So we know how two of the favorite superhero peril tropes are A) Threaten a Loved One and B) Villain unwittingly taking the in-civvies Hero as a hostage. Venom and Eddie’s situation presents an opportunity for a special hybrid of both.
Because honestly, both Venom and Eddie have all the subtlety of a firework stand in a bonfire and X Evil Organization is bound to tail the burly man-eating monster to Eddie’s home and
Goons, breaking down the door: Alright Brock, no more games
Eddie: What
Goons: Don’t play dumb here, Eddie. We know the truth and our employer is determined to have a long, violent chat with the bastard eating all of his men. So we’ll make this simple for you:
Goons: Where is your 10 ft tall cannibal boyfriend?
Eddie:
Venom, inside Eddie: Eddie. Eddie, tell them where he is
Eddie, going thru every stage of grief and inventing new ones: ………………..um
Venom, all up in Eddie’s everything, every slime cell of him laughing to tears: Tell them where your boyfriend is, Eddie
The next perigee on the Reichenbach passed without incident. Despite his apprehension over TA’s namedrop, Eridan chalked it up to a lucky guess so he could sleep during the day. He’d mentioned admin duties before, and all high-ranking officials were announced publicly on the Imperial Network. That’s all it was– a lucky guess. Eridan played a few more poker games, some with TA and some without, and the other troll never made mention of the incident. Besides, TA had closed their private messages again, so asking anything in a private server would look suspicious.
look, im just a slut for some magical exhaustion okay give me your whumpees overusing their magic and having physical repercussions from it, bloody noses, unable to stand, getting progressively weaker, utterly exhausted and spent !!
bonus points: if they know they are running low on magic but they have no choice but to keep using more until they just collapse
bonus bonus points: if their magic is somehow connected to their life force!!
The short answer is that I love redemption arcs—all of them, all the time, always. I was raised too indelibly Catholic not to find all moral battles for the soul fascinating. That being said, I do think sometimes people forget that that a redemption arc requires a Bad Character. If you do not have a Bad Character, definitely Bad, has done Bad Stuff And Needs To Atone, it’s not a redemption arc.
Characters can have a moral arc without ever brushing up against actual redemption! As an example, Finn of The Last Jedi has moral priorities that lie elsewhere (getting away from the galactic conflict, finding Rey and getting her away from it too.) Yet his story never once necessitates an actual redemption arc. He’s never bad, never hurts anyone or triggers negative consequences for the people around him, he’s just narrow-sighted; he just needs adjustment to broaden his gaze and understand what the stakes of this conflict are. When Rose comes along and demonstrates for him that the First Order’s sin isn’t just turning children into stormtroopers, but a force that warps everything it touches into different kinds of oppression, Finn understands. His world (the audience’s world) expands to accommodate this new understanding of evil.
Moral evolution is not the same as redemption.
When I talk about redemption, the kind I love to talk about, I mean “this character has done something wrong, and bad, and there is no way for them to take it back or change their mind without grappling with the consequences of doing it in the first place.”
I mean, for example, if you tortured enemy combatants and killed your unarmed father—you can’t take that back, you can’t erase that from existence. If you slaughtered a whole temple of younglings, that’s something that’s going have to be dealt with. If you chopped off your son’s hand, or perverted galactic democracy, or obliterated planets with a giant laser, or if you—
You can “deserve” redemption only by doing something heinous.
And…I mean, look, I find it hard to believe that Palpatine would ever sincerely regret his actions, to the point where him seeking redemption could be at all plausible. Even Darth Vader—to this day, I’m a little baffled at people who cast him as unequivocally redeemed post-ROTJ, given how intimately selfish his reasons for siding with Luke were. Hux obviously takes a lot of glee in the ways the First Order can impersonally kill and oppress people; Kylo Ren doesn’t seem inclined to turn back towards the Light, even when his only friend in the galaxy begs him to. The ways characters are redeemed and whether that redemption is plausible, or earned, are different and very fascinating questions. It’s one of the reasons that I love fic, and continue to read it voraciously: because despite the text as presented, a good writer can do just about anything. Even redeem the nonredeemable.
But too often I’ve seen “doesn’t deserve” a redemption arc mean, “I don’t like this character.” Which is fine! I don’t like some characters, and I find their redemption arcs implausible; no one is requiring me to read those posts or those stories. But evil-bad-wrong-terrible characters not “deserving” redemption arcs because of author partiality is some bullshit.
(……as a final caveat to the prologue of this post, it is undeniable that white, male characters get redemption arcs 9/10 times, compared to their non-white and non-male counterparts. This doesn’t change how much I love redemption arcs. But as someone who does love them, it’s worth sitting down and thinking about exactly who I’m redeeming, and why I think about them, rather than those other bad-wrong-terrible characters who happen to be something other than white males.)
Brill! This is so well-put.
And, to reiterate a point touched on above in more detail: Just as you can’t give a redemption arc to someone who hasn’t done things to establish themselves as Bad, if you try to write a redemption arc that either denies that the things done were actually bad, or that they’re the character’s responsibility, it’s not a redemption arc.
If your position is that they were never wrong, and don’t have to change in any way because you’ve demonstrated that everyone else was at fault and their choices were justified, so they’re a good guy now without changing or repenting or regretting anything, that is…potentially an amazing story, if done well enough, but it’s not a redemption arc.
Land of Sweetness and Light 
You must be logged in to post a comment.