WEDNESDAY BLOGGING CHALLENGE | VILLAINS I’D ROOT FOR INSTEAD OF THE PROTAGONISTS

Oh man. This is such an interesting prompt, but also a bit of a difficult one. My memory isn’t that great, particularly for books I read a while ago. I don’t remember that many books I’ve read with villains at all, let alone ones I’d root for. I do tend to enjoy books that actually develop the “bad” characters and show why they are how they are, what happened to them to make them that way, and allow them growth as well as the “hero” characters. So I’ve only come up with two, really.

The first is obvious, and probably one a lot of people will be coming up with this week – Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series. Both of these characters are straight up antagonists when the series begins, and they’re easy (and enjoyable) to dislike. But for me, as soon as we meet Draco’s father, my view on him shifted. His behaviour was still reprehensible, and yet it no longer seemed as willfully evil. He was the product of his upbringing, and didn’t have much of a chance to be a better person. His character does develop a lot over the course of the books, and glimmers of who he could have been with different opportunities and people in his life show through. Likewise with Snape, his back story also shows his pain, his lack of belonging, and how difficult it has been for him to move on in his life after losing the person he loved. But that love did leave in him an awareness of what love feels like, and means he isn’t the simply horrid person he appears.

The other one I can think of is a bit of a twist on this, because the book is written backwards. Let me explain. The book is Hench, which is a superhero story, but told from the perspective of a hench-woman-for-hire. Because of this, the book is written in such a way that the villains are the protagonists, they’re who we are led to sumpathize with, they’re the characters we get to know, and they are (mostly) more sympathetic. The heroes are written as the antagonists, and the book frames them as arrogant, self-absorbed and lacking an awareness of the collateral damage they cause. It’s hard to identify the “good” and “bad” guys in this book because of this, but in the end I had more sympathy for the villains, but still had some for a few of the heroes. So it was a bit of a mix. Very interesting reading experience, that one.

That’s all I can come up with for this prompt, though I’m sure there are many others I’m not thinking of and will kick myself over later! What about you guys? Who did you choose for this week’s prompt?

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge is a blog hop hosted every Wednesday by Long and Short Reviews. The weekly prompts range widely, including both book-related and non-book-related topics. The idea is to get bloggers to interact, share a bit about their lives and connect with other bloggers. Click here for the list of upcoming topics, and visit here to join in the fun!