In addition to the very simple Wikipedia definition, I quite like this one from Urban Dictionary:
"The anti-hero is the hero who does the right thing, albeit with tactics that aren't always what you would call ethical. They are more interested with getting the job done than doing it as virtuously as possible, therefore showing how morally ambiguous they are. The anti-hero has become more popular with society today because people can identify better with the good-guy who sometimes does the not-so-good things; the hero who does no wrong is outdated and is becoming increasingly irrelevant in this day and age. They are the product of a society in which the line between good and bad is becoming harder to tell."
There was something else I read which basically said that anti-heroes are grey, operating somewhere in between the purity of a hero and darkness of the villain, with lots of ambiguity to their methods and character traits.
My current list is quite long!
|