Can a racist character be redeemed?

And I'm not talking about a casual racist, I'm talking about a serious Knight Templar Fundamentalist with an agenda who commits Van Helsing Hate Crimes out of a sense of religious obligation. Can someone like this have a character arc that redeems them? Can you possibly come back from graphically lynching people of another species, or is trying to redeem them just going to make the audience react with indifference at best and seething hatred at worst?

Yes I think so, the key is to play up the humanity of the character. Fear of those which are different is a very human trait- only in recent history has it gone away due to people actively trying to understand each other. The easiest way to make the character less hated is show the development of their personality which lead to them being this way and the costs of their life choices. If they are pure evil character who simply wants to destroy everything different you will have a hard time. If you show character defining moments in their life which (in their eyes) justify their behaviour and present them as a misguided character who have reacted badly to unfortunate circumstances it is easier to make them seem like a victim especially if their behaviour is costing them in other areas of their life. It is also important to show that beyond their flaws they are good people- make the racism an unusual aspect of their personality which clashes with caring behaviour towards others.

For example, give you character sympathetic reasons for joining the religion and make it clear they genuinely believe their behaviour is necessary rather than taking pleasure from it. Perhaps give them a reason to be emotionally dependant on the religion so that questioning their behaviour and therefore the religion is just too hard.

There is a lot of fiction where main characters ruthlessly kill other species and they are still portrayed heroically because their targets are deemed monsters or evil even if they aren't shown doing anything wrong. You need to get into the characters head and show that this is the kind of world he thinks he inhabits.

edited 23rd Sep '14 7:56:50 AM by aoide12

yes.

Knight Templar in general is a archetype that I find easy to redeem, because their evil nature is not out of sadism, but out of a sense of misguided obligation and (usually) loyalty to something (be it religion, the government, his country, a philosophical concept...). My favorite tactic is whichever justification he has for his actions flipping against him.

Such as a religious fundamentalist like you described accidentally killing a Preacher of his religion amidst his hunts, triggering a My God, What Have I Done? moment. Or crossing paths with a deity of his actual religion, who makes clear how sinful he is, causing him to break down as he slowly realizes he's done all for nothing.

What if he comes across the deity he worships and the deity approves of the things he does?

It's happened before.

It's awesome

The character in question commits Van Helsing Hate Crimes because his father raised him to a god-fearing fundie and then promptly killed himself once it was revealed to the world that magic, monsters, and pagan gods all exist, but YHWH is (as far as anyone knows) nowhere in the picture, being the only fictional deity. So he's doing it half out of a misguided faith in the teachings of his father, holding out hope that it was the world that was wrong and not his dad, and half in revenge against the new world which took his father from him.

Then he's forcibly shown there really is no God and no afterlife, and what he thought was an angel and a messenger of God is actually an impassive force of nature that's Above Good and Evil and couldn't give a damn about his agenda. And then he's turned into one of the "monsters" he hunts.

edited 23rd Sep '14 10:53:01 AM by KSPAM

Well that'd presumably make him worse, but you could also construct this towards redemption. Something like a Christian fundamentalist meeting a God who's far too merciless or selfish for his tastes could result in him just going "Wait what the Hell" and re-thinking what he's doing until he reaches the inevitable My God, What Have I Done?.

You know I hope you have good Christian characters in this because it's starting to veer a bit close to Unfortunate Implications here with God being the only entity not to exist and two consecutive Christian fundamentalists...

Anyway, I'd refrain from Karmic Transformation more out of personal taste. I just find it a very overused trope; every time a intolerant character has to switch sides, they turn him in what he hates most, it's almost like the only way to let go off intolerance is to become the target of it (I'd be amused to see an example where Karmic Transformation backfires the transformed man just becomes a bigot backwards).

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't matter if there were, he's already made it clear there is no God in his work, no Heaven, no Hell below, so any good Christians would be at least implied to be just as deluded as the villain.

(Watch the South Park episode with the Ginger Kids)

From that, it sounds like there's not much that CAN bring this guy back. Having your faith revealed to be a lie is not something people come back from, especially not in the way you're talking about. I think you've got a fundamental problem with your planned story.

edited 23rd Sep '14 12:08:35 PM by maxwellelvis

It'll have to be done gradually and probably partially, otherwise it could easily become an Out-of-Character Moment. I'm wrestling a bit with it myself but mine's probably going to involve mental justification of separating the person from the sterotype. I.E. "You're my teammate so you aren't a filthy jap." So at least on the racism part maybe you could try something similar as it seems more believable to me than a complete Heel–Face Turn.

My two cents.

edited 23rd Sep '14 12:07:17 PM by Slysheen

@Gaon: Actually, God does exist. He's just not what any of the religions depicting him portray him as (i.e. a benevolent, interventionist deity with a vaguely but understandably human mentality)

@Maxwell: How so? His "faith" isn't really his, but more something inherited from his dad. Like an obligation rather than a belief.

edited 23rd Sep '14 1:46:19 PM by KSPAM

Well being shown that his view of the world is wrong ought to be enough to get him questioning his religious views.

If he is doing it out of duty for his father perhaps let him find out some unpleasant truths about his father which get him wondering if he is a man worth honouring. Or make him encounter someone else who is committing acts he find appalling to honour a family member so he can see his own situation from another perspective.

That... does not really address any of our complaints. By making "God" an amoral, uncaring force, it still means that Christians are deluded and wrong about their beliefs, doesn't matter where they get them from. It's a very cynical premise, and when you put it like that, I'm inclined to sympathize with him and root for his "hate crimes", because quite frankly that's not a world I want to keep around.

In my opinion, the only way to keep the father from becoming sympathetic is if it was revealed that he had raped his children or something despicable like that.

edited 23rd Sep '14 2:11:30 PM by maxwellelvis

Being deluded does not necessairly mean they're evil though, that's what I'm getting at. God may not exist as it is traditionally believed in that universe, but that shouldn't stop good Christians from merely existing, even if they're completely misguided or deluded.

So what are any good Christians supposed to do when they find out everything they've believed in is a-oh, wait, the Mormons already know the answer to that question.

... that doesn't sound biased at all against Mormons, no sir

Keep at it anyway?

To address the original topic, a lot of well written villains are written with at leas some redeeming qualities. If a character is shown to have no redeeming qualities before he changes his ways then it feels like a cop-out. A character who is shown to have redeeming qualities has a foundation to build on to be redeemed.

In the end it depends on how it is written. A poorly written redemption won't be believed even if it makes a lot of sense. Similarly even the most radical racist can be redeemed if it's written well enough. The trick is to let it happen gradually so that the audience can see them changing.

edited 23rd Sep '14 5:42:57 PM by kingandcommoner

That's what the Mormons did.

I... I meant that different.

You do realise what you said comes off as really bigoted, right?

As for the premise outlined here... I think that running this character through the grinder to the degree that you have would probably break him completely. It's not about him being beyond redemption as much as having his identity completely annihilated, which might lead him to a positive epiphany, ultimately, or might just obliterate what little sanity he has left. Which is pretty horrible, I have to say.

That said, discovering that the divine aspect of your religion is not the innate source of your morality might not be a problem for everyone. Whoever said that the creator or boss of the universe had to be one in the same as your saviour or moral ideal? People adapt. Good people remain good people, more often than not, regardless of how their worldview is rocked.

I misspoke if you're talking to me. I meant to say that, oh yeah, the Mormons kept on basically being nice people for the most part even after it became more widely known that Jospeh Smith was taking advantage of his neighbors' religiousness to sleep with their wives.

Oh, OK. That makes sense. Your phrasing was a bit... questionable, though.

I'm running an RPG group. I had a jail warden character show faint signs of redemption. Or, if not redemption, then redeemability.

He was a terrible piece of work - the medieval equivalent of an SS camp guard. He humiliated, tortured, and killed numerous prisoners and felt no remorse for his actions because of a dogma of "racial superiority" for his nation. (This is in a heavily-altered Ravenloft setting - those readers familiar with this world may understand that he was from the nation of Falkovnia.)

The one episode that gave this warden, Lars Beredostich, a glimmer of sympathetic viewpoint, was when an extra player came in from out of town. We wrote up a different character for her, and she became a bird handler working under Beredostich, keeping order in the camp.

Surprisingly, Beredostich was very kind to her, immediately realizing that she had been sent to this backwater assignment because of misogyny in the system, and vowing to help her get out and get her career back on track. It was a strange side to somebody who would happily kill and torture based on race, but who would not abide ill-treatment of somebody based on their gender... provide they were part of the "master race" in accordance with his rigid dogma.

Both characters died at the end of the gaming session. One (the bird handler) was directly killed by the players during the course of their duties. The other (the warden) was killed by a beast which he'd held captive at the camp, tormenting for fun, when it broke free of its bonds. Several of the players agreed that he was a terrible character, but had at least enough unexpected merits to him to force them to wonder "what the hell made him this way? He could have been a decent human being".