History DesignatedHero / Literature

* ''Literature/BooksOfKings'': Literature/TheBible has plenty of supposedly heroic figures do questionable things, which sound terrible today due to ValuesDissonance. But even so, King Jehu is among the most egregious cases. He starts out with killing the kings Joram of Israel (whose throne he then takes) and Achasia of Judah. Then he orders the courtiers to kill the elderly Queen Jezebel (Joram's mother), only to remain notably nonchalant about her gruesome death. Then he orders the death of all of Joram's younger brothers (out of whom some must have only been children), everybody with any connection to the former royal house, some relatives of Achasia, who had not done anything except for saying that they came to see the now extinct former royal family, and all the remaining Baal prophets, who had even been tricked by Jehu into coming to a party where they were killed off. Jehu is never seen doing anything but having people (out of whom most are never seen doing anything wrong) killed, and his body count seems to end up being much larger than that of Queen Jezebel. But he was able to defeat the ''supposed'' bad guys and was ''supposedly'' chosen by God, and God appears to approve of his actions. So he must be a hero, right? And to really make us see that worshipping an idol is worse than killing hundreds of supposedly "evil" people (most of whom clearly were defenseless aginst his attacks), the narrator seems to only have one criticism about King Jehu: He stayed on as king of Israel for twenty-eight years. But he still never got around to removing the golden calves, which were a part of a local idol cult. Because a few statues were obviously more abominable than all that needless bloodshed, that Jehu did during his violent coup d'etat...

* ''Literature/{{Hunter}}'' by the same author is about a neo-Nazi SerialKiller of interracial couples.

** Achilles is a well-known example, since most modern audiences side with the Trojans defending their home and have little sympathy for the pouting, slave-taking Achilles. Another interpretation is that the ''Iliad'' isn't attempting to portray Achilles as a hero (in the modern sense of the word), but is rather showing the tragedy that results from a man's unwillingness to compromise in the face of a perceived offense. Not only to modern readers: in the Middle Ages, Hector was generally a much more popular character than Achilles, largely because he was seen as someone who was defending his home and his people. One popular legend said that Durandal, the sword of Roland, a popular medieval folk hero (based on the very real Roland who was one of Charlemagne's dukes), had been the sword of Hector. In the King Arthur tales, Arthur's adoptive father was named Sir Ector, an alternate spelling of Hector (technically, Hector is an alternate spelling of Ector, but whatever). British statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote in ''Literature/LettersToHisSon'' about Achilles: "I dare assert too, in defiance of the favorers of the ancients, that Creator/{{Homer}}'s hero, Achilles, was both a brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an improper character for the hero of an epic poem; he had so little regard for his country, that he would not act in defense of it, because he had quarreled with Agamemnon about a w⸺e; and then afterward, animated by private resentment only, he went about killing people basely, I will call it, because he knew himself invulnerable; and yet, invulnerable as he was, he wore the strongest armor in the world; which I humbly apprehend to be a blunder; for a horse-shoe clapped to his vulnerable heel would have been sufficient." (letter 64)

* ''Literature/ShipIt'' by Britta Lundin has Tess, who would be considered a LoonyFan in most other books. She's a fan who's allowed to travel with the crew from her favorite TV show, ''Demon Heart'', and decides to make her favorite ship canon. She reveals her girlfriend's fandom interests to her class without her consent and she hijacks the creator's twitter account. When one of the actors in the show reveals that his father beat him, she writes a slash fanfic that mentions that. While she does apologize, it doesn't justify her behavior.

* The unnamed protagonist of ''Gothic Violence'' is a sexist, racist fascist that commits several acts of terrorism. Considering the protagonist engages in many a long and detailed AuthorFilibuster regarding his views on race and how society should be run and the diet advice at the end from the author himself matches the protagonist's own prescriptions, it seems the author doesn't disagree with the protagonist's politically incorrect views.

* ''Ship It'' by Britta Lundin has Tess, who would be considered a LoonyFan in most other books. She's a fan who's allowed to travel with the crew from her favorite TV show, ''Demon Heart'', and decides to make her favorite ship canon. She reveals her girlfriend's fandom interests to her class without her consent and she hijacks the creator's twitter account. When one of the actors in the show reveals that his father beat him, she writes a slash fanfic that mentions that. While she does apologize, it doesn't justify her behavior.

* The Abh from ''Literature/CrestOfTheStars'' are TheEmpire as depicted by an author who is RootingForTheEmpire, and glorified [[RecycledInSpace Space]] [[CantArgueWithElves Elves]] to boot. The dissonance between the fact they're intended to be the sympathetic, admirable, perfect, heroic faction and the reality of what they actually are is so great that many viewers/readers end up RootingForTheEmpire instead -- and TheEmpire in this case is a case of TheEmpire being played straight!

* In ''Literature/TheGame'', Neil Strauss attempts to portray himself as the OnlySaneMan who gets caught up in the world of pickup artistry and submits to it completely, before he eventually realizes that his pursuits are hollow and he ends up settling down with the right woman. However, his explanations come off as {{Jerkass}}-ish as best and completely reprehensible at worst. He steals women from their boyfriends in the middle of clubs, openly carries on relationships with multiple women at once, uses his job (as a journalist) to seduce celebrities who put their trust in him and generally acts passively when people call him out on his self-destructive behavior (to the point that Katja, the so-called SpannerInTheWorks, is more heroic and justified in her actions than he is). Even the ending of the book (Neil finally settling down with Lisa) is rendered hollow, as real-life accounts published after the fact indicated that he cheated on her and caused a breakup.

* The heroes of ''Literature/TheTurnerDiaries'' are a group of {{Western Terrorist|s}} neo-Nazis.

* Celegorm and Curufin in ''Literature/TheSilmarillion''. While they were apparently both decent guys at one point (Celegorm won the favor of Oromë,[[OurAngelsAreDifferent a Vala]] and Curufin ''somehow'' got married; and also they were both apparently decent to their cousin Aredhel despite their father's dislike of her family) by the time we meet them in the story they are jerks with apparently no redeeming qualities. They kidnap Lúthien, with Celegorm planning to marry her by force (and this is only averted because Huan betrays Celegorm). They also take over Nargothrond, an unprovoked insult to a gracious host and one of the most virtuous elves to ever live, Finrod. Finally, the Second Kinslaying was their idea: and during the invasion of Doriath they order the killing of Elured and Elurin, the roughly ten year old sons of Dior. This last action is not only unnecessarily cruel, but also stupid because it allows their older sister Elwing to escape Doriath. It's no wonder that when Orodreth regains control of Nargothrond, Celebrimbor basically disowns Curufin. While all of the sons of Fëanor end up doing some very bad things, most of them actually have some redeeming qualities: Maedhros is humble and wise, Maglor is kind and genuinely repentent, Caranthir is a gracious loser who seems genuinely ''happy''to be proven wrong about humans by Haleth, while Amrod and Amras are beyond generous to the Bëorians (giving them a huge chunk of territory entirely without strings attached). The only reason that Celegorm and Curufin aren't considered outright evil is that they categorically refuse to work for the villains: but this is purely because the BigBad murdered their grandfather, and not because they appear to disagree with him in any way.

** Edward Cullen is an abusive boyfriend. He physically stops Bella from driving herself home so he can take her there; forces her to eat dinner with him; resorts to drastic measures to stop her seeing Jacob, such as having his sister kidnap her and sabotaging her truck; and when she gets pregnant with a half-vampire baby, he tries to get it aborted, and offers to let Jacob impregnate her instead, all without telling Bella anything. And in the unfinished manuscript for ''Literature/MidnightSun'', he's definitely genocidal, casually mentioning wanting to [[MisplacedRetribution slaughter the Quilute tribe]] due to Jacob [[DisproportionateRetribution daring to speak to Bella]] because as far as he knew they were defenseless. He also comes across as a school killer, plotting the murders of his entire class so he could get to Bella without witnesses, and later plots getting her at her home in a way that comes across as though he's planning a rape.

* Creator/RoaldDahl's book ''Esio Trot'' really suffers from this. Mr Hoppy is treated as a sympathetic figure because he is a shy StalkerWithACrush. However he blatantly lies to Mrs Silver about having the secret of getting her tortoise Alfie bigger. He then proceeds to kidnap Alfie and gradually replace him with bigger tortoises. Due to this Mrs Silver ends up marrying him, never discovering that he lied to her.

** Theseus, from the Greek myth of the Minotaur, abandons his lover Ariadne on an island, despite the fact that he would never have killed the Minotaur without her. His reasoning? His father and her father, both kings, are sworn enemies and thus their relationship becoming public would be extremely politically embarrassing. She's rescued by the gods in a rare PetTheDog moment from [[JerkassGods them]], but Theseus doesn't know that. This is arguably not even the worst thing he does, latter he abducts Helen of Troy when she is still a child even by Ancient Greek standards, (ten in some versions, seven in others) with the intention of marrying her when she gets older. He does this almost purely because he feels entitled too have a divine wife as a child of the Olympians. This sparks a war between Sparta and Athens. He's never punished for this, although he is trapped in the underworld for a time as a result of the different but not unrelated crime of attempting to abduct Persephone.

* John Rumford ''Literature/{{Victoria}}''. First, we meet him when he is discharged from the US Marine Corps after interrupting a ceremony remembering their war dead, because he didn't feel it appropriate for a woman Marine to participate. After failing as a farmer he becomes, in effect, a professional rabble-rouser, with his group, the Christian Marines, paying him to plan strategies for preserving conservative Christian culture. Towards this end, he blackmails and kidnaps officials, and leads a militia against federal troops, holding their prisoners as hostages against further government intervention. After states begin seceding from the Union, he employs the same hostage tactics on a grand scale, lynchings, torture, forced relocations, biowarfare, and nukes Atlanta when black rioters seize the city. Blacks are welcome in his state, but only if they refrain from raising families in a city and accept a swift trial and hanging for any substantial offense, non-Christians are outright banished, and heretics burned at the stake. Among the various Straw Liberal successor states, the only one treated as a credible threat and worthy opponent are the actual Nazis, to whom he objects primarily because they are efficiency-crazed modernists. Oh yes, and Rumford becomes fond of 'Retroculture' and sets out to restrict any technology more advanced than was commonly used in the 1930s. In essence, it's a modern rewrite of ''Literature/TheTurnerDiaries'' as viewed by a RightWingMilitiaFanatic.

* Celegorm and Curufin in ''Literature/TheSilmarillion''. While they were apparently both decent guys at one point (Celegorm won the favor of Oromë[[OurAngelsAreDifferent ''a Vala'']] and Curufin ''somehow'' got married; and also they were both apparently decent to their cousin Aredhel despite their father's dislike of her family) by the time we meet them in the story they are jerks with apparently no redeeming qualities. They kidnap Lúthien, with Celegorm planning to marry her by force (and this is only averted because Huan betrays Celegorm). They also take over Nargothrond, an unprovoked insult to a gracious host and one of the most virtuous elves to ever live, Finrod. Finally, the Second Kinslaying was their idea: and during the invasion of Doriath they order the killing of Elured and Elurin, the roughly ten year old sons of Dior. This last action is not only unnecessarily cruel, but also stupid because it allows their older sister Elwing to escape Doriath. It's no wonder that when Orodreth regains control of Nargothrond, Celebrimbor basically disowns Curufin. While all of the sons of Fëanor end up doing some very bad things, most of them actually have some redeeming qualities: Maedhros is humble and wise, Maglor is kind and genuinely repentent, Caranthir is a gracious loser who seems genuinely ''happy''to be proven wrong about humans by Haleth, while Amrod and Amras are beyond generous to the Bëorians (giving them a huge chunk of territory entirely without strings attached). The only reason that Celegorm and Curufin aren't considered outright evil is that they categorically refuse to work for the villains: but this is purely because the BigBad murdered their grandfather, and not because they appear to disagree with him in any way.

* ''Literature/{{Adam}}'' by Ariel Schrag has the titular character. He is a cis heterosexual male who is mistaken for a transman because he's a minor that managed to sneak into gay clubs. When he meets a lesbian named Gillian, he decides to use this misunderstanding to his advantage so that he could sleep with her, and he succeeds, which falls under [[BedTrick Rape by Deception]]. Adding to the creepiness is that he's 17 while Gillian is over 18, so he also tricked an adult into committing statutory rape. Not only does he [[KarmaHoudini get away with it]], he and Gillian get together even after he was exposed.

* In ''Literature/ShadesOfMagic'', stealing is the ''least'' of Delilah Bard's crimes. Over the course of the first two books, she steals anything she can get her hands on despite having been offered honest work, holds a dangerous artifact hostage to force Kell to take her out of her own dimension because she wants an adventure, cheats her way into a tournament by first seriously injuring and then wrongfully imprisoning someone with whom she had no personal quarrel and who'd actually gotten in on merit, murders several people in cold blood for having caught her cheating, and repeatedly abuses magic she barely understands without any regard for the potential consequences to herself or others. [[KarmaHoudini She never suffers any consequences beyond an occasional light scolding]] [[DoubleStandard for actions that are severely punished when committed by any other character]], and is consistently treated as a hero throughout.

* ''Literature/AnitaBlake'': Anita is a killer, rapist, and ephebophile, and performs the same actions she reviles in others but [[ProtagonistCenteredMorality it's okay when she does them]]. And apparently the reason all the evil comes to town is that its attracted to her.
** In the early books the villains are usually interested in more generic "acts of evil" like [[ChildEater eating children]] and her acts of extreme savagery come off more as [[PragmaticHero the only choice]] but then she gets more powerful, and subsequently becomes a worse person. Better written it'd be [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity power corrupting]] but here it earns her designated hero status.

** Almost every word of the above is false. The heroes try everything to save society the entire book, and abandon it in total despair when they find it is hopeless; that is literally the plot of the book. They also save those loved ones, and employees, they can. As regards the charge of racism, the 'Indians' in the book are looting gangs of deserters (by implication, white or mostly white), and there is no negative reference to Asians, but to Asian mysticism and the feudal tyranny of historic India. The above is like saying someone disparaging German Idealism and the Third Reich hates Germans.

* ''Literature/BooksOfKings'': Literature/TheBible has plenty of supposedly heroic figures do questionable things, which sound terrible today due to ValuesDissonance. But even so, King Jehu is among the most egregious cases. He starts out with killing the kings Joram of Israel (whose throne he then takes) and Achasia of Judah. Then he orders the courtiers to kill the elderly Queen Jezebel (Joram's mother), only to remain notably nonchalant about her gruesome death. Then he orders the death of all of Joram's younger brothers (out of whom some must have only been children), everybody with any connection to the former royal house, some relatives of Achasia, who had not done anything except for saying that they came to see the now extinct former royal family, and all the remaining Baal prophets, who had even been tricked by Jehu into coming to a party where they were killed off. Jehu is never seen doing anything but having people (out of whom most are never seen doing anything wrong) killed, and his body count seems to end up being much larger than that of Queen Jezebel. But he was able to defeat the ''supposed'' bad guys and was ''supposedly'' chosen by God, and God appears to approve of his actions. So he must be a hero, right? And to really make us see that worshipping an idol is worse than killing hundreds of supposedly "evil" people (most of whom clearly were defenseless aginst his attacks), the narrator seems to only have one criticism about King Jehu: He stayed on as king of Israel for twentyeight years. But he still never got around to removing the golden calves, which were a part of a local idol cult. Because a few statues were obviously more abominable than all that needless bloodshed, that Jehu did during his violent coup d'etat...

** Zedd is something of a subversion, because while he's a big part of the epic world-saving quests and Richard certainly treats him as a heroic forebear and wise mentor, there are regular asides to remind the reader that he's NOT someone to be emulated or looked up to. Zedd is regularly characterized by all non-Richard characters as being far WORSE than the big bad of the first book (the war between the two being what broke the world prior to the series' birth), and among the characters expressing this opinion is Zed himself. In the Zed-focused short story Debt of Bones, it is heavily implied that his decision to retire to the non-magic portion of the continent had little to do with staying with his family and a lot to do with looking at the path he was on and predicting that it was a matter of a few years at best before he could talk himself into wiping out all life on the planet completely. For bonus points, this is one of the few story elements where [[MarySue Richard]] is actually presented as being unambiguously wrong about something, making Richard's hero-worship an in-setting example of the trope as well.

* Abdel Adrian from the ''Literature/BaldursGate'' novelisations by Philip Athans. The writer [[MarySue wants him to be everything positive, but he really can't pull it off]]. Adrian is treated as the hero even though without being specifically kicked to it he hasn't even the motivation to do anything but booze, womanise, kill random people and possibly [[KickTheDog kick puppies]].

* The protagonist of the fairy tale ''Literature/TheTinderBox'' murders the witch when she refuses to tell him the tinder box's special properties, secretly courts (and in some versions of the story abducts) the princess repeatedly, and -- after getting arrested and sentenced to death for this -- kills the kingdom's ruling members, ''including the princess' parents'', before taking over and marrying her. His hero status is questionable at ''best.'' This was likely deliberate; the author, Hans Christian Anderson, often wrote stories that deconstructed tropes, one of the most blatant was "The Snowdrop."

* The protagonist of the fairy tale ''Literature/TheTinderBox'' murders the witch when she refuses to tell him the tinder box's special properties, secretly courts (and in some versions of the story abducts) the princess repeatedly, and -- after getting arrested and sentenced to death for this -- kills the kingdom's ruling members, ''including the princess' parents'', before taking over and marrying her. His hero status is questionable at ''best.''