Thread:Godzillafan93/@comment-6052796-20141004121045/@comment-397235-20141004145342

For other works, let's see:

There's Robert Neville in the most recent version of I Am Legend. He's a lonely guy who once upon a time was a nice, family man and strongly Christian (which is somewhat refreshing, as most of Hollywood seems to subscribe to the Stephen King denomination); once he meets Anna, however, you can see all the bitterness and resentment he's been harboring all this time spill over.

Peter Parker, Mary-Jane Watson, and Harry Osborne all fall into this to varying degrees in Sam Raimi's hit and miss Spider-Man trilogy. Peter, especially in the beginning of the first and most of the third film, is a self-centered prick (and honestly, the whole "Spider-Man no more" thing in the second movie is pretty selfish too); Mary Jane is needy and clingy and not especially sympathetic in the third film, nor is Harry Osborne (though in his case, he's well-written enough, and James Franco is a talented enough actor to pull it off). They try this with Eddie Brock, but he more comes off as a stalker with a crush than anything else.

Tony Stark is definitely this (in pretty much every iteration of his character, actually); Robert Downey Junior is really good at playing these sorts of characters, however (his interpretation of Sherlock Holmes is less a sympathetic jerk and more a socially awkward but well meaning one). Ivan Vanko is definitely this as well: he and Tony have pretty much the same origin story (except Vanko's captivity was his entire childhood and he never figured out how horrible his father was); there's no reason he and Stark couldn't have come to some sort of understanding.

In video games, of course, there's also General Shepherd (who has no first name) from Modern Warfare 2. On the one hand, the man is a traitor and a murderer who started World War III but he did it because he couldn't bear what was happening to the US military after Vietnam and Iraq. Up until he coldly shoots one player character in the gut with his magnum, he's been an extremely likable character (contrasting with John Price, who spends the entirety of the first game telling you how incompetent and worthless you are). His last words, before preparing to finish off the main character, after laying out his motivations, are actually pretty sad: "I know you understand."

In Resident Evil there's Curtis Miller, who, in an effort to get back at the people he's been told were responsible for covering up Raccoon City, causes another bio-hazard in a major metropolitan area, and furthermore injects himself with something far worse, before spending the remainder of the film trying to impregnate his little sister (it...makes sense in context...sort of). However, Curtis is occasionally lucid, and spends these few moments telling Angela to run because he knows she can't save him. By the end of the film, it furthermore becomes clear everything was a set up so a former Umbrella scientist could attempt to sell both viruses on the black market (and in an implied bit of chess-master-maneuvering from Albert Wesker and Excella Gionne, arrange for their own company, Tri-Cell, to gain control of both the viruses and the antidote when said scientist's plans fall through); in that sense, Curtis was just a pawn. Claire Redfield even mentions, that while none of this absolves Curtis of his actions, he's still been just as much a victim as the rest of them, and he was trying to do the right thing.

From the same series there's also Alexander Kozachenko, who joins what amounts to a terrorist organization with his best friend to get revenge on the government of his nation, which had attacked the school he and his wife taught at, killing her and all their students. What makes him a jerk is his release of Las Plaga parasites on the general population, which ends up making things far worse (Plagas don't differentiate between friend or foe, or even combatant and non-combatant: they kill or infect everyone), in the end killing his best friend. He furthermore launches an extremely violent attack on the government using an army of Plaga-controlled Lickers after the war is officially over, killing even more people. In fact, for the vast majority of the film he's the main antagonist (and he beats the crap out of poor Leon Kennedy several times). However, once it becomes clear the government are doing objectionable things as well (such as keeping their own highly illegal stash of bio-organic weapons), he becomes a protagonist, and he, Leon, and the Lickers fight together for a little while (in one of the better fights in the series). What makes Kozachenko interesting is he's able to argue his point to someone like Leon (who, having survived the bio-hazard in Raccoon City and a much smaller, deliberate outbreak in South America, Curtis Miller's engineered outbreak in Harvardville, and having been the first person discover the Plagas absolutely hates BOWs and anyone who will use them) convincingly, he becomes quite a bit more sympathetic.