hot take here but the way people talk about “redemption arcs” and how they require that the sinner repent, debase himself, and then atone for his sins in order to be accepted back into the warmth of readers’ love, but there are some unforgivable sins for which no atonement is enough

is INCREDIBLY culturally christian

Another fascinating thing about responses to this post: whether they’re agreeing with me or disagreeing, whether they think people’s insistence on this arc is good or bad, a huge portion of people use the word “forgiveness” and center their entire response to this post around it.

Please observe that I never once used the word “forgiveness” - although I should have, because the idea that forgiveness is a necessity for ceasing-to-be-a-sinner, and indeed that forgiveness is the primary goal, is itself christian.

I have at no point in the original post or in any of my further discussion of it said that the end goal, or even a significant feature of, a villain-to-hero arc was forgiveness.

Yet everyone who thinks this arc is indeed the only valid option phrases their arguments in terms like “Would you forgive someone who didn’t…”

Maybe I would - maybe I wouldn’t!  But I never said anything about forgiveness being a requirement!

And everyone who wants to tell me that Christians Don’t Think Like This, Actually, says it in terms of “But Jesus forgives everyone, all you have to do is repent and you will be forgiven.”  …okay great who says the characters need to be forgiven, why is it RELEVANT whether Jesus would forgive them or not - unless you’re operating in a Christian framework where God’s Forgiveness is a central feature of your belief system.

People who agree that yes, this is a culturally christian thing, and further believe that another form of arc would be superior, are saying “you should be able to just stop doing bad things and only do good things, and that should be enough for you to be forgiven” - okay you got the spirit but why do we have to be forgiven.

Forgiveness - as least as it is being used in this context - is someone else granting salvation to you.  It is someone else absolving you of your guilt.  It is you having shown someone else that you are worthy now, and them casting judgement upon you, and then agreeing that you are enough better than you were before.

Why does someone else get to sit in judgement and decide if you’re a good person now?  Who besides a god stands in that position of omniscience and moral superiority and moral infallibility?

What if a character chooses to end his life of villainy, anonymously transfer all his ill-gotten gains to those he harmed, and devote the rest of his life to curing cancer alone in a lab on a deserted island, finally releasing his cure anonymously on his deathbed.  No other character even has any idea this has happened; they all figure he just died or went into hiding.  No one has forgiven him.  Does that mean he’s still a villain?

What if all the other characters have hardened hearts for whatever reason, and no matter how much penance the ex-villain does, even if he only did one tiny bad act and then spent years in pain in punishment and then spent decades saving the world over and over at great personal cost, they will never, ever forgive him?  Does that mean he’s still a villain?

What if everyone he personally wronged died in an accident, he was the only survivor, it was that shock that caused his change of heart, so everybody he knows now loves him and knows him only as a hero, but the people he hurt can never forgive him?  Is he still a villain?

On the other side, if, say, a child continuously forgives their abusive parent, does that mean the parent isn’t a villain?

Forgiveness does not have a one to one correlation with goodness.  In either direction.

I am concerned that what people are doing is translating “…in order to be accepted back into the warmth of readers’ love” as “be forgiven by the readers” (which is not inaccurate, in terms of the christian framework) and then all agreeing that yes, that should indeed be the central goal of every villain-to-hero arc.  Which opens a WILD can of worms.

Because that means - We, as the readers, are in the position of gods to the characters, casting judgement upon them, looking into their hearts and deciding whether We will grant forgiveness to the characters for the wrongs they have done to others.

Like.  Aside from all the other implications.  At the point where you are granting someone forgiveness for something they did to someone else, something’s gone very wrong.  Assuming you’re not, in fact, actually yourself a deity.

But also for people to make translation of “…warmth of readers’ love” to “readers’ forgiveness” you have to already be assuming that we can’t love a character if we haven’t forgiven them for every wrong they’ve done.  And that wouldn’t even be true if they were a real person, and super duper isn’t true if they’re fictional.  I love my mother with all my heart.  I’ll also never forgive her for what she did to me and my brother.  Forgiveness and love are two separate emotional axes and one does not imply anything about the other.

Look.  Here’s some advice for actual real life.  You don’t need to forgive someone to let them participate in society.  You don’t need to forgive someone to love them.  And you DEFINITELY don’t need to forgive them for them to be a good person.  Whether they’re a good person is in their heart - not yours.

Note to minors on Tumblr: The world doesn’t revolve around you.

I realize this might be a shock to hear. You grew up in or after the Think Of The Children™ and It Takes A Village™ era. It’s possible your mommies and daddies took you everywhere — bars, tattoo parlors, $100-a-plate restaurants, cocktail parties — without regard to how well you behaved. You concluded, therefore, you were welcome everywhere, and that all adults, everywhere, must cater to your presence or they’re just a bunch of big ol’ meanieheads.

Free clue: You are not, in fact, welcome everywhere. Nor is every single place, whether in meatspace or on the internet, obliged to think of you and your needs before anyone else’s.

Because adults have our needs, too. And, yes, writing stuff that gets us off or otherwise tickles our fancy is a need for some of us.

Here’s another free clue: Every single adult you encounter is, likewise, not obliged to but your needs first and foremost. Including… women. Strangers on the internet who happen to be women are not your mommies, not your aunties, not your big sisters, not your therapists. They did not sign up for the job of protecting and coddling your precious little asses. Not even the ones who have children themselves. The only ones they’re obliged to look out for are their kids.

I’m not one of those women. I never wanted children, I don’t care that much for children, and I feel absolutely no responsibility to mother them myself. If a minor whines at me for not making them my highest priority, I block them with extreme prejudice.

I can hear you gasping in shock right now. But the idea that women are obliged to nurture everyone out there is a really, really regressive idea. Oh, I can see how it gained currency on a site where the “social justice” crowd thinks that nail polish is feminist, Hades was Mr. Right and Demeter was an abusive mother, and if you’re a not-very-feminine woman you can’t be a cis woman. It’s bullshit, peddled by dipshits who don’t want to examine their underlying beliefs but who want cookies for being all moral and upright.

Now, getting back to spaces. You are not categorically unwelcome on fanart and fanfic websites. Many of them are considered perfectly safe in their entirety for your delicate little psyches. Others are a mix. If you go, for example, to AO3, and you see a fic rated G (general audiences) or T (teen)? You can read it.

If, however, you see a fic that is rated M for mature or E for explicit… or it has all those terrible tags like “Rape,” “Noncon,” “Dubcon,” or whatever else sends you into a shaking ’n’ crying fit? You have two choices:

1. Don’t click through.

2. Click through and pretend you’re an adult. Which means:

a. Don’t tell the author or the other commenters your age.

b. If you liked the story at all, feel free to give feedback about it.

c. If you didn’t like the story and it upset you, take responsibility for having clicked through, then go do some self-care.

Note that none of the above options include “Click through, get offended, whine at the author for having written something that upsets you, and maybe get a posse of your fellow antis together to hound the author off the internet.”

Those tags? Those were all the author owed their audience. Those tags give you the information you need not to click through if you don’t want to be offended, triggered, or disturbed by the fic. You do not have the right to insist that the fic not exist in a public forum.

As for “protecting young women and girls” blah de fucking blah: again, you are not going after abusers. And there’s another very regressive meme: that by policing the shit out of women’s self-expression, you can “protect” them. Nope. You protect them from abusers by targeting the abusers. And writing something “problematic” isn’t abuse. Because fiction isn’t reality and depiction isn’t endorsement.