Sympathetic Villain vs. Redeemed Villain

Recent news that Netflix is launching an animated story called Steps, giving Cinderella's wicked stepsisters a sympathetic side. And how is Netflix marketing this? "Think you know Cinderella’s “evil” stepsisters? Think again!" I can't help wondering if some of this is based off the success of the Wicked movies, which is all about giving the Wicked Witch of the West a sympathetic side--she's not really a villain, she's just misunderstood. 

Sarcastic tone aside, I apprciate this trope when it's done cleverly. I think Moana was a really solid example of that, both with Maui and Te Ka. I could even argue that the greatest RomCom of all time, Pride and Prejudice, relies on this trope. It can be thought-provoking, and it can also be useful for a reader to reflect on--to catch yourself before you go too far down the villain path. 

But I think it's gotten out of hand. Between Maleficent, Cruella, the recent Disney Star Wars attempts to make the Sith look cool, Amazon's atrocious Cinderella, the lunacy of Rings on Prime with the orcs and Pharazon, and now this Steps thing, it seems like that's predominately the story you can expect from forthcoming movies. It's getting to the point where it's not thought-provoking anymore and undercuts the stakes of the movies. 

And people are getting irritated. 

That got me thinking about villains of the past, though--villains like Darth Vader. No one had a problem with (spoiler alert) Darth Vader redeeming himself at the end of the trilogy. Actually, funny story: when we were kids, Mom would only let Karl and me dress up as good guys for Halloween. We weren't allowed to be villains. But one year, we were a little late shopping for costumes, and the only decent costume in Karl's size was Darth Vader. Mom decided that was acceptable for Halloween because Darth Vader ended as a good guy. 

The family lore, I think, actually draws the attention nicely to the difference between Darth Vader and some of the more recent villains: Vader wasn't a sympathetic villain, he was a redeemed villain. 

And this got me thinking about a whole host of villains... 

Being Sympathetic Does Not Equate to Being Redeemed: The Baroness from Ever After

Ever After is a fun movie that takes the old Cinderella story and fleshes the characters out very well. The evil stepmother gets this treatment subtly but effectively. When we meet her, she comes across as warm and friendly and some of her actions make it seem like she might be very in love with Cinderella's father... but she's the wicked stepmother, so this has to be an act right? Well, about halfway through the movie, there's a scene where she stops and comments on how much she sees Danielle's father in her, and the brilliant acting makes it abundantly clear that, yes, she truly did love her husband. 

It's never said specifically, but throughout the movie it is implied that the Baroness hates Danielle because when the father died, his last words were for Danielle, not for her. A real, or at least honest, love for her husband led her into envy and villainy. 

What sets Ever After apart from the stupid orcs in Rings on Prime, however, is that the Baroness's villainous actions are never excused. Her cruelty toward Danielle and the servants, and her lies to the king and queen in pursuit of her ambition, are ultimately punished when she is turned into a servant in the castle, switching her position with Danielle's. In that scene, we see that she has not learned her lesson, and she is still being horrible. 

The key point in this case is that having your heart broken in the past does not make you a good person. A villain needs to face some recognition of their awful actions and make efforts to make amends; they should not get off lightly, and their actions cannot be excused. 

Being Sympathetic Makes an Easier and More Plausible Path to Redemption: Snape from Harry Potter

If you haven't read the last Harry Potter book, please stop reading here. This reveal is actually brilliant, and I would hate to spoil it for you. 

Snape has a whole catalogue of villainous behavior in the books against the kids, especially Neville, but the worst of his behavior happened before the kids showed up at school when he joined the Death Eaters. We don't know what he did as a Death Eater, but it's not unreasonable to assume he was involved in, bare minimum, tormenting some Muggles, and likely torture as well. And even if he himself didn't murder anyone, he definitely joined someone who he knew was committing murder. 

But late in the last book, we learn the most we ever learn about Snape's backstory: he came from a deeply unhappy and unsupportive family. His father hated magic, his parents quarreled constantly, and the only happiness he ever found was when he spent time with Lily Evans, who he fell in love with. After getting to Hogwarts, he found more friends, but all of them grew up to be Death Eaters--presumably, that was a big factor in him joining Voldemort himself. But he never stopped loving Lily, and then he was suddenly forced into a conundrum when Voldemort swore to kill the woman he loved. 

At no point is Snape's behavior acceptable. Enormous portions of his tragic backstory are extremely similar to Sirius and Harry's, but while Sirius also has a catalogue of unacceptable behavior as a teenager, he never played with the Dark Arts (why in the world does Snape always get romanticized as a tragic bad boy and Sirius doesn't? I'll never understand that), and Harry remained a generally kind and honorable person. As for Snape, his traumatic and tragic life don't excuse his behavior, but they do explain it--and, crucially, they also explain his redemption. 

When Voldemort decides he's going to kill Lily, Snape switches sides completely, spying on Voldemort for Dumbledore and helping to keep Harry safe, all this done because he loves Lily. The very thing that could have been trivialized as making Snape a sympathetic villain became his path to redemption. Snape's motives--both for evil and for redemption--are very clear. 

Even though Snape does change sides, he also is not exempt from consequences for his actions... although, if I'm being honest, I kind of think the consequences he got were worse than he deserved by the end (losing the trust of his friend's son, being forced to kill the person who took him under his wing and cared for him, losing any chance of being accepted by anyone on either side after the war with Voldemort was over... he was definitely one of those characters for whom death was not a punishment). Regardless, although he was honored as a hero in the end, he's still forced to deal with the effects of his actions. That is an important part in any redeemed villain's story. 

The Villain Is Reminded That Honor Matters: NCIS Season 9

Season 9 was admittedly not very interesting to me, but on a purely technical level, it's one of the more well-crafted seasons. The final arc pitted two villains together, one a terrorist whose son was killed because of faulty wiring, so he decides to go on a rampage and setting off a bomb in the Navy Yard; and one, Jonathan Cole, was a former bomb squad member who was the main dirtbag in one of the earlier episodes but didn't seem to have a more important act than that. Then, in the very last episode, the team is struggling to apprehend that aforementioned terrorist, and as part of that, Gibbs grabs Cole from prison to give more information about said terrorist. Both of them together discover the enormous bomb on the Navy Yard, right next to the glass windows of Abby's lab, and Cole says something like, "Get out of here, keep her safe." Gibbs leaves the bomb expert with the bomb, and he tries to disarm it, but before he can, the cell phone attached to the bomb goes off and he is killed. 

It's a rather poignant setup because you have one villain who isn't going to change, and one villain who, when faced with overwhelming danger, proves himself to have courage and to remember that honor is to help protect others from danger. It's a little bit of a twist because, as I remember, he didn't have a particularly understandable reason for going rogue in the first place, so he wouldn't be the one you would expect to find redemption, but he did. 

Someone Has Hope That Encourages the Villain to Choose Otherwise: Darth Vader

Darth Vader is one of the classic examples of a villain redeeming himself, but that probably wouldn't have happened if not for Luke. For as long as he can, Luke holds on to a belief that there is some good in Vader, even when Obi-wan and everyone else had completely given up on him. 

I think the fact that many characters acknowledge how evil Vader has become--and he has--sets Vader apart from Maleficent et al and gives his story an edge that some of these "sympathetic" and "misunderstood" villains don't have. Moreover, it shows how strong Luke really is to maintain his hope in the possibility of Vader still having a good side; then that strong hope is rewarded when Vader switches sides, and paying with his life. 

Incidentally, you can apply a lot of the same logic to Megamind, too.

A Villain Has a Responsibility to the People He Hurt: Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol

What more appropriate story to talk about in this post, at this time, than Scrooge? 

(There is a more appropriate story, but I'll come to that later.)

A Christmas Carol's first stave does an excellent job setting up how selfish, evil, and miserly old Scrooge is, with a cold heart and no thought for anything but business. We even seen that early in his youth, his love of gold turned away the woman he loved, and how it led him to be cold to his only nephew and his only employee, leading to him missing out on the happiness they all shared. 

The first four of the five staves are varying degrees of creepy as Scrooge is visited by ghosts, but the final stave is a longer ending than Return of the King and is completely rewarding as we see Scrooge making amends to the people he hurt. His reputation completely changes, and his actions are detailed: he becomes friendly with his nephew, he helps out the Cratchits and especially Tiny Tim, and he becomes known for generosity to the poor. These actions, these choices, are completely different from who he was at first. 

A Christmas Carol and the redemptive story of Scrooge has become the iconic story of Christmas. So how could there be a better villain's redemption story than that?

All of Us Have Been Redeemed: Jesus in a Manger

I can't let Christmas go by without a reference to the greatest redemption power of all: The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you are burdened by guilt of your past actions, or despair that no one could care for you, I encourage you to turn to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, where you will find a God who loves you, you, so much that he willingly endured torment on earth and death to redeem you from your brokenness. Anything that you feel is keeping you from being a good person--God has taken it away. His promise of forgiveness and healing is there for you to claim. 

So What Would Make Steps a Successful Story About a Redeemed Villain?

Based on what I've written above, I come to the conclusion that Steps needs to do a few things to be a successful story about a redeemed villain: 

• Acknowledgement: There absolutely needs to be some acknowledgement that the stepsisters engaged in awful behavior. No excuses. No qualifiers. Bad behavior is bad behavior, and needs to be called out. 
• Motivation to Change: There needs to be some kind of reason they want to change. Love, guilt, loneliness, or someone having hope in them--any of these would probably work. 
• Changing Actions: Somehow, they need to do something that will prove their change of heart is sincere. This could be making amends to the people they have hurt, or taking on some new responsibility. 

So, how does it sound like Steps will accomplish this?

When misunderstood Lilith (Wong) is blamed for hijacking the Royal Ball with a stolen magic wand, she accidentally turns her sister Margot (Hsu) into a frog and allows the kingdom to fall into the hands of a prince-obsessed mean girl. Now Lilith must team up with Cinderella (and a surprisingly dreamy troll) to save the kingdom, repair the fractured fairy tale, and prove that even so-called villains deserve a shot at happily ever after.

Well, that just sounds like another misunderstood or sympathetic villain, as opposed to a redeemed villain. I suspect will be missing an acknowledgement that their actions were reprehensible. Which means they're going to have to change the stepsisters' actions, right? I mean, I don't know how they're going to make the stepsisters sympathetic with their behavior as the way it always has been--even Ever After could only partially accomplish that. 

So... we'll see. 

Evil Races? Let's Look At Two Fantasy Examples

This post does not have a point. It's just a series of my observations. 

One of the key points of Rings on Prime was their attempt to humanize the orcs, which is interesting because Tolkien himself also struggled with the idea of having an intrinsically evil race, like orcs. This video, from about 14:10-14:45 or so, does a great job explaining why RoP failed. 

I've heard things (but it's 10 PM at night and I have work tomorrow, so I'm not researching them now) about Tolkien having a hard time reconciling an "evil race" like orcs with his values of redemption. I've also read a lot of headlines about Tolkien's creation of an evil race being racist and problematic and so on and so forth. I remember also hearing about evil races being reevaluated in other forms of fantasy media, such as D&D--hence this song, for example. 

Something I realized recently, though, is that there is another "evil race" in fantasy that I have never heard this kind of theorizing about: the dementors from Harry Potter. Dear reader, I wonder why this might be? Why are fantasy readers uncomfortable with the orcs being an "evil race", but not uncomfortable with the dementors? 

I mean, I haven’t seen any D&D stuff rewriting the dementors to be sympathetic characters who have their own perspective, and NO, that is NOT A SUGGESTION. Please don’t do that! Having the unsympathetic villain makes the story more interesting, and when the characters spend the entire third book wondering about the morals of compromising with something so evil because it’s a way to punish other evil people… I mean, that’s very interesting and thought-provoking. (Especially when it turns out that they had no compunctions about punishing innocent people, because they are unrestrained evil.)

But I do have to wonder, why are intrinsically evil characters not even noticed in one series, but make lots of other people (including the writer) uncomfortable in a different series?

I suppose one possibility is the context of the story. Rowling’s books have a lot of discussion about unfair treatment to other creatures, so when she trots out one irredeemable creature, everyone kind of gives it a pass. 

Perhaps also because the only things we ever see dementors do are things that humans can’t do, and therefore we have no investment in them being redeemed. Orcs, on the other hand, engage in cruelty and violence, things that humans do and can be redeemed from, so we have an investment in their redemption.

However, I think the biggest difference is that the dementors are clearly some kind of animal, but the orcs in Tolkien were once other creatures. (The movies say they were once elves who were tortured and corrupted, and Rings on Prime really leaned into that; I’ve heard somewhere that Tolkien changed their backstory into something else, but I don’t remember what it was, and that’s not the one that everyone’s thinking of anyway, so…) Orcs are on one level the Elves are on too, while dementors are more in the category of wolves, sharks, and other animals that haunt our nightmares… except that the dementors in the book clearly talk to humans, so theoretically they should be on the same level as humans. 

To be honest, I don’t really care. There are other creatures in Tolkien’ legendarium that no one feels the need to redeem (Balrogs, barrow-wights, and Nazgûl all come to mind), so maybe I’m wasting my time wondering over this question. But I thought it was an interesting difference, and I haven’t posted in a while, so there it is. If anyone has thoughts, then the comments should be working!

What Makes a Good Story?

Hello, readers!

My life has been crazy busy (in case you can't tell by the long absence from my blog, Facebook, and my Travel Blog), but now I'm on second spring break, and this time I had the good sense to only book a short trip. Now, I have a few days to actually do some blogging.

The thing is, though, that I have a hard time trying to decide what to write about, at least as far as nonfiction goes. Most of what I've been doing really belongs on my Travel Blog, I can't talk about work the way I used to talk about school, and the articles and various support stories I've been reading for fantasy authors are just a little too touchy for me to comment on right now. I do have some rather depressing news about a fellow author, but I'll share that to my audience at a later time (spoiler: it has to do with a new book).

Anyway, as I was pondering what to write about, I got to thinking about a quote from John Stephens, author of the Emerald Atlas series. I used it for some of my work at SPU, and I've been thinking about it since:

[N]o one comes to write fantasy who is not, first and foremost, a lover of fantasy, who does not know its ins and outs, the various plot stratagems, the characters who insist on popping up. It somewhat stands to reason that when that person goes to write his or her own fantasy book—as I did— they don’t immediately set about chucking everything that came before; rather, they embrace those tropes, decide what their own spin will be, how they will breathe new life into the genre that they love. [1]

That's true, and I'm guilty of that myself - and I'm not sorry in the slightest, for the same stated reason.

But of course, there still needs to be something new to each of these tropes and stories, or else it's just not good writing. (Am I guilty of this, too? I don't think so, but you be the judge.) That's the point of Stephens' last line - "breathe new life into the genre that they love".

That, I have decided, is going to be the theme of this series of posts. It will be tagged with that "What Makes a Good Story Label", so you should be able to find them easily when you wish. Hopefully there will be some detailed research with this, but like I said, my time is limited (and my access to peer-reviewed databases tends to be iffy at best), so they may end up just being my own theories and ideas.

Anyway, I'm thinking of beginning with what I think of as the three sub-genres of fantasy (other-world fantasy, this-world fantasy, and dual-world fantasy) and considering what is good, bad, and what kind of story I haven't read yet. Then, I'll dig into my favorite part of the stories: the characters!

This probably goes without saying, but I really hope for feedback from you, my readers, for this part. I'm aiming to make this a serious part of my blog, and I want the blog to become something more regular in the future, but that won't happen without comments and support. So, if you want to read more of my blog, please be alert for these upcoming posts!

Cheers!

[1] Stephens, John. "On Fantasy." Journal of Children's Literature, vol. 39, no. 1, Spring2013, pp. 42-46. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.spu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=eue&AN=87330992&site=ehost-live.