cross the irredeemable moral line?

[Ireth]

Where? Any way to change it to a big red button. I'll Keep this in mind for the future though.

Should be on the bottom left corner, in the little grey space right underneath the box you type posts in.

 

[Penpilot]

Grrr... I had a long post explaining things but I got logged out. There really needs to be some way that what we write isn't lost if we have to log back in. I'll rewrite everything tomorrow, but I think this is something that needs to be fixed.

Every time I write a big post, I ctrl-c and save the text to my clipboard before I post it. Saves me the aggravation of stuff like this happening. I have been save a few times by the auto save function, but this leaves no doubt my butt is covered.

 

[ascanius]

For me, what comes to mind is Superior, a very idealistic manga in which the FMC starts out as pretty much Fantasy Hitler. One of the main factors that allows her to be sympathetic is that the story starts with her changing her behavior. To find out more about the hero who's pledged to overthrow her, she secretly accompanies him, and since he avoids violence, she does so as well. She's committed all manner of atrocities in the past, and we see some of them in flashback, but her lack of further violence helps get the audience on her side. I don't think the story would have worked if she'd done any further killing.

Wouldn't a complete 180 kinda be hard to swallow, I would have a hard time believing such a change, though I'm judging before I'm reading so... Do you think such a strong change is necessary? It's going to be all but impossible to make a change that drastic because the character in question is the leader of a mercenary band so becoming completely rightous is not really possible.

There are two things I would need as a reader to like this ending:
1) Is the monstrous past understandable/relate-able and is it tied in with the theme of the story?
2) Is the change in character believable?

On the first question, what was the character's reason for being a monster - is it understandable? Is it relate-able? Is this linked with the overall message of your story (because it is a BIG twist). Would it make me think - oh crap, I could have done that too? Or would I as a reader just think - yuck, that is just way too awful and why the hell did you do that to me??

[Spoiler for The Last of Us computer game below]

I recently finished playing The Last of Us on PS4 and it was brilliant. The protaganist Joel is faced with a moral dilemma at the end - should he save a teenage girl with who he has reluctantly formed a deep emotional bond (his daughter died at around the same age) or should he let her be killed by scientists to create a vaccine for a zombie epidemic. He decides the former and proceeds to kill off anyone who tries to stop him, no matter what their pleas for the greater good. At the end of the game she asks him what happened and he looks her in the eye and lies.

Its a big holy <xx> moment because I've just been playing this guy for how many hours. And now he's doomed humanity.

Why did he do this? He did it because deep down he needed an emotional reason to keep surviving in that horrible post-apocalyptic world and she had become that reason. Without her he had nothing. So stuff the rest of humanity (who he'd seen the worst of over a period of 20 years) he was going to look after his own.

His actions to survive and his need for human connection were consistent with the whole theme of the game, it was reiterated time and time again and was set in the context of the horrific deprivation, loss and violence in which humanity had descended. It was one of the few games I've played in which I felt that the extreme violence actually meant something.

It made me look at myself and wonder - would I have done the same as Joel? And I really couldn't say. It was a story that posed a strong moral question about myself and my kind. Bravo!

On the second question - is it believable? I think this is also important. Is it believable that after being so monstrous that the character could be so nice. Why the change? This needs to be handled very sensitively as I think about faces can be jarring and turn the reader off.

So yes it could be done and could be very poignant - but tread carefully

I need to get a Playstation. I've heard great things about that game.

i hope this answers your questions.
This is what I have outlined so far. The reader gets the majority of the story through two points of view a girl, Anna, and a man, Thom. Thom returns to his modest estate to find a demon attacking, he can hear his wife screaming inside their burning house. His slaves are all fleeing while he tries to save his wife and two daughters. All he finds are the burned bodies of his wife and what he presumes is his youngest daughter. In the span of a day he looses everything, wife, children, wealth and is left with nothing. He places blame for his loss on the slaves who ran which sets him on a dark path as a notorious slaver.

This rage and hate towards the slaves culminates 8 years later when he comes across a group of free slaves and non slaves living in the north. When a survivor of the raid, a young woman, tries to protect her free slave husband and child and her non slave younger sister (Anna) along with other survivors (it would be the equivalent of an interracial couple kinda thing) he looses the small sliver of humanity and kills her, her child, and allows his men to do the same to the other survivors. Only the younger sister Anna survives.

All this is learned through Anna's POV (the part about him being a slaver, not the demon attack) as she leaves the tribe of slaves that rescue her and goes to seek justice for her sister and the family that took her in. Initially her sense of justice is far more important than her sense of vengence but this changes once she find the slaver who killed her new family.

Thom's POV is deals with his fear of loosing the new ragtag family that he found after he realized what he had become. He is the leader of a mercenary band that he tires to use to protect and help the innocent where ever possible. He struggles to protect those he loves and his fear of continued loss pushes him to make a choice. He has changed but he is not perfect and still strugles and fails though never nears the monster he once was until he has to make a choice. No one around him knows he was once the most notorious slaver on the continent and something he shares with no one. Towards the end he is left with a choice to put a city burn a city and help his employer, who he has come to regard as a son, rescue his wife who was kidnapped. Thom understands the fear of his employer and agrees to take the city at all costs knowing that thousands of innocents will die.

This is around the point where Anna discovers that Thom and the slaver are the same person. Her sense of justice is lost to vengence once she discovers the person who they have been following is the slaver and is now going to repeat that violence on an entire city. The battle starts and her thirst for vengence blinds her and she kills him. I'm hoping to leave enough clues for the reader to figure out that Anna and her dead sister are Thoms daughters who didn't die in the demon attack (They were saved by the family slaves, and their mother had actually gone back to help rescue a slave child but died in the fire). Something goes wrong during the rest of the battle and the city burns. Anna Later finds out that when she went to kill Thom she had disrupted his plans that would have saved thousands of people, in the end she caused their deaths. She also has to witness Thoms distraught new wife and two children in their greif along with others who had great respect for Thom. It isn't until the very very end she discovers that Thom may have been her father, but she will never actually know for certain, nor the reader.

I noticed that a lot of what I have outlined focuses mostly on unintended consequences that affect others removed from the situation, and sometimes those consequences change the lives of other characters in very drastic ways.

It's like so many have said that I've read here on the forums, show don't say. So when you create a body narrative behind your characters monstrosity think of the contraindications. Edward Scissorhands' mallody (?) was a good part of his creation. While he's an inbetween character that shows more of duality than monstrosity, that is the point. Human beings have a certain response to duality as a dichotomy and that's present in all of our philosophy and literature, it's the basis of our scientific endeavors as well.

Character creation is problem solving. Good luck.

I'm not understanding what you mean with 'think of the contraindications. Sadly I havn't seen Edward Scissorhands so I'm not understanding what your get at.

Do you think his reasons for changing are as important as his reasons for becoming a monster?

 

[Ayaka Di'rutia]

The situation you describe would certainly be an interesting plot twist. I'm not sure if it's one I would like, unless the character was able to find some sort of redemption from their past, but it would be interesting. Reminds me of the tragic irony in Oedepus. A different situation, but it reveals horror from the past and present.

 

[Feo Takahari]

@Ascanius: I wasn't intending a direct analogue to your story, just something to think about.

To clarify a little more, the FMC in Superior doesn't initially change her moral values. She just doesn't kill because she's trying to blend in with and spy on people who don't kill. In fact, multiple characters who're associated with the MMC are prevented from acting on their more malicious intentions due to his presence.

Looking at your more detailed summary, it's so far from any sort of idealism that I'm not sure if I'm being any use here. (It reminds me of when I talked about that video game I'd played where the only character who has any hope of a better future is a survivor of both rape and cancer who's being blackmailed with information that could get her put in a concentration camp, and people were like "Bzuh?")

 

[ascanius]

The situation you describe would certainly be an interesting plot twist. I'm not sure if it's one I would like, unless the character was able to find some sort of redemption from their past, but it would be interesting. Reminds me of the tragic irony in Oedepus. A different situation, but it reveals horror from the past and present.

Well I kinda wanted to leav it up for the reader to decide if the character was redemed or not but I would like to push the reader enough so it is not a simple question to answere.

@Ascanius: I wasn't intending a direct analogue to your story, just something to think about.

To clarify a little more, the FMC in Superior doesn't initially change her moral values. She just doesn't kill because she's trying to blend in with and spy on people who don't kill. In fact, multiple characters who're associated with the MMC are prevented from acting on their more malicious intentions due to his presence.

Looking at your more detailed summary, it's so far from any sort of idealism that I'm not sure if I'm being any use here. (It reminds me of when I talked about that video game I'd played where the only character who has any hope of a better future is a survivor of both rape and cancer who's being blackmailed with information that could get her put in a concentration camp, and people were like "Bzuh?")

But with summary I gave do you think there would be a problem with the character slipping up? or is the desire to change enough? You brought up a good point, I was just trying to dig deeper and find a balance.

 

[Mythopoet]

My first thought, as a reader and a writer, is to ask "what is the point? what kind of story are you trying to tell? what themes are you trying to explore?" As a reader, I like stories that are going somewhere and trying to say something. I don't like stories where things just happen and I am supposed to draw my own conclusions. I would probably be annoyed by a story like yours if it didn't have a theme.

My second thought is, it's definitely a story that can't be generalized. How well it works is going to depend mostly on how well you actually write it and what choices you make in how to actually present it as a narrative. A lot is going to depend on specifically how the characters are shown and what the atmosphere of the tale is, what you chose to show and what you chose to leave to the reader's imagination, etc. You just won't know how readers will react to it until it is in front of some readers so they can react to it.

My third thought is that you should watch "Passing through Gethsemane", an episode of the sci fi tv show Babylon 5. It's a really great example of having a "good" (practically saintly) character and revealing that he used to be a horrible murderer while managing to not make him any less compelling.

 

[BronzeOracle]

I think it's critical how you portray that scene when Thom kills Anna's family. Why does he do it, what are the circumstances. His actions against Anna's family appear to be very hate filled - is this really justified because he lost his family? He can be a cold blooded murderer or it could be tragic/unintentional. There is a big difference between Thom's numerous actions 'being a slaver' that are recounted broadly versus a visceral scene that massively impacts Anna and thus the reader. I think if its cold blooded then that would affect me for the rest of the book.

I think Mythopoet's question is very valid - why do you want to tell this story? What deep message/theme do you want to convey to the reader and why? Some soul searching here may help with defining Thom's character and the way in which you write his journey.