What We Talk About When We Talk About Redemption Arcs
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Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Every once in a while Book Twitter gets on to the topic of redemption arcs - character arcs where an evil or villainous character sees the error of their ways and learns to be better. There are a lot of questions to ask about redemption arcs. Who gets one? When is it okay to have one? What does a person have to do for their redemption to be plausible? What are the ways they can go wrong? And why do we seem to give them to straight, white, male villains so much more readily than to others?
There are a lot of reasons why a reader or writer might be drawn to a redemption arc. Maybe we have complicated feelings about guilt, shame, personal growth and healing, and those feelings are easiest to address when they can be written in villain-sized letters. Maybe we have a strong belief that anyone can learn to treat people better if they want to and are given the tools. Maybe in a world full of scary people on scales both large and small, it's comforting to imagine a made-up scary person who can see the light and change. Or maybe we just like this particular villain and we want to see their life improve.
But a surprising number of intelligent people are simply against redemption - or at least, against the way it happens in 99% of media. That character isn't sorry enough, they will argue. They haven't faced enough consequences for their evil deeds. They haven't made enough amends. How can we possibly say they are redeemed?
This conversation gets very incoherent very quickly, because we have not actually defined our terms. What is "enough"? Who defines it? What is redemption, actually?
We can't have an argument about whether and when it's okay to have a redemption arc if we don't first have a good idea of what redemption is.
Redemption and Religion
A lot of people arguing about redemption seem to have a binary idea of how it works. Either you are redeemed or you are not. Either you can be forgiven for your sins and welcomed back into the fold or you need to be punished more. There's no gray area in between - what would that gray area even look like?
There's probably more than one place where this binary comes from, but I can't help tracing it back to the Christian idea of forgiveness. In Christianity, either God has forgiven you for your sins or he hasn't. The process is instantaneous, and there is no middle ground.*
(*I am, of course, vastly oversimplifying a lot of very complex doctrine, over which Christian theologians may endlessly argue. The various nuances of how redemption can work in Christianity are beyond the scope of this post.)
Maybe the story you are writing (or critiquing) occurs in a Christian universe. If so, then the question of whether God has forgiven your character for their sins is a meaningful question. But in most modern stories, this is not the case.
Other religions have their own ideas of what it means to be absolved of one's sins, how important it is to be absolved of one's sins, and what are the steps of the process that you have to go through. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous may also have a set of rules about what a person needs to do if they’ve behaved in a way that was harmful to others. Your story might occur in a universe that works according to the principles of these groups. It's great if it does!
But for most of us, and in most of the stories that we have this kind of discourse about, we're not really talking about religion. Most of our speculative fiction stories take place either in a world governed by a fictional religion, or a world where religion is not the primary determinant of whether a character is good or bad.
Even if there is a fictional religion that is provably true in your fictional world, it might or might not be the kind of religion that classifies people as good or bad, forgiven or unforgiven. It might have a more complex way of morally classifying people. Or it might simply be concerned with other things.
Or your fictional world might not be governed by concrete, knowable cosmic forces capable of making moral judgments at all.
Reconciliation(s)
If we leave out religion as a determiner of redemption, as we must do in the majority of speculative fiction stories, we are left with simply a bunch of people and the social structures they have created.
In these cases, the question of redemption becomes a question of how a formerly villainous character can or should interact with the people and structures around them. A character on a redemption arc is trying to repair their relationships with individual people, or with groups of people, or with their own sense of right and wrong.
If we look at redemption arcs in this way, then the binary questions - is this character redeemed? Is this character redeemable? - split into a multitude of different questions, from a multitude of different points of view.
The Self. What caused your character to want a redemption arc in the first place? Presumably they were happy being a villain at some point, or at least, unhappy in a way that didn't stop them from doing it. What changed? Did they see or experience something that made them feel differently, or see other options? What was it? Why was your character a villain to begin with, and what kinds of experiences might make them question those reasons? Or is there some influence in their life that's making them soften and get less villainous, almost despite themselves?
Does the character feel guilt or shame for what they have done? What do they feel most guilty about? How do they try to deal with those feelings? If moral injury haunts them, is there something they could do to heal from it and forgive themselves? If they do not feel very guilty, what else might motivate them to try to do better? What does the character believe they should do now?
What does the character want out of life that their evil past prevents them from getting? Healthier relationships? A reconciled relationship with a particular person? Freedom from some aspect of villainy that hurt or constrained them? The ability to sleep at night and live with themselves? What would they need to do in order to be able to obtain that particular thing - or must they reconcile themselves to living without it?
Victims. Chances are good that, if your character was a villain at some point, they hurt someone. Maybe it was someone they did not know well, but maybe they also hurt someone who used to be close to them, or who they wanted to be close to. What would the character have to do to repair those relationships? Is it possible to repair them? Will the character have to do something else, like proving that they've changed in a certain way, before the people they've hurt will want them back? Would something still look different in the relationship, after it was repaired, compared to before the hurt occurred? What do the people they hurt think they should do?
Note that, when you ask if it's possible to repair these relationships, the answer may be "no"! It's not impossible for a victim to reconcile with someone who hurt them - and it can make for a very dramatic story! - but it's a monumental task and it's not something most victims feel they can or should do. Maybe some characters will want to find a way to reconcile with a redeemed villain, and others will not. The ex-villain may have to learn to live with the fact that some people just don't want to be around them anymore.
There will probably also be people the villain character hurt who are strangers to them and have nothing to repair. These people will probably have their own, complex, difficult feelings about whatever the villain character goes on and ends up doing after being a villain. What do they think your character should do? The villain might or might not even be aware of them - but what happens when they do run into each other at some inconvenient time?
Other People. Chances are good that, however evil your villain character used to be, they didn't directly hurt everyone in the world. They will encounter characters who know about their evil past, but who aren't victims in the same sense as the characters above. Those characters will have to make their own choices about what to do with the villain character, and whether or not they want to work with them or be friends with them given the circumstances.
Your character probably wants to have healthy relationships with other characters who can support them in their quest to not be evil anymore. What would need to happen in order for them to have those relationships? Where would they need to look for them? What would they have to do in order to establish trust? What aspects of a friendship or other relationship might help the villain character to grow and get better, and what aspects might unintentionally (or intentionally, I suppose) hold them back? What conflicts might arise with these people as a result of the ex-villain's past and how it still affects them? What do their new friends think they should do?
The Good Guys. "Banding together with your former enemy against a greater threat" is a classic trope for a reason, and it can even work with villains who aren't very repentant about being villains. If you want to use this trope, or if you want your ex-villain to start working with the heroes for some other reason, it brings up a whole host of questions. In order to work with the ex-villain, the heroes have to be able to trust them - at least for this particular mission, maybe with someone keeping an eye on them. What is necessary in order for the heroes to be able to do that? What would be an effective show of good faith, or of change? What would make the heroes so desperate that they're willing to cut corners with that process? What happens if the heroes disagree on what to do about this person? What happens if some of the heroes have been the character's victims themselves? And what does the ex-villain do when they notice all these conflicts swirling around them?
Society. A line I keep hearing about various villains is "They can't be redeemed, they have to go on trial for their war crimes." Maybe they do! But this will depend on the setting. What kind of justice system does your setting have? What kind of laws has your character broken while they were a villain, and what typically happens to people who break them? Are there factors (like bias in the justice system, or mitigating factors affecting the villain's responsibility for their actions) that would change how the law treats this character?
Is the justice system in your world fair? What does your ex-villain character think of it? What do the good guys think of it? Is it a static, well-established system, or is it something your society is still working on putting together (e.g. if they're on a frontier, or if there was just a revolution)?
Not all justice systems are carceral. Does the justice system in your setting put people into prison or execute them, or does it do something very different? How might a restorative or reparative justice system deal with your villain character? What would a system like that tell them they need to do, and how would it enforce its judgments, and what would your villain character think about them?
What if the normal justice system in your setting doesn't apply to this character? What if they're a magical creature or otherwise "above the law"? Is there some other group (like a council of vampires, or a regulatory committee for superheroes) that would be responsible for making the character answer for their crimes? Is that group carceral or restorative, fair or unfair? What does the character think about it? Or is the character fully on their own to decide what they should do?
Besides the justice system, what other institutions in society might have to reckon with this character and their past? If their crimes are a matter of public knowledge, what does the media say about them, and how does that affect the character as they try to move forward with their life? If the character needs a job, place to live, etc, what options might be barred to them now because of their past? How do they deal with that? What other consequences might they encounter from society at large?
Readers. Believe it or not, your character is fictional - and that means that one of the most important relationships is the relationship between the character and reader. All readers are different, but if you can, you should think about your target audience. What will keep an average reader from your target audience invested in your character's redemption arc?
How do you want your readers to feel? Do you want them to feel sympathy and approve of how the character turns their life around? Do you want them to feel tension and uncertainty over whether they can really do it? Do you want an entertaining trainwreck where the character's colorful mistakes, rather than their improvement per se, keep the reader turning pages? Or do you just want the reader to enjoy spending time with this character? What would cause an average reader to feel that way, and what obstacles might make it hard for them to feel it?
Has your character done things that are likely to be triggering for most readers (like sexual violence, or major bigotry, or involvement with real-world atrocities), and will make it especially hard for the average reader to root for them? If so, how do you plan to handle that? Alternately, has your character done things that are wrong, but that people often don't realize are wrong - like neglecting a disabled child? If so, how do you plan to handle that, and to avoid the potentially harmful effects of a story that treats those problems lightly?
If it's too hard to think about your target audience - and frankly, most days it's too hard for me to think about them - then think about yourself. After all, you should be writing a story that you yourself would find enjoyable to read. How do you want to feel when you write and read a redemption arc? How do you feel about your character, and where would it be satisfying for them to end up? How can you play to those feelings successfully, and how can you get them across on the page?
Concrete Conflicts
I find these kinds of questions much more interesting than the binary question of whether a character is "really redeemed" or not. In case it's not clear, I don't mean them to become a more complicated way of answering the binary question. It's not the kind of thing where you can say "You gave good answers to 15 out of these 17 questions - congratulations, you're a real redemption arc!"
Rather, to me these questions divert away from the binary questions entirely. Your character doesn't have to be "really redeemed" in order for their redemption arc to be an interesting story. You don't even have to be sure what "real redemption" would look like.
Instead, interesting stories are made out of questions like these - from considering what your character wants and feels and why, and what obstacles and conflicts they might run into as they pursue those desires and deal with those feelings. A redemption story really isn't all that different from other kinds of story, in my opinion - it's made out of these concrete questions about feelings and conflicts and consequences, and it can go wherever the answers to those questions take you.
What do you think?