Characters that You Felt Badly for Liking

[skurz]

Everyone has those moments where you find yourself respecting the antagonist. Maybe it's their fighting style? Maybe it's their hair. Or maybe it's an awesome backstory.

Regardless, good vs. bad comes in multiple shades of black, white, and grey- occasionally leaving us feeling a bit guilty for supporting the "bad guy."

(Although please do not limit yourself to only antagonists!)

I'll start with Bowser.
The guy keeps pulling off dastardly plans against the Mushroom Kingdom, but many of the later games point to the idea that Bowser is simply playing along like an actor. That he keeps kidnapping Peach to give us players an elaborate show, purely for entertainment.
It might be a stretch, and he might actually be a raging, princess-stealing psychopath; But I always find myself feeling badly for Bowser (At least until I remember the Lost Levels...).

 

[Nfritzappa]

Your character in Dark Souls.

He/she does nothing but make things worse for everyone. Progressing through that game was so rewarding but it made you feel bad for the actions you did (Sif really comes to mind).
In the end, the ending choices are both bad and regardless of what you did you helped mess up the world even more.

 

[Silvanus]

Nine times out of ten, I much prefer villains with complex motivations, shades-of-grey villains or tragic ones (like Two-Face, or HAL).

...But then, occasionally one crops up who is (almost) purely a figure of evil, and I can't help but love their character (like Ganon, or Lord Bolton).

 

[OneCatch]

The Serpents from the Night's Dawn trilogy.
One's a complete sociopath who's only desire is to be near-immortal at any cost. Not a nice person (at one point has a random child killed to make life difficult for an opponent, and regards his own offspring as relatively expendable) but he's also a Magnificent Bastard, decent at Xanatos Speed Chess, and redeems himself somewhat by going toe-to-toe with the legitimately awful Quinn Dexter, and is the only one to beat the Possessed on their own turf.

The other is a kind of biological space station personality who's overriding concern is to safeguard his lineage, and he spends a few hundred years creating, and then abandoning, clone children (who inevitably go insane because of his brainwashing). He also maintains what's basically the Tortuga of 2600AD.

 

[RJ 17]

Udina from the Mass Effect series. I really think that he gets a bad wrap from most gamers, though he is an uncompromising dick-head so I do feel kinda awkward in standing up for him.

When you think about it, he's just a politician to the very core. And pretty much everyone hates politicians because the politics of a situation often involve a lot of backstabbing and what-not, and Udina definitely does plenty of that. But when you think about the situation/context/environment that he's in, that's EXACTLY what he needs to be: a dirty rotten politician in a society filled with rat-bastard politicians. Think of The Council in the first ME game...are they REALLY that different from Udina in their utter disbelief of EVERYTHING that Shepard says and does? If you're going to beat them, you have to play THEIR game. And in terms of a player of their game, Udina is probably the best that humanity's got. Seeing as how all the council members do whatever they can to look after their own races first, humanity needs a politician with a pro-humanity bias in order to counter-act that...and that's exactly what Udina is.

Then in ME3 you get a chance to actually TALK with him. Maybe it's just the weight of the war, but he comes across a lot more sympathetic and understandable (at least to me) when you have a chance to talk to him about the people he knows and has lost and what he's going to be doing to help the war. And that's when his pro-humanity bias comes back to bite him in the ass. It's clear (again, at least to me) that TIM approached Udina with an offer to assassinate the council and leave Udina in charge, meaning that Humanity would have full authority over the Citadel. Udina likely thought this would be a great way to gain the power and authority that's needed to save Earth and that's why he went along with it. But as the saying goes: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Obviously Udina was making a fatal mistake in dealing with Cerberus, but I do believe he was just doing what he honestly thought was best for Earth.

Eh, that's just my interpretation though and I know there's a LOT of gamers out there that disagree with it. Oh well.

 

[XMark]

Good points on Udina. I hated him in the first two ME games. I was just starting to like him in ME3 and then he goes and ruins everything.

 

[Lieju]

Well, there has been characters I've liked until I found out something about them or they did something bad, but then I generally stop liking them, or at least my opinion on them changes. I can symphatise with them, or agree with them to some extent, though.

I'd only feel bad for liking a character if I felt my reasons were just superficial and not very good. Or if the character is very cliche or pandering, but I liked them anyway.

Like Ulquiorra in Bleach.

Also, some of my favourite stories make you uncomfortable because they make you symphatise with people who do horrible things, 'The Egyptian' and 'The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike', and 'Lawrence of Arabia' have that aspect to them.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I never feel bad for liking any fictional character. Morality doesn't kick in very often when I'm playing a game.

 

[Zhukov]

The Council from the Mass Effect games.

Apparently I was supposed to hate them, but their position always seemed pretty reasonable to me.

Shepard: "I found a Geth audio file! This is evidence of a galactic threat, do something!"
Council: "Uhh... gonna need a bit more proof than that mate."

Shepard: "Saren's hiding in Space Somalia, send in the fleets!"
Council: "We'd really rather not start a war just to arrest one guy. Go find him yourself hotshot."

Shepard: "That giant dreadnaught we killed was one of a race of sentient machines out to destroy all civilization!"
Council: "Or it could have been a Geth dreadnaught. Which is more likely? Kind of hard to tell after it blew up."

Shepard: "Earth is being attacked! Drop everything and help us!"
Council: "Yeah, everyone is being attacked, join the club. Palavan is kind of on fire right now. So wait your fucking turn."

At least the games let me be polite with them most of the time.

 

[Hazy992]

Should I feel bad for liking Johnny Gat? Cause he's like my favourite character in Saints Row.

I mean I know he's an amoral psychopath but c'mon, the guys a straight up badass.

 

[IllumInaTIma]

In games, I'd Lukav from Front Mission 3. He is the main villain, so you're kinda supposed to hate him, and I did, but he still had some legitimate reasons to be what he was.
So, Lukav is an Imaginary Number. A genetically engineered human-being who is supposed to be above all humans. His creator told him that, his colleagues told him that, so, can you really blame him when he believed that? When he turned on his creator for being lesser than him? Not really. He's still an ass though.

Then there's Ryoji/Nyx Avatar from Persona 3. Once again, he's supposed to be a main villain/final boss, but I felt so sorry for him. He never wanted to become a monstrosity, he never wanted to bring Death to humankind, he just wanted to be a simple guy.

And then there's a ************ from Kick-ass movie. God damn it I feel sorry for him. He is such an evil idiot. He's willing to murder innocent people just to prove his childish point, but you just feel so sorry for him. He just doesn't learn and keeps pushing and pushing and hurting himself.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I liked LaCroix from Vampire The Masquerade, despite EVERYONE in the game having an unfavourable opinion of him. I don't think there's a single person who says "yeah LaCroix. He's a pretty decent kid" so I did feel really sorry for him. Even my own Malkavian character would refer to him as "the jester." He's a pretty serious guy who rules a city give him a break!

That and I really like his sense of drama. He can't speak without making small dramatic gestures and one time you walk in and he's standing with his back to you staring out the window of his ivory tower before making an "I did what I had to" speech.

Though I did go for the Anarch ending because as much as I like his sense of drama he does sort of end up double crossing you like 5 times within the same few hours. Fuck that. However I do know why he's the the jester now, pretty funny joke actually.