I have watched Breaking Bad twice, and both times I found myself hoping Walter White would get away with it. Not because I think methamphetamine distribution is good, and not because I had lost track of the bodies. I knew exactly what he had done. I wanted him to succeed anyway. This is one of the stranger experiences television offers, and I think it is worth taking seriously: why do we root for people we would find monstrous in real life?

The Narrative Mechanics of Sympathy

Screenwriters and novelists have long understood that emotional investment follows perspective and sequence rather than moral evaluation. We meet Walter White as a mild, underestimated chemistry teacher who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. By the time he becomes Heisenberg, we have been inside his justifications long enough to understand them, which is not the same as agreeing with them but feels close. The sequence matters enormously. If we met him at the end of the series, we would feel no sympathy at all. Research from the University of Southern California on narrative perspective found that readers and viewers identify most strongly with whoever they follow first, regardless of that character's moral characteristics. This is the origin character effect — the emotional investment created by shared origin point. We were there before things went wrong, and that shared history creates a kind of loyalty that moral evaluation has difficulty overriding.

Empathy as a Cognitive Tool

There is an important distinction between empathy and sympathy that gets lost in casual discussion. Sympathy means feeling bad for someone. Empathy means constructing a model of their inner world — understanding their experience from the inside. When we engage with a villain character, what we are often doing is empathic rather than sympathetic: we understand the internal logic that makes their actions feel, from their perspective, reasonable or even necessary. This cognitive empathy is morally neutral and actually quite valuable. It is the same capacity that allows us to understand how ordinary people become complicit in systems of harm, how radicalization happens, how corruption proceeds incrementally rather than in a single dramatic choice. Villain narratives, when written with craft, are essentially case studies in how moral erosion works.

What the Research Shows About Moral Disengagement

Studies from Tilburg University on villain identification found that audience engagement with morally compromised characters did not reduce participants' real-world moral sensitivity. Viewers could enjoy and identify with a villain within the narrative frame while maintaining their own values outside of it. The researchers described this as moral disengagement within a bounded context — the audience essentially tags the experience as "narrative" and applies different rules to it. This is psychologically sophisticated behavior, not moral failure. The ability to enter a frame where different moral rules apply, engage with it fully, and then exit cleanly is part of what makes fiction valuable. It is also what makes it safe.

The Appeal of Competence

One underappreciated driver of villain empathy is simple competence. Many beloved villains — Hannibal Lecter, Amy Dunne, Tony Soprano — are extraordinarily good at what they do. The pleasure of watching someone execute a plan with precision taps into something separate from moral evaluation. We admire skill in contexts where we would never admire purpose. A skilled surgeon and a skilled pickpocket produce similar aesthetic responses to their craft despite wildly different moral valences. This might explain why villain redemption arcs often feel like a loss to audiences. When the monster becomes good, we lose access to the uncomplicated pleasure of watching them be magnificently terrible. The moral upgrade costs us something. A side note worth following here: this same phenomenon appears in sports, where fans sometimes admire elite athletes who behave badly off the field in ways they would find completely unacceptable in their personal lives. Competence compels something that looks like loyalty, regardless of character.

The Shadow Function

Jungian psychoanalysts would suggest that villain identification allows us to access parts of ourselves — desires for power, for transgression, for being unaccountable — that we manage and suppress in daily life. The villain gives those impulses a proxy. They win the victories we deny ourselves. They say the things we edit before speaking. They act on the anger we process into patience. Whether or not you find that framework persuasive, it points at something real: villain narratives offer a kind of vicarious experience that is not available in stories about people who behave well. And perhaps that is reason enough to keep watching, even when we know exactly what they have done.