Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
The villains we admire can reveal the qualities we have learned to suppress: anger, ambition, rebellion, and loyalty that survives judgement. The heroes we are taught to follow rarely show that inner conflict. Recognising this does not excuse the villain. It invites us to integrate what we hide, turning anger into honest objection and loyalty into loyalty that speaks before it follows.
A reflection on literature, leadership and the whole self.
The Villain I Preferred Was the Hero the Story Would Not Allow
Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? I have. But I now suspect the question is slightly misdirected. I never liked the villain more than the hero. I liked what the story would not allow the hero to be.
Every hero is an edited self. Storytellers cut away his doubt, his appetite, his temper and his divided loyalties. They do not throw these pieces away. They hand them to the villain. So when we find ourselves drawn to the dark figure across the stage, we are often recognising what was trimmed from the character we were told to admire, and from ourselves.
Consider what the villain is permitted to carry.
1. Anger
The hero must be righteous, never simply furious. The villain may rage openly. Iblis, in Islamic tradition, refuses to bow before Adam and says plainly why: he was made of fire, Adam of clay. It is pride, and it is condemned. Yet it is also the voice of wounded rank that many of us swallow at work every week.
2. Ambition
The hero is called to greatness; the villain reaches for it. Milton understood this so well that his Satan in Paradise Lost receives the finest speeches, and generations of readers have felt their pull. The poem does not endorse him. It simply lets him say what ambition sounds like when it is not dressed as duty.
3. Rebellion
Duryodhana is the antagonist of the Mahabharata, the man who refused to yield even a needle’s point of land. Yet at Poruvazhy in Kerala, a temple honours him. Communities remember refusal, even when they know it was wrong.
The Poruvazhy Peruviruthy Malanada Temple in Kollam, Kerala, is regarded as the only major South Indian temple dedicated to Duryodhana, the controversial antagonist of the Mahabharata.
4. Freedom from explanation
The hero must justify every act. The villain simply acts. Those of us who spend our lives writing reasons for decisions quietly envy that.
5. Loyalty that survives judgement
And here is the villain I have always preferred.
He is a giant who sleeps for months at a time. When he is woken for war, he does not rush to fight. First he tells his king, his elder brother, that the war is unjust, that the abducted woman must be returned, and that the king has brought ruin upon the city. He is rebuked. Then he goes out to battle anyway, knowing how it will end, because the brother who raised him should not face death alone. When his younger brother, who has crossed to the righteous side, pleads with him to follow, he refuses gently and sends him back.
He is Kumbhakarna, as the Tamil poet Kamban portrays him in the Kamba Ramayanam [1].
Why prefer him to the hero? Because Rama stands at the story’s moral centre, the conflict between duty and divided loyalty has to be carried by someone else. Kumbhakarna holds two truths at once: his brother is wrong, and his brother is still his brother. He speaks truth to power and then refuses to abandon it. Most of us live that conflict daily in families, institutions and offices, yet no hero is allowed to show it. The story handed it to a demon.
Now the concession, because this argument can be misused.
1. Liking a villain is a diagnosis, not a permission.
If I admire Kumbhakarna’s loyalty, I must also see where it led him: into a war he knew was unjust, and to his death in it. If Milton’s Satan stirs me, I must remember where the poem lets his ambition land. The villain shows what a suppressed quality becomes when nothing restrains it. My attraction tells me something about myself. It does not tell me what to do.
2. The right response is integration, not imitation.
The anger I hide can become honest objection. The ambition I disguise can be named and governed. The loyalty I feel can remain, but it should speak before it follows, as Kumbhakarna’s did, and it should be free to decline where his was not.
So yes, I have liked a villain more than the hero. But what I liked was not his villainy. It was the part of a whole person that the story, and often our own upbringing, found too inconvenient to leave with the good man.
The villain is not the enemy of the hero. He is the hero’s missing chapter.
Note
[1] The Kamba Ramayanam, also called Ramavataram, is a medieval Tamil retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana by the poet Kamban. It is admired for its poetic richness and for the moral depth it gives to characters on the opposing side, especially Kumbhakarna, the brother of the demon king Ravana.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 17 September 2026
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