Top Ten Tuesday is an original weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish.
This Week’s Theme:
Villains in Books
Initial Thoughts:
I’ll be honest: I find myself enjoying villains more than their heroic counterpart as they’re simply more interesting to me. (Not saying I’m interested in evil things though.) What I appreciate is when villains are bad (but good) but actually but (but actually good).
It’s all in perspective.
Chaos Walking Trilogy (Ness)
Mayor Prentiss epitomizes my previous rationale.
Scythe (Shusterman)
First off: I’m so excited for all you readers who are excited to read this book. It’s wonderful. That being said, there’s a Scythe in this story who holds a philosophically sound rationale to gleaning (killing) the masses.
A Darker Shade of Magic (Schwab)
Holland is a cinnamon roll that straddles the line of anti-hero and antagonist.
The Grisha Trilogy (Bardugo)
The Darkling just wants to be your friend.
Coraline (Gaiman)
The Other Mother highlights how perfectly imperfect the mundane life is and why the baddie side can be appealing.
Game of Thrones (Martin)
Joffrey is kind of an asshole. Ramsay is an even bigger asshole. Stannis’ shenanigans was hilarious. And the Frey lineage just don’t exist to me anymore. But I think the character who takes the take for me is Cersei. She might not win but she’s played a damn good game.
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Although I am very much Team Fellowship in this story, gotta hand it to this enigma for ruining everyone’s lives.
Gone Girl (Flynn)
I’m a sheep. I was perusing some lists and saw this mentioned and thought “yes, Nick and Amy are all kinds of messed up“. (I was tempted to say the real antagonist are the peeps who stole Amy’s stash of money easy peasy but that was totally her own fault.)
Jessica Jones/Daredevil (Marvel)
Maybe this is a cop out to include comic/graphic novel/manga to books but Kilgrave and Kingpin are awesome. I haven’t watched the entirety of DD Season 2 or Luke Cage Season 1 but anything in the Marvel verse is solid.
Afterthoughts:
I’d rather sit down for the Symposium of Villains and Antiheroes rather than the unicorns and rainbows and shit at the Protagonist Convention (if such a thing exists…)
Cheers,
Joey
connect:
afterthoughtAn // twitter
anotherafterthought // goodreads
picturevomit // instagram
thoughts and afterthoughts. 
There NEEDS to be a Symposium of Villains and Antiheroes!! And I’m very excited for Scythe!
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But…unicorns. Also I’m just going to assume you like evil things. Haha just kidding.
I want The Darkling to be my friend. But he’s NOT REAL. I really want to read about more antiheroes. They are really cool. If you have any recs, you should give them to me asap. (Does Vicious count?)
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Nick and Amy were a great steal. Such horribly good bad characters. You can’t help but hate them.
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I feel that villains just seem to lend a little more flavor to a story for me. We expect a hero to be heroic and go on to save the day, but a villain is a wild card. The darker characters fascinate me. Great post. This has made me want to read “A Darker Shade of Magic” even more!
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