Since what I am about to ask pertains to the OP, I thought I would ask everyone (I really appreciate everyone who has opined thusfar, I have had a lot upon which to ruminate), what about liking really dark characters?
I will give some examples,
I prefer immensely Sauron and The Witchking of Angmar to Gandalf and even Aragorn/Elessar.
In Star Wars I prefer the Sith which you know what is creepy, the Order Palpatine gives to wipe out the Jedi is 66 (exactly how many books are are in Protestant Bible), The Sith are always two, Jesus sent them out two by two, Sith is a old english word for journey from a prayer, "Christ's Sith of Suffering and Sorrow." Jedi means beloved in Hebrew, fro Jedidiah (beloved of Jehovah), but they are detached people who do not love but lived like Vulcans..
I preferred Jafar in the OG Aladdin
Scar in the Lion King to Mufasa.
What about these dark attractions in fiction? I hear a lot tender hearted people play bad guys, like the actors who played The Predator Alien and Lurtz The Uruk Hai in The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring. The idea is its cathartic, you get to play something you would never be in real life. Though the King James Bible has version that says, "do not even do the appearance of evil." (1 Thessalonians 5:22). Granted I can only find that translation in KJV and NKJV, the others say, "do not do evil." There is a real difference between appearance thereof and doing evil; one is way broader in prohibitive sense.
I have always had an attraction to the dark side of human nature.
A lifetime ago, I wanted to be a clinical psychologist that specialized in abnormal and criminal psychology. This was thwarted in part by my unwanted divorce (I quit school to work full-time,) but looking back, I doubt I could not have held that career for very long.
But the pull towards trying to understand why people snap has never gone away.
I've mentioned being part of a ministry that wrote and and visited prison inmates. During that time, I wrote to one who, in my elementary opinion, had all the makings of a serial killer. By his own admission, he started out torturing animals, then worked his way up to human beings. But the way he got there was gut wrenching.
From the time he was a toddler, he was bounced between two different households. In one he was being severely beaten throughout the week (with a Christian-claiming parent choosing to look the other way,) and on the weekends, he was being severely sexually abused by a deranged man and his posse, whose main turn-on was violence.
In the 1990's, there was a show called Forensic Files, with the classic narration of Peter Thomas. I've listened to nearly every episode, and there are some cases I've listened to several times. I still listen to crime podcasts now and then.
One thing I never understood was that serial killers often had a sexual connection to suffering and death. I always wondered, how on earth could anyone connect two things that, to a normal person, seem like night and day? But as this inmate wrote to me about his story, I finally saw a glimpse of the connection.
Imagine, from the time you can walk, being severely abused by people who are extremely violent towards you-- and turned on by it. And not only are they regularly perpetrating violence, but sexual abuse gets added into the mix. Over and over again, there is a mix of sexual feelings, violence, and response.
I've often wondered if God restricts sex to marriage because it seems that human sexuality gets associated most with the very first things it is exposed to and repeatedly paired with. Once someone has their sexuality associated with a pattern, it seems nearly impossible to break. God meant for this association to be with the love between spouses and their love for Him. But everything goes haywire when other things are thrown into the mix.
This guy explained that for him, violence and sex were intertwined. He didn't spell it out but you could also discern that even from childhood, while these things were happening to him, including sexual abuse, he would fantasize repeatedly about seeking revenge on and ending his abusers. He got to a point where he didn't think about sex and violence separately, but always together, and he said that it eventually turned into an urge he couldn't resist (just like sexual feelings in most people.) He had a long history of violently attacking people in prison, often to a point of no return (leaving things like permanent brain damage.) The more violent the encounter, the more he was drawn to it.
And he was only about 33 when he wrote me these things.
But he also still had the side of him that could sound like a very hurt little boy that said he wished he could take it all back and he just needed to be loved, and that's what drew people to him.
Why am I interested in this?
Because I have had women in my real life, often at my workplaces, tell me things like, "I don't understand why he doesn't kiss me or tell me he loves me during sex. He chokes me instead."
And I tell them, "Because, honey, somewhere along the line, he learned to be turned on by violence and feeds off fear, helplessness, and control over another human being. Please. Get Away. From. This Person." But it's almost never as easy as the person (too much fear of being alone, fear for kids when involved, legal and money troubles, having the abuse escalate and being threatened, etc.)
How much can the human psyche take? Where is the line where sanity finally snaps? How can determine who can be turned around, if it's not too late? And how do we do that?
And yes, God forgives, and God can change people, but some people will not change, and all you can do is keep them away from other people. I always look at it as, "Yes, that person can say they are born again. But would I trust that person to live next to you or your most vulnerable friends and family, etc. and trust that they would not become victims? I know in most cases, I wouldn't.
In this lifetime, there are always more questions than answers.
But I keep trying striving to ask, seek, and knock -- hoping it will help someone, because thousands of people are trapped in situations exactly like this inmate and are being molded into conditions that society is not prepared to handle.