User blog:RRabbit42/Automatically a hero that turned bad

This is a companion blog to Automatic friends and Automatic enemies that will help explain why a character should not be automatically labeled as a hero and not automatically as being "turned" to being bad.

"Every villain is a hero in his own mind."

- Tom Hiddleston, circa 2016

"Every traveller is necessarily the hero of his own story."

- John Galt, 1812

In many stories, we see characters that are only shown to be bad. We see nothing of their earlier life and we see nothing that shows when they made the decision to act like they currently are. There might be a little bit of information like when they made the change, but not much.

In these situations, the tempation is to say, "They're bad now, so they used to be good, therefore they were a hero that was turned to the Dark Side".

That is only partially correct. After we're born, it's the things we experience that help shape whether we'll be good or bad. Sometimes it's a traumatic event that leads a good person to become bad. Sometimes that even leads an average person to do bad things in order to fix what they believe is wrong. In these cases, we can see that they are clearly an antagonist and might even be a villain, depending on what they do.

But that does not automatically mean they were a hero, and saying they were "turned" to become bad implies there were deliberate actions taken by other characters to force that person to become bad.

Let's look at both of those.

To be a hero, you have to be shown doing things that are heroic: saving people, defending their rights, etc. If you're an average person just doing your job when something happens where you decide to start doing bad things, you are not automatically someone who used to be a hero.

For example, Robert Callaghan used to work for Alistair Krei in the movie Big Hero 6. At the time, he was a scientist working on a teleportation device. After a failed demonstration of the first live subject to be transported, Robert became a university professor. He later sought revenge for the death of his daughter (the live test subject) after seeing the potential of an invention by one of his students. Robert definitely became a villain at that point, but that does not automatically mean he used to be a hero. He was a person just doing his job.

As stated above, if someone is "turned" to become bad, that implies deliberate actions were taken to make that person choose to be bad. It's not always going to be the case. Events that just happen to happen don't really qualify.

Using Robert Callaghan as an example again, he viewed Alistair's decision to proceed with the experiement after some readings weren't quite optimal as deliberately putting his daughter at risk. That was not what happened since that small variance led to unforseen problems, but that's how Robert viewed it. As a result, he set about fixing what he thought was wrong. He wasn't "turned to the Dark Side" by Alistair because Alistair's actions had an unintended consequence.

In contrast, Anakin Skywalker was definitely "turned to the Dark Side" and that's where we get the phrase. Emperor Palpatine sensed the potential inside Anakin and took deliberate steps to guide him into choosing to follow the Dark Side. He preyed on Anakin's fears of losing his mother, saying, "I know of a way she wouldn't have to die". He convinced Anakin to commit murder when by saying that Count Dooku was "too dangerous" to be allowed to live. He convinced Anakin to lead a strike against a Jedi temple, where he killed many children. Palpatine definitely turned Anakin to the Dark side.

So when you're looking at an antagonist or villain, don't assume that they used to be a hero before they became bad, and don't assume that they were "turned" to become bad. The story has to show those things happening before you can say either one.