The Bad Guys; Damon Salvatore

In all story plots and scripts that mankind has created, there's always been a, what we call, bad guy. Who is usually the bad guy? Cinderella's step-mother and her step-sisters. The jealous witch on Sleeping Beauty. Morgana who wanted to prove to be more powerful than Merlin. The Witch of the West, too, who wanted Dorothy's slippers. I could keep on naming the stereotyped bad guys, but we all know that when I pronounce those words, we aren't thinking of the real bad guys.

Who is a bad guy now? Over the years the plots of the stories have developed a new kind of bad guy, a new kind of evil to twist the upcoming of the events. They're more intelligent, they speak to turn the protagonists against each other, they manipulate the clues, they learn, they change.

Since when have bad guys changed? Probably since the fairy tales ended. Flat characters are mostly the evil ones, the antagonists, the ones who don't need to change because they're mean, and that's all you need to know. You hate them instantly, you want them to go away, to vanish from the story so that the hero can have a final ‘Happily Ever After’.

Now things have changed; authors have changed. Because authors have varied their way of writing their antagonists from flat to round, the heroes have taken a change too. But let’s not talk about the heroes, we’re talking about the bad guys, and because of that we’ll take the most round bad guy I’ve found; Damon Salvatore.

We all know Damon; he went back to Mystic Falls because he wanted to make Stefan’s life miserable. Then it turned out that he returned because of Katherine, his long lost love who never gave his heart back. As the show develops, you can see Damon changing into this abyss deep character, one that makes you pity him. You want to help him, knowing that he’s suffering. That he loves Elena, and that he’d protect her.

Then we remember he’s a bad guy. He drinks human blood, he kills, and he doesn’t care about others. His instinct is the same, after all, he’s a vampire. Compared to Stefan, though, people see that Damon is much worse, that he really is the main antagonist of the story, that he is the one to fight for Elena’s love, something that he’ll never have.

And though we see the hero’s dark side, though we learn about the hero’s past (which turns out to be much worse than the bad guy’s), though we see Stefan killing his own father with his own hands, we still think that he’s better. Because he has changed, and because Elena loves him no matter what so do you.

No one pays attention to the drastic change in Damon’s actions. Some do, and those are, what they call themselves, the “Delena Shippers’. People like him because he’s bad, he’s hot, he’s a rebel and he says hilarious things in the most inconvenient of the times. He transformed Vicki and we all hated her for hurting Jeremy and Matt. He murdered Mason but we all knew he was a traitor—notice how Katherine comes back.

What I’m trying to say is that we all love the bad guy only if he’s round, only if he changes, only if we see his weakness. Because let’s be honest here; we all know that we are going to see the hero’s weakness as a massive part of the plot, when he almost dies and then comes back to life. There can be many heroes, but there’s always a main one. And with that main hero, we have a main bad guy. Stefan Salvatore, and Damon Salvatore.

Again—as I’m getting side tracked—, my point is that; the bad guy has the most tragic story. He’s the misunderstood one, the one with a reason to be evil if he’s a round character, which is in most of the stories in present-time. We like them because we hate them, because we know that once we’ve felt like them. We fear them. But above all we pity them. Because we’ve once felt like that too.

The purpose of the bad guy is above all twisting the plot, but also getting even the most heartless readers or watchers to pity them.