How can you redeem an awful character, who hits close to home?
There is a problem with a redemption arc:
Anon is an incredibly powerful god with powers of mysterious origin. In the story, he starts out as bad but is supposed to be redeemed later. There is a problem, however.
Anon's actions are understandable and nowhere near as severe as a typical villain's, however, they are there. At the end of the War in Heaven, he abandons the Engineers (Horus, Abzu, Tiamat, Enki and Odin), who were loyal and trusting friends and pretty much commited their life to helping him fight against everyone else in the pantheon.
He kills a lizardfolk chieftain, who was a danger both to his tribe and to the neighbouring humans, but does so in front of his child, and since I love humanizing my characters, said child will forever be scarred by seeing his dad get gutted by a quick-draw + wrath-guard combo.
On top of these horrible things, he even abandons himself, leaving behind his child-like persona, Adam, alone and confused to deal with the mess, he caused. This gets especially painful when he meets a lizardfolk, the (now grown-up) child, who is out for revenge.
The characters, Anon wronged, get more than enough screen time for the readers to see how Anon changed their life for the better and the worse. More often the worse. This is the exact opposite of the "a million is a statistic" trope. We never saw Alderaan, only for a few seconds before kaboom. So, it was easier to forgive Darth Vader.
Here, the exact opposite happens: only one death, but all the misery that came from it was frozen in time and put into an exhibition.
How could a character be redeemed when the ones they hurt are close to the reader?
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2 answers
This question presumes are rather economic view of redemption. If the number of good deeds exceeds the number of bad deeds,the characters is redeemed. If their assets exceed the debts, they are redeemed.
But that is not really the way redemption works. Redemption is a direction of the heart. A change in the direction of the heart generally needs to be proved by some action, but it can be a very small action at the very end of life. There may be no opportunity for the character to pay all their debts or to right all their wrongs. But that is not necessary. All that is necessary is to show that the direction of their heart has changed such that they would have done those things if they had the chance, and, perhaps more importantly, would never have committed their crimes if the direction of their heart had been different.
The other element that I suspect is necessary for a convincing redemption story is that it should come as a shift in the balance, the blossoming of a value that the character has always held. Thus, in so many absent parent stories, the redemption comes when the good value of love of family finally becomes stronger than the bad value of love of worldly success and parent and child are reunited. The damage done by the years of neglect cannot be undone or made up for, but the parent's change of heart redeems them nonetheless. (And usually the child's is redeemed as well by putting their love of family above their years of resentment. This is a popular trope because it is a two-for-one redemption value pack for the the author.)
The good does not have to exceed the bad. All that is required for redemption is a change of direction from bad to good, even if it occurs on the death bed.
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I think they have to more than balance the scales, in the reader's eyes.
Anytime a soldier kills an enemy combatant, she may be depriving a parent of their child, a child of their father, a wife of her husband, a man that was in fact just doing his duty to his own country. Philosophically speaking, what makes that justifiable?
The same goes for cops killing criminals. The truth is, when it comes to us humans, the ends very much can justify the means. If we defend our country, or our friends, then the grief we cause by killing is (hopefully) made up for by the grief we aim to prevent. Our scales are more than balanced, and we can see our soldiers as heroes.
I have said earlier, I think some acts are beyond redemption, but if you want to redeem a really bad guy, you need him to more than balance the scales in the altruistic sense, he has to end up preventing far more grief, misery, and pain than he caused; making a choice to save many lives instead of taking them. He doesn't have to die in order to do this; but must convincingly change to a different tactic.
The people he made suffer may not get over it, that's fine. They may be dead. These are probably two separate incidents in a redemption arc; one in which he causes grief and misery out of selfish aims, and a second one in which he prevents far more grief and misery out of altruistic aims. In order to be convincing for the latter, the MC has to undergo a fundamental and plausibly permanent personality change, realize they were wrong, regret it, AND reverse the karmic scales by preventing far more grief and misery than they ever caused.
There is some hint that Darth tilted the scales in the opposite direction by sacrificing himself to kill the Emperor; but I don't think that was well written. I thought Vader's "redemption" a cheat. There was proof he killed two billion on Alderaan, no proof he saved far more than that, or even regretted it, in my opinion.
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