If you’ve read a book or watched a movie, ever, you’re probably familiar with the trope Redemption Equals Death. Darth Vader saving Luke in the Return of the Jedi is one of the classic examples. I have nothing against the trope, and admire a good use of it. But in the current messy state of the world, where too many of us are dealing with lives wrecked by economic stress, panic, and internet mobs, I think we need more of its less-written counterpart, Redemption Equals Life.
This, of course, will require more skill on the part of writers. It’s much messier.
Think about it. Redemption Equals Death? Quick, clean, enough time for a few last words on the part of the ex-villain, or a tearful speech from one of the hero’s party. And then everyone moves on.
Redemption Equals Life means everyone has to deal with a now-repentant villain in their midst. It’s the ultimate, and then what?
What do your heroes do with a villain who wants to stop being evil? What do average people who’ve suffered from his actions do? (Those that survived, anyway.) And what does the villain do with himself?
(Usually himself. Female villains often don’t even get Redemption Equals Death. Let’s have some better endings!)
Part of the mess is that it tests pieces of your worldbuilding you may not have thought too hard about. The legal system. What are the laws? What are the punishments? Are there courts? Lawyers? A recognition of extenuating circumstances, or even the possibility of reformation at all?
These are not easy questions. They may be painful for you, and worse for your heroes, who have likely suffered personally at the villain’s hand. Can they forgive? Should they? Are they tempted to a quiet, private vengeance? Or are they determined to be moral but watchful, let the villain live out whatever his sentence may be, while always keeping an ear to the ground for future acts of evil?
And if you’re writing in your villain’s head – how guilty does he actually feel? Was he just cutting his losses when it was evident the heroes would win? Did he have no particular objection to Evil, but the Big Bad was about to Destroy the World, and hey, he kind of lives there? Is he grieving, because in the pursuit of great evil he lost someone he never expected to lose? Does he want to do better, but has no idea how?
Like I said. Messy.
But I think we need much more of it. We all like heroes, and we’ll always need heroes. But we are also human, and sometimes we just screw up.
And the worst part of failing is that we can think there’s no way back. That we can’t do better. Be better.
So a few stories on how to claw your way back from the brink? Not a bad idea.
Mind, every villain should work for redemption. But consider it!
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
Funnily enough, I got such a redemption for a villain in my book. Not the main baddie, but someone who got pulled in via “will do anything to keep the family business afloat.”
When will people realize that saying “anything” is essentially a blank check?
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OTOH, it does help to give such a hook to redemption. Fiction having to be plausible and all that, an excuse for being evil helps us believe in seeing the light.
Then, it is also more plausible that a villain would manage to screw his courage to the sticking point and make a heroic sacrifice as a single deed than that he manages to forge a new habit, of virtue.
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Closest to that that I usually see is a villain becoming an anti-hero. Not even sure how many of those were actually brought to justice, so much as just mellowing out some but still not facing the law.
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In the Star Master duology, I had two bad guy-aligned characters (not especially morally challenged themselves) switch to the good guys’ side because basically they realized that the bad guys were not what they were advertising themselves to be. One died: I hesitate to call it redemption equals death, since it had been half or two-thirds of a book since he’d changed sides, so much as just fallout from the process of helping the other bad guy-aligned character change sides. The other one had to all appearances (there’s some timey wimey stuff involved so the other major POV characters don’t get to see much of this) a long and prosperous career with the good guys. In both cases, the good guys accepted them because they had no war crimes on their resume and the good guys needed every warm body they could get.
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I don’t know if you ever saw *Stargate: The Ark of Truth* but Teal’c gets a money scene on forgiveness and redemption there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEaOxGJm87A
And yeah, Redeem to Live is hard, especially when the villain may not have been a villain at all. I’m thinking of Hawkeye and Bucky here, both of whom are heroes but were mind-controlled into committing murder. They *couldn’t* say and make good on “No” and they have to live with that. They have to carry it. In Bucky’s case, some people will always see him as a villain rather than what he is – The Fallen, not the Villain. He has it somewhat worse than Hawkeye from a publicity perspective but they’re in the same boat in a lot of ways.
More to the point, this is why I don’t like the ham-fisted redemption of Loki in Ragnarok (and whatever they occasionally manage in the comics): He’s not sorry for any of what he did to anyone else but *maybe* his adopted family. That’s not Redeem to Live, like Teal’c or Hawkeye or Bucky. That’s “redeem because fans want it, and let’s not think about all the implications and is he actually serious about it beyond *maybe* Thor, Frigga, and Odin? No, of course not, god of chaos here.”
I mean, if you’re going to actually redeem Loki *put him through the wringer and make him mean it*. Make him live with it and work to be a good guy – heck, make sure he always has a backup plan to escape and have someone who has always been a hero snark about it. Then Loki can come back with, “Of course I always have a backup plan. I’m not done atoning yet. If I die, I lose the chance to make sure you all live. You’re welcome, ungrateful mortal cur.”
This is also a really good thing about Endeavor’s arc in My Hero Academia, since he thinks initially he can just say “I’m sorry” about his years of abuse and everyone will be healed, himself included. Horikoshi doesn’t let him off easy at all; Endeavor learns the hard way, repeatedly, that Redeem to Live HURTS. A LOT. It isn’t easy, he has messed up more lives than his family’s, and it has serious ripple effects. No “I’m sorry, please forgive me,” is going to heal those wounds, especially not overnight.
I want to see more redemptions like Endeavor’s, and more redemptions like Hawkeye’s and Bucky’s. Teal’c’s, too. Put Redeem in Death on the back shelf for a while – I want more Redeem to Live on the main course.
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OTOH, readers tend to care more whether they know whether the characters are not villains than whether the world around them does. And Bucky has a fierce squad of fans who defend him against those who call him villain, even if they don’t exist. As for Hawkeye fans, they don’t defend him because no one even thinks of him as a villain — I have seen outraged memes citing that everyone thinks Hawkeye as a hero so they should think of Bucky as one.
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Female Villains often have the High Heel Face Turn, where Love Equals Redemption.
It’s often annoying because in a lot of cases they don’t express any remorse or redemption at all, they just say “I’m in love with the hero, and that makes me a good person!”
Then they keep around all their questionable morals to make them more “exciting.”
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What I want to see more of is the villain realizing their plan won’t work.
There’s a lot of stories where that’s true, and it’s used to strip any justification from their actions, but then they immediately pivot to focus on the fairly fuzzy morality.
“Well, maybe he has a point?”
“No. His plan won’t work. It was proven by this experiment. It will just blow up the planet.”
“Really? Wow, we need to stop him! Maybe we can tell him-”
“And more importantly, it’s rude! He needs to understand that egging people’s houses is wrong! Even if he thinks it will save the world!”
“Really? I mean, I think the ‘it won’t work’ angle is really a better argument…”
“No! He needs to feel remorse for his Evil Ways!”
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Oddly enough the fanfic thing ended up spinning off a female villian redemption arc.
See, one of the base characters is a psuedo lethal joke character. She is one of the hungry yokai, but in universe it is mostly played for dark humor. She’s also rather incompetent, but it is implied that that may be because some local god sealed her so she wouldn’t be quite so dangerous.
When I started doing Granny Samurai vs the Planet of the Aztecs, I figured this would be a good character to use as a secondary antagonist. So she set her self up as a sort of aztec god for a tribe of surviving people. (The world really didn’t like people and was trying very hard to kill them all.)
Grandma Samurai get dumped in the middle of this, says oh hell no, and ends up with the tribe. So if course now the deposed aztec-wannabe godling is going to spend the rest of the story as a sort of stalking horse, dogging the hero through her journey.
Except, then she starts acting weird…
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While there’s a few good “redemption equals death” stories, I’d argue that, like dual wielding, it’s a shortcut for the lazy (or insecure) writer to have their cake and eat it too. “Ok, I got to ‘redeem’ this character, so the fans will be happy, but I also don’t have to bother dealing with the consequences or characterization to actually make the redemption work long term. Best of both worlds.”
On the other hand, there’s good reason for that: “redemption equals life” is usually _very_ poorly done, blatantly a case of “appeasing the fans” (including often the writer as one of those fans) while what we’re actually shown is “no, the character is unrepentantly still evil, hasn’t changed a bit, except _maybe_ adding betrayal of the other badguys to the character’s list of wrongs… and not for an actually good reason, either.” There’s very few “redemption equals life” stories that are actually good, precisely because of the combination of how difficult it is to pull off, and how uncommon the skill to pull it off is combined with the desire to write such a character (you’re one of the few authors I’ve seen manage it. like with Callimachus).
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One of the biggest hurdles to Redemption Equals Life is that most of the time there’s no vector for them to actually redeem themselves. If they don’t end up tried for their crimes and either thrown in jail or sent to the gallows it usually comes off as them being a Karma Houdini.
But if they do end up in jail they really aren’t doing anything to redeem themselves.
For that reason the best way to do a Redemption Equals Life is to have some sort of contrived situation like with Ken/The Digimon Emperor from Digimon 02 where the transgressions take place somewhere that has no government and that the actual government is better kept out of. Or for when there is some sort of literal Higher Power that can be sought to pass judgement and hand down what is basically a suspended sentence while the villain actually displays repentance and does his or her best to make up for their crimes.
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Depends on the severity of the crimes. One can believe that Trickster went to work for the government and got off because he was, after all, only a con man, not a murderer. (Saving the world didn’t hurt.)
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Indeed, I’ve got something to wrestle with in a work where the hero engages in some vigilante justice because the king’s knights are protecting horrible villains in order to use them, and the villains are continuing their villainy.
The king wants to work something out, in particular — well, because he wants to use the hero’s talents.
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Oh, this is a nice one! There’s at least one character I can think of where this happened. Yes, there’s also the Heel-Face-Turn aspect, but… well, doing a Heel-Face-Turn does not automatically mean that they are now a nice person either.
Vegeta. From Dragonball. Everyone else in the team was suspicious of him for YEARS after he switched sides. He never stops being a grumpy, arrogantg asshole, but he -does- become a better person. It’s just an ongoing struggle for him.
And that’s how it should be.
With Redemption Equals Life we are playing the long game.
Vader could have gotten a Redemption Equals Life treatment, but that would have required at least two more movies to work.
…I’m trying to use Redemption Equals Life with Kyouji in MFP. Got a good reward in store for him, now if only I could just get the plot to move alone…
Problem: What I had planned is not in character for the one who is supposed to be tranquel Fury levels of angry, and I’m not sure how to fix it…
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I’d say there’s a good argument – and one with a lot of weight to it – that Vegeta didn’t actually begin his redemption arc until the end of Dragonball Z after he became Majin Vegeta and got his ass beat. And even then it’s iffy.
From my recollection Vegeta never actually expressed any regret for his actions UNLESS they resulted in something negative happening to him or those he claimed as his. A key part of a redemption arc is the person who does something wrong recognizing that it was wrong in a greater scope than just “I did this, and suffered as a result. I wish I hadn’t done this,” and I don’t recall Vegeta ever really doing that. Maybe in GT, but I haven’t watched GT.
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From my recollection Vegeta never actually expressed any regret for his actions UNLESS they resulted in something negative happening to him or those he claimed as his.
Oh, there’s a route for redemption– just keep adding to who the villain views as “his.”
Eventually you end up with “I protect what is mine!” “…. uh, EvilBob? You claim EVERYONE is yours.” “And?”
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‘I kept on calculating and recalculating most the expedient ruthless strategy, and eventually I was so confused that I wound up becoming a decent person somehow.’
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Yes, it does take time to do a real redemption. In the outline where the character who was supposed to be mustache twirling evil suddenly went weird, they didn’t get redemption at the end of that story. They end up siding with the heroes in the end, but they’re frustrated, angry, ashamed, and don’t even understand why, and they just disappear after the big bad is defeated.
When we see them again, quite a lot of time has passed as they’ve sorted through what they are and what they have done, and are a very different person because of that.
I think that is really the way one has to do living redemption; you don’t get to show the real transformation, just the impulse that starts then in the right direction, and everything after that has to be the redemption.
And stories are full of heroes with a dark past. This is just showing that dark past before they chose to become heroes.
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This is why I find the Happy Hypocrite ones the most convincing. It takes time to develop a virtue.
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And if you can pull it off, having something hit them that actually shakes their hypocrisy can make an interesting character arc.
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Err — what happens in the Happy Hypocrite situation is that it dawns on them that they are no longer hypocrites — that is, feigning virtue. They have acted virtuously so long they have developed it, because they liked it.
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Let’s try this again
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There’s one story where I’ve seen this work very well… because the person in question was aiming for Redemption Equals Death, only the heroes knew it and wouldn’t kill him. They had *very* good reason for thinking he didn’t want to do the bad stuff he was doing (he was pressured into it by the actual Big Bad (who *did* get killed) and felt *very* guilty about it).
The heroes all but name this trope outright, pointing out that living is a better punishment than dying and that while it would take a very long time for them come to terms with what happened, they *do* get why he did it and know he’s not going to do it again. And then flat out refuse to become mad enough at the character that they’d kill him out of anger/self-defense.
They wind up essentially kicking him out of the group due to him trying to get them to kill him and say that they’ll look for him again in a few years to see how he’s doing. He is *very* annoyed by this as now he has to deal with actually being alive after everything happened.
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Oddly enough, earlier today I was thinking along parallel lines from the other direction.
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One of my favorites is where the villain thinks he is doing a redemption means death– because while he thinks the hero is going to kill him, he STILL has to Do The Thing which will mean laying his neck right there and handing the guy a knife.
He Does The Thing…and the good guy not only doesn’t kill him, but might actually help him Do The Thing.
The sheer confusion is a great way to get past the emotional whiplash of “this guy hurt people I care about” in readers/watchers.
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Maybe this is part of why so many of the shonen anime have Defeat Means Friendship for villains– it’s satisfying. (Sometimes poorly done.)
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Milton Caniff enjoyed having a really villainous female character, and then having the plot develop such that the villainess finds valid reasons to have to help the main characters, do heroic things, and even to be forced to make friends with romantic rivals. Sorta friends.
So then you end up with a friend who is still dangerous and difficult to hang out with… Except that now you can drop by the secret lair.
The great thing is that if an ex-villain person really is that paranoid, you can depend on him/her to have hidden escape routes and weapons and backup.
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The Codex Alera has a really good Redemption Equals Life situation that almost ends up as Redemption Equals Death, but the hero gets talked around by his girlfriend. (Although there is a symbolic death of identity.) It helps that the character has been living his redemption incognito for a while before his true identity is discovered.
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