I think about Macbeth and other stories, in which a very horrible person is so delightful as a POV character.

So here's the question: would you enjoy reading a story about the rise and downfall of a person who goes from good intentions to extreme evil?

If the story is good i will find a reader.

If it works your readers will be just as upset as you about falling in love with the villian. And I firmly believe it's one of the main duties of an author to f--k with his readers. Give them what they're NOT expecting.

JOHN!

Your hero could be very friendly. A very nice person. Ordinary. Unremarkable. But still nice and decent and the type who *would* stop and help an old lady across the street or stop to help someone stranded on the side of the road.

As for your villain, keep him that way. The one thing people love to see more than a hero succeed... is for a hero to fail. And few villains think of themselves as evil. I doubt Hitler thought himself as evil. And with the first few things he did... would you think that sending Jews and "undesirables" to work camps would lead to death camps? The world was truly shocked and dismayed at the Holocaust. It was unthinkable for people to behave that way... despite the fact that such things *had* happened before, just not on that scale?

"The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions" as the saying goes. Though I think the original was a tad longer and more descript. Even if you don't believe in Hell (I don't), the saying has much potential for any writer. It allows for sympathetic villains that readers won't just hate outright.

Take a vigilante. She was abused and molested as a child. She has decided no child should suffer as she did. So she starts going out and hurting dads that molest and abuse their kids. Only to have a few abusive fathers turn around and hurt their kids worse, one killing their child. So she esculates. She starts killing these parents that are so sick in their head that they do these deeds. Until she kills a father who was just *rumored* to have molested his children... and it was a lie.

Is she a villain? Or a hero? She's killing fathers, no matter how vile and disgusting a human they may be. She's also killing them violently. Think of how that hurts the child? Heck, in an ironic twist to this sad tale... ten years down the line, as she's in jail for her crimes, a guard sets her up to escape, playing on the belief that he knows of a father who's doing really horrid things to his kids but the system can't do anything, but she can. He helps her escape... and then shoots her, saying "that's for my dad, you %#(&*..." (and of course, the hero, who caught her the first time could end up saving her this time from the vengeful child-turned-adult, ten years after he put her in prison... because that's what heros do).

Who was the villain in this tale? Was not the antagonist right, if not in her methods, at least in her goal (to protect children from abuse and molestation)? As for the young man who tries to gain vengence for the slaying of his father... was he a villain?

Perhaps instead of thinking of them as villains and heros, it's better to think of them as protagonists and antagonists. You can have a protagonist who's an assassin, trying to kill a head of state. She or he can be a decent person who truly believes what she or he is doing is right. And the antagonist could be an otherwise decent loving person who is trying to protect the life of that head of state.

Here's a real life example: During Vietnam, there were plenty of people who saw the U.S. as the "villains" in waging war on the Vietnam people. To the men over there, they were not villains. They were heros fighting for their country. The Viet Cong (apologies if I misspelled it) also did not think of themselves as villains. They did what they had to in an effort to drive the U.S. out (and in the end succeeded because the price of victory would be to high for the U.S.). If instead of heros and villains you look at it as protagonists and antagonists, you can write a war story any way you want. You could base it on some American GIs in the jungle... you could base it on the Viet Cong fighting off the Americans... or as a simple farmer trying to keep his family alive and trying to keep enough food for his family as both Viet Cong and Americans go through fighting their war. In this case, both sides are the antagonists to the protagonist of the farmer.

Heh. This went rather far afield, didn't it. Anyway, your Antagonist can be a noble man who will "fall from grace" and your protagonist an unassuming uninteresting man who can still be interesting because of some quirk of personality that makes him likeable. Or you could even write the protagonist as the man who is falling from grace, and his antagonist the man who prevails, the uninteresting unassuming man who just manages, through his sheer ordinariness, to defeat this anti-hero. If you write up the "hero" as too boring and uninteresting, you may end up with people cheering for the "villain" in the end.

Now, whether or not the aforementioned good and bad guys really are good or bad or not is not the thing to consider. What you want to consider is how the reader might perceive them.

The more unsure of himself a character is, the more sympathetic that can make him because being unsure is something most people can relate to.

The character who goes ahead and does what he believes is the right thing to do, in spite of his angst about it, can be very interesting. And he can also be very tragic.

It occurs to me that you may not have a good-guy vs bad-guy situation here as much as you have two good guys in conflict because while their goals may both be worthy, they can't both be achieved--one has to lose.

What makes a villian's POV interesting is that the villian is trying to do the right thing. A villain that is just mindlessly bad becomes very boring very quickly. Oddly enough, the same is true of a hero's POV. It is most interesting when the hero has to put great effort into being good.

If you find that your villian is interesting and your hero is not, then try giving the hero a similar background to the villian. All the experiences and pains that "make" the villian bad are also part of the hero...but the hero tries just a little harder to be a good person

You can do all the rest of the things that have been suggested, of course. But if you are doing them just because you can't figure out how to portray an ordinary person choosing to do the right thing at great personal cost, then you are copping out, not finding a "higher literary motif" or anything like that.

The reason my description didn't make sense (and you're absolutely right about its paradox) is because I didn't want to reveal too much about my magic system and plot in presenting the problem. And yes, the hero's crisis is the point where he has to decide if what he has fought for all along is really worth dying (or killing) for. I personally think it's a good conflict, but it does take him a little while to really get to it. Meanwhile, Mr. BadGuy is where the action is. I guess that's just the way the story is going.

To give an unasked for opinion: write what interests you.

Ever read "Arslan" by M.J. Engh. Read it. Now.

That book is brutal, beautiful, and maybe almost perfect.

And the villian, Arslan, is way more interesting than any of the other characters. And we do sort of fall in love with Arslan even though he rapes and kills and does HORRIBLE things.

Having a villian as a POV character or the main character can be REALLY good.

When writing, if something comes alive and wants to do something, let it. Let the story take you where it needs to go.

After all OSC would tell you time and time again about how many times that he wrote something, but a character or idea took the story in another direction.

The villian is interesting, so, write about the villian, because if you're falling in love with him, so will we.

Also, if you just NEED to have that hero be the focus, try having an ANGLE to his mindless worship, explore that. I mean, people who do that kind of thing actually have either a psychological complex or they're looking for something or they lack something in their lives, they have traumatic pasts, they've been abused. So show what turned a human being into the mindless worshipper.

And let the villian do his thing.

~ Life of Georgie

As a side note: One thing that I'm probably going to use is this psychological theory (I think it's called Kholberg's theory of moral development). Basically it says there are three types of people. There are people (or children) that accept morals because authority figures/parents say so and have the ability to inflict pain. Next are the conventional (almost everybody) reasoners who except most of the moralities of society simply because that is what society expects and it's how they were raised. The last are post-conventional moral reasoners (how was that for original categories) who essentially make up their own moral code independent of society. The reason I feel that's important to this thread is because both Hitler and Ghandi were post-conventional moral reasoners. Both of them were very ethical men but they didn't always seem so (especially Hitler) because the morals that formed the base of the ethical code were self-generated. If you've got the creativity to come up with post-conventional reasoning you have a HUGE potential for characters.

Or you can just ignore my blabbering.