Is Godzilla Better As a Hero or a Villain?

gamerant.com:

When people discuss the greatest anti-heroes in cinematic history, you typically won’t find any giant radioactive lizards on the list. However, the titular kaiju of the Godzilla film series has nevertheless spent his many decades of film history walking the line between good and evil.

Godzilla is arguably best known as a force of destruction, wreaking havoc on the world to punish humanity for their hubris. However, looking at his numerous film appearances, he tends to protect humanity just as often as he menaces him. So considering how often he vacillates between protagonist and antagonist, one has to wonder which role is truly the ideal fit for Godzilla — noble hero or tragic villain?

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All great monsters in fiction tend to reflect a societal fear in the real world. For instance, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead famously used zombies to represent consumerism, while vampires have been interpreted elsewhere as a metaphor for upper-class exploitation. Godzilla is hardly an exception to this trend, as he was very explicitly presented in the original 1954 Godzilla as a symbol of nuclear annihilation. Considering it had been less than a decade since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s no surprise that the fear of nuclear weapons was still embedded in the public consciousness of postwar Japan. More specifically, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was inspired to make the film’s monster atomic-powered by the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident, in which a Japanese fishing boat was contaminated by fallout from a H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

Within the film, Godzilla is described as an ancient sea-dwelling reptile that was awoken from its slumber by a similar H-bomb test. Now irradiated by