What do you call a character that's a villain and a hero?

batman haha???

A conflicted character? I have no idea. I wasn’t even aware that you had a character like that.

I think you would generally say they were an anti-hero. An anti-hero is somebody who fights for a good cause (or what they believe to be one), but uses the methods of a villain to achieve their goals. Dexter Morgan (from the novels, and the series Dexter) might be a good example of an anti-hero.

Batman is a good example actually of an anti-hero, he’s basicallly a vigilante, but one who fights for the good of society.

Good question. Here are some other dimensions: 1. Perspective/perception - one person’s hero is another person’s villain (think Obama or bin Laden) - this is very common in real life. 2. Dual personality (think Incredible Hulk) where alternating sides can change in a moment,or briefly exhibit one overlaid onto the other. 3. The saintly figure who ought to be a shining example, but has a major flaw, e.g. alcoholism, or one that simply doesn’t show until it kinda leaks out (think the evangelist and the call-girl scenario); the media are expecially fond of this one, in case we assume the saintly bit makes the flaw ok. However, they tend to ignore most routinely saintly people, unless one of them is actually courting publicity - usually a bad sign that they’ll dangle for if a fatal flaw comes out later!

I tend to think of an anti-hero as someone who has the right idea, but lacks the resourcefulness to achieve the end-goal. Batman is particularly interesting, as he represents a cultural concept of ‘one man can make a real difference’. His origins are deeply buried in fundamental belief - he’s an Angel. To ordinary and uninformed humans in both comic and real life, his inexplcable abilitities are God-like - hence he has a cult following in real life. Many other super-heroes are conceptually similar, hence the capes and flying or gravity-defying attribute (think X-Men’s Angel character).

LIke Zuko from Avatar: the last Airbender. Just saying!

Excellent! Once ur sensitised to an idea, suddenly it’s everywhere you look - yet you may never have noticed before! The movies are rich with Angel characters. If you look real close, you’ll notice that for most of the 20th century, all the Hollywood blockbusters were biblical in some way. They went out of fashion; yet have a look through the blockbusters since 1980. I think you’ll find that a large number still feature people in epic stories, with exceptional abilities and powers that biblical people would certainly have considered divine. The French have a truly awesome saying; The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same. lol. Cultural characteristics seldom change, and this can tell us much as to what motivated people 2-5,000 years ago. Cultural studies are a microscope on the past and present, and can help us see the future. Look for the patterns and you’ll see what I mean. :)

If you look closer and think further, you’ll notice that super-villains in today’s movies are various types of demon, with ‘powers’ ranging from large-scale subversion (Godfather & mob bosses in general, Lex Luther, the Tron villain, Sauron, etc) to flight (Green Goblin, etc), to pestilence, plague and damnation (Mummy, etc) in many forms. Examples of duality come with Freddy Kruger and various teen-scare flicks, where the good side of the character is subsumed by the ‘possessing spirit’ that is resident from go - and we may or may not get a glimpse of the underlying ‘good spirit’ at the end of the movie. If you look closely, you’ll see the same things in Shakespeare, Marlow and their contemporaries, and in Greek plays, and in the Mystery play tradition, and in early music which is integral to dance in cultures that appear to be pre-biblical. No surprise then, to find similar characters in the Bible itself. All these works are describing aspects of the human story from different perspectives, but like the vase/2 people illusion, it takes an effort to see the second image. The Third image escapes all but a tiny percentage of close Lookers.

like theres a character in my story who has a second soul. She saves people but then she can became very violent and starts killing anybody that gets in her way. Also she steals sometimes and is sometimes cold hearted when she’s not caring. But is there a type of character that is a hero and a villian?

yeah I do but I wonder if theres a name for a character like that?

Gt storyline! A different take on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, maybe? Do you not think Dr Jekyll is a hero and villain in he same person? Or that bin Laden is a villain to the West, but a hero to a smaller population? Duality is innate to humans, that’s why medieval lit often features good/bad angels - they represent the left/right sides of the brain. They didn’t have the vocab to describe neural processing in those days, so they explained it in terms of what it Seemed to look like. This feature ripples through all older literature and will continue to run through modern lit until such time as less-technical terms for left and right-sidedness become appreciated and commonplace. This is the pattern seen with other emerging wisdoms, e.g. werewolves was the popular explanation for ergot poisoning in districts that ate a lot of stale rye bread in their diet. In earlier times, a common peasant meal was to stew stale bread with beer. Filling and cheap, so they ate it a lot. In tiny doses, it’ll fix your migraine, in big doses it’s a major hallucinogen producing remarkably consistent imagery. If you go back further in time, you can see why the ‘magic potion’ concept was so widely accepted in a wide range of cultures - and still is. Aphrodisiacs have a formidable reputation, but none actually seem to do much to the libido except in people who heartily Believe they work. But I digress!