[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think that I would base this on the ethics the character adheres to, because different cultures, religions, and philosophies have different ethical standards. I think that "anti-hero" ought to be based more on the structural role of the character.

I arrive at the same conclusion from a different premise. The term arose in discussing literature, and its original sense included (indeed, mostly referred to) characters who played the role of a hero while lacking some of the attractive qualities of a traditional hero. A hero is "a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities"; the anti-hero does the great or brave acts while lacking one or more of the fine qualities or failing to win the admiration. The hero is not necessarily moral and the anti-hero usually not immoral.

For example, Gregory Peck's character in the deconstructionist western The Big Country is an anti-hero because he is more moral than the traditional heroes of westerns: he doesn't brag, he refuses to use violence to assert or gain status, and he is not willing to kill. His social peers patronise him, the ranch hands hold him in contempt, and his fiancée dumps him. That sort of thing never happened to the traditional ideal hero. Nevertheless, he has more real courage than they have, ends the range war by courage and strength of character, and he ends up married to a better woman than his original fiancée.

For a contrast, a traditional hero such as Odysseus could be driven entirely by his own interests, i.e. quite morally neutral, so long as he was charismatic, handsome, brave, and able to kill lots of warriors. I consider the great hero Achilles to be a complete monster, morally, but literarily he is a straightforward hero¹. "Sacker of Cities" was an epithet of respect in much heroic literature.

An anti-hero is a character who is treated as a hero by the narrative but not by the other characters.

Now, other peoples have different customs and ideals, and their heroes are different in from our heroes. But that doesn't make them anti-heroes. Because they defend our enemies against our heroes they are antagonists and often villains. Consider for instance Attila the Hun, who is a monstrous villain in Romance accounts and a hero (in the sense of a great defender of his people, not a protagonist) in three Norse sagas².
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¹ Real-world people gave him semi-divine honours after his death — Alexander and Hephaistion are recorded as performing a sacrifice to him on his supposed tomb — so he was a literal as well as a literary hero.

² Atlakviða, Volsunga saga, and Atlamál.