Stop Idolizing Terrible Characters
We love them. We love terrible characters. We love villains, we love anti-heroes, we love vengeful psychopaths. I’ve made it clear numerous times on this podcast that revenge stories are some of my absolute favorites. I love them, and I usually love the character exacting revenge. But there’s a difference between loving a character and idolizing a character. I never put any of these villainous, treacherous, cruel characters on a pedestal, nor do I aspire to be anything like them.
The problem is… some people do.
Yeah, I know. Shocking, isn’t it? I was especially surprised when I realized some people genuinely believed that Homelander from The Boys was in the right and was justified in his actions. That he was just misunderstood and garbage like that. But Homelander is an obvious example of this foolhardy idolization. Other examples are more subtle. People idolize characters like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, The Burning’s Tau, or How I Met Your Mother’s Ted Mosby. Why do we idolize these characters, and why is it wrong to do so? What’s the difference between loving a character and idolizing one?
I’ll cover all of that and more in today’s essay: Stop Idolizing Terrible Characters.
Examples I’ll Use
I will use two examples of characters that audience members tend to idolize. The first will be a character who is quite obviously a terrible villain (Homelander) while the other will be someone more subtly awful: Ted Mosby. There will be minor spoilers for both The Boys and How I Met Your Mother involved, but I’ll try to keep them light and unimportant for those who haven’t had the opportunity to view these shows (and intend to in the future.
I need to establish why these characters are both unworthy of being placed on a pedestal. We’ll start with Homelander. Homelander, who is essentially the shining example of Evil Superman, is the main antagonist of The Boys, at least at the time of this writing. He’s an unhinged, emotionally stunted psychopath who has been so sheltered from reality and consequences that he lacks a grasp on how the real world works. His wanton disregard for human life, sense of superiority, and total incompetence render him an unpredictable foe, held back only by his desire for approval and love.
Ted Mosby hasn’t killed anyone, at least as far as we know, so showing you why he’s a terrible person will be a little more complicated. However, he is an incredibly selfish, manipulative jerk throughout the series, not just in a couple of specific instances. The narrator only goes so far as to call his past self a jerk on a couple of occasions during the nine-season run, but I’d argue that this should have done this… in essentially every episode.
Ted’s obsession with Robin leads him to overlook their obvious incompatibilities and results in him manipulating her and cheating on his girlfriend to get a shot with Robin. Additionally, the way he constantly abandons and mistreats women, dumps them without concern, spits on their wants and dreams, and more are just completely unforgivable. Sometimes it’s played for laughs, but I have a harder and harder time laughing at some of these situations with each rewatch. Ted Mosby had ridiculous standards for women that he held them to but never held himself to anything close to that unattainable level of perfection. You could argue that a lot of this is just Ted growing up and figuring out how to be a good person, but it isn’t played as a character arc by the writers or the characters. One day he just becomes decent, which is exemplified during one of his dates with the future mother, when he shows respect for her boundaries.
I could give a ton of examples on this, but it isn’t really what the post is about. I’d love to discuss why Ted Mosby is a terrible person further if you’re interested. We can just have that chat in the comments, though, because it’s time to move on now that I’ve introduced our two case studies. Let’s go on and discover why Ted and Homelander are often idolized.
Protagonist Syndrome
There may be an actual term for this phenomenon, but I’m going to go ahead and call it Protagonist Syndrome. It affects viewers of all sorts of shows in which a protagonist is a terrible person. How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, The Boys, The Punisher, The Last of Us, and more all feature protagonists who do terrible things that can often be overlooked or hand-waved by the audience of these stories.
Now, I know Homelander is technically the antagonist of The Boys. Still, he’s very much the protagonist of his own story, and there are points in the show when the audience is meant to somewhat empathize with Homelander and what he’s endured. So while he isn’t the protagonist of The Boys, there are certainly story arcs in the show for which he is a protagonist.
With protagonist syndrome, the consumer of a story cannot differentiate between what is universally good and what is good only in the eyes of the protagonist. Flaws in the protagonist have diminished in this viewer or reader’s eyes while positive traits are greatly elevated.
Frank Castle straight up slaughters people without trial, but technically he just goes after people who are believed to be bad guys, and he does have a code, so not only is he a protagonist, he’s a good guy and someone to be idolized.
Ted Mosby hurts his friends, manipulates and mistreats women, and is incredibly selfish, but he’s on a quest to find his true love and those extravagant things he does are really just kindnesses in his eyes rather than manipulations, so he’s a good guy and someone to be idolized.
Homelander murders people, views them as disposable, and creates situations where people can be murdered to elevate his societal position. He doesn’t just kill bad guys, either; he savors it. But he was raised in a lab without parents and has never really had a decent authority figure to teach him right from wrong, so he’s a good guy; he’s just a little misunderstood.
Thing is, we can empathize with awful people who are the protagonists of their stories without putting them on pedestals. I love Homelander as a character. He’s well-written, compelling, and genuinely scary. I love an unhinged and unpredictable villain. I do not idolize Homelander, and I do not think he’s just misunderstood. He is genuinely evil and needs to be put down. I think no traits of Homelander are redeemable, and I do not believe any “good” in him can be drawn out. Whatever “good” there may be is so corrupted and broken that it’s been twisted into something awful.
I recognize the difference between someone being a protagonist and someone being an admirable person. Ted Mosby is a protagonist but heavens help me if I ever try to emulate him. If I’m going to emulate anybody on How I Met Your Mother, it will be Marshall.
Whose Fault Is It?
Do we blame the writers or do we blame the consumers of stories for protagonist syndrome? Is it because the writers failed to make it clear that their supposed protagonist is awful that people believe they can be feasibly emulated? Or is it the viewers' fault for not distinguishing between universal morality and subjective morality?
My answer? It varies. That’s exactly why I picked Ted and Homelander as my examples. Ted is an example of writers needing to shoulder some of the blame while Homelander is an example of viewers outright refusing to grasp the obvious.
In the case of Ted, his awfulness is frequently played up for laughs. It’s also contrasted by the horrible behavior of his womanizing friend, Barney. When you put Ted and Barney next to each other, Ted doesn’t look so bad. But when you put Ted next to someone like Marshall, he’s a pretty terrible guy. There were so many instances in the story in which the writers could have (and should have) shown that what Ted was doing wasn’t funny and wasn’t okay, but they didn’t. I can only recall a few instances when Ted’s awful behavior was called out, and I’ll mention a few of them below.
The first is when Ted frequently butt-dials Marshall during his no tomorrow night. Marshall later plays back all of those instances of Ted being truly awful and confronts him, as any good friend should. The second instance, which is a pretty harsh example, is toward the end of the eighth season when Barney tells Ted to stop telling him how to handle his relationship with Robin. Oh, yeah, like I said: spoilers for How I Met Your Mother and The Boys. These are both great examples of the writers showing the audience that they are aware that Ted’s behavior is out of line and not something to be emulated.
This doesn’t have to be so direct, though—you can go for more subtle signs that the audience can pick up on. How I Met Your Mother was never all that great at subtlety in such instances, though they did land subtle and nuanced humor throughout the show. If you want to look at subtle nods toward the awfulness of a character, look at The Boys, which I think did this perfectly in its first and second seasons before it decided to ham-fist the message in the third season of the show.
In The Boys there are many villains, all with their unique quirks and traits that make them villainous. There are also supposed good guys like Butcher who do horrible things and must be confronted about it (which often happens). I think this is the greatest way that The Boys shows us who should be emulated and shouldn’t. Butcher and Homelander are both out-of-control, violent men on a war path. Butcher gets called out for his behavior, but no one really calls out Homelander except on a couple of very rare occasions. Why would anyone risk their necks telling Homelander what to do? He could laser them in half and probably would.
What largely separates Butcher from Homelander in The Boys is this correction that Butcher receives and Homelander doesn’t. Butcher is course-corrected several times by several people throughout the show, but Homelander is seldom corrected by anyone. When Butcher is corrected, he may resist at first or push back, even downright refuse, but eventually, he gets back on the right track for one reason or another. When Homelander is corrected, heavens forbid, he seeks retaliation as best he can. He doesn’t like being corrected and will do whatever he can to ensure that it never happens again (and that whoever dares correct him is dealt with).
The Boys took its time to show how truly evil and unstable Homelander was. He would always reason his way out of things, and you got a feel for how manipulative and conniving the man in spandex was early on. It wasn’t until season three that his genuine wickedness became undeniably blatant. Interestingly, this is when many people who had idolized Homelander—yes, Homelander of all people—believed that the show had “become too woke” or whatever phrasing they were using at the time. There are many examples of people finally catching on to The Boys satirizing certain political leanings and foreign policies when the writers aggressively shoved it into their faces during Season 3. Here’s just one Reddit post I found that exemplifies this.
In the case of The Boys, I can’t fault the writers for the fact the people idolize Homelander. To me, he is so obviously a villain, and the lines between right and wrong are clearly drawn over and over in the show by the likes of Annie, MM, and Frenchie. They did a great job of having both moral ambiguity and a reliable moral compass in the show, even if they ditched the subtlety and nuance for the third season. Believing that Homelander is just a misunderstood good guy who’s going to make the world a better place is entirely the fault of viewers, not writers.
For How I Met Your Mother, I have to fault both the audience and the writers. The writers frequently failed to clarify what was right and wrong in their show, and they often played horrible things for laughs rather than making them out to be the truly selfish, manipulative deeds they were. If you want an example of how to have characters do horrible things that are definitely awful and not to be emulated, look at It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which does this perfectly. You laugh at the horrible things the characters do, but you also know that you’re laughing at them, not with them. Many times, this wasn’t the case for Ted’s misadventures in How I Met Your Mother. You were expected to laugh with his awfulness rather than at it because the show never made it clear that Ted was a terrible, selfish, manipulative bastard. Honestly, I don’t think the writers realized Ted Mosby was horrible. They only really acknowledged that Barney was awful.
How Can This Be Fixed?
I don’t want this to be exclusively a post that complains about a problem without offering a solution. You’ll be pleased to know that I do have some solutions! They’re garnered primarily from great examples of terrible protagonists handled appropriately by writers. I’m sure there are other possible ways to resolve this issue of story audiences idolizing terrible characters, so feel free to share your suggestions!
Hyperbole
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia took a huge risk with its first season. Its pilot is a terrible, divisive, vile episode… and that is perfect for this show. It immediately sets the show's tone with hyperbolic, irrefutably vile characters as the main cast. There isn’t a doubt in your mind after that first episode that everyone in the main cast is unforgivably horrendous. From that moment onward, you know you are watching a show about horrible people doing horrible things that you should neither praise nor emulate.
Hyperbole is a direct, obvious, often humorous way to make it clear that a character is virtually irredeemable. This is the method that The Boys resorted to in the third season, tossing subtlety aside in exchange for hyperbolic characterizations. It’s also how How I Met Your Mother makes it clear that Barney is genuinely awful for much of the show’s run.
Contrast
Hyperbole doesn’t work in every situation, as it primarily matches the tone of comedic stories rather than serious, grounded stories. I don’t think I’d appreciate hyperbolic characterizations of awful characters in a realistic and believable drama, but I love it in comedies. So, when you need something more tenuous—something that’s going to be more invisible to the consumer of your story—I recommend having solid contrast. If you’ve got an antihero, have a hero come along to clarify that your anti-hero isn’t a great person.
Think Daredevil. In its third season, there’s a great exchange between Daredevil and Punisher in which it made clear to the viewer just how different these two are from each other, despite having somewhat-aligned goals. Daredevil highlights moments a Punisher fan may not have realized were deplorable, like Frank Castle shooting up a hospital. When you’re suffering from protagonist syndrome, you’re likely to think that the ends justify the means, regardless of the means that Punisher chooses. Daredevil is a great contrast to Punisher.
Confrontation
My final suggestion for reducing the risk of readers, viewers, or players falling prey to protagonist syndrome is confrontation. This is when a person who does something terrible is confronted about the terribleness of their actions. This is a way for the writers to communicate directly to the story’s audience, telling them that the actions they have seen a character take are deplorable and not to be admired or praised. It doesn’t have to be blatant at all, though if you need to be blatant about it, you can do so.
There are great examples of confrontation in many stories, including The Boys, How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, and The Last of Us. Butcher is confronted by MM several times throughout the series, Marshall admonishes Ted after his St. Patrick’s Day outing, Walt is confronted when his own family is frightened by him, and Joel must face the consequences of his decisions in The Last of Us Part II. In whatever form, confrontation is an excellent method of telling a story’s audience that the individual being confronted did something morally wrong (or at the very least questionable).
Conclusion
Anti-heroes, villains, and morally ambiguous characters are all critical parts of great storytelling. They shouldn’t be removed from stories, but readers, viewers, players, and writers are responsible for approaching such characters with care. Be aware that being a protagonist does not make a character good, nor does it necessarily make a character redeemable. Give praise to characters where it is due, and give admonishment when it is not.
Man, this is a lot to wrap up. I’m not even sure where to begin. This is probably the longest essay I have written in the last year, but I’m glad I wrote it. Thanks for sticking through to the end; I hope you pulled something positive away from this post! I had a lot of fun researching it and getting it written. Regardless of whether it’ll perform well, I’m glad these thoughts are out there now.