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Ah bad boys. Everyone loves them. What, with their cocky attitudes, sarcastic dialogue, leather jackets, motorcycles, rebelliousness, and all around good lucks, why wouldn't you? They sweep protagonists off their feet, take out several bad guys at once, and look good while doing it.
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They're a favorite love interest for YA protagonists everywhere. It's hard to find a Wattpad book without a bad boy written in (usually as the central love interest). But why is that, exactly? And what makes a character a bad boy? Almost every character is sassy and rebellious now, and most urban fantasies have at least one person (usually a guy) in a leather jacket, so what gives?
Well, bad boys aren't necessarily a new concept. The original bad boy was, essentially, a prideful, snarky man. Depending on the genre, he was often rich or represented latent dark desires. Think Lucifer in Paradise Lost and Fitzgerald Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Two very different characters, but you can see traces of the modern day bad boy in each.
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In later years, this archetype evolved. We got Jim Stark (Rebel Without A Cause), Han Solo (A New Hope), Jess Mariano (Gilmore Girls), Damon Salvatore (Vampire Diaries), Captain Hook (Once Upon A Time), Zuko (Avatar: The Last Airbender), Jaime Lannister (A Song of Fire and Ice), Jace Wayland (The Mortal Instruments), William Herondale (The Infernal Devices), Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Four (Divergent), Gale (The Hunger Games), Peter Pan, Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), Draco Malfoy (Harry Potter books 4-6), and Logan Echolls (Veronica Mars). They're more cocky that prideful, and much more rebellious than their early predecessors. However, these are a lot of pretty different characters, which makes actually defining what makes a character a bad boy really hard. To try to encompass all traits, and shed more light on what being a bad boy really means, I've come up with four categories: the Really Bad Boy, the Sympathetic Bad Boy, the Loner Bad Boy, and the Not Really Bad Boy. I'll give a quick list of traits and examples for each, as well as how to break each trope (you know, the actual point of this article).
