To what extent can we sympathise with villains?

      In today's society, villains have taken an important part of the most popular characters of cable TV series. Indeed, those apparently rutheless wrong doers seem to attract the viewer's sympathy. So, we might consider to what extent we can sympatise with vilains. In order to explain that, we will first see how the ant-heroes got out of the manichean vision people had onto them, and then define the limits of this sympathy

Walter White,
Breaking Bad (2008)

 To begin, it sounds important to understand that many things have   changed in the villain's behavior during the last twenty years. the   screenplay writers have gotten them out of their despicable stock   charcater roles and tried to make them more likeable. First, the   antiheroes have become human. They now have very understandable   motivations to do bad things, that can make us appreciate them, since it   is what makes them human. A classical exemple could be Walter White,   the protagonist of the Netflix series Breaking bad, a drug producer and   murderer that started his work so that his family could survive economically after he dies of his cancer. Moreover, some villains really get out of the stereotypical wrong-doer cliché. They allow the series to get new characters, with a tough psycological background, and an undisputable charism. To illustrate that, the Joker is the most logical choice. A warped and evil villain, but with a tough past, which made the movie about him become one of the biggest 2019-2020 blockbuster.

Nevertheless, the sympathy for villains has its own limits; Even if he's got charism and skills, even if he is flawless, an arsonist stays an arsonist, and people won't seriously idolize him. The example of Walter White's humanity had been taken in the first part, but still, somebody producing The top 5 most adictive drug in the word doesn't deserve to be worshiped. Than, I have to talk about the example of Dexter to explain the real point. Doing right by wrong is definitely unfair, and should not be appreciated by people, who could get to take example on them. You don't kill people because they are bad, you put them down to jail.

To conclude, many people sympathise with anti-heroes, in the limit of their own moral judgement. A great litterary piece of work to read, about this notion of  moral judgement would be "beyond good and evil", of Frederich Nieztche.