Recommendations for stories where the protagonist can easily be 'villain'

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Ronald Nand

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I'm looking for stories where the protagonist could easily be the villain of the story should you change the perspective of the story for example Walter White in Breaking Bad or Light in Deathnote, if you made the police to focus of those stories Walter and Light could easily be the villains. I always find those stories more interesting.

Any media will do but I prefer a visual one.
 

Keoul

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Spec Ops: the line is the first thing that popped into my mind.
I guess that fancy new movie Frozen would count as well?
 

Supernova1138

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Okay, time to go into Paint the Hero Black mode.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off - Ferris is the master manipulator that manages to con the city of Chicago into thinking he's dying, and pushed his best friend to steal and ultimately wreck his father's ultra rare Ferrari. Why did he do this, simply so he could skip a day of school.

Star Wars - the plot centers around a smuggler, a religious fanatic, and an impressionable farmboy brainwashed by the aforementioned religious fanatic as they shoot up a government building to break out a terrorist leader. The impressionable farmboy ultimately blows up the previously mentioned government building, killing millions of civil servants.

Bioshock Infinite - you play as a washed up Pinkerton detective who barges into a foreign land and starts shooting up the place. He ultimately winds up sparking a Communist revolution during his quest. His ultimate goal was to abduct a teenage girl, take her back to America and hand her to some rather shady characters to pay off his gambling debts.

Most modern military shooters - you play a soldier in the US army, loaded for bear with all of the latest and greatest military hardware. You use all these fancy toys to blow up a bunch of brown people who are living in poverty and are only equipped with outdated Soviet weaponry. Most of the fancy military hardware you're using will likely cause all sorts of collateral damage and ruin the local infrastructure, ensuring that the local population will be much worse off once you kill the requisite number of AK-47 wielding brown people.
 

Asita

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Scarface, anyone?

Also, on a lighter note, you ever see the Producers? While it's played down and used for laughs, the protagonists are ultimately attempting to scam a bunch of old ladies.

Amnesia: the Dark Descent kinda toes the line there, principally by virtue of what you learn of the backstory. Suffice to say that the protagonist did some positively horrific things before he lost his memory. This background in villainy is also true of the protagonist of the Justine expansion, to arguably greater effect.
 

TheRiddler

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Dexter: TV show about a forensic specialist who moonlights as a serial killer (who kills other serial killers. Not out of some kind of sense of justice, but merely because he has a compulsion, an urge). Seasons 1-4 are well worth watching... though it goes a bit downhill from there.

Wolf of Wall Street: Where the protagonist is a [i/]dick[/i]. I mean, he's a corrupt, aggressively immoral man who rises to the top of the business world. I mean, I'd almost argue that the message of the movie is that evil people are evil, because evil is a lot of fun. And Scorsese stays far away from actually delivering moral judgement in the movie, trusting the audience itself to work out that these are assholes and monsters. Actually, a lot of Scorsese's movies focus on crime of various kinds. Check out Taxi Driver and, of course, Good Fellas. Also, as long as we're talking crime movies, the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy are masterfully made.

Also,

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainProtagonist

This'll help.
 

Nouw

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I don't think Breaking Bad is the best example. Okay, sure, technically the neo-Nazis were the villains of the last season but really the story is about Walter White's change in character and how he becomes the person he promised never to be upon starting to cook crystal meth, a villain. Someone who kills without regard for consequence and acts out of self rather than for others.
 

Radeonx

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Nouw said:
I don't think Breaking Bad is the best example. Okay, sure, technically the neo-Nazis were the villains of the last season but really the story is about Walter White's change in character and how he becomes the person he promised never to be upon starting to cook crystal meth, a villain. Someone who kills without regard for consequence and acts out of self rather than for others.
That's exactly what he was looking for? He said specifically where the protagonist could be viewed as a villain....which is exactly what happens to Walter.


Keoul said:
Spec Ops: the line is the first thing that popped into my mind.
I guess that fancy new movie Frozen would count as well?
Spec Ops: The Line is a fantastic example of this, the story is wonderful overall. The gameplay is fairly generic though, but it was more than tolerable enough to play through for the whole story, so I'd recommend this.
 

bartholen_v1legacy

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Berserk. The protagonist is (for a good portion of the story) a full-blown psychopath who even says out loud multiple times that all he cares about is fighting. He remorselessly kills anyone getting in his way and never helps anyone unless there's something in it for him.

FF Tactics Advance. You're trying to escape from a fantasy world, but will tear away any and all happiness your close ones have achieved in said world. Plus your way of escaping basically amounts to destroying the whole world.
 

Nouw

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Radeonx said:
Nouw said:
I don't think Breaking Bad is the best example. Okay, sure, technically the neo-Nazis were the villains of the last season but really the story is about Walter White's change in character and how he becomes the person he promised never to be upon starting to cook crystal meth, a villain. Someone who kills without regard for consequence and acts out of self rather than for others.
That's exactly what he was looking for? He said specifically where the protagonist could be viewed as a villain....which is exactly what happens to Walter.
I guess so but flipping the perspective thing seems kinda superficial considering he already is the villain, in my opinion anyway, without having to change the focus. Hell, I'd argue that at one point they do shift the focus to the police tracking Walter down and offer a neat parallel narrative between Hank and Walter.

Or maybe I'm just tripping up on what 'could' means too much lol

EDIT: I think I took it the wrong way, yeah. What I thought of is stories where the main character's heroism is unquestioned and how when the perspective is flipped, the protagonist's heroism could actually be not at all that heroic e.g. Super Mario from the Goomba's perspective. I'm thinking of 'are they' for Breaking Bad, not 'can they.' My fault.
 

bunnielovekins

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Ocarina of time: first you kill a giant bug doing as its instincts tell it to, eating the inside of a giant tree, then you break into the lair of a giant, docile rock-eating lizard, simply going about its business eating rocks, and mercilessly slaughter it.

I haven't even got all the way through yet, and I can see link is kind of a dick.

And in case anyone thinks I'm being remotely original, someone else said this first. I just don't remember who.
 

Radeonx

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Nouw said:
Radeonx said:
Nouw said:
I don't think Breaking Bad is the best example. Okay, sure, technically the neo-Nazis were the villains of the last season but really the story is about Walter White's change in character and how he becomes the person he promised never to be upon starting to cook crystal meth, a villain. Someone who kills without regard for consequence and acts out of self rather than for others.
That's exactly what he was looking for? He said specifically where the protagonist could be viewed as a villain....which is exactly what happens to Walter.
I guess so but flipping the perspective thing seems kinda superficial considering he already is the villain, in my opinion anyway, without having to change the focus. Hell, I'd argue that at one point they do shift the focus to the police tracking Walter down and offer a neat parallel narrative between Hank and Walter.

Or maybe I'm just tripping up on what 'could' means too much lol

EDIT: I think I took it the wrong way, yeah. What I thought of is stories where the main character's heroism is unquestioned and how when the perspective is flipped, the protagonist's heroism could actually be not at all that heroic e.g. Super Mario from the Goomba's perspective. I'm thinking of 'are they' for Breaking Bad, not 'can they.' My fault.
To be fair, after hearing your pre-edit explanation, I see exactly what you were saying. I just assumed your idea was missing the point when he brought up Light from Death Note who's entire character is based on his delusion/ideal that he was heroic and deserved to be considered a god when he could easily be considered a villain by almost everyone else in the series (Which sort of applies to Walt in BB, though not nearly as much).
 

Casual Shinji

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bartholen said:
Berserk. The protagonist is (for a good portion of the story) a full-blown psychopath who even says out loud multiple times that all he cares about is fighting. He remorselessly kills anyone getting in his way and never helps anyone unless there's something in it for him.
Kinda yeah, but for different reasons. It's pretty obvious that in the first 2 and a half volumes and in that whole 'Butterfly/Fairy' story arc, he's meant to be a completely ruthless beast of a man.

But in the Goldon Age arc he plays the assassin to Griffith's egomaniacal whims. And while obviously not presented as anything good, it's still the best he's ever felt in his life. He even describes it himself as one long dream, despite all the death and carnage of the battlefield. But more than that, this feeling also comes across to the audience. Bad things happen, and they are a mercenary band with many deaths to their name, yet it almost feels like this great vacation.

OT: Let the Right One In

The protagonist is this bully victim who strikes up a friendship with a vampire girl. But the movie starts with the boy acting out revenge fantasies, and he also collects newspaper clippings of murder cases. And while the boy and girl have a very touching relationship, it's very much suggected that the girl is grooming him to be her "provider".
 

Norithics

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Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. Wylfred's father is taken by the Valkyrie, and he views this entire system of using human suffering to create and select the best possible heroes for the gods' own purposes as abhorrent and evil. However, when he gets an offer that's too good to be true- a magical feather that can eventually allow him to destroy the Valkyrie- he jumps on it all too eagerly, learning too late that it requires him to sacrifice a comrade, murdering them to further his vengeance. What's more, the story can go multiple ways, with him slaughtering everyone to turn himself into a monster of the battlefield, him trying to fulfill his role but losing his nerve, or even being completely unable to go any further with the monstrous plan after the first, arguably accidental death occurs.

I really like the story because no matter what decisions you make, there really are no 'good guys.' There are different political factions all wishing to stab each other in the gut to further their wills, and of course the gods, who are indifferent to humanity's own foolishness and depravity. It's easy to see how Wyl is easily able to further the plan in a world where the severity of murder depends only on whose team you're on, and there's always plenty of victims. And just as Wyl is blind to how terrible the power he's invoking is, those who ally themselves with him turn their heads at his obvious monstrous power, not caring how he does it as long as it furthers their goals. Everyone's so very ardently human in it.

But if that's too far from what you were thinking, I have another example that may be better:

Megaman X. Much is made of X's sacrifices to destroy his robotic brethren in order to protect Humanity from them when they go Maverick, but on closer inspection, this almost runs counter to the entire idea of the series. Megaman was about robots that had predestined personalities, but ultimately couldn't think for themselves. Reploids were supposed to be able to do what they chose. But every time that a reploid chooses to do something that humans feel uncomfortable with, tensions escalate and inevitably the Maverick Hunters get called in to squash the threat. This has the unfortunate effect of creating two different and stark 'sides' in the conflict, but also insulates humans from having to make difficult decisions about how to coexist with beings very similar but also very different from them. Ultimately the way the series progressed seemed only logical to me, as X keeps providing a band-aid so that humans never have to give up anything. I guess it depends on how you interpret "going Maverick," but for me it didn't seem as clear cut as the "murder program" shorthand that it was used as; I always sort of saw it as genuinely being able to do what they wanted, thus causing all the tension, conflict and war. I couldn't help but think that if the reploids had their own space, they would eventually have decided of their own accord that listening to self-aggrandizing leaders wasn't in their interest and had a better coexistence. But thanks to X always siding with humans, that never has the opportunity to happen.
 

Dalisclock

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Saints Row pretty much immediatly springs to mind. Particulary in the second game, the boss does some pretty horrible things to people. Granted a lot of them them deserved it but it's still not counting all the innocent bystanders killed along the way.

Notably in the forth game the boss is called out on his/her actions in the previous games(By the alien overlord, of all people).
 

Ihateregistering1

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Ronald Nand said:
I'm looking for stories where the protagonist could easily be the villain of the story should you change the perspective of the story for example Walter White in Breaking Bad or Light in Deathnote, if you made the police to focus of those stories Walter and Light could easily be the villains. I always find those stories more interesting.

Any media will do but I prefer a visual one.
Pretty much anything with Judge Dredd (or the entire system of law in the Judge Dredd universe, really). It's essentially a group of people who believe they have the right to do whatever they want because they're the only ones smart enough to hold society together, and if you don't like it too bad.

The "Syndicate" reboot, since your character works for the Syndicates, which are obviously thought of as evil by some people.

The Samurai in "The Last Samurai". The Samurai were basically fighting to maintain a way of life that was essentially a caste system where they could kill anyone 'lower' than them whenever they felt disrespected.

The God of War series, for pretty obvious reasons, since Kratos Is a psychopath.
 
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Well, how about one where the main character really is what the title claims she is?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340855/?ref_=nv_sr_3

It's the touching story of a prostitute that falls in love and shows the depths of her feelings by becoming a serial killer.

As a side-note, the acting is just magnificent in this film.
 

shootthebandit

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Filth. This movie/book is about a corrupt cop trying to solve a murder investigation. He is homophobic, racist, sexist, psychopathic and well just not a very nice guy. I thoroughly recommend it although its pretty intense. James mcavoy plays the cop and its nice to see him playing a scot for once