An antihero is a protagonist who lacks the qualities a hero is supposed to have. They might be selfish, cowardly, dishonest, bitter or simply out for themselves — and the story is still theirs. You follow them, you often want them to succeed, and you would be uncomfortable defending them out loud.
A villain opposes the protagonist. An antihero is the protagonist. The difference is structural, not moral.
Not a villain, not a dark hero
These three get mixed up constantly. A villain is defined by position: they stand against whoever the story follows. A dark hero is still a hero — grim, violent, brooding, but fundamentally pointed at the right target. An antihero is defined by deficit: they occupy the hero's chair while missing the hero's virtues.
Which means a story can have both. An antihero protagonist with a villain opposite them is extremely common, especially in crime fiction. If you are writing the other side of that pairing, how to write a villain is about the opposition specifically.
The varieties
The reluctant one. Capable and decent underneath, but refuses the role and has to be dragged into it. The gentlest form, and the most popular. The pragmatist. Does the necessary thing and does not pretend it was noble. Common in war novels, spy fiction and politics. The self-destructive one. Their worst enemy is themselves; the plot is often just the environment their decline happens in. The genuinely unpleasant one. Vain, cruel or petty, and the book does not redeem them. The hardest to pull off, because the reader needs another reason to stay.
Why readers stay
Because likeability is not what holds attention. Four things do, and an antihero needs at least one.
Competence. We will watch anyone who is extremely good at something. Honesty with us. A character who lies to everyone except the reader builds a conspiratorial loyalty that is very hard to break. A wound we understand. Not an excuse — an explanation. A line they will not cross. One rule, however arbitrary, gives the reader somewhere to stand.
What does not work is apologising for them. If the narration keeps explaining that they are secretly good, the tension that made them interesting drains away. Let them be what they are and let the reader do the judging.
They are often unreliable, but not always
Antiheroes are frequently first-person narrators, and a self-serving person narrating their own story will shade the truth. That overlap is so common that the two terms get used interchangeably, which is wrong: an antihero can narrate with brutal accuracy, and a saintly narrator can be completely unreliable. The techniques are separate, and what is an unreliable narrator covers the other one.
Where to start reading
Plenty of the canonical examples are out of copyright. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky is the foundational text of the guilty, self-justifying protagonist. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte gives you a romantic lead who is frankly cruel, and refuses to soften him. Vanity Fair by Thackeray has Becky Sharp, a social climber the novel admires and condemns at once. Notes from Underground, also Dostoevsky, is a short, bracing monologue by someone who despises himself and you.
Among modern books, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley is the clean textbook case: a charming murderer you want to see get away with it. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl handed the role to characters readers had not often seen in it. Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself is a fantasy cast made almost entirely of them.
In Turkish literature the type appears early and often; Oguz Atay's narrators are self-aware, self-sabotaging and very funny about it. If that is unfamiliar ground, Turkish literature for beginners is a starting point.
If you are writing one
Decide early whether the book agrees with them. A story that quietly endorses a selfish protagonist is a different book from one that lets them fail, and readers can tell when the author has not decided. Give them one relationship they handle badly and care about anyway, because that is where the reader's sympathy actually comes from. And resist the late redemption unless you have earned it over the whole book — a conversion in the last chapter reads as the author losing their nerve.
One more practical thing: antiheroes are polarising, and that is useful information you can only get from readers. Published chapter by chapter, you find out in week one whether people are gripped or repelled — which is part of why we built Arwy, our Android reading and writing app, around serialising and per-line comments. If you would rather nobody judges a difficult protagonist until the full arc exists, finish the manuscript privately first; that is a sound plan, and Arwy is the wrong tool for it.
Reading a book with a protagonist you cannot defend? Find someone else arguing about them. Arwy is on Google Play.