- Edward Cullen, Han Solo, Killmonger, Lestat.

What do all of these characters have in common besides being heartthrobs?

They share a common ancestor, the Byronic hero, brooding, sensual, violent, a little too single minded.

The Byronic hero has been a staple in literature dating back to the 19th century, but the archetype is all over film, television, even video games.

I see Cloud Strife, all sad and angsty with your giant sword clocked.

But what does it mean to be a Byronic hero and who exactly was the man that helped create this iconic archetype?

Well, let's get into the myth, the man and the literary legacy.

(soft music) According to Professor Peter L.Thorslev, author of the Byronic Hero, Types and Prototypes in Romantic Contraries, the characteristic Byronic hero has borrowed characteristics from the Gothic Villain, in his looks, his mysterious past and his secret sins and from the Man of Feeling in his tender sensibilities and in his undying fidelity to the woman he loves, but he is more than these.

He is a romantic rebel.

He chooses his values in open defiance of the codes of society.

That's right.

You defy the codes of society by being sad and hot and with your slightly stalker like tendencies, we'll get into that.

The Byronic hero allowed for more complicated male characters to form.

And without him, we miss out on the development of the anti-hero, but where did the Byronic hero even come from?

A very, very bad boy named George Gordon Byron AKA Lord Byron himself.

Born to an absent father and mercurial mother, Byron had a brilliant mind, but had a very deep complex about being born with a misshapen foot.

He came into wealth while young, but was surrounded by such a malevolent cast of characters in his home life, it makes the Dursleys seem loving and supportive.

Because of the complex he developed around his warped foot, Byron exercised excessively to make up for what he saw as a flaw.

The other thing he was excessive about was his love of the ladies and the gents.

Enter Lady Caroline Lamb, England, 1812.

The drama begins.

Caroline Lamb, wife of future prime minister, Lord Melbourne had a very, very messy love affair with Byron that had several public dramatic moments, including her breaking a wine glass and threatening to harm herself.

She notoriously called Byron mad, bad and dangerous to know definitely a Gemini.

TMZ would have lived for this, The real kicker came when Lamb wrote her Gothic revenge novel, Glenarvon, which basically frames Byron as a vampiric figure who through this incredible magnetism attracts women only to suck out their strength by stealing their hearts and taking their innocence.

Glenarvon was basically a tell all book under the guise of fiction with very clear illusions to real people, illusions that were so obvious that it ended Lamb's position in socialciety forever.

But, the public loved it.

And the main villain that Byron inspired, Clarence Deruthvin van AKA Lord Glenarvon was deliciously messy.

It was from this story by Lamb that we get the first Byronic hero, not written from Byron's point of view.

And low, the Byronic flood Gates opened up.

Gothic and romantic fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries ate this up.

The Brontes, Dumas, Hugo, Leroux, hell even Ian Fleming's James Bond is pretty Byronic.

Debate me in the comments.

So why is this version of a romantic hero so popular?

There are many kinds of Byronic heroes, but for the sake of everyone, we're gonna split them into two groups, the gothic and the romantic.

Gothic novels, which often blend together horror and romance, feature dark hopeless figures, tormented by a wrong done to them that makes up their entire existence.

They can sometimes be villains, but are often anti-heroes.

Possessing some sort of complex emotional backstory that is meant to be sympathetic.

Some famous examples are Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster.

Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, Eric from the Phantom of The Opera, Edmond Dantes, from the Count of Monte Cristo and Megamind from Dreamworks' Megamind.

Again, debate me in the comments.

In romance literature, AKA romance literature of the 19th century, as opposed to the romance genre we know today.

In those, the hero is a solitary figure who seeks to live out their life in isolation, but is pulled into society against their will.

They have a mixture of monstrous or dark appearance, yet alluring personalities, they'll scream and yell at you at one moment and then look longingly into your eyes in the other, which when you think about it, is kind of a red flag.

Popular versions of this archetype are Rochester from Jane Eyre.

Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and pretty much any vampire and fiction who was ever sad about being a vampire.

They love to brood.

In these sad boy versus vengeance boy Venn diagram, what connects them is the moral gray that makes you as the reader empathize with their situation.

The creature from Frankenstein is reacting to the cruel world that created him and Victor while reckless was genuinely frightened by what he had created.

And while he was neglectful, he didn't deserve to have his entire family slaughtered.

Edmond Dantes' desire for revenge after spending 14 years in a French prison after being framed for a crime he did not commit is very understandable.

However, does it actually justify the innocent lives lost in the crossfire of said revenge quest.

Claude Frolo from Victor Hugo's 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dom starts off as a good man who loves his adoptive son and younger brother, but is gripped by a lust for a woman he cannot have and does not want him explicitly.

And it tips him into madness quicker than you can say, I'm losing to a bird.

Heathcliffe is such a compelling romantic leap because the text makes it clear that he was forced into becoming a bitter, hateful man by the society around him.

But his deep, toxic love for Catherine and his lack of begging for sympathy actually makes the reader drawn to him.

Rochester has this deep love for Jane and treats the people around him overall very kindly, but he can still lock his mentally ill wife up in an attic and shame her for being sick.

Byron, he had this huge capacity for love, intelligence and understood the great beauty in the world, but he was also chaotic and emotionally aloof.

He was the baddest bad boy.

And the appeal of that character is that misguided hope that one day you will be the one that you might change him.

As literary genre critic, Conrad Aqualina eloquently put it, "the Byronic hero bears "the dual markings of both villain and victim.

"He is a fallen creature in his own right.

"A dark angel bringing both love and death, "yearning for redemption and ultimately finding none."

Eric, the titular Phantom from Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera is a talented man whose lifetime of pain has forced him to resort to extreme means in order to be loved by someone like building a torture chamber in his guest bedroom.

Did Eric know he was rich?

In Eidth Hull's 1919 novel, The Sheik, not only is our hero abusive and tortured, which I am putting mildly, he breaks his victims so hard, she totally falls in love with him by the end, but don't worry, he feels bad about it, eventually.

This novel though, incredibly problematic, created a paradigm shift for the Byronic hero and romance in general, before this, if a woman is defiled, she can only regain her purity through death.

But this time she gets a happy ending with the guy who kidnapped her, progress.

So not as hot of a commodity in the mid 20th century, the late 20th century saw a huge resurgence in the popularity of the Byronic hero.

There was the emergence of the Bodice Ripper sub genre of romance novels like 1972's, The Flame and the Flower, which is considered the first bodice ripper romance and revolutionized the modern romance genre.

And it has a dynamic between the two romantic leads that is very influenced by The Sheik.

Then there's more recent characters like twilight's Edward Cullen and his spiritual cousin, Christian Grey.

Yeah, I know, but he's a really popular example.

So we had to talk about him.

He is very Byronic.

Grey has severe childhood, emotional and sexual trauma that keeps him from being able to form healthy, sexual or romantic relationships with the women he respects.

Or able to respect women period.

But don't worry.

In comes bright eyed virgin, Anastasia Steel, whom he gaslights, abuses and makes cry a lot, but you know, she wants to change him.

And by the end of the thousand plus agonizing journey, she succeeds and he's healed now, huzzah.

See, The Sheik is really influential.

All of these characters are different from the more traditional, upbeat capital our romantic hero and that they are primarily shaped and motivated by their traumas, past and present.

One might note that overwhelmingly these characters are male and white, but more recently we see more female characters who possess some Byronic qualities, Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Regina from Once Upon a Time, Olivia Pope from Scandal, Catra from She-ra.

But those characters are punished more by both the audience and the writers for their nature.

It tends not to be framed with the same seductive quality, sometimes.

The learning aspect of female and nonwhite Byronic characters is seeing them have the freedom to be more complex than just idealize one note types of representation.

Atara Stein argues that Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights and Eustacia Vye from the Return of The Native by Thomas Hardy are Byronic heroes because of their quote, "rebellion against a conventional society "that stifles individuality and that these Byronic heroines "take on the characteristics of the rebellious, "ambitious, narcissistic, individualistic, "and ultimately self-destructive Byronic male."

However, both these characters are killed off and those who are not end up finding their way back to traditional female values, whatever that means.

This reflects the reality for a lot of women throughout history who were brilliant, but were considered too loud, may have been dismissed as hysterical, were queer, were women of color and didn't conduct themselves as ladies.

A major difference between the male and female variants, at least in the 19th century is that these female characters are not allowed to be romanticized in the same way men are.

Byronic heroes are unlikable on purpose, but there will always be a privilege of being white, male and rich that allows these characters to be so awful and get away with it.

Do you think Rochester would be able to get away with keeping his wife in the attic for the LOLs and still be considered the romantic lead?

Byron died at 36 years old from an illness exacerbated by the then common practice of bloodletting.

I'll let you Google that.

His tragic death at a young age made him a hero.

The world mourned him in the same way people mourned, Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, Winehouse.

The sudden death of a great artistic genius who burned so hotly and wildly, that was no shock at all that he burned out so quickly.

But in a delightful touch of irony, one of the greatest legacies of Byron's life was his daughter, Ada Lovelace, called one of the first computer programmers and considered by many to be as much, or if not more of a genius than her father.

Byron can be noted as one of the most influential authors and artists of his time.

According to British literature, professor Andrew Elfenbein, "Byron is not just an author, "but an unprecedented cultural phenomenon.

"His work not only affects the novel, poetry and drama, "but fashion, social manners, erotic experience, "and gender roles."

The Byronic hero has much in common with the broader concept of the anti-hero tormented by forces beyond their control with a sharp wit, that they have developed in order to cope with whatever monstrous thing that is innate to them.

Now, this damage does not make them good.

There is no good reason to emotionally manipulate people or lock people in attics or kidnap young singers and put them into your torture guest room.

Leave nice people alone.

No means no Byron's.

But the cruel circumstances of fate make them tragic, especially when the story makes it clear that otherwise they may have actually been someone capable of true emotional growth.

Leroux even ends his Phantom of the Opera thusly, "with an an ordinary face, "he would have been one of the noblest members "of the human race.

"He had a heart great enough to hold "the empire of the world.

"And in the end, he had to be content with a cellar."

All of the tortured, romantic bad boys of literature, film and television have a little bit of Byron in them.

So the next time you get deep in your feels for Kylo Ren, cheer on the redemption arc of Prince Zuko or secretly pop on Twilight for the 200th time, maybe pull one out to Lord Byron, to who we owe all of this angsty goodness too.

Or James Dean, either one will do.

Yikes, nah.

(church bells ring) I live next to a church.

This is my fight song, take back my life song.

All that work for two lines.

(laughs)