Character that use bad means to achive good results.

If one collides with a hero, they’re both annihilated.

An anti hero is someone who’s TECHNICALLY (caps because they really push the limits of that technicality) doing heroic things but does so in the most questionable heroic ways.

Deadpool: Shoots opposition in the face and several other body parts while laughing and quiping about it. Then shoots the corpse to set up a joke.

Harley Quinn: Actively chooses to let her hyenas rip you apart instead of killing you herself because you were cruel to animals so lol at your screams.

Jack (Mass Effect 2/3): Will do the most fucked up shit to your entire body, insides and outs, and then power slam you into a singularity because she got dragged into Shepard’s nonsense and she just wants to go back to her fucking bed.

Vegeta from DBZ after the Saiyan Saga is an Anti-hero. Fights the bad guys, but only for his own ego.

Heros and anti-heros are united in that they genuinely want to do good. They just differ in the means (or what they’d allow to use as means) to their ends. For example, a hero will vehemently refuse to blow up a street market while an anti-hero might consider it if they deem it to be sufficiently helpful to their end.

I’d rather look at it as a sliding scale with “will never do anything bad” on one end, and “a villain who has good intentions” on the other. And even those two ends are subject to the questions “What do you mean by ‘’bad?” and “What do you mean by ‘good intentions’?” Thus, I think while heros and anti-heros across stories and genres have commonalities, one story’s anti-hero might as well be a hero in another story and that the best way to judge a character being a hero or an anti-hero is in the light of the story they’re in.

There is a definition of what a narrative anti hero is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihero

What is this ongoing trend of encouraging opinions to refine accepted terminology and culture? Just make up your own new words instead of diluting the meaning of existing ones into slop.

A character who either does the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong things for the right reasons as a kind of twisted version of a hero. Really any hero type character that doesn’t do the right things for the right reasons.

Punisher is an anti-hero because he takes things way too far.

Han Solo is an anti-hero because he is a scoundrel who happened to do the right thing a few times.

There’s a lot of overlap with villains but whereas true villains are irredeemable, anti-heroes show some humanity or empathy or ethics in some context and have vulnerability.

John Constantine is a good example. He will do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing one of his oldest friends to eternal damnation to do it.

And his past is littered with people he’s done that to. It’s not a one off “Oh, sorry mate, only way to get this done is to… you know, infest you with a swarm of demon bugs…”

Han Solo? Really? Are you 5?

Of course there are wrong answers, otherwise the term has no meaning.

To me, an anti-hero is a character in a story who does not try to be a hero, and is not motivated by a heroic drive, but rather is selfish, and maybe stumbles upon doing the right thing in the end.

Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is an example of this.

A good guy with the affectations of a bad guy.

Like Mario’s brother.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihero

Although it’s often written into the story to make them more sympathetic, I don’t think an anti-hero needs to do the right thing when it matters. We can root for the thief in a heist movie even if he never really does the right thing.