Skip to content
Search AI Powered

Latest Stories

People Explain Which 'Heroes' Are Even Worse Than Their Story's Villains

People Explain Which 'Heroes' Are Even Worse Than Their Story's Villains

Stories in books, movies, and TV are usually framed so that the main character is seen as the hero, but sometimes these "heroes" are a bit less heroic than they might seem at first glance.


Whether they're just generally a jerk to other characters or their whole mission was really bad from the start, these characters are not the good guys they seem to be.

Reddit user u/ThePuzzler13 asked:

"What "hero" is more villainous than the actual villain?"

Aladdin

Giphy

Aladdin.

Steals from honest merchants. Steals a magical artifact and uses it for entirely personal gain up until the very end. When the Sultan suggests rewriting laws so that they can marry, he doesn't even consider amending the law that has children getting their hands cut off that he experienced firsthand.

-tensing99

Ladybug

Ladybug from Miraculous, mostly every single person on that show gets akumatized as a result of Marinette being mean to them or her just doing something plain right dumb. But then she always saves the day as Ladybug and everything is all fine and dandy, like she didn't just cause all that stuff.

-Mara_Uzumaki

Troy

Giphy

Troy Bolton in High School Musical. He gets everything handed to him, and whenever he has to give even the slightest in return, he squirms and squeals and breaks promises to people who are helping him. There's a Film Theory video about it.

-SpaceSquirrel7

God

Old Testament God is usually more capricious, bloodthirsty, warmongering than Satan.

-The_Bill_Brasky

Patch

Patch Adams. I'm sorry, but the way that the fictional Patch Adams acted in that movie was not only unprofessional, but stupid, unfunny, illegal, and sometimes even dangerous. The "evil" school administration trying to stop him that the movie tries to paint as stuffy and uncaring ends up looking reasonable by comparison. No wonder the real Patch Adams hated how he was portrayed.

-AporiaParadox

Spongebob

Giphy

SpongeBob SquarePants. Whenever something good happens to Squidward, he and Patrick always have to go and ruin it for him.

-GW2RNGR

Jedi

Jedi are a group of religious zealot megalomaniacs.

-stevieoats

If they had just let Anakin rescue his Mom from slavery. But no.

-greenvortex

well Qui-Gon could have just bought the kid and the mother

-frenchchevalierblanc

But no pod is worth 2 slaves. To do what you propose one of the obscenely rich characters in the story with seemingly nothing to do all day but stare out windows would have had to go ALL the way back to purchase her. That's like...3 hours in hyperspace.. WHO HAS 3 HOURS TO WASTE ON THAT?!!?!

-Varlo

Goku

Anyone ever talked about Goku being inefficient as a hero, like reviving the most dangerous species in the known universe just to see hOw sTrOnG tHeY BeCoMe, although he himself doesn't have a guaranteed way of winning

-RGaming

Daredevil

Giphy

I always found the Daredevil-Punisher dynamic odd. Especially the Netflix version.

The Punisher kills people who hurt others. He's usually quick about it though, allowing them a mostly painless death. But still, murderer. Villain.

Meanwhile Matt freaking Murdock breaks peoples' spines, paralyzing them and doesn't give a flying crap. He won't kill anyone, but he has no problem making sure they suffer for the rest of their life. He's kind of terrifying for a hero.

-Groot_ofthe_Galaxy

Sleeping Beauty

The married king in the original sleeping beauty in case you didn't know it goes a little like this.

So basic first bit she gets primed by a spinning wheel and falls asleep but she isn't rescued by a prince she gets "rescued" by a married king. He comes in sees her and does unspeakable things to her and leaves. 9 months later she awakes and gives birth to twins. She find her way to a palace which just happens to be the same king. The king sees her and falls in love with her.

The Queen sees this and is jealous of sleeping beauty so she plots to kill her and give her twins to the cook so she can cook them up and serve them to the king. The plans fall through the kids are saved by the cook and the queen is killed and sleeping beauty and the king are married, The End.

-TeaQueen1206

Jack

And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

Hogfather, Sir Terry Pratchett

-ClockwerkHart

This is subverted by Fables too, because Jack is such an unrepentant a-hole who's backstory is full of him just doing horrible things for the sake of women, money and power.

-Whitewind617

Nick Jr

Giphy

Honestly any any protagonist from a Nick Jr cartoon. They always treat the "antagonist" like crap for doing only mildly bad things.

-GeneralButterpants

Power Puff Girls

The Power Puff Girls were notorious for this.

Mojo Jojo would, like, be at the grocery store picking up juice and stuff and they'd fly in and kick his butt for no reason

-Japjer

Claire

Claire from Jurassic World. Her negligence and poor decision making is directly responsible for the injuries and deaths of many visitors and employees of the park.

-pubefire

Not just that, her characters response to events are supposed to be herioc but in reality she leaves the park managerless to go find her nephews that she couldn't be asked to look after earlier and finally hooks up with the park ranger in the rescue centre despite being the most seniour park manager left, who should be in charge of head counts and organising communication with the mainland extraction teams.

Then in the next film she dosent get punished and decides to push people to risk more human lives to save the assests that she never truly cared about in the first film.

-coolpeopleit

Wedding Crashers

Giphy

Wedding Crashers' Jeremy and John -- they lie their way into a family's wedding and eventually their home. Then John starts to peel a woman away from her fiance, even going so far as to poison him with Visine.

-searchforcoins

Jerry

Jerry from Tom & Jerry. Screw this mouse.

-AlphaKevin667

As a kid I thought he was the hero but now I have realized how he was awful to Tom. Tom just wanted to get laid in one episode but Jerry just kept on messing up his chances.

-Hexzillan

Odysseus

Odysseus in the Odyssey.

While the foreigners are portrayed as the bad guys, he goes around pillaging everyone and expecting tons of lavish gifts.

-WilliamHough

For us it looks pretty messed up, but for ancient Greeks, it's pretty on brand with their idea of heroism.

-BoonIsTooSpig

The ruins

Giphy

SPOILER: THE RUINS

The final girl for the The Ruin. You were supposed to root for the main characters to escape the vine infested pyramid surrounded by locals who have quarantined them because the vines are sentient, flesheating, and world-endingly dangerous. Something that the "protagonists" learn less than halfway through the film.

So essentially they know that they're going to die either way, but they don't care because forget the entire rest of KINGDOM ANIMALIA I'M A TOURIST AND I WANNA GO BACK TO MY HOTEL TO DIE.

I literally spent the last half of the movie rooting for the locals AND the vines because these a-holes were so hellbent on being "patient zero" of the apocalypse plant disease.

-BoneYardBirdy

Buggs Bunny

Bugs Bunny, I love the show, but that rabbit screws with people and other characters just for fun. Plus, if you're going to take your friend to the beach, get your directions right so you don't end up in the Himalayas, feeding him to an abominable snowman.

-Merdin86

Neo

Neo, and most of the redpill hackers, are more evil than the machines in the Matrix.

The machines were built by humans. When the AI began to get too smart and some machines went haywire, what was humanity's response? Eradicate them. Total AI genocide. Was it evil for the machines to value and protect their own lives?

And after the war was won, after the machines had dominated mankind and had us on the edge of extinction, did they finish us? No. They preserved humanity. I know, the movie makes it seem like they need us, but some digging into the lore of the Matrix-verse shows that's not true. Even the Architect tells Neo, "There are levels of existence we are prepared to accept.

"Knowing the humans would always try to eradicate machines, the machines devised the best way they could think to preserve us - in a prison that we could never see. They built us a cage infinitely more humane than the ones we keep animals in on Earth. The first Matrix was even designed as a paradise, to give us all we could ever want, and the only reason it didn't stay that way was because the human mind wouldn't accept that reality.

The machines don't kill a human unless they have to for self-defense. Humans who reject the Matrix are a threat to the machines, but they DON'T EVEN KILL THOSE until they become a direct threat. The Oracle herself shelters many children who show signs of rejecting the Matrix. She studies them, their minds, why they make the choices they do, so that the machines can continue to make better Matrices. Indeed, the machines do not view rejection as a fault of humans, they view it as a fault in the Matrix.

Meanwhile, redpill hackers crash into the Matrix on a regular basis and kill lots of innocent people. Think of all the security guards and cops who are killed by the hackers - innocent humans living their blissfully ignorant virtual lives. Sure, Agents could infiltrate those people, and the hackers are doing what they do for the greater good of humanity (or so they think,) but they still kill far more innocents than the machines ever do.

-irishwonder

Mario

Giphy

That goomba-murdering, mushroom-addicted, dinosaur head-bashing psychopath MARIO. Just look at what he did to the homes of the Koopalings in SMW!

-Mindbender444



More from People

Jennifer Siebel Newsom
@jennifersiebelnewsom/Instagram

Gavin Newsom's Wife Has Stark Warning For MAGA Women Who Still Support Trump—And She's Absolutely Right

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, First Partner of California, shared a message for the women of MAGA in the wake of the firings of Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

The two women were the first Cabinet members of MAGA Republican President Donald Trump’s second administration to get their walking papers.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump; Screenshot of Artemis II crew
Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images; @atrupar/X

Trump Tries To Blame Awkward Silence During Call With Artemis II On Technical Glitch—But The Video Says Otherwise

President Donald Trump was not fooling anyone when he blamed a supposed technical glitch for the Artemis II crew’s silence during their historic fly-by of the Moon.

Artemis II is the first mission to bring astronauts toward the Moon in over half a century, launching successfully on April 1 to the delight of space enthusiasts and the general public alike.

Keep ReadingShow less
Dan Levy; Catherine O'Hara
CBS Sunday Morning/YouTube; Amy Sussman/Getty Images

Dan Levy Gets Choked Up While Visiting 'Schitt's Creek' Town For First Time Since Catherine O'Hara's Death

Dan Levy has been open about his grief after the loss of the late, great Catherine O'Hara.

Catherine O'Hara was a lot of things to a lot of people, with her versatility and willingness to create big, memorable characters that people love and cherish, from Kate McCallister to Delia Deetz to Moira Rose.

Keep ReadingShow less
Laura Ingraham
Roy Rochlin/Getty Images; @lauraingraham/Instagram

Laura Ingraham Gets Blunt Reminder After Awkward Video Of Her Doing The Griddy Dance Goes Viral

After sharing a video of herself doing the "Griddy," Fox News talking head Laura Ingraham was called out for appropriating Black culture after years of attacking Black people, Black Democratic leaders, sharing racist stereotypes, and attacking their basic human rights on her program.

The Griddy is a popular celebratory dance seen in the NFL, NBA, and the game Fortnite. It was popularized by NFL players Ja'Marr Chase of the Cincinnati Bengals and Justin Jefferson of the Minnesota Vikings.

Keep ReadingShow less
Domino’s delivery driver Dan Simpson is seen on a Ring camera going the extra mile during a viral Boise, Idaho delivery.
@katey_93/TikTok

Internet Steps Up To Help Out Idaho Domino's Delivery Driver Who Went The Extra Mile For Customer

It started with a missing Diet Coke and turned into a six-figure thank-you.

A 68-year-old pizza delivery worker is heading into retirement with an unexpected boost after a small act of kindness sparked a viral moment—and a wave of support from strangers who chose to pay it forward.

Keep ReadingShow less