the latter, by the way.
Demona from Gargoyles is often a victim of this. While the character is definitely a three dimensional villain, and you understand where she is coming from, a lot of fanfic authors spin this off into either being an apologist or completely re-writing the character to the point where she is Demona in name only. Usually, her daughter Angela will either wave a finger in Demona's face, and Demona magically gives up her hatred to have a relationship with her, or Demona magically falls in love with a human (often a human female) and sees that humans are not all bad. A lot of the time, Goliath is portrayed as an evil mysoginist. Generally, most of these fanfics are just an excuse to get Demona naked, and some authors have admitted that canon Demona is too difficult to write. Of course, Word Of God states that Demona will still be plotting against humanity long after Angela and most of the cast are dead.
- I'm sure it has nothing to do with Demona's defining physical characteristic being that she's tall, gorgeous, phenomenally well-endowed and, oh yeah, a hot redhead. Certainly the fact she's the hottest Gargoyle character yet seen has no impact at all.
This troper has been in constant battle on a movie forum with someone who seems utterly convinced that Gaston of Disney's Beauty and the Beast was a sympathetic character and tragic hero while Belle was an ungrateful girl who held out for royalty and humilated him when he came to propose (apparently ignoring the fact that when she kicked him out of the house, Belle was being pinned against the wall by Gaston, who was trying to kiss her). This person also keeps insisting that Gaston is smarter than he appears because he quotes one line of Macbeth when going to storm the castle (again, ignoring other evidence: "Lefou I'm afraid I've been thinking" "A dangerous past time..." "I know."
Fanfics about Batman The Animated Series often depict the Rogues Gallery as fun-loving bunch of lovable misfits who are unfairly and brutally harassed by the humourless Caped Crusader. Never mind that even in the kids' show's context, most of the Rogues were originally apprehended for attemping ruthless murders on hapless civilians for imagined or exaggerated slights, and that when Batman was put on trial for supposedly creating his foes, the jury of villains found him not guilty in the end and decided that they were responsible for their own messed-up behavior. Then they try to kill Batman anyway.
Likewise, and perhaps even worse off about this trope is the newer "The Batman" where many villain origins are reimagined yet again and many characters are portrayed as younger, and therefore somehow less corrupt and more tragic (especially the Riddler.) The Batman suffers from this trope possibly because it was targeted towards a younger demographic than the previous incarnation, yet still has that pesky Peripheral Demographic...
Zim from Invader Zim. It turns out all those ridiculous failed plans? They mean nothing; Zim is really a totally badass genius. But don't worry, he's not really evil; he would seriously regret destroying humanity, and would probably give it up if a nice, kind-hearted human girl would just show him some love. Oh, and also, isn't Dib just such a bastard for trying to defeat him so much?

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