Ah, uncle Iroh, everyone's favorite barely reformed war criminal.
What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
The first one is better. The second one is more impressive.
True
~Mario, 2011
This is why there’s that trope where the bad guy gets killed in the process of, or just after, getting redeemed. So the story can have its cake and not have to deal with any of the icky justice afterwards. How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes? So justice has to be meted out by fate rather than having to complicate our heroes.
How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes?
I'd love to see that in a story!
RDR2 in a nutshell
I read that as R2D2 and was just like "...wut"
I read that as R2D2, accepted the crimes, but was trying to figure out when the hell he was put on trial for them
How many planets did Vegeta destroy that we didn't see? We saw that one that was such a casual fucking thing for him.
Even after he turned good, he was still willing to kill a stadium full of people to get Kakarot to fight him. He acted like he was under control of the Majin spell but only went along with it until they started acting superior to him, then was just like, "nah, I just want to fight Kakarot because I've been training very hard and he's usually dead these days and I miss fighting with my buddy but don't tell anyone I called him my buddy, and I thought pretending to be under your control would get him to fight me, but I'm not going to bow to you or any of that shit."
Though I can't remember if he actually did kill some of them or if he just did an attack he knew Goku would stop, which would affect how evil the ruse was.
He killed those people. I guess you could argue since he knows about the dragon balls that they could wish them back after, but he still straight up killed them to get goku to fight.
Tbh I don't think vegeta really was a good guy until he fought kid buu. He was pacified sure and maybe even on the path to being good, but that was because his target was gone and to his knowledge was never coming back. That's why I love his turn to majin so much. It's a hardcore backslide because his target came back and if it wasn't for that he never would have realized how much everything on earth actually meant to him.
I don't consider him good after going for fat buu because he wasn't being selfless yet. Him + goku could have taken buu on but he felt like HE needed to be the one to finish the job. His sacrifice was hollow since it (despite what he said) was for him. If it really was for everyone he would have let goku join to guarantee a win.
It wasn't until he fought kid buu that he was actually being selfless. He let himself get wailed on so goku could charge up knowing he both stood no chance and could potentially be permanently erased since he was already dead. The "you are number one" speech is the conclusion to his story and his redemption.
This became a bit of a ramble but I love Vegeta's story and could probably keep going if I had the time
Yeah, Vegeta is ambiguously good/evil but makes the story better by being in it regardless.
Kinda like Piccolo, who clearly stated at the start of DBZ that he still intended to take over the world once he was powerful enough to defeat Goku and they were only joining forces because neither wanted the saiyans to destroy the planet, but then somewhere along the way he changed his mind, probably because of his bond with Gohan.
It's especially interesting in Piccolo's case IMO because he was basically born evil as a reincarnation of his father, never having a choice in the matter. It wasn't until Gohan came along and treated him as anything but a monster that he began to realize he had a choice.
Piccolo with baby Pan in super was one of the most wholesome moments in the entire series. Especially when Goku shows up to relieve him from babysitting and he explains a bunch of stuff to a half listening Goku and then ends up just staying because he doesn't trust Goku to remember any of it.
I mean if the villain's redemption is well written then typically the guilt from their past actions is the punishment for said actions, and their current actions are largely focused on atonement and reparation. That sort of thing often makes them even more relatable because while not everyone has killed another person, everyone in the world has hurt someone else at some point, maybe unintentionally, maybe unknowingly, maybe due to extenuating circumstances or their own trauma, or maybe because they were just a worse person at the time. Does that mean they are never allowed to be a better person and must eternally suffer for all the wrongs they've committed? Is it not better to encourage their goodness in the present than to forcibly drag them back to when they were bad over and over again for the sake of vindication? Does society really benefit from that sort of thing? And what if they end up saving more lives than they've taken? Something to think about.
Wait not everyone has killed someone?
It's got to be better to encourage people to be better and allow them to have a chance to change.
hilarious how this guy became a meme. I hope he earns at least $1 every time someone posts a picture of his trying-so-hard-to-stay-awake face on the internet.
My biggest problem with Fairy Tail.
Never got over Gajeel beating Levy within an inch of her life, then literally crucifying her for the rest of the guild to find.
And then that's who people start shipping her with?! AND THEN IT BECOMES FUCKING CANON!?
anime fans have a nasty tendency to ship the most absolutely toxic, nonsensical, garbage pairs. That includes the creators.
This is why I like the Halo expanded lore. There's a lot of guilt and grudges when it comes to Thel Vadam in Halo. Dude led fleets that killed millions of humans. He just accepts that he'll never make up for it, no matter how much good he does for humanity after the war.
It also goes into how, even though he was manipulated by the Covenant, he'll never stop feeling guilty. But he's the only Sangheili leader that is 100% devoted to peace with the humans, so most humans aren't willing to take a shot at revenge.
Reminds me of Sylar from Heros. Man killed a lot of people. Like, a lot. If memory serves, he became a "hero" in the last 10 minutes of the last episode.
Just use the Dragonballs to revive them
So, from a meta perspective, no real people died or were harmed. And the things real people get from a story are not a direct one to one analog to what goes on in a story.
Stories let people process things without actually having to participate in them. The fictional characters are not real. The person reading is, and generally filters what they read through a lifetime of experiences, picking and choosing what to integrate into themselves. Watching media or reading books and liking things doesn't turn you into a bad person simply by exposure.
It's true a story can spread a dialogue, but acting like someone is a terrible sinner guilty of the most horrifying thought crimes because they like the bad guy in a story isn't really different in my mind that someone religious peddling nonsense like you'll go to hell if you merely think a thought that isn't in line with a holy book.
I think sometimes people raised in religious homes with all that guilt about thinking sinful things stop going to church, but sort of copy and paste the moral thought crime bullshit onto random things and pick that up as their replacement zealotry because it feels familiar.
I see it happening a lot in discussions of media with darker content.
Agreed 100%. I think it’s a combination of that and a severe lack of media literacy. I don’t know if there’s a real name for it, but what I think of as sort of internet neo-Puritanism is a driving force behind people being extremely uncomfortable with media that isn’t a morality play with clearly delineated good and bad guys, where the bad guys always suffer. Like, we had that, it was called the Hayes Code and it was terrible.
I agree, though I also think there's a discussion to be had about society's obsession with punishment over anything else, and how sometimes it's okay to let go of the past and appreciate that someone has become a better person and is working to attone for that they did and do good things from that point onwards, which is overall better for the world as a whole than them being forced to suffer endlessly for their past actions for the sake of vindication or revenge. If you're going to take the stance that someone can have a moral debt they must be forced to pay, then you have to likewise acknowledge that there must be a point at which it can be paid. If you try to claim that some things can never be made up for and thus some moral debts can never be repaid, then that only highlights the problem with that sort of reasoning. Because if someone takes a life then saves a life, and you claim that one is not enough to make up for the other, then you're essentially treating life 1 as more valuable than life 2. And what if they take 100 lives but save 1000? Can human lives even be stacked up against each other like that to say which group has more "value" than the other? That's the paradox of a moral debt, something can not simultaneously be priceless and yet also not hold enough value to balance the scale against itself at the same time.
In real life this can be complicated further because it can be hard to judge whether someone has truly learned from their mistakes and genuinely changed their ways, but in a fictional story you often get to see for sure that the character truly is sincere. So to tie that in to what you said, just because a viewer/reader is capable of accepting a character's redemption in a fictional setting, where they are 100% certain that the former villain has had a change of heart and feels bad and will continue to do good things into the future, that doesn't mean it's a moral failing on the audience's part. But it's also worth noting that being willing to give someone a chance to improve themselves and grow as a person instead of demanding their eternal damnation and punishment isn't a moral failing either even outside of fiction.
The village of Nameks that Vegeta massacred, including children. And the planet of bug people he killed on his way to Earth with Nappa.
He didn't even become actually "good" until after he kills himself. Never atoned AFAIK
Thank you Fred Johnson!
Fred Johnson is such a great character. The Expanse writers absolutely nailed him in the books as he puts everything into atonement with the Belters. I need to read the Fred Johnson short story soon
Accelerator's redemption arc made him my favorite character and you loser teenagers can get mad at me all you want
Accelerator wasn't inherently evil though, he was practically cultivated to be a killing machine for the sake of Level 6. Like yeah what he did was absolutely horrible and fucked up, but that's kinda what happens when you make a child kill more than 10,000 people that were actively attempting to harm him.
I did always like the twist of fate where his life is now dependent on his former to-be victims. I had no qualms with his redemption arc.
Teal'c.
Teal'c was always willing to pay for what he did in his past evident in Cor-ai. I don't know if I would classify him as a villain. His whole backstory basically consists of him being trained by Bra'tac to take down the false gods
Tealc was a soldier/slave just mostly obeying orders to survive. He jumped at the chance to rebel.
Magneto was >!right!< a murderer
Cyclops was >!right!< done dirty twice
Quentin was a snarky jerk but technically right?
I absolutely love her character and her S5 arc, but Catra from SPOP be like
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