Why Do We Love Bad Boys?
There’s something about a bad boy…
From Stefan Salvatore to Eric Northman,
what is it about those bad boys that sets our pulses racing? We might crave the
happy ever after with the nice guy, but we all want to dabble in the dark side
– who didn’t find Spike more fun than Angel, after all, with his peroxide hair,
the leather coat and the sexy British snark? It was enough to make you overlook
the terrible accent. It’s not exactly a new phenomenon – you just have to look
at a book like Wuthering Heights, where Cathy’s safe marriage never makes up
for the wild passion of her tortured, tempestuous relationship with the brooding
and borderline-demonic Heathcliff. We even like our good guys with a hint of
darkness – Angel going Angelus, Stefan turning Ripper; even Sam Winchester got
sexier once he started guzzling demon blood.
Partly, of course, this is because the
devil gets all the best lines: the good guys are often left with little but
po-faced sincerity. Undying love is all
well and good, but sometimes a girl likes a laugh: and all too often writers
seem to think that being a hero means being serious all the time. You only get
to be sarcastic if you’re a loveable rogue, Han Solo-style , and then it’s
proof of your roguishness. You could argue, of course, that there’s the world
of difference between that ‘loveable rogue’ type – think Han Solo, Mal Reynolds
or Dean Winchester and the genuine bad boy so prevalent in vampire fiction (let’s
not forget, both Eric and Spike are stone cold killers, and Damon has not only
casually killed a lot of women, he has also compelled plenty to have sex with
him – which is basically rape). But deep down, the fantasy is the same: that
under that rough exterior beats a heart of gold, and all they need to change
them is the love of the right woman. That woman being, of course, us.
You can argue it’s a pernicious ideology –
how many women have stayed in awful or abusive relationships because they think
‘he’ll change!”? Certainly it’s a terrible, terrible
way to live. But who said fantasies have to be politically correct? If that
were the case, nobody alive would have bought 50 Shades. The very point of a
fantasy is that it allows you to explore your own limits, to vicariously
indulge in behaviours that in life are beyond the pale: personally, I’m a woman
who only travels first class on trains and stays in hotels with cable TV and
great room service: I’d last about 5 minutes ‘roughing it’. Does that stop me
fantasizing about Dean Winchester sweeping me off into the horizon in the
Impala to live a life on the road? Hell, no.
Because the bad guys appeal to our own wild
side – we might live by the rules, but who doesn’t dream about behaving as
badly as we want to, damn society and the consequences? Bad boys don’t live by
anyone’s rules but their own: often, we want them simply because we want to be them, to have that freedom ourselves.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Elena tells Damon, in The Vampires Diaries, and he
replies, “But stupid is more fun.” And sometimes you can’t argue with that.
[You might wonder how I approached this
when I wrote the love triangle in my own book, Dark Dates: how to avoid the
boring hero? Simple: I made them both bad boys. Problem solved – and a LOT more
fun to write….]
Tracey, thanks so much for this awesome post! You definitely know your bad boys!
Tracey, thanks so much for this awesome post! You definitely know your bad boys!
Her work has appeared in magazines as diverse as Sky, Printer’s Devil, Yours and Woman’s Weekly, as well as having been performed on the radio . Her first play, Bystanders, was premiered as part of the New Writing Season at Baron’s Court Theatre earlier this year. She also a regular contributor to online theatre magazine Exeunt (www.exeuntmagazine.com) and writes the Fangirl Unleashed column for www.unleashthefanboy.com
Her blog http://bodyofageekgoddess.blogspot.com was shortlisted for this year’s Cosmopolitan Blog Awards.
