Omniman from ‘Invincible”

Now, I don’t remember the character that made me wonder about this topic.  It can fall into various categories with high body counts:

• Former supervillain
• Hero who was a soldier
• Monster that gains humanity
• Serial killer who gets a second chance

To be fair, the categories can keep going.  The central point is that you have a character who lived a life of violence.  It was either before or during the story, but they reach a point where they feel remorse for their actions.  This sets them on a path of redemption, which may require some forgiveness.  The question of if they even deserve it comes up because their past actions are fairly heinous.  It doesn’t only cause the other characters to decide on forgiveness, but the audience too.

I feel like that’s where things can fall apart.  While an author can have a hero find a reason to forgive a remorseful former villain, audiences aren’t easily manipulated.  Many people, especially these days, will refuse to forgive a villain who hasn’t given a reason for why they were killing.  Soldiers who only killed other soldiers will find it easier to gain redemption than a serial killer who murdered innocent people.  Having a hero forgive them can derail the entire story too because people will see them as weak or the overall story being stretched.

A factor here is also if the audience sees the violence or simply hears about it.  If it happens prior to the story, there’s a distance that helps with garnering sympathy.  One only knows the former killer who seeks redemption instead of the person that took lives.  Even if they say they enjoyed the act at the time, we don’t get the full picture.  There isn’t a description of their face or voice reveling in the deaths.  The overall brutality of their actions are missing as well.  It becomes harder to forgive if you see all of that because you wonder if that is the real person and this one is a facade.

Forgiveness isn’t permanent either.  After all, this doesn’t mean the other characters and audience forget what happened.  Any slip can push this former killer back to the beginning because trust will be lost.  If it happens enough, they may just go back to their former habits since they feel incapable of changing.  Honestly, one can see how this would happen in real life too.  Continue making a person feel like their worst self and that’s how they’re going to be.  So, an author has to be careful in having these characters commit any level of violence.  Perhaps one can think of them as an addict who needs to avoid or minimize exposure to what they were obsessed with.

Personally, I like the idea of a killer gaining forgiveness, but there is a limit.  If they killed hundreds of people for fun then that’s a hard redemption to pull off.  While it wasn’t that big a number, Lloyd Tenay in Crossing Bedlam touched on a bit of redemption, but only with Cassidy.  To be fair, he kept killing because he was now in a world ruled by violence and nobody really remembered his crimes.  So, you can create a ‘redemption’ by having them face those who commit even greater atrocities.

Beyond that scenario, I think you do need to consider the reason for a character being so violent.  If they did it for fun or out of boredom, you aren’t going to get very far.  Forgiveness is easier if you have it be a war, survival, not knowing any better, or other situations that don’t revolve around their own enjoyment.  People will feel like they didn’t want to kill, but HAD to do it.  One can muster forgiveness for that because they come off as a victim as well.