First Appearance: Red Dragon by Thomas Harris The argument that some people will have is that Hannibal Lecter isn't really a hero. And you'd be right about his first two outings, Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs he's mainly the antagonist. In Red Dragon he is a cannibalistic serial killer who feeds human meat to Boston's upper class. After killing and eating 13 people, he was caught by FBI Agent Will Graham. While in prison, Lecter terrorizes Graham and tries to have his family butchered. In Silence of the Lambs, he chews a prison guard's face off, which aren't exactly the most ideal actions of a hero. But then an interesting thing happened on the way to the trilogy. Anthony Hopkins portrayed him in the utterly excellent adaptation of Silence of the Lambs, and people were utterly fascinated by Hannibal Lecter. Hopkins won best male lead actor and was only on the screen for 17 minutes. After that, things began to change for Hannibal the Cannibal and he moved to the forefront of the story in the novel Hannibal. In this novel, we see a shift in the attitude toward Hannibal. He's been living on the lam since escaping in Silence of the Lambs, until one of his surviving victims discovers him and wants to feed him to pigs. That, and we find out that the hero of Silence of the Lambs, Clarice (try and read it without doing it in Hannibal's voice), has actually killed more people than Hannibal, taking the Guinness World Record for killing the most suspects by a female agent. Clarice and Hannibal have a lot in common, except they are on different sides of the law. Why Lecter is the hero in Hannibal is because he's the one that is being hunted; he's the potential victim. The reader finds him or herself siding with the sociopathic cannibal, even if he does cut open a FBI agent's head and feed his own brains to him. What's clear in the novel is that Hannibal is the good guy in the story. Combine that with Hannibal and Clarice being so much alike that they need to be a couple and you have strange and terrifying hero that is surprisingly easy to root for.
