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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/48439
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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?**

Original score: 2