"The biggest problem in the series is something that no amount of editing can get around: The series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn't get discovered."
An interesting twist on conventional storytelling is to make The Protagonist a villain. Sometimes (but not always), this villainous main character will even get the Sympathetic P.O.V. or be portrayed as an Anti-Villain. Although "hero" and "protagonist" are frequently used interchangeably, it can be fun to take Evil's side and root for it to win over the boring goody two-shoes. However, it is not necessary for a villain to be sympathetic for them to be this trope. Sometimes it's done by having the protagonist facing even worse people.
A Villain Protagonist (especially in a comedy) is quite likely to go down in flames at the end. Whether this counts as a Downer Ending or not is debatable. They may also do a Heel Face Turn and become a Hero Protagonist.
Of course, in the case of video games, some will allow you to choose to be evil, but that's another trope entirely; only when the character you play automatically defaults to villainy does this trope apply. Commonly in video games, you just do it For the Evulz.
When this is done for one episode, it's a Villain Episode.
Compare the Hero Antagonist and Hero Protagonist. May overlap with the more extreme cases of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist.
Not to be confused with the Byronic Hero, who is a horribly flawed person but has heroic qualities and is often working towards a heroic goal, though, there are cases where a Byronic Hero and Villain Protagonist overlap. May also overlap with a Type IV and Type VAnti-Hero and/or Sociopathic Hero.
The point of this trope is for the Protagonist to be the Villain; it doesn't count if the Hero's girlfriend, or best friend is the evil.
Don't confuse this with the Anti-Hero, the Outlaw Hero, or the Hero with Bad Publicity. If the Protagonist's goal is to kill the Chosen One, or to take over the world for is own ambition, or something like that you are ok.
Raoh from Fist of the North Star is the main focus of two of the Legends of the True Savior movies, as well as the protagonist of his own spinoff manga/anime titled Legends of the Dark King
Ladd Russo of Baccano. Mind you, he's not the main character (there is no main character), but he is an Ensemble Darkhorse.
If you think about it, almost the entire main cast of Baccano! is villainous. Firo and the Martillo family are camorristi, the Gandors are mafia, Jacuzzi and gang are, well, a gang, Claire Stanfield is a master assassin, Ennis is the servant of the Big Bad of 1930, the Daily Days is a cynical information broker worried only about itself. Really the only main character who isn't villainous is Eve Genoard, and even then, she has some Corrupt the Cutie moments in the 1932 novel.
The eponymous Golgo 13 tempered by the fact that those he fights tend to be complete monsters
Lucy from Elfen Lied is a cold-blooded killer. She has killed armed men and innocent children, for reasons ranging from "trying to kill me" to "You killed my dog" to "I envy your happy, normal life, and I need a place to crash." She kicks people quite sadistically when they are down. She hears voices and tries to infest humans with her diclonius genes, which will lead to the extinction of mankind. No effort is spared to let the viewer feel sympathy for her plight. In the end, she sacrifices herself to save the one guy who was nice to her. And then you look in the fridge and realize that by the time the series started, years after her most horrific deeds, she never explicitly killed anyone who was unarguably innocent, and even got Mayu, whom she'd never met before, out of harm's way when fighting another diclonius...
MD Geist is revealed to be a Villain Protagonist, but it is difficult to either sympathize or despise him because he isn't developed at all and his true motives are never revealed.
Mirai Nikki is interesting as the true protagonist is reasonably moral (though not truly heroic, least not yet), but all of his allies seem to have rather questionable morals. One is a terrorist who thinks nothing of blowing up a school while it's occupied, while his closest ally and potential girlfriend is dangerous. Over the course of the series, he does eventually become more immoral and becomes as nutty as his girlfriend. Many characters call him out on his villainous behaviour as he gets worse and worse.
Yuuhi and Sami, the main duo of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer. Sami has vowed to destroy the Earth herself after saving it from the eponymous hammer, and Yuuhi is extremely loyal to her for that end. The other Knights besides Yuuhi don't know about Sami's intention; Yuuhi and Sami plot to turn against them as soon as the world is saved. After much Character Development for both of them, they get better. Yuuhi eventually 'defeats' Sami, who didn't really want to destroy the Earth at that point, and the two go on to live Happily Ever After.
Hell Girl. Ai and her helpers are likable, but they damn people to hell for a living. What's more, Ai gets most of her contracts from desperate, vulnerable people who will regret their decision for all eternity. The first season balanced Ai's group with a pair of non-villain protagonists, Hajime and Tsugumi, and Mitsuganae seems to be doing the same with Mikage. Futakomori's approach was to emphasize the helpers' sympathetic backgrounds and ramp up the nastiness of Ai's victims.
The protagonist, Ryo Narushima, in Shamo is one of the most hate-able main characters in comic/manga history. He murders his parents in the first 3 pages of the book, and throughout the series commits (or at least attempts to commit) multiple acts of murder and rape.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni loves this trope. Several characters play this role at some point. Subverted as neither the protagonist nor the viewer knows until The Reveal.
Mayo Sasaki in Fushigi Yuugi: Eikoden. While she's not truly evil, she is extremely selfish and unsympathetic, and her obsession with stealing Miaka's beloved husband Taka/Tamahome, coupled with her irresponsible behavior, causes a lot of trouble for the warriors of Suzaku.
Gundam SEED Stargazer does this with the pilot of the Strike Noir, Sven Cal Vayan. He is the character with the most focus and the only one that (due to the length of the story) got any degree of backstory. He's also shown to be extremely cold, more than willing to gun down entire crowds of refugees on the off-chance that one is a terrorist, and show no trace of remorse or grief when a wingman gets killed. He does eventually get better, but not before getting into a Chained Heat situation with the Hero Antagonist of the series and the pilot of the Stargazer.
The Count of Monte Cristo aka Edmond Dantes from Gankutsuou. Especially when the title Cosmic Horror is in control of him.
Alucard from Hellsing . The first anime leans towards Anti-Hero, but the manga and OVA series depict him as more of a monster. But in that series, he does have a more human side as well. we really see it during his last battle with Anderson.
Ookami no Kuchi: Wolfsmund'' is a series of tragic stories only connected by the presence of Wolfram and the eponymous border pass that he oversees. As of the first volume, no one has gotten past Wolfsmund alive or unscathed thanks to him.
A lot of hentai has this. One notable series is the OVA Slave Market. Every episode features the main character, Cassius, buying a slavegirl. His initial intention is to "save" her, but he finds himself becoming obsessed with her, leading to rape and torture. In an effort to make him even remotely likable, there is inevitably someone even worse hunting his newest slave. Notably, the second episode featured a pair of Hero Antagonists who ended up saving the girl from both Cassius, and the real villains.
Sheila of Superior. Responsible for the death of half the human race (and wants to finish the job), thinks children are an excellent snack, travels with the Yuusha with the express intent of betraying and murdering him... But the entire story is about her slooow Face Heel Turn.
The Rise of Scourge focuses on bloodthirsty murderer Scourge, as he commits murder, murderously.
Ling Xiaoyu from Tekken: Blood Vengeance is probably the most heroic example of this trope ever, seeing that she was only in it because her target is a hottie. After her opponent goes out of her way to save her life following a showdown, she pulls a Heel Face Turn and allies herself with her so they can get to the bottom of what their superiors are really up to.
Natsuo of Teppu definitely qualifies. The realistic high school setting of the manga means that she's probably not going to be murdering anyone, but she has demonstrated herself to be ruthless, selfish, arrogant and frequently sadistic. For example, she initiates a fight with her future rival just because she's bored, and her rival's cheerfulness and self-confidence pisses her off. Natsuo has gotten a little less arrogant over the course of the series so far, but otherwise she's still just as much of a bitch as she was at the start.
Shana is revealed to have unknowingly been this all along in volume 22 of Shakugan No Shana. To be fair, neither she nor the other Flame Hazes knew what the Snake of the Festival was really up to, and when they find out it's a big What Is Evil? moment for all of them.
In Black Lagoon almost all the main characters are villainous, and some arcs (like the first arc, and the initial Roberta arc) sees them take the actual villain's role by doing stuff like kidnapping, or doing stuff like supporting Balalaika, who is the Big Bad of the Yakuza arc (with the Washimine clan and Yuko being the closest thing to 'the hero', up until the point where The Bad Guy Wins).
Comedian of Watchmen, with more emphasis on "Villain" than on "Protagonist"; like Rorschach, he is essentially a violent thug. Unlike Rorschach, however, he's willing to kill people whose only crime was not letting him do whatever the hell he wants, and he stays a "Superhero" mostly so he can enjoy government sanction for his thuggery.
The protagonist of the eponymous Bomb Queen is a supervillainess-turned-EvilOverlord. There are no apparent efforts to justify a Sympathetic P.O.V.. In the beginning it showed her character in a more humorous light but now there is no doubt that she is a complete monster (she crushes Obama's nuts just for fun in the latest volume, murders all of her "friends", and if that isn't bad enough she then has a baby by George Bush. Heck her actions would make Johan Liebert blush)
The Tomb of Dracula has stories focusing on the Count, and all the evil deeds he commits.
Mark Millar's Wanted, clearly, since nearly all of the main characters are stand-ins for DC and Marvel supervillains.
Millar does everything to make sure beyond the shadow of a doubt everyone understands that most of those guys (including the protagonist) were too busy raping the dog to notice the point at which they crossed the moral event horizon.
Oh, and by the way, they're still looking for the next kick.
The Joker had his own short-lived series back in the '70s in which he cheerfully offed various other characters.
Lex Luthor had his own limited series in which he presents himself as a brave man trying to let humanity take its own course by freeing us from the influence of that meddling alien, Superman. He was also the star of Paul Cornell's Action Comics run (concurrent with Brightest Day).
Eclipso, a B-squad villain upgraded in a Crisis Crossover to the God of Vengeance, was the narrator and main villain in said crossover, "The Darkness Within", after which he was given his own series which lasted nearly two years.
Around the time of the 1970s Joker comic, DC also broached the trope (depending on your point of view) by launching Blitzkreig, a WWII comic featuring a group of Nazi soldiers as sympathetic protagonists.
The seven issue miniseries Empire centers around a Doctor Doom-esque protagonist finalizing his conquest of the Earth, and dealing with the question "what next?"
In the original comic book version of The Mask, the central character (who is called "Bighead", because most people don't know he's wearing a mask) is a sociopathic serial murderer, akin to The Joker given powers (which got even scarier in the Joker Mask miniseries, where this actually happened). Let's just say that in the comics, the early scene in the movie where the Mask shoved mufflers up the asses of the mechanics who ripped him off would have involved a lot of red ink being used in the coloring process. Very often, the actual people wearing the mask are treated as little more than hosts whose bodies are being used to commit Bighead's comedic killing sprees... and they'll still gladly kill each other for the chance to wear it.
One wearer of the mask was a little girl (in 5th grade or something) who was bullied at school, and so when she puts the mask on (a dream come true for her) she goes to a school party and burns the school down.
This aspect of the comic series may have been referenced in the animated series, when a 4000 year old sociopathic fey who claims to have known all of the Mask's previous hosts (who included the likes of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan) returns to Earth to team up with the latest Mask, but soon realizes he's "not like the others."
Teknophage, a short-lived comic by forgotten mid-90's publisher Tekno Comix, was a story about a 65 million year old, reptilian, Steam PunkDimension Lord/Magnificent Bastard who fed strife, misery, and tyranny merely to enjoy the chance to eat the souls of those with the killer instinct to struggle against him. Nominally, the comics were about the people trying to stop him, but everyone knew who to root for.
The eponymous Lord Havok and the Extremists are all deadly supervillains bent on dominating the world that denied them... and are in fact portrayed much more sympathetically than the "heroic" Americommando, who is inarguably a danger to all around him. Lord Havok in particular is given a heartbreaking Start of Darkness.
Hunter Rose, the original Grendel, was an assassin/crimelord who did a lot of bad stuff for kicks and giggles. The later Grendels were more Anti Heroes, fighting against even worse individuals, particularly Japanese Kabuki Vampire Tujiro XIV.
According to Word Of God, the Legion of 3 Worlds miniseries is focused on its main villain Superboy-Prime.
Diabolik, the eponymous hero of the long-running Italian comic series. He is a ruthlessly violent jewel-thief who indifferently kidnaps, tortures, brainwashes and kills the innocent and guilty alike. His lover/partner-in-crime Eva Kant happily assists with all of the above, and throws obsessive sexual jealousy into the mix.
Incognito's main character, Zack, is an ex-super villain who got put into a witness protection program. He does do some heroic acts in secret, but only for selfish reasons.
Secret Six: It has Bane, the man who broke the Bat, Scandal Savage, the psychotic daughter of the first murderer, and Ragdoll, who is just freaky. Add to that Catman (an honorable but crazy hired killer), Deadshot (a sociopathic hitman) and an actual freakin' Banshee and you know this is not a team of nice people. Nice to look at, sure, but not nice. Definitely not nice.
A good chunk of titles under Marvel's Dark Reign banner.
The DCU villain Kobra, the Mad Scientist leader of a Religion of Evil, was originally introduced in an eponymous comic series that followed his efforts to Take Over the World, which were invariably foiled by his good twin brother. The series was cancelled after just seven issues (but Kobra would return).
RISE, KRAKEN! is a comic about a Cobra/SPECTRE-like global organization "with the stated goal of raising a giant sea creature that will rule the world by iron fist and slimy tentacle", and what kind of person joins up to build lasers on the Moon and get beaten up by the heroes. The protagonist discovers that most of the people involved aren't in it For the Evulz, but to advance their own possibly more reasonable agendas.
Marvel loves giving their villains their own books. Bullseye has actually had a few miniseries under his belt (Bullseye: Greatest Hits and Dark Reign: Hawkeye for example) and other villains like Loki, Doctor Doom, The Hood, Sabertooth, Mystique, Baron Zemo, Magneto, Norman Osborn, etc., have all starred in their own books.
Daken in his own ongoing. It's made pretty clear he is not a good person (He kills people for kicks after all), but he is charismatic though.
Most iterations of the Thunderbolts, although how villainous they are depends on the iteration and the villains involved.
Chaos! Comics, a horror comics company whose heyday was in the '90s, specialized in villain protagonists. Their most successful "hero" and a downright extreme example of this trope was Lady Death, who in her first story won over a boy who had suffered severe child abuse with promises of love and then coaxed him into going on a killing spree. After seizing the opportunity to turn him into the "super-zombie" Evil Ernie, she encouraged him to wipe out the entire human race, all just to free her from a curse that kept her from returning to Earth. Over the course of his various mini-series Evil Ernie did indeed succeed in wiping out millions through hijacked nuclear bombs and his own zombie plague. Unsurprisingly, Lady Death softened up quite a bit even before Chaos! went under and even more when she was licensed out to other companies; at least there was no more goading abuse victims into committing genocide.
Paperinik (a Donald Duck alter-ego created in Italy) had no problem committing thefts and fighting the police to get revenge on who wronged him in his early stories. He however evolved into a much more heroic character with time, especially in Paperinik New Adventures.
Fan Fic
In The Mad Scientist Wars, a great number of the characters fit this trope. The story doesn't even bother to try and justify.
Arestis from Arestis' Childhood is a violent manipulative bitch of a psychopath, who quite possibly has NO redeeming qualities. She also happens to be the main character. Also, the stage is set for Tarsia to be one of these in the sequel.
Justin as Kira in Kira Is Justice. However, his motive is that he is using the Death Note because he feels like "it is his duty".
King Superman: Each and every one of the protagonists qualify, for acts including using the children of Little Lamplight as slaves and human shields, repeatedly leaving behind friends and allies to save their own asses, and convincing Cliff Briscoe to chug radioactive sludge.
Dark Yagami in Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami. While he's once referred to as the "hero" of the story (mainly to justify his Plot Armor), unlike many fanfics with sociopathic main characters, the author seems to acknowledge that he's almost pure evil.
Ghost in the Armored Core cooperative fanfic From the Ashes is this turned Up to Eleven. Relatively early on in the story, he kills one hundred million people. It's implied that he's been running a hugeEvil Plan for a long, long time, and is most definitely a Magnificent Bastard and The Chessmaster; he seems to believe that Utopia Justifies the Means, but in this case, the 'means' are genocide of the highest order. He gradually turns all the members of the rebuilt ORCA Brigade against him, and when his Morality Chain Holly came out of a coma and didn't remember him... well, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse. Given that he's an [[spoiler:Omnicidal Maniac already... the world should probably start running. Especially given that he's got the king of all Super Prototype NEXTs and is a Person of Mass Destruction when on foot... well, this is bad. Really bad.
The Pony POV Series, being a POV series, does this on occasion. But the example that stands out is Princess Luna during her second POV. She starts out as a hero, but eventually performs a Face Heel Turn due to her overpossessiveness of Pip. She gets into an argument with Celestia, resulting in her killing and bringing Pip back to life as an immortal undead so she can have him forever. When Celestia tries to convince her against making him immortal, she tries to murder her, killing a number of innocent ponies in the process. This leads to Celestia being a Hero Antagonist and fighting back to stop her now insane sister, ultimately killing her. Of course, it was All Just a Dream, but still!
Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic Prison Island Break has all the main cast as violent convicted criminals. They don't even have a particuarly heroic goal; they just want to escape. But because the story is centered on them, they get the Sympathetic P.O.V. and you completely forget they're a collection of terrorists, serial killers and rapists (even though the writer never lets you forget).
Film
While the first two Ringu movies antagonized Sadako, the third film, Ringu 0: Birthday, treats her as the protagonist.
The Starship Troopers trilogy is about the humans as the evil invading aliens.
Henry Faber in Eye of the Needle (Ken Follett has said that it was mostly his inexperience hubris as a first-time novelist that led him to use such a risky device as a Villain Protagonist).
Yuri Orlov in Lord of War is a gunrunner who sells weapons to anybody, including violent dictators and human rights violators. We're shown what a disaster his love life and family relationships are in such a way that you have to stop and feel sorry for him.
Big Jim Mc Lain features a "hero" who works for Senator Joseph McCarthy (yes, that McCarthy), and beats the living snot out of liberals in Hawaii. Made worse by the fact that this "hero" is played by John Wayne. To be fair he is targeting "communists", but the definition seems to be more than a little... general.
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, Peter Sellers' final film, is an Affectionate Parody (with roots in The Goon Show) that makes Fu Manchu charming and even a bit sympathetic in his unrepentant wickedness. Having been thwarted so many times by the British, and on the brink of death, the whole plot hinges on him creating a youth elixir to save himself.
Nick Naylor of Thank You For Smoking is the "Sultan of Spin" and chief spokesperson for the tobacco industry. His Crowning Moment of Awesome comes when he testifies before a Congressional hearing that when his son, possibly the only other sympathetic character, turned eighteen and wanted a cigarette, he would buy him his first pack. The story softens his character considerably by making plain that he realizes the fact that many people see him as a villain, and good-naturedly takes this in stride.
Diabolik, Italian comic book "hero" and main character of the film Danger: Diabolik (spoofed on Mystery Science Theater 3000's final episode) is definitely a Villain Protagonist. At first rub, Diabolik may come off as a Gentleman Thief, but throughout the film he indulges in purely selfish acts, stealing millions and killing indiscriminately just to satisfy his girlfriend Eva's tastes or his own whims. He doesn't even have the caveat of fighting a greater evil; he's simply indulging himself with every act in the film.
Crow: Well I'm sorry if you're offended by my random killings. Servo: Once again they triumph in the name of sex! Mike: (fake joviality) So more innocent people killed because of Diabolik's whims!
Repo! The Genetic Opera has an ensemble cast with a lot of these—Rotti, Luigi, Pavi, Amber, Grave-Robber, and Nathan can all apply.
Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole (1951). He's a washed-up, amusingly cynical, charismatic, and brilliantly manipulative newspaper writer who dooms a man to death in a collapsed cave by prolonging and milking the rescue attempt - he's confident the man will make it through several days in there - just so he can report on it and restore his career. He regrets what he does in the end, but it's doesn't much matter because it's a World Half Empty where most of the characters don't care about the life at stake, and instead take his lead and encouragement to profit off of the literal media carnival that springs up in its wake of this "Human Interest Story".
Hard Candy. You can choose either one or both of protagonists. Word Of God is that it's both. Jeff is a predatory hebephile, and Hayley is a fledgling serial killer.
Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down, though reviewers like this one seemed not to understand the concept of the villain protagonist.
Sing from Kung Fu Hustle starts off as a poodle-poker wanting to make big-time with the powerful Axe Gang, but eventually pulls a Heel Face Turn and becomes a proper hero.
Similarly for John Preston from Equilibrium, who starts the film as a member of the local dystopia's StoicBadass Longcoat-clad Culture Police, but misses a dose of the emotion-blocking drug, starts questioning his own actions and eventually becomes a hero.
Neither of the eponymous characters in Mr. and Mrs. Smith seem to have any qualms at all with killing anyone (except each other... eventually) which makes them a notch more evil than most Hitmen With A Heart who have the decency to be emotionally damaged.
The main character from Woody Allen's Match Pointstarts a love affair with his friend's (eventually ex) lover, marries the same friend's sister, and continues the affair while married. He eventually gets his mistress pregnant and when she confronts him about it, murders both her and her unborn child in cold blood after and makes it look like a robbery, effectively crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
Woody Allen loves the Trope, as Judah of Crimes & Misdemeanors follows a similar path to the protagonist of Match Point. Judah wrings his hands a lot, but he's still a complete monster.
Babs Johnson, the main character of Pink Flamingos. She's a serial killer, robber, thief among other things, but you just have to love her.
Henry, the eponymous character from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Unlike other examples of this trope, though, he's not Affably Evil or an Anti-Villain in the slightest. In fact, he's so cold and emotionless that he comes across as barely human, and routinely commits some of the most horrific murders in film history.
In the Norwegian film Insomnia, the protagonist Engstrom begins as a moderately corrupt detective (though he's highly regarded by his peers). By the end, he's descended into near-Complete Monster status, partially caused by the madness of working in 24-hour sunlight above the Arctic Circle but mostly due to his own inner lack of humanity. The final shot of his dead, haunted eyes is one of the creepier endings in film.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille kills women in order to create the perfect perfume.
Kind Hearts and Coronets: The protagonist's mother, the daughter of a duke, is disowned by her family after eloping with an opera singer. In revenge, the protagonist plots to murder every relative standing between himself and the dukedom. While simultaneously leading on both Betty and Veronica. And it's all played for laughs.
The Godfather: Michael Corleone is the American Film Institute's 11th most iconic villain in film history, in spite of being the protagonist.
Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle came in 30th on AFI's most iconic villains. He comes off as a hero at the end, but it's ironic. Had things gone slightly different, he would have been an attempted assassin instead.
Frank Abagnale Jr., the protagonist of Catch Me If You Can, is an adrift and young counterfeiter & con man who uses his natural cleverness to make some money, and his antagonist, Hanratty, is an FBI agent trying to, well, Catch Him if He Can. In the end Frank with Hanratty's support eventually goes straight.
The Producers (either version) is about two guys who basically spend the whole movie not only scamming old ladies assembling a Batman Gambit that bites them in the ass, and is also the Trope Namer for Springtime for Hitler, and it is hinted that after they got their (much deserved) sentence, they intended to scam the police in prison with a theatrical play.
The eponymous character of Charley Varrick is a career bank robber, who we first see robbing a bank. However, given that the movie is about him trying to escape the consequences when the bank he hits turns out to be a money laundry for the Mob, he played entirely fair with his fellow gang members until they tried to screw him over (at which point he unhesitatingly arranged for them to fall into the hands of the antagonists), avoided killing innocent bystanders (again unlike the antagonists), tragically lost his (fellow bank robber) wife in the opening scene, and faced off against a Complete Monster of a Mafia hitman, he's entirely easy to root for.
As suggested by the title, the western spoof The Villain is an example of this trope.
Otis, which features a deranged serial killer who targets young women in order to relive his high school memories (or more accurately, his brother's). However, he apparently doesn't rape them.
King Of New York is the heartwarming saga of a couple of violent drug dealers (played by Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne) who just want to sell drugs, kill people that cross them, and build a few hospitals for poor people.
The Australian psychological thriller Restraint has a female example in Teresa Palmer's character Dale, a stripper on a crime spree with her murderous boyfriend. She remains sympathetic due to a kind streak.
The father/daughter con-artist team of Paper Moon.
Tony Wendice in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder and Steven Taylor in the pseudo-remake A Perfect Murder. Both discover that their wives (who are each independently wealthy) are cheating on them and, not wanting to divorce them and lose out on the money, cook up elaborate schemes to murder them instead.
The Usual Suspects revolves around a group of criminals, trying to get out from under the finger of the villain, Keyser Soze. It turns out that the main character, Verbal Kint, was the villain all along.
Jodie Foster's character from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. An interesting case, because her killing is more of a survival tactic than a true villainy, but her actions are a little too extreme to describe as "antihero." Plus, it's not (usually) so much a matter of physical survival, but of preserving what amounts to a set of hippie values. Which is subversive in all kinds of great ways.
Four Lions: a comedy about wannabe jihadist suicide bombers.
The eponymous main character of Mini's First Time is an utterly remorseless parricide. She is probably as close to soulless as a person could be, which is precisely what makes her so compelling to watch.
The Hot Rock, based on the first of the Dortmunder novels by Donald E. Westlake (see Literature examples below).
The protagonist of The Bad and the Beautiful is a ruthless movie producer who scruples not to lie, cheat, steal, seduce, and con to get his movies made. The film is narrated by three of the people whom he chewed up and spat out on his way to the top.
Bridget Gregory of The Last Seduction, a Con Artist who steals $700,000 from her equally crooked (but much less clever) husband and spends the rest of the movie scheming to bump him off and get away with it. She succeeds, and her Unwitting Pawn goes to prison in her place.
Tony Curtis's Sidney Falco of Sweet Smell of Success. He screws over and uses everyone he meets in the film, with the exception of his master, J.J. Hunsecker (as portrayed by Burt Lancaster).
Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) of Mr. Brooks, a caring family man and philanthropist with a secret addiction to serial murder. Unlike a lot of examples, the good sides of his persona are real and not just a mask, making him highly sympathetic and far from a Complete Monster. Despite that, he's still a monster.
Matsu from the Female Prisoner Scorpion films is, not too surprisingly, a prisoner. Put away for attempted murder, she goes on to kill and cause to be killed many more times before the series ends, her victims including the prison warden at least two detectives and several other policemen. The facts that one of the detectives, the man she tried and failed to kill, seduced her and arranged her rape purely to allow him to arrest the rapists and corruptly take over their business, that the prison warden tortured her, locked her underground in chains for a year, had her raped and ultimately tried to stage her death, and that she never kills senselessly, only makes her less villainous relatively speaking.
Maindrian Pace of the original Gone in Sixty Seconds steals cars for a living, though he makes sure that the cars are insured. The remake averts the trope. Although the protagonist is also a car thief, he's being blackmailed into performing the heist by the real villains.
A Clockwork Orange tells the story of Alex, a sadistic young thug who enjoys beating up homeless people, raping women, and picking fights with rival thugs just for fun.
The protagonist of I Stand Alone is a violent ex-butcher who pummels his pregnant girlfriend into a miscarriage, plans to murder random people who cross him, and molests his daughter.
Literature
Christopher Marlowe's play, Tamburlaine the Great, features as its protagonist a man who mutilates, kills, subjugates, and rapes at any opportunity he gets. He locks up the Ottoman Emperor in a cage and feeds him his wife; he kills one of his own sons for being unwilling to fight; he is driven around in a chariot drawn by deposed kings and emperors. In the end, he burns a Qor'an and dies suddenly.
The Howard edition of Billy & Howard has one of these. Duumvirate has two and a whole lot of Supporting Villain Protagonists besides.
Michael Moorcock created Colonel Pyatt - a cocaine-addicted, self-aggrandising, violently anti-semitic Jewish engineer who worships Fascism and may or may not be a rapist. He's also the narrator of his series of novels, despite being an outrageous liar.
Barry Lyndon. The title character is based on a real-life cad, and William Makepeace Thackaray hides no joy in having his villain protagonist gets what's coming to him, including a Karmic Death. Stanley Kubrick's adaptation makes Barry far more sympathetic.
Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, also by Thackeray. The book's subtitle is A Novel Without a Hero.
The abominable Protagonists, from the novel Hell's Children, by Andrew Boland, are this.
Thornhill is one of these by the end of The Secret River, having facilitated a genocide in order to avoid having to sell a hundred acres.
Lucius Cornelius Sulla from Colleen McCullough's Masters Of Rome series is a pretty mean guy. He brings about the deaths of his stepmother, her nephew and his stepmother's lover in order to inherit their fortune (and kills another man to frame the deaths on him), treats his wife harshly to the point of driving her to suicide, and travels up north to spy on a group of Germans where he meets and impregnates a woman, he later arranges for his German family to be protected and leaves them. And that's all in the first book.
Alex from A Clockwork Orange. On most nights, he and his gang do things like drink spiked milk, beat up other people, and commit rape. Though he changes his ways in the end.
Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Altogether a charming, well-spoken and eloquent young historian of French literature, liked by the reader and nearly anyone who meets him. Too bad he is also a pedophile who marries a woman in order to abuse her daughter, then proceeds to lie to said daughter about the death of her mother while taking her on a not-quite-consensual road trip, on which he tries to drug and then have intercourse with her.
Lord Soth of Dargaard Keep, a death knight, was originally a villain in the Dragonlance novels. Three novels were later released starring Soth as the main character: Knight of the Black Rose and Spectre of the Black Rose by James Lowder and Voronica Whitney Robinson, and the eponymous Lord Soth by Edo van Belkom.
Paradise Lost. Half of the story follows the War in Heaven, in which Satan is the protagonist. Putting Satan center stage and allowing him to work his diabolical charisma on the reader is a major source of the poem's appeal. Some readers argue that Satan is an actual hero. This isn't the place to argue it.
R. A. Salvatore's Sellswords series follow the adventures of Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle, both of whom are recurring antagonists in his previous novels. While Jarlaxle is really more of a neutral, power-hungry Magnificent Bastard than an outright villain and Entreri's backstory gives him a Freudian Excuse for being a heartless-murderer-with-morals, neither character can really ever be seen in a positive light. It's also worth noting that Entreri has improved a great deal from his first murderous appearance.
Similarly, the antagonists Jarlaxle and Entreri face are all much worse than them.
Forgotten Realms' War of the Spider Queen series. All characters walking along the plot are fit in range from casual backstabbers to neighbour-sacrificing Lloth priestesses, not to mention violent half-demons. Which does not prevent some of them from being charming and all of them from having more or less good points.
Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is a deliciously Ax CrazySerial Killer who tortures and murders a wide variety of innocent people in the story, simply because he likes the feeling. But even if he's just imagining that, he's still an unlikable, self-centered, elitist, racist, shallow bastard.
The Eagle Has Landed follows a group of Nazi agents attempting to assassinate Winston Churchill. You'll still likely find yourself rooting for them at a few points.
Donald E. Westlake:
Parker, the central protagonist of a series of novels by Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark. Several of these have been filmed (most famously as Point Blank starring Lee Marvin, and Payback starring Mel Gibson), although the central character is never named Parker in these adaptations due to the author's request. Parker has no moral hang ups about killing, stealing, or torturing to get what he wants, and what he wants is usually money or revenge for not getting money.
Westlake also wrote a series of novels under his real name about John Dortmunder, a professional burglar. The books are much Lighter and Softer than the Parker series, and generally Played for Laughs.
Wyatt is the thief protagonist of a series of novels (starting with Kickback) by Australian author Garry Disher. You will end up barracking for Wyatt as his schemes bring him into conflict with worse criminals who lack even Wyatt's basic sense of honour and ethics.
Mary Gentle's Grunts! tells the story of a group of orcs just trying to make their way in the world. After they loot a dragon's horde that has weapons from assorted universes, including some from the US Marines and assorted literature (including Das Kapital, which turns one female orc into a Communist Commissar). The book is an acid-tipped parody of Lord of the Rings, and none of the characters are heroes in the traditional sense.
A number of the books by Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked) feature villains from well-known stories as the protagonist. For example, the queen from Snow White (in Mirror, Mirror), and one of the stepsisters from Cinderella (in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister).
The Hitman from Thomas Perry's first novel The Butcher's Boy. He is a sociopathic, amoral killer of considerable ability who has to evade both government agents and Mafia thugs when a Mafia boss tries to have him killed after a successful hit on a U.S. Senator that can be traced back to the latter.
Mercedes Lackey, in one of her stories featuring fantasy elves in the real world, had a cold-hearted, ruthless bitch of an antagonist who was quite willing to kill children if the job required it. The only problem was that she was going after a family that were protected by those same, very powerful, elves acting in secret to protect them. The shear magnitude of her hapless floundering around as she was constantly thwarted in one long Humiliation Conga would make you feel sorry for her if you didn't remind yourself that she was a murderous sociopath.
Strahd von Zarovich, the sociopathic vampire in I, Strahd (and TSR's Ravenloft campaign world).
Soltan Gris, narrator of L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth, is also the series antagonist (although you can't really call him sympathetic) who is secretly trying to stop the mission of his incorruptible, heroic Marty Stu counterpart Jettero Heller.
Hester Shaw, from Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet (really, she's only the protagonist of the second book "Predator's Gold;" the first focuses on her husband and the third and fourth on her daughter), hovers between this and anti-hero. On the one hand, she is completely and incontrovertibly evil (she sells a city into slavery or death just to get rid of her rival for her husband-to-be, and actively enjoys killing people); on the other, one somehow can't help sympathising with her regardless, and because of her genuine love for Tom, her interests generally coincide with those of the other (not so evil) protagonists.
The narrator of The Debt to Pleasure, although his villainy is only gradually revealed over the course of the book.
The Cleaner by Paul Cleave is written from the first person perspective of a psychotic serial killer who considers killing, mutilating, and raping women "just a hobby."
Horace Dorrington from the short stories by Arthur Morrison is a corrupt detective who won't hesitate to cut deals with the villains or even kill his own clients, if he can profit from it.
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we have Death Star, which focuses on the various people on the first Death Star. Most of them are Punch Clock Villains, really, who either think that The Empire is flawed but good or don't think they can join the Rebellion, either because they are stuck or they think it would just be curb stomped (they are on the Death Star). The cast includes the gunner who pulled the trigger to destroy Alderaan, a pilot who shot down enough X-Wings to become an Ace Pilot, a Force-Sensitive cultured stormtrooper, a surgeon who'd been stuck in service since the start of the Clone Wars, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Darth Vader. The survivors all either join the Rebellion (it blew up the Death Star! Maybe there's a chance!), flee to somewhere far away, or are Darth Vader. The Rebels aren't seen much - they're out there, but they don't show up for long. Leia's in the novel long enough to impress and guilt the surgeon who's treating her for torture, but the others don't get voices or faces, let alone names.
The "My Side of the Story" series of Disney picturebooks. One side of the book has the protagonists' story while the literal flip side has the villain's account.
Steerpike is pretty much the protagonist of the first Gormenghast novel, while he either manipulates or assassinates the Groan family and their associates.
To at least one other protagonist's surprise, Clem's motives for assembling the Hand Of Mercy are only a part the problem- as a Fallen angel, he's the villain by default. To a lesser extent, Nana Sophie and Salve aren't loyalists either, so it could be argued that most of the main characters are, at the very least, officially morally grubby.
The title character of The English Patient, in the sequences where he tells the other characters his backstory, probably qualifies, seeing as he was actively helping Axis spies cross the deserts in North Africa.
Baron Harkonen from Dune during his POV segments. You so want him dead for his crimes and perversions, but while waiting for his comeuppance, you can't help but admire his brilliant political maneuvering and epic-level Magnificent Bastardy.
Subverted in Book 4, where Leto II says that the Baron wasn't really evil at all, just a very excessive individual. And Leto II knows evil better than anyone, since he has most of humanity living in his head.
Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God is either an extremely sympathetic, but selfish and destructive one of these, or a type III antiheroine.
Catherine de' Medici is the protagonist of Jean Plaidy's trilogy Madame Serpent, The Italian Woman, and Queen Jezebel. Plaidy paints her as a Complete Monster who has her brother-in-law and one of her own sons murdered, and orders courtiers to sexually abuse another son to "turn him gay" and ensure that her favourite would reach the throne. She also shows the abuse Catherine endured as a child - in one scene, a 6-year old Catherine is forced to watch her beloved dog die in agony because her aunt disapproved of her crying over her other dog's death (all Truth in Television, sadly).
For most of the book The Woad to Wuin, the normally cowardly Anti-HeroSir Apropos Of Nothing descends into this. And fully enjoys it.
Gerald Tarrant of the Coldfire Trilogy is the true embodiment of a villain hero. From the beginning of the first book he is foreshadowed as the boogieman of an entire country. He is what parents threaten their children with to get them to go to their beds on time, and it is completely justified. The only reason he is a protagonist is because the thing that is threatening the world just happens to be a threat to him as well. He is a Magnificent Bastard who quite literally feeds on suffering and fear. But he also has an amusing side, in a state of near exhaustion in a land where he might be attacked at any moment, he still uses a part of his magic to fix his clothes and hair to look dashing.
A.E. van Vogt's classic sci-fi novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle opens with his previously published story "Black Destroyer", recounting the powerful, feline predator Coeurl's battle of wits against the crew of human space explorers who arrive on his planet. Partly because the story's told largely through Coeurl's eyes, and partly because the human characters' Expo Speak dialogue makes them seem bland and uninteresting in comparison, his eventual defeat almost comes across as a Downer Ending. In the end, though, perhaps Coeurl had the last laugh: the Space Beagle's crew has passed on into obscurity, while he's gotten a Shout Out as an enemy in practically every Final Fantasy game.
And, thanks to van Vogt's estate, a Pathfinder module.
In the second book of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Nathaniel becomes one of these as part of his Character Development, especially unfortunate seeing as how he had previously been disgusted with the behavior of magicians who acted similarly to how he started to in the book.
Fantômas, protagonist of a series of stories written by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre.
Brendan Stokes in Edmund Power's The Last Chapter starts out as an "aspiring novelist", i.e. a pathetic, conceited, talentless hack. He finds a manuscript while looting his dead neighbor's apartment, promptly steals and plagiarizes it, lies his way to success, and on the way expands his repertoire with adultery, blackmail, and eventually, double homicide.
In the second book in the Night Watch series, Day Watch, part of the story is narrated by Alysa, who is the series protagonist Anton's opposite number/Evil Counterpart in the forces of darkness (They start at the same level of power; while the Big Good is Anton's mentor, the Big Bad was Alysa's lover), and she is one of the protagonists of the book.
The Eye Of The Needle has a villain co-protagonist, since it spends far more pages following the spy's progress across England than it spends with the heroine who eventually brings him down.
Most Gothic horror fiction features a Villain Protagonist:
Ambrosio, the villainous priest of Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk, who gives in to his desire for his pupil Matilda, a woman disguised as a monk, and then is overcome by lust for the innocent Antonia. With Matilda's sorcerous help, Ambrosio seduces her, then later rapes and murders her. He is delivered into the hands of the Inquisition and makes a Deal with the Devil to avoid the death sentence that awaits him. Only after getting tortured to death does he learn that Antonia was actually his sister.
Edward Montague's Demon of Sicily, who promises two holy people fulfillment of their wanton sexual urges in exchange for their souls.
Manfred, the lord of The Castle of Otranto, who tries to forcibly marry his own son's fiancee in order to avert the destruction of his line.
Byronic Hero Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. His life ambition is to wreak vengeance on all who have (in his opinion) stood between him and his would-be lover Cathy Earnshaw. He achieves this by mentally and physically abusing them, and embezzling their property. He extends his revenge to the children of his enemies.
The unnamed protagonist of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, which is full of squick.
Medea from the final novel in The Icemark Chronicles. Its debatable though if she should be included in the category as the book has so many main characters
When the Marquis De Sade wasn't writing about good people that horrible things happen to, he was writing villain protagonists.
The Malus Darkblade series by Dan Abnett certainly qualifies though its plain Warhammer.
Lady Susan Vernon of Jane Austen's epistolary novel Lady Susan. Despite being the novel's central, most prominent figure, she is an unscrupulous, manipulative Vamp engaged in a sort of pre-affair with a married man while at the same time trying to snare the man her daughter is in love with as she struggles to force said daughter to marry a man against her will. Unlike Austen's Emma, Lady Susan does not change at all over the curse of her story. Her daughter Frederica is the more sympathetic heroine.
Simon Darcourt from A Snowball In Hell spends an awful lot of time narrating his crimes to the reader with glee.
Lysander in the last Apprentice Adept book, Phaze Doubt. Much of the book is spent trying to lure Lysander over to Phaze/Photon's cause (doubling as distracting him from his "real" mission as The Mole). Even though he's essential in the good guys' eventual triumph, he never actually switches sides.
Umberto Eco's latest novel The Prague Cemetery stars a racist, misogynistic forger whose only redeeming feature is his love of good food. The book starts with him penning down why he hates Germans, Italians, French, women, Jews, Catholics, Freemasons and many others, and ends with him penning The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as his magnum opus.
In John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Ao Aeon points at Phaethon's behavior and assures him he is obviously the villain of the piece. In The Golden Transcendence, Phaethon cites this to explain his behavior to Daphne, who is obviously, he explains, the heroine.
We spend so much time experiencing The Liveship Traders through Captain Kennit's POV that it sometimes becomes hard to remember that he really is the villain of the piece. Just an extremely charismatic, sympathetic villain who tends to overshadow his more heroic fellow-protagonists.
Johannes Cabal in the series of the same name by Jonathan L. Howard.
Haplo of The Death Gate Cycle begins as one of these. In addition to being the main character, he is also a member of the Patryn race, which seeks to subjugate all the worlds under Patryn rule. Later, he becomes less of a villain.
Specifically, his progression goes thusly- in the first two books, he's the flat-out Dragon to Lord Xar, and though his backstory makes him sympathetic, there's no real doubt that he's a bad guy. Then, in books 3 and 4, he starts getting pitted against people much worse than he is, moving to more of a Type V Anti-Hero. From the fifth book onward, Haplo has reevaluated his purpose and place in the universe, and though he never loses his ruthlessness or hard edges, he softens up enough to settle in as a Type III Anti-Hero.
Thérèse Raquin is all about a woman who murdered her husband to be with her lover.
Ambrosio, who was never a particularly nice or forgiving person to begin with, quickly falls from what grace he had and over the course of the story gets involved in Black Magic, rape, and murder.
Live-Action TV
Emily Thorne on Revenge is not quite this, but she is skating dangerously close to it. Particularly with the fact that she doesn't seem to care about the innocent people who get hurt from game of vengeance.
The Shield Vic Mackey, and the other members of the Strike Team.
Hustle is about a group of con artists, though they tend to remain sympathetic due to their incredible charm and their code of only scamming people who are dishonest, greedy, and otherwise presented to the audience as unsympathetic.
There a few episodes of iCarly where even Freddie and Carly end up going against Sam when she does something bad. Example, starting a child labour sweatshop.
In Volume Four of Heroes, Sylar has become this. He's no longer working against the heroes, he's off looking for answers, killing people and racking up CMOAs while he's at it.
A character who sometimes seems to be irredeemably, cruelly evil and at other times merely a misunderstood, slightly unstable Anti-Villain. Sometimes even kicking up the bar to Hero until he performs a prompt Heel Face Turn. Actually, this character is basically the embodiment of Heel Face Revolving Door, but is classified generally as a villain just so we poor fanfiction writers don't have to go out of our way to keep up with the canon, as well as due to the definite evil side of his personality. More-or-less, a much-sympathized Anti-Villain who isn't really the primary protagonist (who is in Heroes?) but nevertheless is widely rooted for.
To the extent that they are protagonists, rather than Echo, the staff of the Dollhouse is this.
Although their villainy lessens over time, especially in season 2 as a Greater Evil is uncovered.
All male members of the Blake's 7 crew flirt with this, even Blake when you consider that in the finale of season 2 it's made clear that he was fully willing to cause the deaths of millions of people (by computer failure) in order to take down the Federation.
Francis Urquhart in the BBC series House of Cards and its sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut. Urquhart is a Richard III-esque British MP who schemes his way up to being Prime Minister via various sneaky and some downright evil acts.
Lex Luthor in Smallville fits this trope. Although the show is supposed to be about Clark it focuses on Lex just as much and his descent into becoming the Arch-Enemy of Superman. So much so that he becomes The Woobie.
Neal Caffrey of White Collar is a thief, but he's presented as all-around cooler than his stick-in-the-mud partner Burke. He could count as The Atoner, since he has stayed with the FBI beyond the three months he had left on his sentence.
Al Swearingen in the first season of Deadwood, though Seth Bullock is an equal protagonist and the hero. In the second and third season, the Hearst enterprises serve as the villain and Al becomes a more sympathetic Anti-Hero.
Rod Serling wrote three stories in which the main character is a Nazi who receives a supernatural punishment: The Twilight Zone episodes "Judgment Night" and "Death's-Head Revisited", and a segment of the Night Gallery pilot film titled "The Escape Route".
Almost every episode of Columbo started off from the villain's point-of-view as he or she carried out a supposedly perfect murder.
Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers, although he's not a villain per se and more of just a nasty jerk.
For someone who is the main character of her series, Alex in Wizards of Waverly Place is a very bratty, self-centered jerkass who uses her powers mostly to her own benefit without caring for the consequences.
The Borgias: Rodrigo Borgia, also known as Pope Alexander Sextus, is this. He's Affably Evil, has four kids and an openly-known mistress, and has no problem with blackmail or bribery, and basically pimps his kids out to the highest bidder. Not to mention all of the less-than-ethical executions he's considered, and the situations his children have had to endure—in what basically amounts to emotional abuse. His elder son, Cesare, is an even better example, what with the killing people, having a personal assassin as a best friend, and really loving his sister, though that's probably the least villainous part of his personality. If history has anything to say about it,he gets worse.
Also Jimmy Darmody, trying to make his mark and killing people along the way. Just because the people he kills are criminals doesn't mean he's not a murderer.
Harry Montebello in The Straits has been known to kill people by feeding them to a variety of exotic wildlife. This is because he takes the security of his drug-smuggling business and his family extremely seriously.
Everyone on Leverage. No matter how likeable they are, they're all wanted criminals and at least one has an (implied) very high body count. Not to mention the sheer amount of collateral damage that results from their jobs.
The narrator of the Wreckers song "Crazy People". There's a reason only crazy people fall in love with you, lady.
Likewise, the viewpoint characters in Jonathan Coulton's "Skullcrusher Mountain" and "Re: Your Brains".
The narrator of "The Future Soon" doesn't actually do anything, but he daydreams about taking over the Earth with a robot army and forcing the girl he likes to marry him, so he could also count.
In his first few albums, Eminem was this in his persona of "Slim Shady".
The narrator of Warren Zevon's "Mr. Bad Example". He starts out stealing from a church fund for widows and orphans, and only gets worse.
The Ax Crazy "Excitable Boy" would be another example.
Opera, by Mozart: "Don Giovanni". He probably even qualifies as a Magnificent Bastard...
Hip-Hop artists like Jay-Z or 50 Cent were allegedly criminals before having music careers, and many of their songs deal with this topic from their perspective.
The viewpoint character of Voltaire's song "When You're Evil" is a Card-Carrying Villain. Also "Almost Human", and "The Chosen" and "Brains"... he kinda likes that one.
The Rake from The Decemberists' "The Rake's Song" sings, without so much as a hint of regret, about how he killed his three children in order to escape from the responsibilities of parenthood. It's quite good.
Nick Cave has a few songs about villain protagonists, most notably the entire album Murder Ballads.
Then there's "Sympathy for the Devil" by The Rolling Stones, which should qualify.
Peter Gabriel's songs "Intruder" and "Family Snapshot" are told from the perspectives of a burglar and Lee Harvey Oswald, respectively.
Everything that happens in a Monster Magnet song happens with a fistful of pills. Protagonists run the gamut from garden-variety drug abusers/dealers to comic-book-style supervillains and demonic agents. There are a lot of bombs getting planted, and things might get a little rape-y. Notable are the infanticidal couple of "See You in Hell", the drug-addled character in "Tractor", and various personifications of evil in "Kiss of the Scorpion", "Atomic Clock", and "Bummer".
"I drove out to the Meadowlands to throw our baby away."
See You in Hell
"If you wanna spank your demons and make them pay, well baby, I'm your man of the hour"
Bummer
"Got a knife in my back, got a hole in my arm, I'm driving a tractor on a drug farm"
Tractor
"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen is sung by a condemned murderer who is only sorry he didn't get away with it.
The title characters in John's The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill and Paul's Maxwell's Silver Hammer. The persona in John's Run for Your Life would qualify as well as would John's persona in the second half of Happiness is a Warm Gun and George's persona in Taxman.
Ziltoid from the Ziltoid the Omniscient album by Devin Townsend is definitely this. He destroys earth, because he didn't like the coffee they presented him, follows the escaping humans to another planet, unsuccessfully attempts to destroy that one, then he asks the Planet Smasher to destroy another planet, which is populated by sentient being, just to lift his mood.
The Nirvana song "Polly" is sung from the point of view of a rapist who holds his victim captive and tortures her with razors and a blowtorch. It was based on a true story.
Tabletop Games
After two expansions to their Middle Earth CCG, Iron Crown Entertainment tried shaking things up by releasing a whole second basic set called "The Lidless Eye", casting the players as one of the nine Nazgul, working in the shadows to locate the Ringbearer and/or rally the monstrous races into an army. An interesting idea, but unfortunately, one which did nothing to stem fan complaints of "filler lore", and only ruffled more feathers by being largely incompatible with cards from the previous set.
In the main 40k game, playing as any of the "evil" factions will automatically lead to this, even the fluff in the book is less sympathetic. This is most notable with the aforementioned chaos space marines and Tyranids, the latter of which usually has fluff written in an Apocalyptic Log style. This is more true during global campaigns, where the victories of "evil" factions will slowly edge the plot towards a downer ending, and the player base will still cheer for it.
The basic assumption when you play an Abyssal in Exalted. One chapter even has discussion about how to make the game more than one slaughterfest after another; they are that Baaad.
This is where you're assumed to start as a Green Sun Prince. Subverted, however, in the assumption is that you'll quickly catch on that the Yozis are (A) certifiably insane and (B) can't actually rope you in, so you'll either become a Punch Clock Villain looking for an escape, a Well-Intentioned ExtremistAnti-Hero using a loose interpretation of your orders to push an ultimately producitive agenda, or just a plan ol' Noble Demon who just wants to be left alone, before you slip the leash entirely.
Although Othello is ostensibly a play about Othello, Iago is really the protagonist and most definitely the villain.
Richard of Gloucester (aka King Richard III) from William Shakespeare's Richard III is one of the earliest Villain Protagonists. To some extent, Richard's father, Richard of York, in the Henry VI trilogy.
Medea from Greek Myth, at least as presented by Euripides in the play Medea. A straight reading of the facts of the myth makes Medea come across as an irredeemably evil multiple murderess (her victims included her younger brother and her sons), yet Euripides presents her as sympathetic, or at least understandable. So this is Older Than Feudalism.
Roxie Hart, Velma Kelly, and Billy Flynn from Chicago.
Shylock from The Merchant Of Venice, although Bassanio and Portia have about as much or more lines. Some productions turn Shylock into an Anti-Villain, as the play was fairly Fair for Its Day and gives him legitimate reasons for being so ruthless.
In Used Cars, the salesman protagonists lie, cheat, and steal from essentially everyone they meet.
Volpone of Volpone is a greedy and lecherous con man; the play's main plot is about him faking being on the edge of death to trick people into giving him gifts in the hopes that he'd name them as his heir.
Arnolphe, from The School for Wives (L'école des femmes), is a clear example, although he is usually seen as sympathetic due to the fact that all his plans are easily thwarted and his villainy stems mostly from his desire to have a loving wife who will not be unfaithful to him.
Don Giovanni of Don Giovanni is a lecherous noble who has had sex with over two thousand women before callously abandoning them. The opera begins with him trying to rape a woman, then killing her father when he defends her honor.
Video Games
All RTSs with playable factions, a cleargood factionandevil faction, and a full compliment of Campaigns have this, especially ones with intertwined campaigns: At some point, you can or will be given the option to play the story's Big Bad. Exceptions fall under No Campaign for the Wicked.
Amnesia The Dark Descent is an odd example. The backstory, which is slowly revealed over the course of the game, shows that the protagonist was once a normal man who sunk to shockingly low depths in order to save his own life.
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer bears mention, because there is no other clear villain in the story unless the player takes it upon him or herself to be one. It is hard to consider The Founder a villain, despite what she did, and the only other character who bears any blame has been dead (for certain values of dead) for centuries.
3 of the 4 paths in Der Langrisser (Light, Imperial, Chaos, Independent) have the protagonist Elwin be this way. Especially in the Chaos Path.
Independent casts Elwin as more of an Anti-Hero. He does some questionable things, but his goals remain fairly noble. For one thing, it's the only path where you can end the Fantastic Racism against demons.
Overlord, although you're allowed to choose between being really evil and just self-proclaimed evil. Plus, given that all the "good" characters are corrupt, choosing the latter option makes you the most sympathetic character in the game with this depiction being decidedly canon (the Overlord at least saves the Elves and Rose is the mother of his child). In the sequel you is 100% evil and you fight some genuinely Good foes, though your main enemies is still the anti-magic Glorious Empire bent on destruction of all magic. Lord Gromgard of the Wii prequel Dark Legend is portrayed as a Villain with Good Publicity who is at the least well-liked amongst his servants for not letting them starve.
The games have gone back-and forth with this trope:
In Grand Theft Auto III, the protagonist was not even named, and appeared to be doing what he did solely to survive (the game starts with him being busted out of a prison transport). Only at the very end does a revenge motive appear.
The most clear-cut Villain Protagonist of the series is Tommy Vercetti from Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Unlike the other protagonists, Tommy is not above dealing drugs, and the game's plot mostly revolves around Tommy seizing control of Vice City from the criminals who previously controlled it.
By Grand Theft Auto San Andreas the first Anti-Hero protagonist appeared, Carl Johnson. In cutscenes CJ is present as an honourable, even admirable character, and his motivation for most of the game is simple survival as well as keeping his family safe. Notably, CJ is opposed to dealing drugs of any nature, the only protagonist in the series that does so. Of course, out of cutscenes he's just as willing to murder, steal, and destroy as any of the other protagonists.
Niko from Grand Theft Auto IV is a strange example. He cares about his family, and part of him wants to live a normal life, but his experiences in the wars in Serbia, in his own words "ruined him." He kidnaps, robs, murders, sells drugs, and in general, does not seem to have anything close to a conscience. Interestingly, he realizes this about himself, and readily recognizes that the things he does are awful. When questioned on it at one point, he basically says that he considers himself to be completely soulless.
The "Dark" story in Sonic Adventure 2 runs opposite in goals to the "Hero" story.
Destroy All Humans!, at least in the first game (the second casts the protagonist as more of an Anti-Hero by circumstance and the third has him become an Unwitting Pawn).
The Bad Guy, a famous demo game in the Hispanic RPG Maker scene, chronicles the rise of Omaen, an aspiring villain, while parodying every RPG trope. Omaen is presented as downright evil but the Only Sane Man in comparison with both the idiotic "heroes" and the other Slave to PRCard Carrying Villains who fear more the strike of the Weird Trade Union of monsters and minions than anything the heroic characters can do.
Warcraft III has a linear storyline that puts the player in control of different commanders from different sides of the war depending on the point of time in the story. The human campaign features Prince Arthas, an idealistic young man fighting a horrific undead army. As the war carries on, Arthas must resort to increasingly reprehensible tactics, starting with the slaughter of a sleeping town when he learns they've received shipments of food from a village secretly contaminated by the undead plague. Out of desperation to save the human population, he acquires, at the cost of his soul, a magic sword powerful enough to defeat his undead nemesis. The player is still in control of Arthas during the next campaign, but now he's a soulless Death Knight leading the undead in their war against the living.
Similarly, StarCraft has one campaign for each of the three factions, all of which form a cohesive story. During the Zerg campaign, you're an evil giant brain-slug monster, commanding your evil Big Creepy Crawlies into killing the good(ish) guys.
Likewise in Star Trek Armada, the second to last campaign is the Borg campaign. In the final mission, you successfully assimilate Earth, killing Worf in the process. Of course, this is undone via Time Travel in the subsequent hidden campaign, in which the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans join forces to defeat the Borg.
Kratos from the God Of War series is a berserker whose primary motivation is revenge on anyone who has spurned him.
Which by now has been expanded to everyone who crosses his path or tries to stop him doing whatever he's doing. Also a fair few people whose deaths would be convenient for him.
To go into more details after the first game where he wants revenge on Zeus, and while Zeus is shown to be evil, him wanting to rid off Kratos doesn't really seem like a bad thing since Kratos is just doing all the stuff Ares was before him. In God of War III, Kratos' personality has been flanderized to the point where he is almost completely heartless and doesn't care that his desire for revenge is destroying the world, and is the real villain of the game since it's revealed that Zeus turned evil because of Kratos opening Pandora's box in the first game; therefore everything Zeus did afterwords (which isn't much compared to Kratos' atrocities) is indirectly caused by him.
Agent 47 from the Hitman series borders on this, but his victims tend to be worse.
The Brotherhood of Nod in general, and Kane in particular, of the Command & Conquer series, especially in Tiberium Wars where a large part of the Brotherhood's basic motivation stems from economic woes, health problems, and perceived oppression and marginalization by the Global Defense Initiative.
Taken up to eleven in Kane's Wrath, where you learn that a previous mission you played in Wars, where you were defending as the bad-guy Nod and were attacked by a rogue group of Nod traitors supposedly led by Killian, where you learn the truth of the treachery. However the perpetrator did it in belief that she would be helping Nod rid themselves of an unbeliever, but unintentionally (however it was planned by Kane) triggering the arrival of the Scrin. What makes this a villain protagonist is that you are now in command of the traitor army. It's hard to understand exactly who she ended up helping in the end, but she's definitely a villain to all factions.
Tie Fighter. You play on the side of The Empire, and have Darth Vader as your wingman.
Infocom's 1983 game Infidel featured a villain protagonist, making this trope in computer games Older Than the NES.
The Force Unleashed features Starkiller, a Dark Jedi who was raised by Darth Vader and has a disturbing talent for killing his enemies in outlandish, yet surprisingly amusing ways. Justified to an extent as he was raised from childhood to believe in Vader's cause and eventually turns against him anyway (canonically).
The non-canon add-on missions included in Ultimate Sith Edition take it further, complete with Starkiller informing a captain "You Have Failed Me For The Last Time."
The Star Wars Battlefront games allow players to play as the Separatists against the Republic or as the Empire against the Rebels, depending on the era in which one chooses to play. There's also a level in Battlefront II called Mos Eisley Assault, which features all the important characters in the game—from both eras—doing battle against each other. In this level, players can play on either the Hero side (Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Yoda, Aayla Secura, Ki-Adi-Mundi, young Obi-Wan, Mace Windu) or the Villain side (Vader, The Emperor, Boba Fett, Count Dooku, General Grievous, Darth Maul, Anakin, Jango Fett).
Star Wars The Old Republic, if you go with the dark side on The Empire side. Sith warriors who follow this path will stun many a jedi with their vicious brutality. Then you have the Psycho for Hire bounty hunters, inquisitors with force lightning as way of greeting people, and Imperial agents who take the protocol of Leave No Witnesses to heart.
The Misadventures of Tron Bonne has you play as Goldfish Poop Gang member from Mega Man Legends, Tron Bonne in her quest to steal one million zenny worth of goods to save her kidnapped air pirate family.
Adam Cadre's Varicella has you playing the generally reprehensible Primo Varicella, who attempts to knock off each of his rivals to the position of Regent. Thing is, each of his rivals are worse.
In No More Heroes, Travis Touchdown creates the line in the sand for a character who either just barely counts as a Villain Protagonist (he has very few, if any, likable qualities, and kills people for a living) or is not quite evil enough to be a Villain Protagonist (the people he kills are, for the most part, even moresick and twisted than he is, or at the very least other assassins). Which side he is actually on is up for debate. He veers completely away from this in the sequel, however.
Servant Avenger from Fate hollow ataraxia is definitely a Villain Protagonist - he is supposed to Evil Incarnate, after all. His soul itself is twisted and Always Chaotic Evil, and he actively pursues murder and rape to pass the time. This does not prevent him from becoming a character you can sympathise with, especially after the flashback to his horrific Start of Darkness and some very poignant conversations with other characters. Despite hating humanity, he still shoulders the responsibility that was forced onto him - to bear every sin ever committed and will be committed by a human and forever serve as a twisted 'champion' of humanity. The ending is complete with a Tear JerkingHeroic Sacrifice.
"Even if humanity is worthless, the history that has been laid down until now has meaning. (...) It is not a sin to exist."
The unreleased arcade game Chimera Beast is about ruthless and mindless Horde of Alien Locusts who reabsorb the DNA of what they eat to become stronger... and you play as one of them, digging your way through the food chain of your homeplanet starting from bacteria. If you win against the final boss you end up blowing up the planet and going through a killing spree across the universe, eventually reaching Earth... Even the game mocks you for this. To get the "good" ending, you must lose to the final boss and opt not to continue.
Firebrand of Demon's Crest is, for starters, a Red Arremer from Ghouls 'n Ghosts (the original Demonic Spider). The game starts with him as a prisoner of the demon Phalanax, who interrupted his attempt to take over the world and stole the Crests he was using to do so. Once he breaks out, the rest of the game concerns him reclaiming his stolen property and kill Phanalax so that he can Take Over the World as previously planned.
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni loves to play with this trope, at least in-universe. Namely, in the 5th Arc, Battler become the Endless Sorcerer while a Mary Sue of Bernkastel's creation takes up the 'protagonist' role. (That is, has a reliable perspective.) In reality, though, no face heels or heel faces occur. The 'protagonist' role simply gets taken over by the two most evil characters in the series while they force the good guys into the 'antagonist' role.
In the Rampage games you score points by destroying as much property as possible and eating people, and most of the people haven't done anything to you or are just soldiers doing their job. You can also kick them to death or knock them off building/tear off parachutes and watch them splat.
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion has the Dark Brotherhood quest line, in which the player takes the role of an assassin. It mixes in clearly deserving targets (The very first one is lightly implied to be either a rapist or a murderer) with somewhat-deserving ones (A pirate, who's clearly killed people 'on the job' before) with clearly innocent people. You also get to kill your entire 'family' of assassins, which may or may not qualify for the Moral Event Horizon. Several of the Daedric quests in the game are also pretty villainous, ranging from gleeful sociopathy to diabolic evil: In Molag Bal's Daedric quest, the player is asked to goad a Reluctant Warrior into murder. Obviously being a sandbox game it also features Video Game Cruelty Potential aplenty.
After you give a Daedric artifact to Martin as part of the main storyline, he assures you that he won't ask what you had to do to get it — as a former Daedra worshipper, he is all too aware of the cruel whims of the Daedra lords. Of course, some are more clearly evil than others (like Molag Bal), some are relatively harmless pranks in comparison (Sheogorath pranking a small village), and others are downright heroic (freeing enslaved Ogres for Malacath, mercy killing vampirized worshippers for Azura, and killing a bunch of evil necromancers for Meridia).
Rapelay is about the player character raping women.
Dungeon Keeper: Build your sprawling dungeon, employ creatures of darkness, spread your dark influence over the land. Don't forget to deal with those adventuring heroes who want to slay your army and steal your treasure. If the imps or the traps don't kill the them, have them tortured.
Caleb, the main character in the Blood series, is a psychotic undead cowboy killing his way through his former Evil Cult so he can get revenge on his former god, Tchernobog. What pushes Caleb into true villainy is just how much he loves his Roaring Rampage of Revenge; when he isn't wisecracking or snarking, he's cackling like a madman while chucking dynamite at anything that gets in his way. And then, in the second game, he misuses Tchernaborg's powers so much he begins to unravel the very stability of the universe; he's quite happy to let the totality of existence collapse out of boredom.
In the flash game Armed with Wings 2, you play as the exiled king Vandheer Lorde, the main villain of the series, who is undeniably Badass.
Also as it is revealed, Kazuya Mishima has always been this since the first game.
The Forsaken from World of Warcraft, who are former Scourge who gained free-will away from the Lich King often look like this. Even people as Obviously Evil as Varimathras and Putress blend in perfectly with them, almost completely unnoticed until they double-cross the Horde. Post Lich King and Sylvanas has no problems with using the same method the Lich King himself used to raise the dead for her own army. Even Garrosh, one of the least sympathetic characters in the game was practically spittingly disgusted by this. It reached it's pinnacle when they began massacring and experimenting on entire human settlements, basically just to see what would happen. Even on the Horde, the questlines lead to you killing the person who was leading these atrocities.
Centipede: The comic book adaptation has the playable character (a wizard) in the role of the bad guy, with a boy trying to stop him.
Sands Of Destruction has us follow the adventures of the World Destruction Committee. Although only one is actively seeking the destruction of the world, the other is tagging along because he likes our crazed lady protagonist, and the third is going with to protect him.
Okage's main character is a slave of the evil king Stan, and through the game, you're trying to take the power of the other evil kings that showed up while Stan was in a jar, so he can take over the world. It's not very prominent though, what with Stan being a Harmless Villain who spends more time fighting evil than causing it.
The title character in Legacy of Kain is quite the nasty piece of work. The series starts with him becoming a vampire so he can avenge his death. He then decides to destroy the town he was murdered in. And then he gets a list of people to kill, and just settles for slaughtering every man, woman, and child he sees. And right as he's finished, he ruins the whole point of the quest and just decides to rule over Nosgoth's dying remains. In Blood Omen 2, he mind controls bystanders to their deaths, kills every human he sees, and murders his Love Interest when she realizes what a monster he is, all in the name of regaining his empire. It takes Nosgoth itself dying in the Soul Reaver series for him to simmer down, and even then, he's a Manipulative Bastard to his vampire offspring Raziel, and is only out to save himself.
Scott Shelby in Heavy Rain especially when it is revealed that he is the Origami Killer.
You get a choice in who you want to play as though. Four of the five levels have Megatron playable, but the first level also has Barricade and Brawl, while the last three have Soundwave and Breakdown. The second level is dedicated to Starscream, with Skywarp and Thundercracker as choices. Whoever you don't control become your (almost useless) CPU buddies.
Wizardry IV is an atypical entry in the series: it has the player take control of Werdna, the Evil Sorcerer of the first episode, now resurrected and thirsty for revenge... If he manages to just leave the dungeon where he was buried first, which is not an easy task.
PAYDAY: The Heist has you as crook taking part in various heists, complete with taking hostages and shooting a whole lot of cops.
Jinkuro, the malevolent ghost possessing Momohime's body, in Muramasa The Demon Blade. He's outright only into the whole ordeal to get his chosen weapon back and find a better target in his Grand Theft Me scheme to live forever, and does a lot of villainous actions (such as invading Heaven) in order to find alternate routes to immortality.
The Voinian campaign in Escape Velocity: Override is about as unambiguously evil as they come. The Voinians are a race of vicious alien warlords bent on conquering the galaxy and enslaving everything in their path. The player has the option to help the Voinians break their stalemate with the human United Earth, and crippling the attempts of a previously conquered race to rebel against their overlords. Rewards for doing so include access to a variety of powerful Voinian military vessels and the unsettling satisfaction of committing genocide against your own race.
Once you do join, the Voinians never question your motivations for helping them, yet they only seem superficially appreciative of your efforts. One gets the sense that they're stringing you along simply because they know you're capable and willing to wipe out entire UE fleets at a moment's notice.
AllEscape Velocity games have at least one storyline where the player character can be called a villain: in Classic, working for the Confederation and trying to bring the Rebels back to heel, in Override, the Voinian and the two Renegade storylines, and in Nova, the Federation storyline (after a certain point of no return).
Brice, a UFO-obsessed ghost and one of the playable characters in the adventure game, Amber: Journeys Beyond. After you complete his level he is sent to Hell in a particularly horrifying way - granted, he murdered at least 3 people in the game's backstory, so it's not like he didn't deserve it.
Web Comics
The Fourth is about Dark Lord Tiberius Skarva IV and his plans to take over the local kingdom.
Darken features an entire party of evil characters led by Gort, the Lord of Hellfire, who wants to unite the three Artifacts of Hell in order to become a demonic demi-god and rule all of Darken with an iron fist.
Counting The Colonel poisons the entire town of Thirston.
The protagonists of Hellbound, especially Mel the demon.
The Antagonist, which follows a villain after he fails. K, the Antagonist, is largely Affably Evil, and would be Dangerously Genre Savvy if he were a little more ruthless. He frequently talks to the readers, an act which confuses the hell out of everyone around him, sounding sometimes like the narrator of a book, and he believes his life is ruled by an overreaching "plot".
The title characters of Succubus Justice are soul stealing demons who regularly mutilate innocent people.
Suicide for Hire. Boy howdy, Suicide for Hire. Especially Hunter. In their defense though the people who die such over the top deaths do tend to deserve it.
Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is from the point of view of a group of evil humanoids (and unnatural beings) living underground.
It's also a subversion. Foxhound might be villains by the time Metal Gear Solid, but they start out the comic as heroes working for the US government, and remain so right up until the very end, where they become heroes working against The Patriots, Metal Gear's version of the Illuminati.
Either way, the Virtues are the ones that made it so the Sins need hosts to prevent the universe from being destroyed (the Sins were not always so nice). But, the Virtues are actively trying to destroy the universe by killing the Sins on the off chance the universe gets remade without evil.
anti-HEROES. The title pretty much sums it up, although we should avoid confusion by saying that they're the opposite of heroes (i.e. villains, but sympathetic and fun) NOT Anti-Heroes as we know them.
Life And Death while played for laughs, Steve takes his job as Death seriously and murders a lot of people as does his assistant Sally.
Chopping Block. Hard to get more Villain than a serial killer protagonist.
Bun Bun of Sluggy Freelance is a sociopathic, switchblade-wielding, possibly immortal madman (well, madrabbit) who cuts anything that annoys him, and he was actually the protagonist of an entire story arc.
Every character in Cry Havoc bar Hati is greedy, violent, sadistic, or manipulative. The only defining characteristic the protagonists share is a sense of group loyalty (that may or may not be innate).
Dr. Kinesis, and in fact, most of the main characters in Evil Plan The Webcomic. The webcomic is about supervillains, so this trope applies heavily.
Frankly, she makes Travis Touchdown look like a candidate for sainthood.
The premise of The Good Witch basically boils down to "What would happen if you took someone who, through years of social ostracism and abuse, became a total sociopath, and gave that person magic powers centering around transformation and memory modification?" The short answer: Angel happens. Boydoessheever.
The main characters of True Villains. Really though, what else would you expect in a comic by that title?
Jared features three main characters who are all varying shades of evil; Jared, Mary and Lilac, as well as some with questionable motives; corrupt police officer Carl and Hat Cat. The good guy is not introduced until the last page of the first arc.
Second Empire has the Daleks of the Second Dalek Empire going against the slightly more evil First Dalek Empire.
The Grey and Grey Morality of Two Rooks complicates matters, but protagonist Dea O'Malley is a ruthless assassin working for a crime syndicate, and his opposite number, Serus Eden, is undeniably A Lighter Shade of Grey. But neither side is all that nice.
We still don't know the final fate of Mungo though.
Minion Comics focuses on the lives of minions who sign up with an evil organization.
Web Original
The Blogfic Soon, I will Rule The World! has one of these. He's a Lich who has come to our world to take it over. He hasn't really crossed the Moral Event Horizon yet, and he's decent to his minions, but does collect protection money from a substantial chunk of the city and did try (and fail) to hypnotize some orphans to mess with his nemesis. Though it is implied (Albeit barely, though the author says that more on that is planned) that he does have a Freudian Excuse.
The Joker Blogs. He knows that this time, you're rooting for him.
In Sailor Moon Abridged, Raye/Sailor Mars is very much this, being a Satan-worshipper (Human Sacrifice included) who was more than happy to take Molly up on her offer of "Kill me first!" when she defended Nephlyte. All of it is played for laughs.
Dorf Quest's Beardbeard embodies this trope - cutting down forests, killing elves, attacking small children, and promoting Satan himself to godhood.
Muschio in Dive Quest's goal is to "become the Devil" and has no qualms about burning down peaceful villages and assassinating his rivals to get his way.
The point of the entire seriesCause of Death, where individual serial killers and psychos end up joining together and, in some cases, dueling against one another. It's up to the viewer to decide who to root for, because basically everyone in the show is going to Hell anyway.
Michael from The Salvation War. Though the humans are undoubtedly the real heroes of the story, Michael acts as our main viewpoint in Heaven, and has quite sympathetic motivations in wanting to limit the damage done to Heaven when the humans inevitably invade, even as he keeps crossing the Moral Event Horizon to accomplish this.
Whateley Universe example: the story "Mimeographic", featuring the supervillain Mimeo. He's not an amoral street thug. He's an amoral street thug with unstoppable superpowers.
Or "It's Good to be the Don", told from the viewpoint of Complete Monster Don Sebastiano.
Or the Jobe stories. Or "Razzle Dazzle", told by a supervillain who may have been, among other supervillains, the legendary Cerebrex. It's hard to be sure, since it clearly has an Unreliable Narrator.
While Bugs Bunny was generally a defensive character, there have been several episodes where he became a straight up villain. Examples of this include "Elmer's Candid Camera" (with a Bugs prototype where he picks on Elmer unprovoked), "Elmer's Pet Rabbit" (where he heckles Elmer for no justifiable reason), "Tortoise Beats Hare" and its follow ups "Tortoise Wins by a Hare" and "Rabbit Transit" (where Bugs is portrayed as an egomaniac who's willing to harm and cheat just to beat a turtle), "Wabbit Twouble" (again, picking on Elmer unprovoked), "The Wacky Wabbit (picking on an unprovoked Elmer again), "Hare Ribbin'" (where he picks on a dog who just happened to encounter him, unlike his encounter with a similar dog in "The Heckling Hare", and even assists the dog in suicide*
It's even worse in the directors cut included on Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5, where Bugs himself shoots the dog
), "Buckaroo Bugs" (where he's a flat out thief and bully), and "Rebel Rabbit" (where he wreaks havoc on the US solely because the bounty for rabbits was so low, doing atrocities like tying up a railroad and sawing Florida off the mainland, and by the end of the short gets so out of control that the military is called in to bring him down).
And when Bugs softened, the focus often changed to his enemies, with the former often acting as Hero Antagonist. In a lot of his bouts against Yosemite Sam and Daffy, the focus was more on their failings than his methods of dealing with them.
Daffy Duck also had several bouts of this trope, such as "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (where he causes trouble in a Hollywood studio for the heck of it) and "Boobs in the Woods" (where he heckles Porky Pig for the sake of causing trouble). This only intensified during his later meaner years where he evolved into a genuine villain, albeit still often with the primary spotlight (see above).
Other Looney Tunes antagonists such as Sylvester and Yosemite Sam often fall into this category due to their immensely pitiful qualities and humor value and the fact the heroes' warring against them are often too swift and sudden to draw much focus and sympathy on (it can take a couple of minutes to establish a villain and how he sets up a trap, and couple of seconds for the hero to enter and foil it).
Woody Woodpecker went in and out of being this and an Anti-Hero in the original cartoons. Sometimes, he just goes about breaking the rules or causing trouble for the mere thrill of it or just out of ignorance, and is clearly shown to be a selfish glutton who will mow down or manipulate anyone who gets in the way of his food. On the other hand, he did occasionally star in a sympathetic light (i.e. "The Hollywood Matador") and by the late 40's his Anti-Hero traits were played up more by director Dick Lundy, especially when Buzz Buzzard entered the series. By the 50's, Woody veered between being a straight up hero, a villain and an anti-hero, and by the mid-50's both of the former traits were dropped altogether in favor of making Woody a straight up hero character.
Zim of Invader Zim, an alien trying to Take Over the World. He is juxtaposed to Dib, a preteen paranormal investigator trying to stop him. One could argue that the issue becomes confused for this show, however; while the majority of episodes focus on Zim, there are so many Villain Episodes that some fans would argue that Dib and Zim could both be seen as the protagonists, and that the show has one Villain Protagonist and one traditional hero.
A weird example mixed with Deliberate Values Dissonance in an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Play Within A Show "The Boy In The Iceberg" stars actors playing the Gaang as protagonists, with Ozai as the main anatagonist. As all the characters are exaggerated parodies of the "real" people, the play version of Aang is a Wide-Eyed Idealist with Incorruptible Pure Pureness, whereas Ozai is a flamboyant Card-Carrying Villain; however, at the end of the play, when Ozai brutally kills Aang, the audience gives it a standing ovation. Although the viewers know that Aang is The Hero and Ozai is a Complete Monster, due to a century of propaganda and cultural conditioning, as far as the Fire Nation rank and file is concerned, Aang is the play's Villain Protagonist
Eddy from Ed Edd N Eddy, while not as evil as some of the examples, is still a cynical con artist who will do every dirty trick in the book for money. Including stealing Christmas presents from children. He has his reasons, but still.
Also, he either serves as The Dragon for a greater evil, or IS the Big Bad in most episodes.
Task Force X are focused on during their mission to infiltrate Justice League headquarters and steal an invincible armor forged by the gods in the Justice League Unlimited episode named after them.
Aeon Flux. It is very convoluted but in the MTV adaptation Aeon Flux is the villain of the series and Trevor Goodchild is the hero. It is bizarre because Aeon's actions are noble (normally) even though she is a terrorist whereas Trevor's actions are often very cruel and cold (often sickening) though he does everything for the betterment of the human race. It is sometimes hard to see because of the writing but it is made extremely clear in the final episode where Aeon murders the entire human race save for her and Trevor.
Clay Puppington from Moral Orel, especially the fact that season 3 is more focused onto him.
Mr. Krabs from Spongebob Squarepants became one during the Seasonal Rot, though around the start of the seventh season he pulls a Heel Face Turn. As a more conventional example, a good few later episodes focus more on Plankton and his schemes.
Resident Alien Roger from American Dad. He started out as a sympathetic, vaguely hedonistic alien, but over time he has established himself as a volatile, dangerous sociopath.
Zordrak and the Urpneys of The Dreamstone usually act this, in that each episode starts and ends from their perspective and we generally spend more time following them than the heroes. Depending on the Writer however, Sympathetic P.O.V. is sometimes given to the actual heroes.
