It would be a pretty massive understatement to say that fictional characters spend a disproportionate
amount of time disagreeing with each other, on anything and everything from small-scale
differences of opinion to grand world-shaping moral battles.
If two characters aren't literally two copies of the exact same guy, they're liable to have
different personal motivations, priorities and/or values, leading to fun disagreements
on anything from what to have for dinner to the moral and ethical considerations of killing
their bad guys.
Even characters that get along very well with each other aren't going to have the same opinions
on everything, and that simple fact allows for the vast majority of interesting character
dynamics, since characters usually have more to say when they're disagreeing with each
other than when they're 100% agreeing.
Hell, in the right circumstances a character can easily have reason to disagree with themself,
meaning even solo plotlines aren't free of it.
This structure of disagreement is generally called "conflict" and is considered a vital
staple of storytelling, which is broadly accurate but a little unhelpful in the phrasing, because
sometimes it makes people think that stories need to have people constantly loudly arguing
in order to count as stories.
In actuality, "conflict" is a very broad concept that covers a lot of ground from very large
to very small, and among other things, there's kind of a spectrum of disagreement - it's
not a binary switch between "completely on the same page" and "completely opposed at
all costs".
It's very common for characters to want the same thing but have different ideas of how
to get it, which is a form of conflict; or for one character to have a personal motivation
that influences them more than the rest of the gang, which can become a conflict depending
on their circumstances; or for a character to have reservations about a goal that their
allies are 100% on board with pursuing, which is a low-stakes conflict with the potential
to escalate.
Different wants and needs and motivations mean the characters want different things
in different ways, and in the most basic possible sense, that's conflict, even if they end up
working towards the same thing and ultimately being on the same team.
This definition of "conflict" is so broad it borders on total meaninglessness, but that's
good news for us, because it means "stories have conflict" isn't a rule anyone needs to
stress about following, it's just a mostly true observation.
But when a conflict of motivations gets intense enough, the characters' clashing desires can
break away from each other, and in the event that this produces a schism in loyalties,
this character conflict can become a full-on betrayal.
Now "betrayal" is one of those slightly weird tropes that is completely dependent on context,
because on paper what it describes is very simple and completely morality-free: a character
previously thought to be aligned with one group of one or more characters turns out
to have an agenda that is at odds with that group's plans and/or values and takes an action
that is at cross-purposes from their agenda.
But that's a very dry, legalistic way to frame something so emotionally weighty.
"Betrayal" has oomf.
It means something.
Calling a character a traitor is an instant gutpunch.
When a character betrays the heroes it's crushing; expect heartfelt declarations of broken trust
and frequently a permanent black mark on the treacherous character's reception - they might
end up being liked and trusted even less than the card-carrying bad guys who've been openly
evil right from the start.
Treachery is a special kind of evil that in many cases renders the traitorous character
permanently untrustworthy by characters and audiences alike - unless their treachery is
happening to the bad guys.
When a villain's right-hand man or abused evil minion or wide-eyed idealist recruit
starts making "wait, this sucks actually" noises it's most common for the audiences
to whole-heartedly root for them to backstab the people who trust them so they can break
away for their own good and the good of the plot.
These defectors from villainy are often seen as more trustworthy because their moral compass
steered them out from the shadow of evil and onto the side of good.
From a certain point of view, anyway.
The trope of betrayal is in this very weird, completely subjective space, where depending
on who the audience and/or writer personally sides with, a traitorous character can either
be an irredeemable monster or an unconditional moral paragon, and most of the time this assessment
has absolutely nothing to do with anything they've actually done and why, but rather
who they've done it to.
A character becoming disillusioned with their organization after learning about its sinister
origins and breaking away to oppose them at every turn is a hero origin story if you're
in She-Ra and a sequel villain setup if you're in Doctor Strange.
A character backstabbing their trusted mentor and longtime companion for the sake of someone
they love is bad when that mentor is generally good guy Mace Windu but extremely heroic and
applause-worthy when that mentor is big bad Palpatine.
Now the thing is, while the real world is a very morally complex place where simple
black-and-white 100%-good-vs-pure-dag-nasty-evil situations are much rarer than you'd be led
to believe, it's silly to pretend that this nuance extends into fiction-land.
Obviously in the world of simple moral conflicts, betraying a bad guy is good and betraying
a good guy is bad.
Betrayal is not an inherently moralized act, despite the absolutely rancid vibes of treachery
- the action just takes on the morality of the character's revealed motivation.
If it turns out the traitor character has a moral line their skull-wearing boss wants
them to cross, the traitor splitting from Team Bad Guy is a good thing because it reflects
their good-guy moral compass.
If the traitor character is splitting from the plucky protagonist posse because they're
secretly driven by a lust for revenge at any cost, that's a lot more dubious because it
reflects the understandable but generally bad motivation of vengeance.
But things can get significantly more complicated.
The character's motivation might have layers.
For instance, maybe they have to betray their friends because they're winding up to betray
their mutual enemies even harder, but they can't do that if their enemies don't trust
them.
Needing to ingratiate oneself to a bad guy can drive a fundamentally good character to
do all kinds of horrible things to maintain cover, and there's a ton of drama that can
be derived from this.
Or maybe their internal motivations are in flux, and even they're not sure who they should
side with, which is why their loyalties keep changing.
Or maybe their internal motivations are totally solid but they've always been kind of an independent
actor with different priorities than the good guys, and a new situation causes them to switch
sides without even necessarily noticing because their own priorities are unchanged.
"Betrayal" is a very big trope that covers a lot of ground, and while we're mostly gonna
be focusing on the "traitor revealed" variant, we can't really talk about it without acknowledging
some of the other ways characters can turn on each other.
Because surprise surprise, as much as I love categorizing and subdividing stuff into nice
little clades, we still can't draw rigid delineations around a literary concept!
Anyway, in the "traitor revealed" plot, the specifics of the traitor character's secret
agenda is, unsurprisingly, a very important part of their role in the story.
Generally the way the story is structured is that this character spends the first chunk
of the story with this agenda hidden from both their allies and the audience, passing
for a completely regular and heroic good-guy - then there's a reveal when the audience
learns of their treachery, sometimes but not always before the other characters do - and
from that point onward the audience knows what this character is really about, which
is typically something nefarious.
Many betrayals take this form, though the audience's perspective is sometimes relocated
- in some stories the audience is following the traitor the whole time, and the intrigue
is in watching them maintain their cover and plotting their evildoing - but the most common
way these stories are structured are the ones where the traitor has been secretly following
their own plan without the audience's knowledge.
Of course, this can be a tricky bit of writing, because its explicit goal is to mislead the
audience and the characters, and it can be hard to do that without cheating.
In some stories the traitor suffers from a case of bad-plot-twist-itis, where the twist
of their treachery retroactively makes the story make less sense, because their previous
totally-a-good-guy actions don't actually line up with whatever their actual secret
agenda was.
Sometimes it's almost like the traitor character knows the audience is watching, because they'll
keep up their charade even when they're alone for the benefit of absolutely nobody, just
for the sake of hiding the twist.
Traitor characters often also act like a completely different person after the reveal, which can
make sense depending on how much of an act they were putting on for the other characters,
but can also weaken the impact of the betrayal.
Part of what makes this trope hit so hard is that it forces the characters and the audience
to try and reconcile what they already know about the traitor with the new information
about them - how their kind and compassionate love interest could sell them out, or why
their trusted comrade is running off with the macguffin, or what made their leader turn
their back on everything they stood for.
It recontextualizes their previous actions and makes the audience and characters question
how much of what they know about them was a lie.
This means if it turns out that everything was a lie, the gutpunch is basically gone.
"Why would my close friend and comrade do this awful thing?"
is a juicy question with a lot of exciting possibilities - perhaps blackmail, brainwashing,
a lust for revenge, a secret loyalty to the bad guy that predates their dynamic with the
heroes, a hidden resentment that's been bubbling under the surface and never addressed until
now.
"How could this asshole stranger who was pretending to be someone I liked do something bad?" is
a significantly less juicy question.
A revealed-traitor character tends to hit harder the more honest they are about their
whole deal, because that usually makes their past actions make sense in hindsight.
If the traitor's pre-treachery personality was 100% a lie, there's nothing of value for
the treachery plotline to lose.
The more lovable, sympathetic and valuable the traitor is, the more it hurts when they
split from the gang and the more the other characters will feel it.
If the traitor character is genuinely their friend, love interest, mentor, whatever - then
the betrayal means something to both of them.
It damages or even sacrifices something extremely important.
If the only gutpunch is that the traitor character tricked their allies about their entire motivation
and personality, the only thing the other characters are likely to feel about the whole
situation is anger that they were tricked.
You can't mourn the loss of something that never existed, and mourning is a huge part
of what makes this trope hit.
This is probably why betrayal is much less of an oof when it happens to bad guys.
Good guys form meaningful relationships much more frequently than bad guys do, so when
a character realizes they're on the bad guy side and dips they're usually not breaking
too many hearts on the way out.
But that's not always true!
Sometimes a villain can actually be made startlingly sympathetic by highlighting how much it hurts
them when one of their allies turns on them and leaves.
[catra, azula] It's usually much more downplayed than when the heroes deal with it, but it's
still there, and can make the villain feel a lot more human than just some monolithic
force of evil.
Of course, after the traitor is revealed, the story can go in a lot of different directions
- which is where we run the risk of encountering "the traitor is functionally a completely
new character now whose previous actions make less sense retroactively" - but in stories
that don't do that, a lot of interesting things can still happen with them.
Most commonly they become a major antagonist, now freely and openly admitting the motivation
they concealed for the first arc of the story - but that is not at all the only way this
can play out.
For instance, big ol' spoiler alert for the Justice League season two finale, but in the
final arc it's revealed that Hawkgirl, who's been on the team since episode 1 and has been
a stalwart and reliable teammate, was not in fact accidentally stranded on earth by
a malfunctioning wormhole with the implied motivation of wanting to find her way back
to her homeworld of Thanagar - she was an advance scout for the Thanagarian armada,
who turn up in huge numbers in the finale with the alleged goal of arming and defending
the Earth from an alien threat but have the actual goal of literally destroying the earth
in the process of creating a hyperspace relay for a tactical advance against that aforementioned
alien threat.
When Hawkgirl's true allegiance is initially revealed, the League gets a little testy about
her hidden motivation, and the Thanagarians declaring martial law on the earth and branding
the league as fugitives makes things significantly worse - but then things get really strained
when they figure out the Thanagarian's real goal for earth, which is also the tipping
point for Hawkgirl, who already felt very bad about betraying the League by siding with
her original loyalties and considers the destruction of the earth to be absolutely unacceptable.
So after revealing herself as a traitor and betraying the league, she betrays the Thanagarians,
helping to save the earth but tactically weakening the Thanagarians enough that the next time
we see them, they've clearly lost that interstellar war they were doing.
And of course saving the earth from a threat only wins you so many points when the threat
was technically your fault, so at the end of the episode a vote is held about whether
or not she should be allowed to stay in the League, and instead of waiting for the results,
she leaves anyway, hoping to find an identity for herself that isn't a lie.
She's then absent for the vast majority of Justice League Unlimited, and when she eventually
reappears, even though she's welcomed back into the league, it's clear there's still
a lot of bad blood, both from civilians and from parts of her own team.
Hawkgirl's case is interesting because, despite starting out as a rather stock "traitor revealed"
plotline, she was kind of in an impossible situation - torn between two very real loyalties
she couldn't freely sacrifice, for bonus points with a love interest on both sides.
She ended up betraying both of them and did in the end do what we consider to be the right
thing, but the process was so fraught and painful for everyone involved that she basically
spends three seasons recovering before she's finally back on the A-team in the finale.
Now the Traitor Reveal plot is good for a gutpunch at the moment of reveal, but what
this example demonstrates most clearly is that the real weight of the betrayal comes
from the planting before it happens and the repercussions afterwards.
So let's widen the scope just a little to unpack some of the other parts of the Betrayal
trope that hit exceptionally hard.
On the planting side of the equation, traitor characters are often foreshadowed in stories
by having one or more characters conclude that there has to be a mole in their team.
In fact, one of the number one ways to anticipate that a "traitor reveal" plotline is on the
horizon is when a protagonist actively points out that the bad guys always seem to be one
step ahead of them somehow.
This is very funny, because "the bad guys are always winning" is a diabolus ex machina
that tons of stories do without explanation, and it's generally expected that the audience
just has to suspend their disbelief about it and accept that their heroes will never,
ever win until the grand finale because that's what makes the plot go.
But when the heroes call this out like it's not just a literary convention to drive escalating
stakes, it's a sign that we're supposed to think it's weird and start questioning why
and how the bad guys can so easily thwart the good guys' plans.
And of course the answer is that they have a mole on the inside - one of the alleged
protagonists is feeding them information to further their own secret, sinister agenda
- or because they're being blackmailed or brainwashed or working as a triple-agent or
about a hundred other explanations that don't involve active treachery.
These plotlines can be intriguing, but they can also be quite frustrating depending on
how the characters handle it, because of course a plotline about the heroes suspecting each
other of being secret bad guys is a good way to get them at each other's throats and thus
hurting their innocent friends in their hunt for the one person who'd actually kind of
deserve it.
This is a good source of drama, depending on how it's played - though it can be frustrating
to watch, because it relies on the characters making a lot of unwise decisions, which can
rankle an audience if it goes on for too long.
There's also the variant where the characters receive some sort of supernatural or futuristic
warning that one of them will betray the others, and each character worries that somehow they'll
be the one who turns for whatever reason - or maybe the warning even gets specific about
which character will supposedly betray them, usually a total paragon who it seems like
would absolutely never do that.
These stories usually have some kind of prophecy twist - like maybe the action that looks like
a betrayal has a completely reasonable but inobvious explanation, or the character in
question doesn't betray anybody, they get brainwashed or replaced by a doppelganger
or some other thing that morally absolves them.
But however it's framed, there's plenty of drama to exploit from a plotline where characters
are anticipating a betrayal, because that drives them into conflict with each other,
even with the characters aren't traitors.
If it doesn't come across as an idiot plot, it can be pretty tense!
And the setup for the betrayal can get a little weird in the edge cases, like the stories
where a character thinks they've been black-and-white betrayed, but the reality is a little more…
complicated.
For instance, when a former bad guy decides that being bad is not for them and defects
to team good guy, their former bad-guy buddies might feel very personally betrayed.
And the thing is, from their perspective, they have been betrayed, even if the motivation
for it was "the greater good" and it wasn't in any way personal for the newly-minted good
guy - from their perspective they just got Traitor Revealed.
You also get stories where a character thinks or acts like they've been personally betrayed,
but it's just because they felt entitled to someone's loyalty or help and then didn't
get it.
For instance, maybe a character in crisis needs help and seeks it from a character who
either can't or won't assist them, usually because they have a much more pressing concern,
and that hits them like a personal betrayal and motivates some kind of revenge plot - producing
a situation where the theoretically wronged party has a very protagonist-y motivation,
but only from their personal perspective where their needs are the most important part of
the story.
This produces a dramatic disconnect where only the wronged party believes that a betrayal
actually happened.
And on a similar note, betrayal is also frequently a backstory element or an inciting incident
because it is such a good motivator, typically filling characters and audiences alike with
righteous fury at the wrongdoing inflicted by someone the character trusted.
This has almost no overlap with the "traitor revealed" plotline because that typically
boils over very late in the game, while these betrayals hit early, sometimes even before
the story really starts.
Betrayals of this type usually become a character's primary motivation because they're so emotionally
impactful and can be very damaging - seeking revenge and/or reparations is very common
after a backstory betrayal.
As we discussed earlier, betrayal is a special kind of gutpunch that, in many cases, feels
completely unforgivable and highly personal.
A hero betrayed by somebody they trusted needs no other justification to spend the rest of
their storyline trying to hunt down that person or avenge themself on them, and of course
on the flipside if a villain is - or thinks they have been - betrayed by one of the heroes,
that internally motivates them in exactly the same way.
Because again - betrayal is relative.
At its fundamental core, betrayal is a difference of perspective that becomes so strained it
schisms into a potentially irreparable break.
Like all differences of perspective, it is thus heavily reliant on context and on which
perspective makes more sense to the audience.
Most tropes are tough to strictly define, but "betrayal" is probably the slipperiest
one I've discussed so far, because even in the case of an individual story it can be
hard to nail down what does and doesn't count as a betrayal.
It's most obvious in the huge, gut-punchy, unforgiveable cases where the revealed traitor
starts monologuing and cackling to the skies the minute their true sinister nature is revealed,
but betrayals come in all shapes and sizes and characters respond to them in all sorts
of ways.
What's unforgivable to one might be barely worth mentioning to another.
In a way, this trope is a very powerful tool when used for characterization, because it
highlights parts of a character's internal thought process that might not otherwise see
the light of day very often.
Cheerful, trusting, friendly characters might be rendered shockingly furious by the betrayal
of someone they put their trust in, but they also might forgive and forget as happily as
they do everything else.
Angry, mistrustful loners who typically hold grudges for years might forgive a betrayal
quicker than anyone because they understand letting a personal, internal motivation take
priority even if it screws over others.
Characters in conflict reveal new and frequently very interesting sides of themselves that
aren't seen in any other context, and what is betrayal if not the culmination of conflict?
Of course it's good for characterization.
It's like turning up the heat under a pan of popcorn.
It's gonna get a lot louder and something might catch fire.
So… yeah!