Identifying With The Enemy

I remember back in high school we did a lot of Shakespeare in English class. We did Othello one year and we had to write a literary essay on it. I took a very different approach to the whole subject. Most people would say that Othello was the tragic hero whereas Iago was the antagonist. I, on the other hand, wrote that it was Iago that was the hero, and Othello was the true villain. I'm not going to go into the thesis now, but it does illustrate a point. I have always had the tendency to understand, pity, even like the so called "villain".

True this may seem like an odd way of looking at things, and you would be right, the bad guy is supposed to be loathed, hated. It is the hero that we should identify with. And yet, at least to me I find it hard to do.

When you boil down a character to its essence, when you look at their qualities, their motivations, their thinking process, their dreams, the villain is, well, more real, more human then the hero. I guess it is because we, I, can see myself in them. I find myself commiserating with such characters because I can see myself in their shoes, I understand what drives them because their motives are essentially human.

It's not that I root for the bad guys to win, for evil to triumph over good. Rather it is the opposite. It is just that I have this desire for the villain to achieve redemption. A silly Idea, I know, but those villains are just like me.