Antihero

[2] Antihero is a literary term that can be understood as standing in opposition to the traditional hero, i.e., one with high social status, well liked by the general populace.

[7] The concept has also been identified in classical Greek drama,[8] Roman satire, and Renaissance literature[7] such as Don Quixote[8][9] and the picaresque rogue.

He is ridiculed by the Pandavas, but accepted as an excellent warrior by the antagonist Duryodhana, thus becoming a loyal friend to him, eventually fighting on the wrong side of the final just war.

[7] The antihero emerged as a foil to the traditional hero archetype, a process that Northrop Frye called the fictional "center of gravity".

[17] This movement indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, as was the shift from epic to ironic narratives.

[19][20][21] The antihero became prominent in early 20th-century existentialist works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915),[22] Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938),[23] and Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942).

[8][28] The collective protests of Sixties counterculture saw the solitary antihero gradually eclipsed from fictional prominence,[27] though not without subsequent revivals in literary and cinematic form.

[26] During the Golden Age of Television from the 2000s and into early 2020s, antiheroes such as Tony Soprano, Gru, Megamind, Jack Bauer, Gregory House, Dexter Morgan, Walter White, Frank Underwood, Don Draper, Neal Caffrey, Nucky Thompson, Jax Teller, Alicia Florrick, Annalise Keating, Selina Meyer and Kendall Roy became prominent in the most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows.