Melanie Nilles

(If you read that as “he rows or he don’t”, you got the pun. Don’t like it? Then you come up with a title to make people think!)

Okay, enough semantics. This is about heroes and anti-heroes. In my current WIP, my heroine is in the midst of a feud between the antagonist and the protagonist, an anti-hero. It started me thinking about the use of anti-heroes in writing. They can be a lot of fun!

We all know what a hero is–someone who comes in and saves the day. They generally do what’s moral and just.

However, the anti-hero is something a little different. They can be fun when done right, and come in a few different flavors. Perhaps one of the best known is a character named Han Solo. Remember him? Brash, bold, only looking out for himself. Yeah, that Corellian smuggler who helped save the kid who saved the day, then got himself frozen in carbonite and married to a princess. You get the idea.

Now, how do we define the anti-hero? He or she is a protagonist, sure, but not your typical good-guy. Rather, he’s the one who only cares about his own goals. He may not always be honest, who may lie on occasion as a means to his ends. He may engage in questionable behavior–rude, conceited, greedy, even stupid, clumsy, or…Hell, he may downright bad. So, what makes him a hero if he’s as bad as any villain? Think about Han Solo. He was always fouling things up, but he found a way out of a mess and ended up saving the princess, even if it was just for the money. In the end, he realized with help from friends he met along the way who showed him a mirror on himself what was right.

Not all anti-heroes turn around. Sometimes they just get by on accidents that turn out right. As I said, there are different flavors, depending on what the story requires. They range in a wide variety of traits, but what they are NOT are heroes. They lack heroic qualities, but that does not mean they can’t be redeemed.

Know any anti-heroes? I bet you’ve read about them in at least one work of fiction, or seen them in other movies (Riddick, Han Solo, perhaps even Severus Snape).