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your horizons and questioning the moral character of your spiky-pauldron’d boss.
Far be it from me to generalize off an incomplete dataset unless it's Friday or I'm sleepy or the
sun rose in the morning, but as a rule, most fiction is pretty upfront about who the good guys
and bad guys are. Moral gray areas and surprise twist villain reveals are the exception, not the
rule. Characters will slyly glower for nobody's benefit but the camera just so the audience knows
they can't be trusted. Musical stings and dialogue patterns will clue us in on who's dangerous and
bad versus who's a quippy fun-loving hero. In real life you can't judge a book by its cover,
but in fiction that is what the cover is there for, and most stories will focus on showing a
character's fundamental gimmick pretty quickly so the audience is familiar with them and knows
what to expect going forward. And sometimes that means the bad guys are spooky baritones in long
black capes and ominous face-concealing masks while the heroes are a delightful
cadre of beautiful young people with personal morals as pristine as their winning smiles.
But sometimes that's just what the characters think is happening. In some stories the true
morality of the situation is being purposefully obfuscated - typically reversed. The hero will
be under the strong and heartfelt impression that their culture, society, organization,
friend group, training facility, etc are the go-getting paragon heroes while their enemies
are the nasty and corrupt minions of evil they must morally oppose. But the audience is usually
informed fairly quickly that all is not as it seems - perhaps our hero's boss wears a
suspiciously dark outfit, or the enemy leader is a beautiful young person, or the name of the hero's
organization is something subtly ominous like "The Empire" or "KittenSquishers Incorporated."
Whatever the specifics, the audience is clued in pretty quickly that our optimistic hero may
be being misled, and typically early in the first act - right where you'd put the Inciting Incident,
in fact - the hero will become suspicious of the same. Somehow, something slips through - maybe a
suspiciously beautiful enemy agent who seems to be making some weirdly reasonable points,
or a quick glimpse at the outside world calls into question the stories our hero's been told about
the way things work, or the hero's boss calls everyone in for a powerpoint presentation about
how they're on track to become the first empire run solely on the renewable energy provided by
orphan souls. Whatever the trigger, something causes our hero to question their hitherto
ironclad black-and-white worldview. Something makes our hero wonder… are we the baddies?
Now despite the villainy inherent in this reveal, this is actually a startlingly common
heroic origin story, and more startlingly, it almost always happens to total paragons. See,
most evil empires and similar organizations are pretty unsubtle about their evil machinations
at the top levels, but for the purposes of PR and maintaining order in the rank-and-file and stuff,
they usually have a veneer of propaganda reframing the stuff they do as good, or at least necessary,
or failing all of that, harmless fun. The empire isn't evil, it's just keeping things organized.
Everyone loves organization! So some people working for KittenSquishers Incorporated can
see the writing on the wall, read between the lines and know they're doing bad stuff and are
tacitly on board with that, but this paradigm will also attract the kind of big-hearted paragons who
are really excited to uphold the stated ideals KittenSquishers Incorporated highlights in all
their onboarding seminars. The danger, of course, is that these characters are very
quick to pivot as soon as they learn what actually goes down at KittenSquishers HQ,
as they were taking all their propaganda at 100% face value rather than seeing things from a
broader and potentially more nuanced perspective. Often all it takes is a field trip or a single
conversation with a suspiciously beautiful rebel to show these guys the error of their ways,
and suddenly they have a whole new black and white worldview to uncritically absorb! This trope is
most frequently a way to add a little exciting spice to the "evil empire heroic rebels" stock
narrative, since it lets you pull protagonists from both sides of the conflict without having
to get all morally complicated in the process. But beyond the very basic black-and-white
morality, this trope actually explores a very interesting space about propaganda and
perspective. The heroes at the center of these stories often have extremely limited worldviews
before their surprise revelation. Frequently they've been raised their whole lives in this
propagandistic environment and have zero access to competing perspectives or even anyone outside that
environment. Often they have a mentor and/or parental figure who's been guiding them as
they grew, preparing them for greatness and a promotion to KittenSquisher upper management.
With a limited view of the world at large being actively curated by someone with power over them,
it's no wonder that these characters have a completely circumstantial perspective on morality.
The minute they're given brief, unfiltered access to the world outside that bubble,
they start to realize how narrow their slice of reality really is. Often this drives these
characters to take a more active interest in the sides of KittenSquisher operations they don't
normally deal with, to try and determine for the first time whether or not what they've been told
is good is actually good. And because these characters are typically passionate paragons,
as soon as they've seen enough, they usually bail very quickly to join the Heroic Rebels instead,
often pursued by very angry former bosses and mentors and occasionally by other future
heroes beginning to question their role in the KittenSquisher corporate ladder.
There are a few key ingredients that make this trope what it is. As discussed,
our hero must initially be lacking in perspective so the revelation is suitably dramatic, but it's
also important that they're not in charge. They're following someone's lead rather than
determining their own life trajectory, and their motivation typically aligns with whatever their
boss's stated motivation is - helping people, bringing order, saving the world, something
equally vague and generally positive - but their boss's actual motivation is just something that
can be dressed up pretty to look like that stated motivation. World domination, for instance, does
all three of those things from a certain point of view, but our hero is typically much less
onboard with that. This disconnect between their boss's true motivation and their own motivation is
what causes the schism once they realize they're not actually on the same page. If, in contrast,
the character is in total control over their own life and is making all their own choices for all
their own reasons - and then realizes what they're doing makes them the baddie - this is a rather
different trope that usually kicks off a villain redemption arc for them - unless they immediately
die or something, which also happens a lot, more on that later. Actually that's a risk for all the
characters in this category, as villains will often default to killing minions who stop being
useful, and "defecting from Team Bad Guy after reading the fine print on the user agreement" is
a pretty definitive "stopping being useful." Recently enlightened heroes trying to break
away from KittenSquishers Incorporated might find themselves having to fight their way out through
former bosses and coworkers, and non-protagonist minions that figure out their bosses are actually
evil are often immediately killed by said boss just to prove how evil they are.
It is also important that these characters have some sort of code. It doesn't have to
be a specifically moral code, they just need some kind of personal standard - a line that they don't
want to cross. KittenSquishers Incorporated's positive façade tends to slip when a minion
doesn't immediately follow orders, and a character being pushed to do something that completely
crosses their personal line is often a pretty revelatory moment for a hero who's hitherto only
seen the fluffy positive side of KittenSquisher's marketing. It's pretty common for these characters
to have a chill, casual no killing policy they might be encouraged to sidestep For The Greater
Good, or the character might see their bosses or coworkers doing something they consider personally
super dishonorable, like sacrificing their allies or torturing their enemies or dabbling in evil
sorcery or whatever. Whatever it is, it's not what they signed up for, and it makes them start
to reconsider their loyalty to KittenSquishers Incorporated's brand. In fact, this can lead to
our intrepid protagonist getting themselves into very serious trouble very quickly if they assume,
perhaps reasonably, that the bad stuff they just witnessed that made them question their entire
worldview must be happening without the knowledge and consent of their beloved boss who they love
and trust and would certainly never condone any sort of nastiness on account of how dedicated to
world peace they are. Thus, it makes perfect sense for our paragon POV character to march
up to their trusted mentor and tell them about these terrible kitten-mulching rumors they've
heard about and they can't possibly be true can they, while of course from the boss's
perspective their most enthusiastic and talented evil minion just marched up and said "hey boss,
are we evil? if you give me an answer I don't like I might fight you about it," which is the sort of
thing an evil emperor might reasonably be expected to respond to with, say, stabbing, or a dungeon,
or ominously asking if they told anyone about this before coming while slowly reaching for the
trapdoor button under their desk. Paragon heroes are often also very trusting, which is usually why
evil bosses like them so much, but it can make the process of defection a lot less fun for the
hero than if they'd had the wherewithal to be sneaky about their investigative process.
This trope also comes with a lot of fun accessories, mostly from the "evil former
friend" line. As a formerly loyal KittenSquisher employee, our newly rebellious hero will have
plenty of friends and allies back at KS HQ who are probably reacting to their defection in all
sorts of exciting ways. Some may feel personally betrayed that their buddy chose a moral code over
hanging out with them more, others may choose their loyalty to their friend over their place
in the company and defect right along with them. If the hero has an evil mentor of some kind,
they can very easily become the main villain's right-hand bad guy, the evil lancer that has an
actual personal connection to the protagonist rather than just an idealogical one. In other
cases, the evil mentor is the boss, and a formerly parental relationship becomes a full-blown
arch-nemesis situation. An evil former bestie can also get promoted to Main Villain status this way.
On the flip side, though, a hero's former mentor might turn out to have actually been a secret
good guy the whole time who was rooting for them to defect and subtly encouraging their
more heroic impulses. Our hero might also find kindred spirits in other former KittenSquisher
employees who defected earlier and acquire some nice tasty validation that they're not alone in
their unorthodox career trajectory. Plus this is an easy conflict-driver among the protagonists,
as heroic rebels can be expected to be justifiably suspicious of this shiny new defector from the bad
guys no matter how earnest and heroic they appear. Now this is definitely the stock way for this
trope to play out, but there's plenty of room for variation. For one thing,
sometimes the character is less of a 100% paragon and is instead a little more okay with doing
stuff they think is morally iffy. This can slow down the side-switching process significantly,
as even as their horizons broaden, they might have a personal priority they think is more important
than doing what they're beginning to think would be actually good. Similarly, sometimes a character
will only realize they're one of the baddies when they're actively mid-atrocity and have already
done some really terrible things and this'll kick off a personal arc about trying to atone for what
they did, rather than immediately pivoting to Team Unproblematic Faves without issue.
This is a much less common backstory for main heroes because it produces characters with very
complex moral pasts who might be better slated for emotionally fraught redemption arcs than for wacky
fun protagonist adventures. These characters also might consider themselves fundamentally
irredeemable and instead of trying to seek some kind of personal unproblematic-en-ing will focus
on trying to make up for the damage they did by making the world a better place overall, often by
going out of their way to stop anyone else trying to do the same thing or to more broadly make it
so it can't happen again. While this backstory is fairly uncommon for main characters, it's actually
surprisingly common for mentors, who are allowed to have more morally complex characters because of
their complex and varied pasts and also typically being more than two decades old. These characters
maybe were full-blown villains in their youth, but had some form of personal revelation about
their bad-ness and pivoted to uncomplicated heroism to support the new generation of heroes
and keep them from making the same mistakes. And, as briefly mentioned, sometimes full-blown
main villains will have this sort of realization, usually very close to the
end of the story and right before either dying or being redeemed - but not always.
Sometimes when a character realizes they're the bad guy, instead of flipping to be more heroic,
this actually causes them to double down. There's something liberating about concluding you're an
irredeemable monster - it lets you do all the things you think an irredeemable monster would
do without feeling any worse than you already do. While some villains will recognize the scope
of their own evil in a sudden crushing moment of personal revelation and immediately remove
themselves from the story about it, other villains will finally get the memo that they're the main
villain and decide to start owning it, sacrificing whatever pretenses or personal codes they were
worried about back when they were still the hero of their own story. This is bad in a lot of ways,
as it usually leads to the newly enthused villain stacking up a lot of really bad stuff on their
ledger very quickly with no regard to actual moral impact, and if this character is supposed
to get a redemption arc somewhere down the line, this can make that whole process a lot harder to
sell. But even if this villain is just a villain and there's no redemption arc on the horizon,
this still usually leads to a significant escalation in villainy and the corresponding
damage done by it. A villain who previously had a personal code or a not-particularly-evil life goal
has now concluded that the actions they formerly thought were justifiable or heroic were actually
evil, and instead of ratcheting back on the evil they've decided to crank it up. As a side note,
this can make the bad guy both more dangerous and less interesting, as instead of having a
complex motivation or an intriguingly skewed worldview that casts their own terribleness as
misunderstood heroism, they're just evil out of a sense of obligation to stay consistent. Pure Evil
can be a joy to watch, but these guys are usually kinda bad at it because they're demonstrably not
particularly self-aware considering how long it took them to figure out they were the bad guy,
and a Pure Evil Villain is at their most fun when they're both self-aware and gleeful about their
evilness. There's a hint of angstiness about these villains that can make them interesting in their
own way, but also almost… frustrating. A villain who realizes they're the villain and then decides
to villain even harder is so close to figuring out what might actually be good for them, but as a
general rule, the mindset of "I am an irredeemable monster whose best hope is to burn the world down
right along with me" is not healthy. Pure Evil villains who are fully self-aware the whole time
often seem to be remarkably well-adjusted and are thoroughly loving life, evil not out of obligation
but because of their passion for the field - but these villains-turned-worse-villains are usually
visibly spiralling in a very self-destructive way, digging themselves deeper because they
saw they'd already unknowingly dug themselves a hole and concluded the only way to go from
there was further down. It can be quite painful to watch, and the audience might want them to try the
self-awareness thing one more time just to realize that doing all this is bad for them, actually. And
this can be a very interesting character for an author to explore. Villains motivated by spite
and self-loathing are a lot spicier than villains motivated by malice and the joys of crime-doing
and often engender audience sympathy even while they're at their absolute worst as the audience
roots for them to knock it off and maybe take a nap or something. They can be kind of tough
to handle after their en-shittening arcs, though, as a lot of audiences tend to write these guys off
as "fully irredeemable" shortly after they start doing bad stuff on purpose, and often don't take
too kindly to these characters doing anything other than getting worse and/or dying, but
personally I can't be mad at any story that says it's never too late to stop digging. If redemption
arcs are only for characters who haven't really done anything too bad, they're… not really
redemption arcs. They're self-indulgent angst arcs. Exploring a character who gains perspective,
realizes they were doing bad stuff, and then handles that revelation extremely poorly can be
very interesting. Just look at the half-million thinkpieces on why Zuko is the coolest,
including the one you're watching right now. On some level, this trope is all about how one
handles the realization that they've unknowingly caused harm. Some will immediately pivot to the
new thing they think is right with unwavering confidence and defend it just as enthusiastically
as they did the bad stuff. Others will stick with the bad stuff for some personal reason - a sense
of duty or obligation or a bone-deep desire to protect someone else just as mired in it. Some
will fall for the sunk cost fallacy and double down on the badness, weighing themselves down with
a newfound sense of irredeemability and an almost liberating sense that they now have no choice but
to be terrible because it's too late for them to be anything else. Others will turn and take a
stand against the system they've hitherto served even if they know it'll go very badly for them,
because the principle of the thing is most important than their own well-being.
Unsurprisingly, in fiction as in reality, the question "how should we act when we realize
we've done something bad" is a complicated one with a lot of different answers - and it is very
rich in drama. So… yeah.!
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