Another fascinating thing about responses to this post: whether they’re agreeing with me or disagreeing, whether they think people’s insistence on this arc is good or bad, a huge portion of people use the word “forgiveness” and center their entire response to this post around it.
Please observe that I never once used the word “forgiveness” - although I should have, because the idea that forgiveness is a necessity for ceasing-to-be-a-sinner, and indeed that forgiveness is the primary goal, is itself christian.
I have at no point in the original post or in any of my further discussion of it said that the end goal, or even a significant feature of, a villain-to-hero arc was forgiveness.
Yet everyone who thinks this arc is indeed the only valid option phrases their arguments in terms like “Would you forgive someone who didn’t…”
Maybe I would - maybe I wouldn’t! But I never said anything about forgiveness being a requirement!
And everyone who wants to tell me that Christians Don’t Think Like This, Actually, says it in terms of “But Jesus forgives everyone, all you have to do is repent and you will be forgiven.” …okay great who says the characters need to be forgiven, why is it RELEVANT whether Jesus would forgive them or not - unless you’re operating in a Christian framework where God’s Forgiveness is a central feature of your belief system.
People who agree that yes, this is a culturally christian thing, and further believe that another form of arc would be superior, are saying “you should be able to just stop doing bad things and only do good things, and that should be enough for you to be forgiven” - okay you got the spirit but why do we have to be forgiven.
Forgiveness - as least as it is being used in this context - is someone else granting salvation to you. It is someone else absolving you of your guilt. It is you having shown someone else that you are worthy now, and them casting judgement upon you, and then agreeing that you are enough better than you were before.
Why does someone else get to sit in judgement and decide if you’re a good person now? Who besides a god stands in that position of omniscience and moral superiority and moral infallibility?
What if a character chooses to end his life of villainy, anonymously transfer all his ill-gotten gains to those he harmed, and devote the rest of his life to curing cancer alone in a lab on a deserted island, finally releasing his cure anonymously on his deathbed. No other character even has any idea this has happened; they all figure he just died or went into hiding. No one has forgiven him. Does that mean he’s still a villain?
What if all the other characters have hardened hearts for whatever reason, and no matter how much penance the ex-villain does, even if he only did one tiny bad act and then spent years in pain in punishment and then spent decades saving the world over and over at great personal cost, they will never, ever forgive him? Does that mean he’s still a villain?
What if everyone he personally wronged died in an accident, he was the only survivor, it was that shock that caused his change of heart, so everybody he knows now loves him and knows him only as a hero, but the people he hurt can never forgive him? Is he still a villain?
On the other side, if, say, a child continuously forgives their abusive parent, does that mean the parent isn’t a villain?
Forgiveness does not have a one to one correlation with goodness. In either direction.
I am concerned that what people are doing is translating “…in order to be accepted back into the warmth of readers’ love” as “be forgiven by the readers” (which is not inaccurate, in terms of the christian framework) and then all agreeing that yes, that should indeed be the central goal of every villain-to-hero arc. Which opens a WILD can of worms.
Because that means - We, as the readers, are in the position of gods to the characters, casting judgement upon them, looking into their hearts and deciding whether We will grant forgiveness to the characters for the wrongs they have done to others.
Like. Aside from all the other implications. At the point where you are granting someone forgiveness for something they did to someone else, something’s gone very wrong. Assuming you’re not, in fact, actually yourself a deity.
But also for people to make translation of “…warmth of readers’ love” to “readers’ forgiveness” you have to already be assuming that we can’t love a character if we haven’t forgiven them for every wrong they’ve done. And that wouldn’t even be true if they were a real person, and super duper isn’t true if they’re fictional. I love my mother with all my heart. I’ll also never forgive her for what she did to me and my brother. Forgiveness and love are two separate emotional axes and one does not imply anything about the other.
Look. Here’s some advice for actual real life. You don’t need to forgive someone to let them participate in society. You don’t need to forgive someone to love them. And you DEFINITELY don’t need to forgive them for them to be a good person. Whether they’re a good person is in their heart - not yours.
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