Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
I’ll be honest — yes. More times than I’d like to admit.
For me, it’s Erik Killmonger. Not Thanos, not even Loki, as tempting as both are. Killmonger stayed with me long after the credits rolled, and I’ve spent a strange amount of time since then trying to understand why a man who was, by every conventional measure, the antagonist of his story left me quieter and more unsettled than the hero he opposed.
I think it’s because he wasn’t wrong about everything. That’s the uncomfortable truth sympathetic villains force on us. Killmonger grew up outside the golden walls of Wakanda, watching a nation hoard its brilliance while people who looked like him suffered in silence elsewhere. His anger wasn’t manufactured — it was inherited, earned, passed down through absence and injustice. The tragedy isn’t that he was evil. The tragedy is that he was a wounded person who chose the wrong instrument to answer a legitimate grief.
That’s the pattern I keep noticing in the villains I love. They’re rarely villains because they woke up one morning and chose darkness for its own sake. They’re villains because somewhere along the way, pain calcified into philosophy. Hurt people don’t just hurt people — sometimes they build entire worldviews on top of that hurt, and those worldviews can be seductive precisely because they contain a kernel of truth wrapped around a wound.
As someone studying medicine, I think about this in clinical terms sometimes. You learn early that behavior is rarely random — there’s almost always a history behind it, a cause behind the symptom. The villain who lashes out at the world is, in a sense, presenting with a chronic condition nobody diagnosed in time. The hero, meanwhile, often gets to be good because he was lucky enough not to be broken the same way. That’s not heroism, that’s circumstance. And I think that’s what makes heroes feel flat sometimes — not because they’re badly written, but because goodness without cost or history can feel unearned next to villainy that was hard-won through suffering.
There’s a faith dimension to this too, one I can’t separate from how I read these stories. I believe deeply in the idea that no one is beyond redemption, that the line between the saved and the lost is thinner than we like to pretend, and that grace exists precisely because all of us have a little Killmonger in us — some wound we’ve let harden into justification. When I watch a villain like that, I’m not rooting for his methods. I’m mourning what he could have become if someone had reached him before the bitterness set in. That’s not admiration for evil. That’s grief for a road not taken.
It’s also, I’ll admit, a writer’s fascination. I’m working on a novel right now, and one thing I’ve learned is that villains are simply harder to write badly when you give them a real interior life. The moment you let a “bad” character want something understandable — safety, justice, belonging, love — readers stop seeing a cardboard obstacle and start seeing a mirror. Heroes are supposed to inspire us toward who we want to be. But villains like Killmonger do something else — they warn us about who we could become if our pain goes unattended, unspoken, unhealed.
So when I say I liked him more than the hero, I don’t mean I wanted him to win. I mean he made me examine myself more honestly than the hero did. He asked harder questions. He carried a heavier history. And in some strange way, loving a villain like that is really just an act of empathy — a reminder that beneath every “monster” we meet, fictional or otherwise, is usually just someone who was never given the chance to become anything else.
Who’s your villain? I’d genuinely love to know — and why they got under your skin the way this one got under mine.