Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31077
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My personal favourite is when the villain lives, but repents. In real life, violence is an ending for an argument where one (or both) sides have given up on trying to get the other to see things their way, and the easiest way to 'win' is to make them simply go away and win by default.

In stories I've always found that rather unsatisfying. It's not only making your hero do something which might go against their own moral code, but it's also not a validation of their worldview or cause - that it's not inherently 'right' enough to change the mind of the person who opposes it; so we'll just make that person disappear so we don't need to worry about it anymore.

Getting your enemy to see what they did was wrong, to regret it and suffer from their guilt is far more satisfying (see the fate of the operative in Serenity, for example).

The tricky part is doing it believably. The villain can't simply escape their just deserts through saying 'Oh, I'm sorry; I shouldn't have killed all those people'; they need to go through a journey as well, and that journey needs to be caused by your hero - the inverse mirror of your Hero's journey, as it were.

Original score: 3