In universe I mean, not by the reader. I remember the few times I saw stories like that were fairly… cringe; the MC was usually a loner and the people didn’t have a good reason to hate him, if any at all!
But when there is a reason, whether it would be something they did in the past or being bad in the present? I love the drama and conflict potential. Does anyone know a book like this?
Learning about his actual history is honestly one of the things that bounced me out of that series. I just couldn’t keep rooting for a character who was essentially a genocidal monster, when the narrative clearly wanted me to be sympathetic toward him and believe he had reformed. I didn’t feel like he had anywhere near the level of remorse or even justification for his atrocities that he should have, and it was even worse that nobody around him seemed to care much about them either.
Once the magic of the worldbuilding wore off, the series started to feel like a clockwork mechanism that I was merely watching unspool after winding up its intricate gears for two thousand pages.