The last type of the antihero that Prusa brings forward is the dark hero, “a character who has
flaws of character that make them harder to like. They may even come across as not very
good person only to grow and chance into a better person because of events of the story.”
(Mgr. Igor Prusa Ph.D., Towards The Antihero Theory, 2019). While again being able to link
this type of hero to Aristotle in terms of the character being flawed, here Prusa is arguing the
importance of how this type of antihero has the ability to be changed by the events in a story
and may begin as an antihero but emerge at the other end as another type of character.
The case study featuring a dark antihero which I indent to use is Killing Eve (Killing Eve,
BBC, 2018), but specifically, the character Villanelle. Killing Eve is a cat and mouse style
story which follows how MI6 agent, Eve Polastri, attempts to hunt down a wanted assassin,
Villanelle. As a highly acclaimed killer, we see Villanelle commit a string of murders without
much thought. She’s hired for a job and gets it done like it were any other business, very
much like how dark type of heroes are described. While at first Villanelle is shown to be an
emotionless character with no morals or compassion, through specific events that give her
reasons to care about others as well as herself, she starts to see things differently and realise
that maybe what she’s doing is wrong and there could be more to her life than she first
thought. This is clear example of how certain events in a story can affect the dark hero and
start their slow transformation into another type of character.