Some SFF characters start out good and stay the course. Some, of course, start out flawed and try to reform. There’s a lot of entertainment potential in a character who wants to do better. Here are some SFF stories about trying to be a better person…
S. L. Huang’s Cas Russell (protagonist of the ongoing Russell’s Attic series) has an unusual superpower (ultra-speedy physics and math computation). If she weren’t trying to be good, she would be a superlative villain, applying her math skills to all-round badassery. But the people she desperately wants to like her won’t if she stays on the dark side. They also won’t like her if she stops bad guys but also takes out a crowd of innocent bystanders in the process. Being a discriminating white hat (one capable of stopping the bad guys without causing massive collateral damage) is hard. She has a tendency to overdo it. But she has to try if she wants to keep her friends.
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Critical Point
Kazuma Kamachi and Arata Yamaji’s manga A Certain Scientific Accelerator is the story of a fifth level ESPer (named Accelerator) who wants to be so powerful that other ESPers will stop picking fights with him. Accelerator has decided to power up by fighting twenty thousand level-three Misaka clones to the death. He would have become the first sixth level ESPer…except for that crucial moment when he began to see his victims as people.
Accelerator eventually reconsiders. His body count is already in the thousands. Can he redeem himself? Accelerator feels that he’s irreparably damaged. His actions, on the other hand, would seem to indicate that he does not really believe that redemption is impossible.
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A Certain Scientific Accelerator Vol. 1
A shapeshifting entity takes on the persona of John Persons, PI (deceased). The Yithian protagonist of Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone is determined to put his disreputable old life behind him, to live amongst fragile mortal humans as though he were one of them—almost as though he were a white knight-style protagonist in one of the humans’ pulp detective novels. None of the humans of Croyden guess that there’s something uncanny slithering about in the shadows.
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Hammers on Bone
Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series protagonist Ray Lilly would have been right at home in a hardboiled crime novel. In the weird horror setting in which he lives, Ray’s combination of criminal smarts, blind loyalty, and diminished executive function led him to dabble in the Dark Arts. Unlike most fools who flirt with inadvertently letting extradimensional predators into our world, Ray is given a chance to make amends for his bad judgement. Indeed, he’s not given any choice: Ray will spend the rest of his life fighting the horrors he enabled.
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Child of Fire
Edward and Alphonse Elric had a simple dream: use forbidden alchemy to drag their dead mother back from beyond the grave. Their effort was not entirely successful: their mother stayed dead, Edward lost his arm, and his younger brother was reduced to a soul bound to a suit of armour. Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist follows Edward’s efforts to make up for his terrible judgment and somehow restore his brother before the spell binding him to the armour wears out. More than that, Fullmetal Alchemist’s cast is almost entirely composed of war criminals trying their best to make amends for crimes against humanity committed during the Ishbalan War. Is redemption for genocidaires is even possible?
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Fullmetal Alchemist (3-in-1 Edition) Volume 1
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Flawed characters doing their best to become if not good, at least less bad, is such fertile soil from which to grow stories that there are dozens I could have mentioned but did not. Feel free to list all the excellent examples you are outraged I overlooked in comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is one of four candidates for the 2020 Down Under Fan Fund, and is surprisingly flammable.
A special shout-out to supporting character Sue Snell, without whose sincere efforts to make amends for bullying Carrie White, Carrie would never have made the splash she did at the school dance.
There’s Tanner in Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. He’s … complex and a not very reliable narrator, but it’s a interesting tale.
Cheradenine Zakalwe might also be an example….
And then there’s Thomas Covenant…
In Oathbringer alone we have Dalinar, Venli, and Szeth.
5: How did you do that masked text trick?
Marc Remillard spent a lot of time trying to make up for his sins in Julian May’s books.
I love Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces series.
Zanj from The Empress of Forever (a version of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West) does her best to leave her bad, violent ways behind her.
Good thing she’s still down for good, violent ways.
@3: That was the first example I thought of.
For masked text, just use the comment pull-down menu and set the text color to white. Instant invisibility!
I wonder exactly what markup system Tor uses. BBCode? Wikicode? WordPress-style? Some kind of custom one-off? Sanitized HTML? A number of implementations come with spoiler tags to hide text, either by blanking it or putting it into an expandable box.
Mark Pierre Vorkosigan.
Julian May’s Intervention and Milieu Trilogy. Got goosebumps the first time I read it realising who was atoning
The Thessaly books by Jo Walton are, among a lot of other things, about the god Apollo trying to understand human nature, consent and free will after he [CW: sexual violence] tries to rape the nymph Daphne and she is saved/turned into a tree by Artemis.
The Terra Ignota series’ narrator, Mycroft Canner, advises the reader to set the book aside if they know who Mycroft is; he’s a future convict, living a sort of forced labor/parole sentence for life, reserved for very serious crimes. We only get to know what Mycroft is guilty of about halfway through the first book, Too Like the Lightning, but from the start we see them trying very, very hard to be a better person.
I would pick the Takeshi Kovacs anti-hero from Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon trilogy. Not the Kovacs from the terrible netflix reimagining, where they totally missed/changed the underlying theme of a second life as a chance to do it all over again but better. Yes, there was an evil element of an immortal over class in the novels, but the idea of redemption was crystal clear.
After he finally saw the evil his Envoy leaders were perpetuating, he left to find his own path, and eventually some redemption. I really wish those in charge at Netflix had seen the point, perhaps then they would have gotten it right
Surely Joe Abercrombie (especially in the First Law trilogy) is ‘the man’ for characters seeking redemption? When the Bloody Nine tries to turn himself into Lamb (later books) what else is this?
Redemption is powerful…
Nobody has mentioned Snape? Of course, he committed the high crime of yelling at Harry, so according to all too many fans all his efforts at saving Harry and dying for people who hated him was a total waste of time (sorry, been in the Quora wars).
But all the life we saw in the series was a search for redemption (including the arc of Regulus Black). Alas, the only conclusion that one gets from Rowling is that if you’re Slytherin, changing sides means dying in a ditch and being thoroughly hated by all but a few anyway.