Red Flags Look Better Under Good Lighting
Why toxic characters become irresistible, and what happens when that fascination follows us into real life
Content warning: This article discusses stalking, controlling and abusive behaviour, murder, violence, sexual abuse of a child and the romanticisation of real offenders.
There are fictional people I adore who, if they appeared outside my house at two in the morning, would have me calling the police before they finished their first emotionally devastating monologue. Edward Cullen watches Bella sleep. Damon Salvatore has a body count that should make accepting a drink from him feel like an objectively terrible decision. Klaus Mikaelson can be tender, wounded and ridiculously charming until somebody irritates him and suddenly there is another massacre to explain. Joe Goldberg spends entire seasons narrating stalking and murder so calmly that there are moments when you almost have to remind yourself that no, actually, he is not making a good point.
And it is not only men. Amy Dunne lies, manipulates and kills. Villanelle is an assassin. Jennifer Check literally eats boys. Yet give a dangerous woman a fabulous wardrobe, a sharp enough line and the right soundtrack and suddenly the internet is talking about supporting women's rights and women's wrongs.
We know these characters are terrible. We like them anyway, and I do not think that means there is secretly something wrong with us. Fiction has always given us a safe place to explore people and situations that would be disastrous in reality. Loving Klaus Mikaelson as a character does not mean I would like Klaus Mikaelson anywhere near my actual family.
What interests me is how differently the red flags can look once a story gets hold of them. Stalking becomes devotion. Possessiveness becomes protection. Obsession becomes passion. Cruelty becomes confidence. Somewhere between the casting, the point of view, the tragic backstory and the good lighting, behaviour we would recognise as frightening in real life can start looking strangely romantic on screen or on the page.
Why Toxic Characters Rarely Look Toxic at First
Stories do not simply show us people. They teach us how to look at them.
Film and television can do that literally. Casting, lighting, music, costume and camera work all shape the way we experience a character before we have consciously decided what we think of them. If somebody enters a room beautifully dressed while the soundtrack swells and the camera spends several seconds admiring their face, the production has already made a choice about how it wants us to see them.
Books do the same thing differently. A novel can put us inside somebody's head, explain the wound beneath the cruelty and show us the vulnerability nobody else gets to see. We understand what frightens them, what happened to them and why they behave the way they do. Understanding someone is not the same as excusing them, but storytelling can make the gap between the two surprisingly easy to cross.
Edward Cullen is almost too perfect an example. Strip Twilight of the paranormal romance and some of his behaviour belongs in a very different genre. He watches Bella while she sleeps without her knowing. He follows her. He is intensely protective and sometimes treats keeping her safe as more important than allowing her to decide what risks she is willing to take.
But we never encounter those behaviours in isolation. We encounter them through Bella, who wants him. We know Edward is obsessed with her, but we also know he is terrified of hurting her. His constant attention is framed as evidence of the intensity of his love rather than evidence that Bella should probably change her locks.
That does not mean Twilight taught an entire generation to seek controlling relationships. It means framing matters. A behaviour can remain objectively questionable while the fantasy surrounding it changes how pleasurable it is to experience in a story.
He Is Terrible to Everyone Except You
Damon Salvatore and Klaus Mikaelson offer another version of the same appeal. Neither character requires us to believe he is morally good. In fact, much of the attraction comes from knowing he is not.
Both men are violent, selfish and capable of appalling things, but the audience is also given access to their humour, grief, insecurity and fear of abandonment. Then romance adds something even more seductive. We see selective softness.
There is an obvious fantasy in being the one person who can reach somebody nobody else can. The man who terrifies everyone else becomes gentle with you. The character who trusts nobody tells you the thing he has never told anyone. You are not merely loved. You are exceptional enough to reveal the person underneath the monster.
In reality, somebody being horrible to everybody except you is not particularly reassuring. Fiction can make that promise safely because the writer controls the universe. The story can guarantee that you really are the exception. Real people come with no such guarantee.
A Dangerous Woman Gets a Different Story
It would be easy to turn this entire conversation into one about women being attracted to dangerous men, but we are perfectly capable of becoming fascinated by toxic women too. We simply tend to package their appeal differently.
Amy Dunne is fascinating because Gone Girl allows her to articulate something recognisable about the expectations placed on women while also making her manipulative, abusive and violent. The fact that Amy can say something perceptive about gender does not make everything she does an act of feminist liberation, yet she has still become a cultural icon.
Villanelle gives us another version. She is a murderer, but she is also funny, stylish, confident, unpredictable and magnetic. Her clothes are part of the pleasure of watching her. So is her humour. So is the chemistry between her and Eve. The programme does not merely ask us to observe an assassin. It makes that assassin enormously entertaining company.
The language changes too. A dangerous man becomes tortured, protective or misunderstood. A dangerous woman can become a femme fatale, an avatar of female rage or simply "mother" if the internet approves of her enough. Some of that is playful, and there is something genuinely satisfying about watching women occupy roles fiction once reserved almost exclusively for men. But being fascinating does not make a character right, and gender does not transform cruelty into empowerment.
Fiction Lets Us Want What We Would Run From
There is one fairly important difference between Klaus Mikaelson and somebody who behaves like Klaus Mikaelson in real life. Klaus cannot hurt you.
Fiction gives us danger with a safety rail. We can enjoy jealousy without somebody actually controlling who we speak to. We can enjoy obsession without discovering somebody outside our bedroom window. We can experience dominance, revenge, violence and emotional intensity while remaining completely protected from their consequences.
That is why I find the idea that enjoying toxic characters must reveal some secret desire to experience the same thing in reality rather simplistic. I can enjoy a haunted house without wanting my own house haunted. I can find Hannibal Lecter fascinating without accepting a dinner invitation.
Sometimes the attraction exists precisely because the danger is fictional. The story allows us to keep the intensity and remove the consequences.
The more uncomfortable question is what happens when the person is no longer fictional.
Then the Danger Becomes Real
Beauty and charisma do not stop influencing us because somebody is real. Psychology has a name for one part of this. The halo effect describes the way an overall positive impression of somebody can influence our judgement of their other qualities. If we already perceive a person positively, we may also be more inclined to see them as intelligent, competent or trustworthy, even when those qualities have not actually been demonstrated.
That does not mean finding someone attractive makes us incapable of understanding that they committed a crime. Human judgement is considerably more complicated than that. What attraction can influence is the narrative we begin constructing around a person.
Real offenders acquire narratives just as fictional characters do. Newspapers choose photographs. Documentaries reconstruct childhoods. Court footage provides expressions, voices and personalities. Social media cuts those personalities into clips, adds music and circulates the most flattering thirty seconds without requiring anybody watching to sit with the hours of evidence surrounding them.
The person begins to function like a character, except nobody wrote the victims.
From Prison Letters to Fan Edits
Ted Bundy remains one of the clearest examples of how attractiveness and charisma can become tangled with the mythology surrounding a murderer. His public image has long been accompanied by descriptions of him as handsome, articulate and charming. Women wrote to him while he was imprisoned, and The Washington Post reported that thousands of letters reached his death row cell. Carole Ann Boone married him during his trial.
There is something unsettling about how thoroughly his appearance became part of the story. Bundy murdered women, yet decades of popular fascination have repeatedly returned to the apparent contradiction between what he looked like and what he did, as though violence ought to announce itself on somebody's face.
Perhaps that is part of the appeal of the "handsome monster". We would like danger to look dangerous. It is comforting to imagine that the person we should avoid will somehow advertise the fact. A conventionally attractive, charming person disrupts that fantasy because they look ordinary enough to be trusted.
Wade Wilson shows what the same fascination looks like in the social media era. Wilson was convicted in Florida of murdering Kristine Melton and Diane Ruiz and was sentenced to death in 2024. Before sentencing, the Lee County Sheriff's Office said he had received nearly 4,000 online messages, hundreds of photographs and dozens of letters, while women also wrote to the judge asking that his life be spared.
Bundy's admirers had prison letters and courtroom galleries. Now there are edits.
A clip can isolate a smile, slow down courtroom footage, add music and remove everything that happened before and after those few seconds. That is a form of storytelling too. It decides where we look and what stays outside the frame.
The problem is that Kristine Melton and Diane Ruiz were not supporting characters in somebody else's dark romance. They were real women who were murdered. Once actual victims exist outside the frame, he's hot though becomes a much less harmless observation.
When the Perpetrator Is Pretty, Who Gets to Be the Victim?
The same bias becomes even more revealing when the perpetrator is an attractive woman, because gender changes the cultural story we tell about both the offender and the victim.
Pamela Rogers Turner was a Tennessee teacher who engaged in sexual conduct with a 13 year old male pupil. In 2005, she entered no contest pleas to four counts of sexual battery by an authority figure. The Tennessee Court of Appeals records that she was his teacher and that he was thirteen, so the imbalance of age and authority is not ambiguous.
Yet her appearance became part of the coverage almost immediately. A contemporary CNN report introduced the case with the words "another young, attractive teacher", while local reporting later described how the boy's mother had encountered claims that her son had somehow "gotten lucky".
That response is revealing because attractiveness did not merely influence how some people viewed the adult perpetrator. It affected whether they were willing to recognise the child as a victim.
Reverse the genders and the absurdity becomes obvious. Few people would congratulate a 13 year old girl because an attractive 27 year old male teacher sexually abused her. Yet cultural assumptions about masculinity can turn a boy's victimisation into something he is supposedly fortunate to have experienced.
This is where the conversation stops being about whether attractive people receive more attention. The way we romanticise a perpetrator can also change how seriously we take the person they harmed.
Maybe the Red Flag Was Never the Attractive Part
I do not think most people love Edward Cullen because he watches Bella sleep, or Damon because he is violent, or Villanelle because she murders people. The attraction is usually everything the story has attached to those behaviours.
Edward offers absolute certainty. Damon offers humour, vulnerability and emotional intensity. Klaus combines enormous power with a terrified fear of abandonment. Villanelle has confidence, style and seemingly no concern about whether the world approves of her. Those are attractive qualities wrapped around people doing deeply unattractive things.
That is what good storytelling can do. It changes the context around the red flag until the behaviour begins to look like evidence of something else. Jealousy becomes proof that somebody cares. Obsession becomes proof that nobody has ever mattered this much. Cruelty becomes strength. Danger becomes confidence.
Inside fiction, we can enjoy that translation because we know where the edges of the story are. There is nothing inherently troubling about loving a villain, shipping a disastrous fictional couple or enjoying the fantasy of somebody you would cross the road to avoid in real life.
The distinction matters when we carry the same translation outside fiction. A murderer does not become misunderstood because he photographs well. An adult does not become less responsible for abusing a child because people find her attractive. A victim does not become less harmed because the person who hurt them happens to have fans.
The lighting can change. The red flag cannot.
Maybe that is why toxic characters are so fascinating in the first place. They show us how easily beauty, charisma, point of view and narrative can change our emotional response to behaviour we thought we knew how to recognise. The interesting part is not that red flags disappear under good lighting.
It is how easily we can forget they are still red.
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