I don't remember ever rooting for the protagonist of a story, at least not entirely. It's something that's been bugging me since I was a child and I've only been figuring out why over the last couple years. What changed exactly? Well, I've waltzed into my thirties and let go of all sorts of beautiful and hollow notions about myself, like that I was special or that I was special because I understood I was not special. That sort of thing. Last year, I'v read the latest essay collection of one of my favorite authors Chuck Klosterman, which convinced me to finally get out of the closet and admit this:
I root for the bad guy now and I will judge your fiction by the quality of your antagonist.
Sometimes it's antihero, other times I'm openly cheering for the psychopath to figure a way to kill everyone and live to tell about it, but I've walked through that door and there's no turning back. Narratives are a moral medium by nature, but human beings aren't always moral themselves and it's a question of time before you become the bad guy in someone else's life. Every story is framed in order to justify the protagonist's quest for improvement/retribution, but sometimes being the bad guy just is being in the way of what other people really want and standing your ground firm. It's by far my favorite psychological stance in fiction.
A great story always has a great antagonist because it is the primary source of conflict. Putting an evil, controlling bastard in the way is a quick and easy solution, but what if both the protagonist and the antagonist were just after the same thing and the antagonist was ahead? Think back to the first season of Veronica Mars where she's dating the stereotypical Duncan Kane, but wise-cracking murder suspect Logan Echolls is obviously the ideal fit as her boyfriend. Logan quickly became a fan favorite despite that show runners couldn't stand him, so they turned him into a lame antihero, but Logan was the original bad guy: rich, arrogant, baby faced, whipcrack smart. And the got the girl.
One of my favorite "bad" characters of all-time is Breaking Bad's Walter White. He is fascinating to me because he is both the protagonist and the antagonist of the series. Walter is a perfectly written antihero. He is a character that I love, because being a moral, law-abiding citizen never got him anything. It got him a house in the suburbs he needs to work two jobs to afford and a quiet, alienating life with a bossy wife and a handicapped son who is 200% useless to the narrative outside of symbolizing Walter's feeling of underachievement. When Walter is diagnosed with cancer in season one, the logical thing to do would've been to kill himself so his family would inherit insurance money, but what happened was a lot more awesome than that.
See, Walter is an underachieving, but genius chemist who started cooking meth from what he perceived to be necessity, but truth was that he just let go of fear and started doing something for himself. Being a criminal (or a cutthroat entrepreneur) is who Walter White was destined to be. He doesn't care all that much about the money or the drugs, Walter wants to be somebody, to feel like he's done something important before he dies and it's something that is universal. It's understandable and better yet, it works. He claws his way up the underworld ladder during the five seasons of the show and becomes a legend by the time it finishes. The driving force and the source of conflict of Breaking Bad are the same thing: Walter's desire to succeed.
Perhaps my favorite bad guy in recent years is Justified's Boyd Crowder. He is the guy U.S Marshal Raylan Givens is trying to put in prison for the entire duration of the show, but can't. Boyd is the roadrunner to Raylan's Wile E. Coyote. Now, Boyd would be just a classic outlaw antihero is he hadn't spent the first two seasons of the show being a neo-nazi and a Born Again Christian respectively. Boyd Crowder has been a terrible person ON AIR, but what makes him so goddamn endearing is that he has evolved, learned from his mistakes and set priorities for himself while still being an uncompromising violent criminal.
Boyd Crowder is the embodiment of a simple, yet empowering idea: you are not defined by your mistakes as long as you don't let yourself be. He's a bad guy sending a positive message. Now, he's more of a romantic figure than Walter White and therefore he's not as realistic as his actions have very little negative consequences on his life, but it works beautifully anyway because Justified is not a realistic show to begin with. It's a series about how one defines himself in regards to the law and despite that Boyd Crowder is a criminal and a murderer, he has the most romantic and idealistic values of the entire character cast. He is the chaotic freedom we all aspire to, but can't afford to live.
Walter White and Boyd Crowder are bad guys or antiheroes depending where you stand on the moral spectrum. I really believe they're just well-written antagonists which layer the psychological aspect of their respective narrative by being human and sometimes admirable in certain aspects of their personality. There is light and shadow in everybody, and it's something "bad" characters have made peace with. It's why I like them so much. Nothing is black and white. Nuance improves a story tremendously and this is, ladies and gentlemen, why I believe we should learn to love our antagonists a little better.