Do you consider Vito Corleone a villain?

Do you consider Vito Corleone a villain?

It always bugged me that AFI put him on their 'best villains' list, when he isn't even close to being the antagonist of that story or really even an evil dude in general.

> he le did le nothing le wrong le meme

please kill yourself

You can be a villain without being an antagonist, the same as you can be a hero without being a protagonist.

He's certainly not a decent human being.

That being said, I wouldn't class him as top 100 villains, no.

Of course he's a villain. What a stupid fucking question.

I enjoyed De Niro in part 2, however I felt Vito stepped into and accepted criminality rather quickly in contrast to Michael.

How is he a villain? I don't think you should label all of the criminals in a story as 'villains'.

I didn't say he didn't do anything wrong, dipshit, learn to read.

>I don't think you should label all of the criminals in a story as 'villains'
Not if their crime is minor shoplifting or some pirated dvd's, no.

Corleone is a mob boss. He murders, assaults, bribes and extorts. If you don't see him as particularly villainous then I question your morality.

There is a difference between being 'villainous' based mostly on implication and playing the 'villain' role in a story.

Take the Terminator in T2 - he is villainous by implication too, he shoots cops and he is a literal death machine from the future designed to wipe out humanity and yet, in that film, he is not the villain.

but the film is centric on the Corleone family, he isn't a villain unless they switched the POV to someone in the police or something similar

I can't see him as the villain in the story. He's villainous, however.

>There is a difference between being 'villainous' based mostly on implication and playing the 'villain' role in a story.
No, I entirely agree with you. I said that. He doesn't deserve to be on the AFI list, because he is not "the villain" of the story. I'm with you.
He is, however, a villain. Some idiot obviously decided that fit into the parameters of the list, when it should not have.

Your Terminator example is bad, though. Just saying. A better example would be something like Walter White, or Dexter, or Tony Soprano. All of those are also villains, yes, but they are not antagonists. There's a distinction.

>he is villainous by implication too
To understand if character is villain you have to use character's motivation. Terminator shoots cops not because he is evil but because he just does not know better.

>literal death machine from the future designed to wipe out humanity
Not anymore.

Protagonist can be a villain, you know.

because hes there to save the boy and not destroy the world? T2 was the hero, T1000 was the villain.

Objectively youre right, but its not the case here.

Is everyone here retarded?
How is he a villain?

Exactly and yet, by his actions and his 'occupation' (or function) one might be quick on the draw to label him a villain. He is 'villainous' to an extent, and characters in the film sometimes treat him as such, but he's not a villain.

But everything he did was for the good of his family and his community. He was noble for a mafia don.

Is he an evil character? Yes.
Is he important to the plot? Yes.

Vito is a villain/hero byproduct - the anti-hero.

Well if we go by the Google definition he isn't

But, he is involved in crime and the deaths of people, so he's an anti hero for sure

He's not.

Vito never killed anyone who didn't deserve it and always used his power for good.

It was Michael who grew up spoiled and exercised power for the sake of power.

>it's a tv-thinks-hero-is-synonymous-with-protagonist episode

Is Ozymandias a villain?

He's not the protagonist though

Does AFI really have any good opinions?
To me they just retain a status to many people because of their name and history, but their lists to me are always really bad.

Good question.

I would say that, yes, he is the villain of that story. To me, being a villain requires two things:
>You need to be a bad dude who does bad things
>You need to be integral to the plot, working against another central character

So that guy Rorschach kills over that girl? Not a villain. He's just a piece of shit and a minor (albiet important) character in the story.

But Ozymandias is the antagonist of the story, he's the guy they're going after since issue one, even though they don't know it at the time. And, despite his intentions, he does kill millions of people and basically takes over the world. The fact that he does those two things, even if he did think he was saving some lives, makes him the story's villain.

Vito, on the other hand, while he is a bad dude doing bad things, does not work against our central character(s), he fights alongside them, helps them out, etc. He's missing that adverse connection to the protagonist(s) that would solidify him as a villain.

He's not on the list.
Michael is.

You're right, I goofed and misremembered which Godfather character they put on the list.

Lisa from The Room needs to be put under Best Villains.

>Lisa from The Room
THAT FUCKING BITCH

Whether or not Vito is a villain casts a mortal man in the role of an omniscient being, like he could know every outcome of every actio. We saw in Godfather 2 how an immigrant of meager origins came to prominence, even governing over an entire crime family - this happened bit by bit, compromise after compromise justified by serving his family. This slippery chain of choices transformed the boy into the man into the din. You should wish to be as capable as the Don, though not wish to share his position. That is why The Godfather is timeless, it is a story of a man doing the best he can to provide even through nefarious means. While Vito was successful by many measures it's still tragic because he was always having to defend, deal with business, look over his shoulder. Even at his daughter's wedding he was doing business. Micheal's life is even more a tragedy because he did not even have his family when in his Autumn years. Neither man wanted to be bad or suffer, but they both did because they became entangled bit by bit in the world of organized crime