On the one hand, to the "why do redeemed villains have to die in the end?" - my God, yes, exactly! I was reading an interview with a show creator recently where he said (re the team member who had betrayed his leader, and then died nobly to save him), that there was no other end to his arc. Well, really, why not? Why shouldn't he fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the guy he betrayed and risk their lives together? Why shouldn't it be complicated and difficult for a long time? Dying is just a really easy end to a redemption arc - everyone gets to feel sad, and noone has to deal with the real consequences of what happened. Also, killing your villains, redeemed or not, is a simple way to up the body count and prove the danger without any real cost.
On the other hand, on the side of the "well apparently I absorbed more Juedo-Christian worldview than I thought", I get the need for suffering.
He hasn't been punished at all.' And I shrug, because no, he hasn't, and unless one of his victims catches up to him, he probably won't be, but so what? In what sense would it be better if he were? For me, it kind of feeds into the redemption. Which makes me way more of a sadist than I realised. It doesn't have to be suffering, but it's as good a proof as any? Guilt would be another, but it's easier to fake. It doesn't actually, really, need to be suffering in the tortured and abused sense. Suffering for a purpose, in a "taking the hard/dangerous/better way because I'm a different person now", tends to be a part of my redemption arcs. But then I'm an atheist who's also a lapsed Presbyterian - we're big believers in salvation through suffering!
(Maybe it's just that the good path is normally the hard one? I think generally it's easier not to be good, so when the villain's redeemed, as readers, we need some proof of that? If they're redeemed without that, it seems like the authorial standpoint is that they could have been good all along if they'd just bothered, rather than it being a positive, difficult choice?) Okay, that's enough babbling all over your journal...
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On the one hand, to the "why do redeemed villains have to die in the end?" - my God, yes, exactly! I was reading an interview with a show creator recently where he said (re the team member who had betrayed his leader, and then died nobly to save him), that there was no other end to his arc. Well, really, why not? Why shouldn't he fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the guy he betrayed and risk their lives together? Why shouldn't it be complicated and difficult for a long time? Dying is just a really easy end to a redemption arc - everyone gets to feel sad, and noone has to deal with the real consequences of what happened. Also, killing your villains, redeemed or not, is a simple way to up the body count and prove the danger without any real cost.
On the other hand, on the side of the "well apparently I absorbed more Juedo-Christian worldview than I thought", I get the need for suffering.
He hasn't been punished at all.' And I shrug, because no, he hasn't, and unless one of his victims catches up to him, he probably won't be, but so what? In what sense would it be better if he were?
For me, it kind of feeds into the redemption. Which makes me way more of a sadist than I realised. It doesn't have to be suffering, but it's as good a proof as any? Guilt would be another, but it's easier to fake. It doesn't actually, really, need to be suffering in the tortured and abused sense. Suffering for a purpose, in a "taking the hard/dangerous/better way because I'm a different person now", tends to be a part of my redemption arcs. But then I'm an atheist who's also a lapsed Presbyterian - we're big believers in salvation through suffering!
(Maybe it's just that the good path is normally the hard one? I think generally it's easier not to be good, so when the villain's redeemed, as readers, we need some proof of that? If they're redeemed without that, it seems like the authorial standpoint is that they could have been good all along if they'd just bothered, rather than it being a positive, difficult choice?) Okay, that's enough babbling all over your journal...