In the world of fiction there are many ways to acquire power.
Some characters are born with it, gifted with some privilege or ability that sets them apart
from their peers; and while it might take them some time to fully come into their own,
the power they wield is within them all along.
Then there are the characters who achieve or earn their power, proving their worth through
trials and challenges and training, typically starting from nothing before working their
way to a level of strength or ability or capital unmatched by most around them.
And there are characters who gain their power unwillingly, by way of an accident or unexpected
inheritance or legacy or the bequeathment of an empowering artifact or some other way
a great power can unexpectedly find its way to a questionably-willing host.
This trifecta forms the three classical ways one can be powerful; to be born great, to
achieve greatness, or to have greatness thrust upon one.
You either have it from the beginning, seek it out along the way, or get smacked by a
pop-fly in the outfield and wake up with superpowers.
But in the gray area between achieving greatness and being inflicted with greatness, we find
a fourth option that is almost universally regarded as cheating, and that is bargaining
for greatness.
Characters in this paradigm gain their power by just asking for it, and giving something
back in return.
This may sound fair on paper, but it basically never is, in large part because this dynamic
contains - obviously - a power imbalance.
Most commonly, the person asking for power is mortal, while the entity granting that
power is immortal, and the power the person receives is temporary while whatever they
give in return is eternal.
This is by its nature an inadequate exchange for the mortal half of the equation, because
no matter how great the temporary reward, eternity is always bigger.
As an additional factor, bargains for power are almost always handled by entities that
are morally dubious at best.
Good and nice power-granting entities don't tend to demand an exchange for their help,
typically because they grant power for some sort of greater purpose.
The power-dealers that demand a bargain are usually in it for whatever they're bargaining
for, with the implication that they're at best self-interested and at worst actively
manipulative.
The archetypical example of this sort of "deal with the devil" is Doctor Faust, the protagonist
of a chunk of German folklore loosely based on a real historical dude who lived from the
late 1400s to the mid 1500s and was a bit of a polymath by 16th-century standards - you
know, alchemy, astrology, wizard stuff, all that good business.
The actual facts of his life are very difficult to suss out because he's been entirely eclipsed
by his folkloric counterpart, who made a deal with the devil to acquire scientific knowledge
and also sickass wizard powers at the cost of his eternal damnation.
Being a folkloric figure, the consistency of this character's story is nonexistant,
but that one core characteristic is pretty solidly locked in, and that is really the
root of this trope in its modern form, so iconic that it's responsible for the term
"Faustian Bargain".
As discussed in the ol' Halloween Werewolf video, the idea that real magical powers could
be drawn from demonic sources was originally considered a very un-christian thing to believe,
because it indicated that there was real power behind "pagan false gods" etcetera etcetera,
but during the frenzy of the witch hunts that concept fully flipped and the idea that a
real human being could get wild superpowers by shaking hands with a goat-man really took
off.
Timeline-wise that shift lines up decently well with the original bulk of Faustian folklore,
which was mostly a 1500s to 1700s thing.
The broad strokes of the story described a selfish and short-sighted man who sacrificed
his eternal soul for control of a fleeting power that was never really his, and only
regretted it when the bill came due.
And the trope hasn't drifted too far from its roots.
The exchange is simple: someone seeking power makes contact with an entity willing to give
them power - at a cost.
This empowering entity is usually explicitly malevolent and in many cases is specifically
demonic, satanic, or otherwise underworld-adjacent - but there are exceptions.
Some of these guys are just deeply inhuman with a bad case of blue-and-orange morality,
and some of them are downright affable, they just like getting repaid for their help.
The nicer ones will even bend the parameters of their deal to help out their chosen human
- but these are not the ones we'll be discussing today.
The fact is, the kinds of characters willing to make faustian bargains are almost always
either bad guys or really, really desperate, and that dynamic between a power-hungry human
and a powerful and evil supernatural entity is a deeply intriguing one to explore.
For one thing, most villains spend their story being set up to fail.
It's the nature of being the antagonist that one's role in the story is to eventually be
defeated, and furthermore for that defeat to be cathartically satisfying for the audience.
This means that most of a villain's arc is generally planting for the payoff of their
eventual defeat - dropping weak points or hubristic boasts or checkov's guns for the
story to fire later in a callback to their own cruelty.
This is also why villains often get "third-act breakdowns," where whatever façade or walls
they have up crack and we get a look at the raw, unfiltered emotion boiling behind the
surface - we see how the villain responds when all their plans fall apart, when their
victory is ripped from them at the last minute, when the core hypocrisy of their motivation
is exposed.
It's the payoff for a story's worth of planting - the final cascading collapse of the domino
chain of character weaknesses the story has been building around them.
So villains that have made faustian bargains are useful because they come off the shelf
with a lot of that planting already done.
The fact is, there's really only one way for those stories to end: the villain dies or
is otherwise defeated, as is typical of villains, and the entity they made the bargain with
collects on the deal, driving home that the villain was only ever working on borrowed
power and it was nothing but empty ego and delusions of grandeur that made them believe
they were the master of their fate.
The villain's downfall and karmic punishment for their evil is baked into the premise of
the Faustian Bargain.
All the good guys need to do is thwart them thoroughly enough that the satanic deal entity
comes to collect and wraps the story up cleanly.
Sometimes it's actually kind of a reveal that the bad guy's power came from Devil-Dealing,
and it only becomes clear to the protagonists when they get dragged off in the finale.
This is also a narrative format that overlaps with the appeal of Doomed Hero stories - a
case where you know the ending from the beginning.
Characters that strike faustian bargains for personal power are doomed by their own hand
to become completely subject to the whims of a massively powerful and malevolent being
that controls all the power they could ever hope to wield in their own defense.
And because they entered this bargain willingly, the character knows this from the beginning,
though they might not have fully processed it.
They understand, at least theoretically, that whatever they get from the bargain will be
temporary, and the price they pay will be forever.
So implicitly they have to believe that whatever benefit they're reaping is worth the cost.
Which does actually lead us to an important factor in this character archetype: what exactly
did they get out of the bargain?
After all, while the classic example is a power-hungry supervillain, there's a lot of
things you can get out of a deal with the devil.
Obviously POWER is the easy one.
These characters strike a deal that gives them an ability, asset or other fun benefit
designed to make their life simpler, easier and/or more impactful on the world at large.
It covers a lot of ground - characters in this category might shoot the moon and get
full wizard powers or a demonic super-mode, or they might just get a big pile of money
or something they can use to fund their independently dastardly schemes.
These characters are sometimes seeking power specifically for the purpose of revenge, in
which case they might be very self-destructive in its pursuit, willing to sacrifice everything
for the sake of vengeance.
But sometimes they just want power for its own sake, maybe even for a lofty goal like
trying to save the world - since power can be desired for a wide variety of reasons,
which is why these guys make very good antagonists.
As far as narrative threats go, "superpowered bad guy juiced up on Satan-ade" is a pretty
good way to make a seemingly-insurmountable threat with a built-in defeat switch for the
endgame.
Faust and his various Faust-alikes are pretty much the ur-example of this angle, striking
dubious deals for power and only coming to regret it quite late in the game, when the
benefits have run out and the power broker has come to collect.
But this is also where you get the characters motivated by revenge that accept a bad deal
because their desire for vengeance is the only thing they care about anymore, and they'll
gladly burn themselves down for the power they need to make their enemies suffer.
Unlike the smug sorcerous types, these guys are usually pretty tragic figures, and while
they make good nightmarish villains, if they're permitted enough character development to
rediscover priorities beyond revenge they might come to regret their Faustian bargain,
intensifying the tragedy of these former hotheads who sacrificed a future they never thought
they'd want.
There's also kind of a niche sub-category where the character gets the powers, not because
they wanted them, but because the thing they're dealing with demands that they take them as
part of their side of the bargain - like the satan-alike they're dealing with really wants
a vessel or a servant or a sickass flaming skeleton and they just get the powerset no
matter what they asked for.
These guys don't ask for power, they just get it anyway.
This subcategory features, among other things, Ghost Rider, Kratos, Spawn, and every single
magical girl in Madoka.
Remember kids, cute kitty things offering free superpowers are only benevolent like
sixty percent of the time.
Speaking of, it's common for these guys that get unwittingly roped into having superpowers
to have struck a deal for SOMEONE THEY LOVE.
These dudes are sometimes classic Faustian villains but are more often sympathetic at
minimum, and in extreme cases are full-blown antiheroes.
They make the deal as an act of personal sacrifice to save somebody they care about, usually
from death.
And as a rule, because satan-alikes are cheatin' bastards, those "saved" loved ones don't tend
to stay saved for very long, because once they make the deal to save their loved one
from the first falling piano they have nothing to bargain with when the second one drops.
These guys work well as sympathetic figures because they lose right out the gate; the
thing they make the deal for doesn't even matter, and as an extra kick in the teeth,
they're still bound to hold up their end of the bargain with their dope-ass superpowers
and their tragic backstories and yea I can see why these guys turn into antiheroes.
This is where you get your Ghost Riders, who get locked into a deal trying to save a loved
one who immediately dies anyway.
This is also why the guys making these wishes tend to get strongarmed into getting rad-as-hell
powersets, because if the satanalike DIDN'T do that, this deal would begin and end with
"please save my loved one" "okay.
PSYCH got your soul!"
It's such a quick and cruel gutpunch that it functions better as an origin story than
anything else.
But on the flip side, you get the characters whose only wish is to HAVE A GOOD TIME.
These are the hedonistic types that wish for things like eternal youth and beauty or for
a specific person to love them or to be super rich but with no political motivations.
These guys don't tend to get the full supervillain treatment, because they're obviously very
short-sighted in trading eternal suffering for brief enjoyment and thus don't make particularly
good schemers.
Instead they tend to get spotlighted as villain protagonists - aka terrible people who are
the main character, where often the appeal of their arc is simply watching them crash
and burn.
The trick is that these guys almost always star in stories about how one should be careful
what they wish for, because what they think they want isn't necessarily what they need
in order to be happy, because figuring out what makes you happy can be deceptively difficult.
It's also frequently a monkey's paw situation, where the thing they get doesn't manifest
exactly how they wanted but they're still bound by whatever bargain gave it to them
in the first place.
This is where you find your Dorian Grays, the confident fancy folks who spend just long
enough living what they think is a life of perfect hedonism to conclude that it's actually
terrible and everything is pointless because the thing they thought would make them happy
didn't.
These stories basically start with the main character asking for something they think
will fix them, getting that thing, and then gradually realizing that it didn't fix them
at all.
This one loops back around to the "wishing for power" archetype in a few places, because
some people wish for power so they can use that power to be happy, and some people wish
for personal happiness in the form of power over others, but in general there's a clear
distinction between the turbocharged supervillains and the walking object lessons on the folly
of greed.
There is also some variation in the nature of the bargain.
Obviously the archetypical Deal with the Devil involves the mortal giving the bargaining
entity their soul, but it's not always so simple or so permanent, and not every bargaining
entity is the soul-taking type.
Some Faustain bargains can even be reversed if the bargainer gives up what they got out
of the deal, though obviously that's restricted to the less overtly malicious bargainers.
And on the flipside, sometimes the benefit of the bargain is really permanent - where
instead of making a deal for temporary power, the mortal makes a deal for some sort of monstrous
immortality.
It might not even be explicit who they made the deal with; the power-seeking mortal just
chooses to sacrifice their humanity and/or their soul and is immediately reborn as some
kind of undying monster without it ever feeling like they're beholden to anything other than
the nightmare they just became.
This is a common angle in things like Dracula origin stories that want to explain how an
ordinary warlord became a vampiric eldritch abomination.
These cases are a little unusual because the price of the bargain isn't directly highlighted
like it is in more classical Faustian Bargains, and it can seem like the souped-up mortal
actually managed to get the better end of the deal, since they're legit immortal and
can just keep doing their thing forever without ever answering to the thing that gave them
the power in the first place - which is why it's usually highlighted that their new life
as a superpowered monstrosity is both the bargain and the cost.
They got what they wanted, or at least what they asked for, and the fact that they didn't
seem to pay for it is actually a very bad sign.
If these guys get introspective enough they might realize that becoming a monster wasn't
even what they wanted or asked for, it only became what they thought they wanted in hindsight
when all their other priorities went away.
The thing they struck the bargain with didn't hold up their end of the deal, but striking
the bargain changed them so much they didn't even notice they were cheated.
There's a level of deep, existential horror to this kind of story, where the person who
strikes the bargain is so fundamentally changed by it that they don't even notice that they
didn't get what they wanted, which really highlights how much of a grift Faustian Bargains
can be.
It depends on the specific devil - some of them really do honor their bargains to the
letter, and some of them are even kinda nice about it - but some of them are just blatantly
self-interested, and they'll reneg on any deal they want because they genuinely don't
care about fairness or deals or any of the trappings of a bargain, they just care about
whatever they want.
This is probably the most classical form a Deal with the Devil can take, because at its
heart the premise of this trope is that making a deal with the devil is really, really stupid.
It's not actually a deal because there's no reciprocity, and the enormous power imbalance
puts the mortal participant on the back foot the whole way.
If they think they have any real control over the situation, they're grievously misreading
it.
The house always wins.
Ultimately this trope is, in all its forms, a self-inflicted doom, which is why it's either
a villain trope or a tragic trope or both, with almost no exceptions.
The characters that enthusiastically strike a Faustian Bargain are generally self-confident
short-sighted goobers who think they're too smart or too special or too important to be
manipulated, and the characters that feel desperate or are forced into it generally
spend the entire rest of the story regretting their decision.
The first category make for great, fun villains, because they are tailor-made to suffer a hubristic
downfall when they finally realize they aren't the one calling the shots, and the thing that
is calling the shots couldn't care less about them.
The second category make for walking tragedies with neato superpowers, which is always a
fun combination for angst.
But there's a sneaky third category that's fallen out of fashion in recent decades but
used to be very big in fairytales: outsmarting the devil.
Instead of being played for angst or hubris, the heroes of these stories stumble into deals
with the devil and have to figure out how to make it go away, or how to get its help
without paying a terrible price.
These stories highlight cunning and cleverness rather than angsting about inevitable damnation
or whatever, and the bargaining entity often ends these stories as a bit of a laughingstock.
This kind of story does still happen sometimes, where the character making the Faustian Bargain
either uses their wits or the very powers they got in the bargain to defeat or outsmart
the bad guy, but it's not particularly common, possibly because there's a slightly…
moralized element to this trope.
What?
Moral absolutism in a trope about Deals With The Devil?
Surely not!
Yeah, yeah, I know.
But it's not a mandatory element of this kind of storytelling!
I think the reason it shows up as much as it does while the stories about characters
benefiting from the bargain and then escaping the consequences have fallen out of favor
is because, well - to put it bluntly, the devil gets a really bad rap and so does everyone
who hangs out with him.
Not to dive crazy far into theological history, a field I am very distant from but can already
feel boiling my comment section, but back in the day, the Jewish concept of Satan was
basically just a prosecuting attorney whose job was to argue with god, who was unconditionally
his boss.
And speaking as someone with a large jewish family I can say from firsthand experience
that in this culture, arguing is considered to be extremely healthy and necessary about
anything and everything.
The Satan we find in the Book of Job, for instance, is not a deal-making crossroads
power-broker - god literally asks his opinion and values his perspective.
This is not the satan figure later adapted by christianity and spread through folklore
and pop culture.
Pop Culture Pitchfork Satan is not to be argued with, he's a corrupting and powerful influence
to be stalwartly ignored, and anybody who talks to him or listens to him or, god forbid,
deals with him can expect - well, I believe the technical term would be "eternal damnation."
So the roots of this trope are heavily planted in the concept that dealing with the devil
automatically makes you either evil or stupid.
So while stories about outsmarting the devil do still happen, there's a reason most of
the characters that make Faustian Bargains are either unapologetic bad guys or short-sighted
and easily manipulable people whose punishment is a tragedy, but, well, they brought it on
themselves.
Maybe they even deserve it because they should've known better.
From this perspective it's not too surprising that most characters in this context don't
get to outsmart the devil - because that would be escaping the consequences for their inherently
evil actions, wouldn't it?
That would mean they did something bad and weren't punished.
I said earlier that this trope, when applied to villains, bakes in their karmic downfall.
There's a very popular form of catharsis in seeing bad people suffer, and there's a frustration
in seeing bad people escape consequences.
But the question of what makes a bad person is absolutely vital to think about when unpacking
this.
Most modern stories hold that striking deals with devilish characters for wealth or power
is automatically a strong black mark in the "bad" column, but in the old fairy tale days
- well, everybody liked the girl that outsmarted Rumpelstiltskin, and there were a lot of stories
where the hero took the deal to survive.
"Fairness" is an entirely relative concept, and there's plenty of catharsis to be found
in the heroes that escape an unfair situation without having to pay whatever dues that unfair
situation levied on them.
Is the bargain really a fair deal if the bargainer was desperate and had no other choice?
Is it morally imperative for that bargainer to then unmake themselves in payment to an
opportunistic supernatural loan shark?
Are they bad and deserving of punishment because they were desperate and took the first helping
hand that reached down?
The nature of these stories and their theoretical satisfying ending relies very strongly on
the personality of the bargainer.
An enthusiastic mass murderer we're probably gonna want to see lose.
A frightened young girl who just doesn't wanna die - I'm probably gonna root for her to get
out all right.
Even if she did make a deal with the devil.
And even if the devil has a really stupid name.
So… yeah?