If You Can't Beat 'Em, Redeem Yourself
Why there are some redemption stories we don't need to keep telling.
The Strawing of Men
Every once in a while, I’ll see an argument that basically goes “if you’re against redemption stories, what you’re really saying is that you think that if you do something bad you’re bad forever and so can never deserve love,” and while I think that that’s a ridiculous straw man argument, I’ve actually thought a lot about my feelings on redemption stories and, more specifically, why there are some redemption stories I’m truly not interested in seeing.
Namely, redemption stories around Nazis, neo-Nazis, racists, white supremacists, fascists, and others of that ilk.
These stories pop up from time to time, from historical romances to the fantasy versions like Kylo Ren and Loki. And this is not to say that anyone “isn’t allowed” to write them because, among other things, I have no say in what anyone else writes. This is about my own feelings on the way we tell redemption stories for people/characters like that.
(Re)Academic
In one of my many hats, I am in the (very long) process of getting my PhD, and my academic focus for a while has been largely on right-wing political violent extremism in the United States (aka domestic terrorism). I know a fair amount about right-wing extremism, as well as about how people move away from it—including through the work of organizations like Life After Hate, which is a nonprofit run by former right-wing extremists that helps members of those groups get out.
I truly, deeply, wholeheartedly want people to stop being racists, fascists, and/or right-wing extremists. I want better countering violent extremism programs in the U.S., and I want better deradicalization programs, and I want a culture that is less okay with people existing on the far right of the political spectrum.
But I’m not interested in reading fiction centering those people–or people who are starting from somewhere else on the ideological spectrum but have done or attempted great harm. I’m not interested in reading about the redemption of people who were integral to the British Raj or white/Christian missionaries or the Japanese Imperial Army or the freaking Nazis.
Will No One Think of the Neo-Nazis?
One of the many problems in talking about this is that we don’t all mean the same thing when we talk about redemption stories. Culturally, there are a lot of different ways that redemption is defined, and it is often a deeply religious concept. So here’s what I mean by a redemption within the narrative in this context:
When a character who previously intentionally/maliciously committed harm against innocents and/or those on the protagonist’s side 1) stops committing harm against those groups, 2) is viewed as “good” or “reformed” by the protagonist (or by a reader proxy, if the character being redeemed is the protagonist), and 3) is narratively centered in the story.
Note here that this doesn’t say anything about a shift in ideology; in stories like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren’s redemption doesn’t come with an obvious ideological shift away from the First Order. He changes sides for personal reasons, not ideological ones.
These are rarely stories about people putting in the hard, painful, uncomfortable work, day after day, to be better, to make the world better—not just to stop hurting people, but to help, to undo harm. They stop being racist, or they stop committing genocide, or they start feeling bad about it—and that’s where the story ends. The redemption is that they’ve changed, in that magic ephemeral way, and then it fades to black, Cinderella and her prince riding off to their honeymoon after the bad people are defeated and the good have prevailed.
A lot of the time, it’s about the idea of bad being a thing you are, not a thing you do—but it’s about it in the way that it’s changeable, that if you do one good act or unlearn your biases or find God or die heroically, the switch flips and you Become Good. The bad is behind you, and going forward you’re Good, and you’re Redeemed.
Often, these stories include what some would consider a “reward” for these redeemed characters—inclusion in the protagonist’s group and potentially even a romantic and/or sexual relationship with the protagonist (or, if the redeemed character is the protagonist, a romantic/sexual relationship with whoever they are in love with). See: the Kylo Ren/Rey kiss at the end of The Rise of Skywalker.
Sometimes, the redemption comes earlier in the story, and then the story often becomes about people convincing the Redeemed Person to let go of their guilt and move forward, convincing them that they can be happy, that they can live their life, that they don’t have to hold on to it for the rest of their life. And the happy resolution of the story is that they do; their character growth is concluded with them giving up their guilt to live a freer life.
It’s rarely about them holding on to the knowledge of that harm that they did so that they can make sure to stop it from happening again, so that they can make up for it.
And this is not to say that people who did bad things earlier in their life need to feel guilty every day of their life, that they need to balance some magical unknowable scales. It’s not Black Widow needing to wipe out red in her ledger.
But I think it says something that the emotional arc we most often see in redemption stories is about the person who did bad things healing emotionally. I think it says something that their emotions are the ones that are made to matter.
Oftentimes in one of these stories, the Formerly Bad But Now Redeemed Person sees someone who was hurt by them—and when that person reacts badly, the Redeemed Person takes that reaction as their due, but their friends or loved ones stand up for them. The person who reacted badly is shamed, often, or presented in a negative light, for Being Mean To Someone Who Has Changed. The switch has flipped, and so people should treat them as though they are Good now.
Good becomes what you are, not what you have done.
The thing about these stories is that there’s usually some combination of one of three points to them—either “look, these people were human too” or “look, these people weren’t really as bad as you thought” or “look, these people suffered too.”
It’s the same thing that comes up in those arguments for redemption arcs—that these people deserve love too.
Here’s the thing: that’s never been in question, at least in the United States. People don’t doubt that ablebodied cis/het white Christian men are humans, that they deserve love, that they suffer. That’s basically the entire framework of American history. We all know that. Pointing a finger at a specific white man and going “see, he redeemed himself. That means he gets to have love now, and comfort, and human experiences” is just…how we talk about white men anyway.
Redemption narratives become a part of a hurt-comfort narrative, except the hurt to them is that they did bad things that they have now realized were bad, and the comfort is that someone reassures them that they’re human and deserve love and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
The question is, what happens in these stories to the victims? And normally, the answer is: they’re the ones comforting the redeemed character. They become the voice to give legitimacy to the character’s redemption, because if they’re saying the character is good now, it must be true.
And so victims are decentered from their own victimhood. The (usually white) person realizing that other people are people too stays the center of the story. We just keep telling white men’s stories, or imperialists’ stories, or bigots’ stories, but this time we’re doing it with a performative anti-discriminatory hat on.
"Oftentimes in one of these stories, the Formerly Bad But Now Redeemed Person sees someone who was hurt by them—and when that person reacts badly, the Redeemed Person takes that reaction as their due, but their friends or loved ones stand up for them. The person who reacted badly is shamed, often, or presented in a negative light, for Being Mean To Someone Who Has Changed. The switch has flipped, and so people should treat them as though they are Good now. / Good becomes what you are, not what you have done."
^ yep yep yep to all this. Centering the ex-Bad person and making them a character the audience should be sympathetic with *over* their victims is such a strange thing to do. I feel like the parts where the ex-Baddie's new family/friends stand up for them always feels more like they've been shoved into the role rather than actually having learned it.