OK, so here's a puzzling thing...

The other night I watched Pirates of the Caribbean again. OK, so get 
this: Captain Jack Sparrow. He's a notorious pirate. He steals. He lies. 
He cheats. He tries to sell a man's soul to get his ship back. He 
triple-crosses the Royal Navy and then quadruple-crosses his enemies. 
The guy will basically do anything to save his own neck, or anything 
with a profit in it for him.

And yet... he's the hero? No, seriously. He tries to sell poor Will so 
he can get cut up, and at the end of the film, Will risks being hanged 
to help Jack escape. Wuh??

Jack does all these despicable things. And yet, as the audience, we all 
come away instinctively "knowing" that he's obviously the hero. How the 
heck did the script writers *do* that? How did they turn such a 
villainous man into a hero?

Apparently I still have much to learn about the art of writing a good 
story...

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