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raine-renaissance · 2 months ago

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So I've been reading Lore Rekindled for awhile and how Persephone not getting consequences for her actions and how Apollo didn't get enough consequence, and I have something to ask;

How exactly do you punish or redeem a character who has done many bad things *without excusing their actions*?

How do you know that the consequences you gave them is proportionate to the crime?

Say I have a character who has done some pretty terrible things in their childhood... War crimes, they killed many innocent people in the name of their "mother". They have lived a life of luxury and has never had to struggle. But here's the twist;

They have been manipulated and mentally abused by their "mother" and was used as a weapon of war because of their prowess. The "mother" had made her into nothing but a weapon, she loved them as a weapon, not as a child. The character then finds out the truth and kills their "mother", single-handedly ending the conflict between the "mother's" nation and their enemy. The character then lies about their identity and gets adopted by a family. However the family finds out the truth, they have lost everything to the character's war crimes. Where do I go from here? Do the family forgive them or abandon them, knowing the child they adopted is a monster?

Reason = / = excuse. This goes both ways - some people who present reasons may be solely using them as excuses, whereas others with excuses are seeking out reasons for their own choices/behaviour and simply don't have an explanation yet.

As for whether the punishment fits the crime, I always err more towards the side of "what satisfies the themes of the story" more so than "what satisfies every single reader". Because frankly, you're never really gonna satisfy everyone who wants to see a character get punished a certain way - there will always be folks who go "awww that's IT???" so focusing more on achieving the actual themes of the story through the punishment itself is often the best way to go, at least in my opinion.

I'm gonna go on some WILD tangents here to provide some examples of stories featuring characters who deserve punishment, and how they were done well (or not well).

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CLOSURE OF A CHARACTER ARC - BREAKING BAD (CW: DISCUSSION OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE; BB SPOILERS AHEAD)

Breaking Bad, throughout its entire story, features a main character who progressively gets more violent and evil as the story goes on. Walter White may not be "circling the drain" the same way as his drug addict foil Jesse, but he is still circling a drain of addiction to money and power which, in his head, he was denied having after he split from Gray Matter, the company he founded alongside his at-the-time romantic partner and his dorm mate. Just like an addict of alcohol/drugs would seek out justifications to continue their substance abuse, Walter is continuously seeking out justifications to commit crimes and deal in meth. "I'm dying of cancer" is his main reasoning, but once his cancer is in remission, we see him have a violent breakdown in the bathroom at the realization that he can no longer use that as an excuse to continue what he was enjoying doing; so after that, it becomes "I'm not in the meth business, I'm in the empire business", he wants to gain what he felt was robbed from him. To everyone else, these are excuses, but to him, these are rigid reasons that he does not want to bend on.

It's not until the final episode that we finally see him accept the truth of his wrongdoings - he did it because he liked it.

It does not excuse his behavior. It will not change the fact that Skyler and her son lost everything in the wake of him becoming a meth kingpin. It will not bring Hank back from the dead. It will not absolve him of the charges against him. It will not clean his hands of the blood he spilled.

But his admittance of the truth is closure of his character arc. Throughout the series, we see him spin lies upon lies, often very poorly, but still somehow manage to pull himself out of situations where he should have wound up dead. So him finally admitting to his crimes to his wife, the first person he ever lied to at the beginning of it all when he told her in the first episode he was working late (when he was really cooking meth in an RV with Jesse), is a wonderful way to really seal the deal that it's over for him.

But it doesn't end there, because he makes a final stand - he still manages to get his 'revenge' on Gretchen and Elliott by threatening them with fake snipers to get his money to Skyler and Flynn by any means necessary; he takes out Lydia, who despite all her paranoia, was never going to stop facilitating the selling of meth in his territory and beyond; he takes out the Nazi's who were imprisoning Jesse, finally allowing Jesse to be free of both him and the business that ruined his life.

And then Walter dies. Through all the attempts on his life that have been made, whether through the awful circumstances of cancer or through the external threats of the dealers he's been involved with, he's somehow been able to squeeze out of them, refusing to quit - now he's accepted that it's time to stop, and with that acceptance, he's stopped denying his fate and death has finally claimed him, on the cold hard floor of a meth lab, a setting in which he truly felt "alive" now becoming his grave.

Despite how perfect the ending of Breaking Bad is, there are still people who think Walter should have lived, that he should have "won" by getting to have his drug empire, that he "deserved the win". There are many articles written entirely on the high of copium, demanding and insisting that Walter White can't really be dead, he must have gotten out of it like all the other times. The entire point of the story and its themes have fallen on these deaf ears. There is nothing Vince Gilligan can do or even really should do about this. It is simply a part of his audience engaging with the story in the only way they can see fit.

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CLOSURE OF NARRATIVE THEMES - THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (CW: DISCUSSION OF GENOCIDE, VIOLENCE THROUGH FAITH)

Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame features an uncharacteristically (for Disney, at least) dark and grounded villain in that of Judge Claude Frollo, an obsessive man who uses religion as his justification to commit heinous crimes. As soon as we are introduced to him, we're simultaneously introduced to Quasimodo, who is convinced by him that due to his physical deformities and his ethnicity that he's a monster, undeserving of any sort of real relationship outside of what Frollo provides him, and thus locks him away in the bell tower. In Frollo's eyes, Quasimodo is not his child, but a punishment that he's being forced to live with, a trial delivered upon him by God that he must pass lest he suffer from divine punishment himself.

As we see Quasimodo start to break out of the parental brainwashing through his friendship with Esmeralda, we see Frollo fall further and further into his own guilt imposed upon him by his own religious doctrines - after meeting Esmeralda himself, he decides that he either must have her for himself, or she must die. Just like Quasimodo, Frollo only sees Esmeralda as an object who he can either use for his own gain or cast away into the pits of hell at his own whim. In his twisted mind, it's not his fault - it's in God's plan.

Of course, I think the majority of us here know how his story ends. He decides Esmeralda and her people must be destroyed, and begins to burn Paris to the ground in his attempts to weed out every single "sinner". Though it is a little "goofy" in the way that it's presented in the movie (this is a Disney movie still) he's ultimately killed after falling into the literal flames of his own creation - a hell he made for himself in his own rejection of himself through his faith and his guilt in being human.

Claude Frollo dying doesn't bring back the lives of those who already died at the hands of his soldiers. His dedication to his faith absolutely was not an excuse to commit genocide upon the Romani people, but he cemented his faith as his reason all the same.

That said, unlike Walter White, he never really accepts that the justification behind his actions were flawed and selfish. But we do get thematic closure in that of the dichotomy between him and Quasimodo - though Quasimodo may "look" like a monster, he's empathetic, humble, and loving to those around him, even though he's been led to believe he doesn't deserve love; Claude Frollo believes he should be loved above all as a judge and servant of God, that any love given must be earned through following the doctrines of his faith, and that anyone who fails to live up to those doctrines is not only undeserving of love, but deserving of punishment that he feels entitled to deciding. The story calls on us to look beyond surface level assumptions and instead analyze the actions of a person, regardless of their appearance or social status, both of which are things that often blind us in our own assessments of people.

All of it is fairly obvious though, from the closing line of the opening musical number:

So here is a riddle to guess if you can

Sing the bells of Notre Dame

What makes a monster and what makes a man?

And despite this, there are still many people walking among us today who subscribe to the doctrines of Claude Frollo - to act as the judge, jury, and executioners of society, using faith and religion as their guide. If anything, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is even more relevant today than it already was in the 90's.

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WHEN THERE'S NO CLOSURE AT ALL - LORE OLYMPUS (CW: DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AHEAD)

Lore Olympus is obviously the one I'm gonna talk about as a failure of this type of character arc. It obviously was never actually trying to address these types of themes from the start, but it definitely took a shot at it by the end, and much of its biggest failings were in the fact that its attempts undermined what it had already shown us throughout its first two seasons.

Throughout LO, we're directly shown and told how awful of a man Apollo is, how possessive he is of Persephone, how he's willing to go to whatever means to have her - even if he can't have her, he's still obsessed enough to push other women's boundaries in the hopes they'll fulfill the hole in himself that he's convinced only Persephone can fill.

But this comes at odds with the later plot point of Apollo specifically wanting power, and that Persephone is simply a means to gaining that power through her status as a fertility goddess. Him asking Daphne if she would ever consider cutting her hair the same way Persephone does not accomplish that goal, so again, it begs the question of what the real motivation of Apollo is when it seems to change every time he's present in the story - sometimes he's a vapid, self-absorbed, and delusional asshole who simply wanted Persephone but had to convince her that it would benefit her to be with him; sometimes he's a cunning puppeteer who's trying to overthrow Zeus because he truly believes he would be better at the job than Zeus; and sometimes he's the puppet himself, being led on a trail of prophecies by Ouranos which is ultimately just to allow Ouranos to come back and regain his own power over all the realms and do... well, not sure what, because we never even really have his motivations expressed to us and he's OHKO'd by Gaia as soon as he comes back.

We do sort of get a semi-satisfying scene of Persephone finally "getting revenge" on Apollo, but ultimately there's no real closure to the themes of what his character arc represented. The only moral of his story ends up being "rape is bad, don't rape people" and even then the punishment is... community service.

When the punishment for the main villain is arguably a lighter sentence than what Persephone got for killing people by accident, you really have to wonder why Rachel incorporated an SA plotline at all. I get into that a lot more here though.

But the real failure in LO respecting the themes of its own story is in that of Persephone herself. Throughout the entire story, Smythe tries to convince us that Apollo is truly evil, that he's the embodiment of everything wrong in the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, but meanwhile, both Hades and Persephone embody much of the exact same traits - they're self-absorbed, they're constantly coming up with justifications and excuses for their horrific actions upon others, and ultimately there's never really any punishment or even acknowledgement of their wrongdoings.

When Persephone finds out what Hades did to Alex, she's simply disappointed and then goes right back to flirting with him, even telling him that it's "not fair" for her to flirt with him while he's with Minthe, but clearly not wanting to stop, stating she just wants to 'slow down'; when Persephone turns Minthe into a plant, they continuously flirt throughout the exchange that follows and even ultimately go "oh well, guess we'll figure that out later" and then we never really see anything of this plotline again until the trial arc, with the solution to turning Minthe back happening off-screen; when Persephone trashes Leuce's apartment with animals and threatens her and Hades later asks her about it, she simply gives a coy "teehee yeah maybe I did that :)" and he... rewards her with sex.

And yes, there are the arguments of "well they're gods! of course they do terrible things!" and "Minthe/Alex/Leuce deserved what they got!" but they fail to recognize that 1.) if their terrible actions are so normal and routine for gods, then why do we have gods who are "evil" at all such as Apollo? ; and 2.) the justifications that Minthe/Alex/Leuce/etc. deserved what they got is pretty much the exact same justifications we just got through discussing in the above two works, to which I say, "maybe you're missing the bigger picture here."

Ultimately LO is built on picking favorites - only some gods deserve punishment for their crimes, while others don't simply on the basis of whether or not they're the main characters and/or how hot they are. And yeah, it makes for a pretty frustrating reading experience for those who are actually bothering to pay attention. Even when Hades and Persephone "accept" who they are, it's not as an admittance to their crimes and willingness to accept the punishment that follows - it's so they can go "that's just who I am!" and pretend that everything they did was excusable. It's like the people who say "I'm just brutally honest!" but really just enjoy the brutality more so than the honesty.

And in the end, the only "message" it can come up with at the last minute is that "true love exists", which was never even really a question throughout the story, let alone a question that was ever posed towards Hades and Persephone.

It almost feels like Smythe's last ditch effort to "prove" that Hades isn't like Apollo because, "See! He's ACTUALLY in love with her, he's not just using her for her powers!" but that was, again, never an issue that seemed to be present in the story until she started bringing it up constantly in the latter half of the comic. We were never concerned about Hades using Persephone for her fertility goddess powers - we were concerned about Hades being a 2000+ year old man creeping on a 19 year old girl who resembles both his own mother as well as the flower nymphs he has a canonical fetish for.

Gaia declaring that they've proven that "true love exists" doesn't at all absolve the circumstances in which Hades fell for Persephone, but the narrative that Smythe has written clearly wants that to be the case so we can finally shut up about Hades being a groomer with a history of pursuing younger women and using his money and power as a means to trap them, much like what Apollo was trying to do to Persephone.

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TANGENT OVER - WHAT'S THE POINT OF ALL THIS?

Well, the point is pretty much what I already covered in the beginning pre-tangent, but I hope the tangent helps express in further detail how the closure of a character arc and themes of a story can make or break whether the punishment fits the crime. There are certainly many more examples of stories that both succeed and fail at this (a very recent one that I realized too late I could have covered is The Umbrella Academy's recent series finale which completely shit on its own established themes of found family, that's for another essay I guess LOL). It brings to mind the tired cliches of "it was all a dream" to magically undo everything that was said and done, and "rocks fall, you die" to conveniently kill off villains... but even those cliches can be done really well if integrated well into the themes of a story - if "the dream" was the vehicle through which the story was resolved (Inception, Final Fantasy X), or if "the rocks" were the weapons utilized by the villain that ultimately became their downfall (The Incredibles when Syndrome dies from his own cape; Avengers: Endgame when Thanos is literally killed by magical rocks LOL)

And again, reason =/= excuse. In that same regard, understanding =/= agreeing. I can understand the reasoning of characters like Walter White, Judge Frollo, and even Persephone - but that doesn't mean I agree with the conclusions they came to or the actions they took, because those actions were ultimately wrong and heinous. I can understand the circumstances that drove Walter White to becoming a meth dealer; I can understand the societal expectations of religion that Claude Frollo would have been raised in, and the guilt that can manifest as externalized anger if left unchecked; I can understand the rose-colored glasses of love worn by characters like Hades and Persephone that would allow them to become so absorbed in each other they don't care about others anymore; if Rachel had acknowledged Apollo's heritage at the start instead of turning it into a last second twist, I can even understand how a man like Apollo can come to exist, as much of his mindset reflects that of his own father which is largely perpetuated by a patriarchal system that objectifies women and rewards power and status.

All that said, understanding and empathy for the circumstances in which these characters exist doesn't excuse their actions, so I can be both understanding of how a character like Claude Frollo or Apollo can be molded while also understanding that their actions are wrong and misguided.

And yes, there will always be those who can and will argue my own points regarding these characters - that Walter White should have lived, that Claude Frollo's way of thinking is superior, that Persephone and Hades deserve to do and have whatever they want on the virtue of being "in love", and that characters like Minthe and Leuce "had it coming".

In that sense, I wouldn't worry too much about what conclusions people may draw on their own time - do justice by your own work first. That even applies to Rachel - I can bitch all I want about how poorly handled LO's plotline was, but Rachel still made all her money and got her rewards, and if she's happy with how she ended LO, then no amount of my criticizing of her work can take that away from her, and that's fine.

Criticism towards your work and how you write it is certainly valid to be concerned about, but at the end of the day it's gonna exist regardless of what you do, so do justice by your own work first. Even if it ends up not being your best work, it's still a stepping stone to something better in the future through trial and error.

Take it from me, I have loads of characters who, like your own, have committed heinous crimes that can also be explained by the circumstances of their upbringing - it doesn't mean that they shouldn't be punished or that their reasons excuse their actions, it just means that the punishment may be as nuanced and complicated as the actions themselves. Sometimes the punishment doesn't even have to be explicit - sometimes it can simply be through the character having to live with their decisions and actions, knowing that they can never have the life they thought they wanted and have to live with the life they've made for themselves through their actions.

In your case, would your character's new family forgiving them align with the themes of your work? I would say, judging by the brief summary you gave me, that the goal of your story may be that of acceptance and getting second chances - so their new family rejecting them may not be the solution to that, as such rejection could just propel that character to return to the exact point they started in ("if people only see me as a monster no matter what I do, then I guess that's all I'll be") and that could make for a very flat character arc. But maybe that's the point? Maybe you're writing a story about how monsters are made, not born? Maybe there is no explicit answer, and the finale of this character's story is simply in the revealing of the truth itself? (<<< TW: THIS IS AN OMORI VIDEO SO BE WARNED, THERE'S DEPICTIONS OF SELF-HARM AND SUICIDE AHEAD!)

That's a question only you can really answer. There isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer in how to properly either redeem or condemn a character who's done awful things - only the answer that conveys the message and resolves the story you set out to write. Is your story trying to reassure the people who have similar circumstances to this character that redemption can be found? Or is it to reassure those who have been hurt by characters like this, to promise that their crimes will eventually be paid for, even if it feels hopeless that condemnation may never come?

And yes, I realize that answer, in and of itself, is very fortune-cookie-esque, but like the discussions of morality in characters throughout fiction, it's simply not always black and white. But I hope this post that turned out to be WAY longer than I initially planned (eep!) helps give you some more stepping stones to walk along in your own writing.

Best of luck ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡

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