Moral Event Horizon - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Rape The Dog

"Widely recognized as a tyrannical megalomaniac who prided himself on cruelty and ruled through fear, Caligula was nearly undone by an underground smear campaign to depict him as a 'pretty nice guy.' Other sculptures and frescoes of the time libelously show him flying a kite and helping an old lady cross the Appian Way. An incensed Caligula immediately went into 'damage control' by publicly sodomizing a puppy."

— America: The Book

The Moral Event Horizon is the point of no return. Once a character crosses it of their own free will, they cease to be cool or admirable. It is a single act which, while not necessarily objectively worse than anything else the villain has previously committed, affects the audience and the story on a far deeper level. Whether the person has truly become irredeemable may be a question that can never be answered (or only by that person, the one they've wronged, or a higher power), but the viewers no longer wish for such a redemption.

A Million Is A Statistic often comes into play because psychologically, it is impossible to feel as deeply about reported villainy as about visual injury to characters we care about. Also, the real shock of the event may not be felt until we see the motive or the attitude toward it; much as we might dislike a general who ordered the artillery to fire on his own troops, it might not qualify as this until we see him laughing about it.

A Noble Demon who crosses the horizon ceases to be noble. Draco will lose his leather pants for most (but never all) of the fandom. If a Knight Templar, Well Intentioned Extremist, or any other type of Anti Villain crosses it, they stop being sympathetic and become someone the audience wants to see dead and in Hell by the end of the story. If a hero crosses it, they immediately become an evil villain; when this happens, the hero will typically have been on the slippery slope to the Villain Corner for some time. Keep in mind that crossing the Moral Event Horizon is more than a mere Face Heel Turn; the former hero has to do something not merely evil but truly unforgivable.

A character can cross the horizon in a number of ways. Where the horizon lies on the spectrum of acts depends on the nature and style of the story, and where it overall lies on the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Maybe a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain committed a murder. Maybe someone got drunk on power and organized the gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl for the lulz. Maybe, rather than kill the man who killed their brother, they killed the man's brother, in order to make the killer suffer. Or maybe they blew up an inhabited planet. Whatever happens, such an act signals a permanent shift of the character and often the work as a whole into Darker And Edgier territory.

The key point here is that once a character crosses the horizon, they cannot be made admirable or sympathetic without again altering the moral tone of the story. A good litmus test is that if you still think a villain is cool or potentially redeemable, they have not yet crossed the horizon. Similarly, if you feel a character being redeemed would make them a Karma Houdini, then odds are they have crossed it (unless they were that depraved at the start of the story).

If a character has a Split Personality, it is possible for one personality to cross the horizon while still feeling sympathy for the other — for example, we can still admire the Jekyll regardless of what the Hyde might get up to. Similarly, if a character is Not Himself or under the influence of mind control, the person can't really be considered to have crossed the horizon because they weren't doing it of their own free will. The Moral Event Horizon may be instead applied to the one responsible for the brainwashing, depending on the severity of the evil act in question and the degree of the brainwasher's control over the subject.

For some particularly villainous characters it is almost impossible to cross the horizon. These evil characters exercise a certain twisted charm, and no matter what they do, they are already so far across the horizon so nothing will make them 'uncool' in the eyes of the audience. The sort of behavior that would put another character across the line is simply expected of these villains. The Joker and Hannibal Lecter fall into this category - so don't list any of their misdeeds here. Also frequently exempt are acts by characters who qualify as The Unfettered - they have abandoned all limitations, moral or otherwise, and as far as morality goes are more like forces of nature than human characters.

When this is a form of Character Derailment, it is apt to be more hated than other forms of Character Derailment. Authors Saving Throw is, obviously, limited to either claiming that the event did not happen, or that someone else did the deed and was the actual one to fall over the Moral Event Horizon. (Possession is a favorite form of this.)

Compare Despair Event Horizon, since the character who experiences Start Of Darkness and Face Heel Turn because of extreme despair may end up crossing the this trope later on.

Compare the Complete Monster, a character who is built specifically to cross this threshold, if they didn't cross it in their first appearance.

Also compare with Even Evil Has Standards, for the point at which even the villains think somebody's gone way too far.

When this character is still loved by fans, Draco In Leather Pants kicks in.

It should be noted that there will be no Real Life section for this trope. While everyone would agree that actions such as these have certainly been committed, listing concrete examples would almost certainly attract Flame Wars.

Not to be confused with the 1997 SF horror film Event Horizon.

Naturally, spoilers abound in these examples.

Contrast What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?.

This trope used to be called Rape The Dog but that name was easily mis-understood so it was changed. Please stop using that name.