Playing with EvilIsCool and RootingForTheEmpire

So while looking at a topic on the Trope talk page about when you would root for the empire, it occurred to me that an interesting story could be made about what it would be like for a hero to fight, when everyone is on the villain's side.

You could have the hero be a bit of a jerk, and the bad guy have some redeeming qualities, but I think it would work best if the Hero and Villain were just that: Hero and Villain.

So could you get an interesting story out of a hero knowing everyone is against him (for petty reasons, like he's boring), you know, the kind of stuff we talk about on this side of the Fourth Wall. Play it seriously, play it for humor, Deconstruct it (there's that damn word again) anything.

An interesting story to be told is it not. What do you say? Some ideas on this idea. Discuss.

• Shakes fist Homer Simpson style

DISCUSS.

edited 5th Aug '11 6:23:39 PM by HandsomeRob

I'm confused. How is this different from having an antihero?

The title made me think more of fighting a Villain with Good Publicity. You know, a hero up against a villainous regime that everyone roots for because their uniforms are so snappy could be fun!

Any thoughts? Oh, and this is a bump.

I think there's some fun meta possibilities here. I've always wondered how a hero would react to finding out that his nemesis was a Draco in Leather Pants in "the real world".

Assuming that people don't have the hero and villain confused as in the case of a Villain with Good Publicity, and they are sympathetic to the villain on grounds of style rather than substance (which is how I interpret Evil Is Cool and Rooting for the Empire), I think buffoonery might realistically be better than classical "coolness" at distracting people from terrible stuff. I think this was one of Idi Amin's successes. I think Kim Jong Il also achieves something like that, and, to a much milder extent, Silvio Berlusconi. If the villain is making megalomaniacal rants about how he's actually a faster runner than Carl Lewis and he puts out hilariously amateurish propaganda flicks in which he stars as an action hero leaping the Eiffel Tower, it can make people actually forget for a minute that, hey, this is actually a seriously bad guy who tortures and kills and stuff.

(I know I picked real life examples which could be flamebait-ish, but given that we're talking about in-universe Evil Is Cool and Rooting for the Empire, which is usually a phenomenon that takes place outside of fictional universes, they were all I could think of for in-universe examples.)