And I think, even if he's equally morally culpable, books are often more sympathetic to characters who bumble a big crime than ones who succeed at it
That's probably true, although of course it confuses the issue somewhat that you say "crime" rather than "moral wrong" – don't forget that in Ankh-Morpork, assassination isn't a crime! In fact, perhaps that's another factor in this case: the assassin isn't doing anything wrong according to the prevailing norms of their own society, even if those norms don't match those of the reader.
And to some extent we do take that into account when making our hero/villain judgments: in fiction set in ancient Rome, for example, we're prepared to see it as a sign that someone's the good guy when he sets one of his slaves free as a reward for exceptional service and doesn't beat any of the others, in spite of the fact that contemporary moral standards would strongly suggest a course of action more along the lines of "don't buy any slaves in the first place and vigorously campaign for abolition".
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Date: 2012-09-03 02:55 pm (UTC)That's probably true, although of course it confuses the issue somewhat that you say "crime" rather than "moral wrong" – don't forget that in Ankh-Morpork, assassination isn't a crime! In fact, perhaps that's another factor in this case: the assassin isn't doing anything wrong according to the prevailing norms of their own society, even if those norms don't match those of the reader.
And to some extent we do take that into account when making our hero/villain judgments: in fiction set in ancient Rome, for example, we're prepared to see it as a sign that someone's the good guy when he sets one of his slaves free as a reward for exceptional service and doesn't beat any of the others, in spite of the fact that contemporary moral standards would strongly suggest a course of action more along the lines of "don't buy any slaves in the first place and vigorously campaign for abolition".