Why We Love Anti-heroes So Much

There is a title card from Fx’s Legion, in the episode: Crowds of Madness.

It read;

“For what is normal is that upon which nine wise men can agree, leaving the tenth man to swing from the hangman’s rope.”

How well can you actually remain “good” if your world is bad?

Even though Legion's main character had all the elements of good, bad and evil, it did ignite the prospect of how the minds of Antiheroes work and why audiences love them. Freud had some answers, somewhat.

Sigmund Freud is probably the most influential psychologist in history. His theories on the unconscious mind and the drives behind human behavior completely changed how we understand the human psyche.

He once wrote;

"men are far more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine"

A line that really captures the contradictions in human morality and the anti-hero theme almost too perfectly.

On one hand, Freud believed that deep down, people do have a moral compass and want to do good. But at the same time, he recognized that humans are capable of shocking immorality if the right circumstances arise.

As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, "men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved." We have great potential for cruelty, greed, and violence.

Freud theorized that this stems from the constant conflict between our desires and social norms. We repress many of our primal urges in order to function in civilized society. But those dark impulses don't go away - they reside in our unconscious minds, always threatening to bubble up if our moral compass fails us.

Sure, we might think of ourselves as highly ethical people, but Freud cautions us not to be so sure. Given the right circumstances, we could all be capable of terrible deeds because the "immoral" parts of ourselves are always there under the surface, even if we pretend they don't exist.

Freud's whole concept of good vs evil inside the human mind can actually be better interpreted within the context of Antiheroes in cinema.

Antiheroes are intriguing characters that dance on the tightrope between good and evil. I think their allure lies in their ability to cloak their actions in shadows, leaving audiences questioning their true intentions.

We have a character like Dexter Morgan who lives by a moral code but has no qualms about killing criminals in the most gruesome way possible. Or Tony Soprano, who routinely orders hits on many people over the course of the show because he sees it as necessary for his own and his family's survival.

Arya Stark brutally murders all the Freys who slaughtered her family, the Starks. Yes, it's revenge, but even her actions were morally questionable at best.

But we seem to… love these characters and would even go as far as to call some of them heroes.

If we turn to Wikipedia for a definition, it straightforwardly describes an antihero as a main character lacking the conventional heroic qualities of idealism, courage, and morality. The simplicity of this explanation, however, only serves to amplify the complexity that antiheroes bring to stories.

But we can't truly understand the antihero of we don't understand the conventional hero - the archetypal "good guy." According to societal norms, this character is expected to embody unwavering virtue, free from moral ambiguity, and steadfastly treading the path of righteousness.

It's a clear-cut image – the protagonist who doesn't engage in morally questionable actions. Yet, life rarely allows for that level of simplicity.

Can we genuinely confine the essence of "goodness" to a neat and finite concept? Life throws curveballs. Sometimes, situations push us to our limits, making us pull moves we never thought we had in us.

This is where the antihero comes in, a character who doesn't bother labeling himself as a saint or even a sinner. Instead, he's just navigating the shady waters of survival, doing whatever it takes to stay afloat.

Unlike the hero, who wears his moral compass like a badge of honor, the antihero's compass is more like a variable dial, adjusting based on the situation at hand. There's no grand ideology at play – it's a pragmatic dance between achieving goals and the methods used to get there, whether they fall on the moral or immoral side of the spectrum.

Heroes, in the conventional sense, are expected to embody pure goodness, with perhaps a few flaws to make them relatable. But the antihero doesn't neatly fit into this mold. Society might not deem him worthy of the hero title because he lacks that unquestionable righteousness.

Jack Sparrow and Clint Eastwood`s "Man with No Name" are both characters portrayed as selfish, devious but would sometimes go against their better judgements and find themselves doing things that are morally correct.

There's a fascinating complexity to the antihero. While traditional heroes see the world through a crystal-clear lens, envisioning a utopia of goodness, the antihero's view is more nuanced. He might not be out to save the world, but circumstances might push him to exhibit heroic traits when it's convenient or at least very necessary.

But this convenient heroism comes at a cost – the sacrifice of selflessness. Heroes are celebrated for putting others before themselves, holding this quality above all else. The antihero, However, is a master of self-preservation, making choices that benefit him, even if they occasionally align with the hero's playbook.

Most Freudian ideas allude to morality all the time. Take Oedipus complex, for instance, based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who killed his dad and married his mom.

But the one concept that bleeds into our anti-hero analysis is the id, ego, and superego. These are three parts of our personality that fight with each other all the time.

The id is the selfish part of us that just wants to have fun and doesn't care about what other people think. The ego is the part of us that tries to balance the id and the superego. The superego is the part of us that tells us what's right and wrong and makes us feel guilty when we do something bad.

So, the id wants to eat cake for breakfast, the ego says "no, you'll get fat," and the superego says "don't eat cake, it's bad for you."

These three parts of our personality are always fighting with each other, and it's up to our ego to try to keep them all happy.

It's hard to be a good person when the world around you is bad. So sometimes, the anti-hero thinks we have to do things that we know are wrong in order to survive.

For example, if you're living in a war zone, you might have to steal food from other people in order to feed your family. Even though stealing is wrong, it might be the only way to survive.

So, is there such a thing as a truly "good" person? Or is it all just a matter of survival? The most successful antiheroes in cinema and across all fictions still don't have this answer.