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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

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BlackCat-055 said:
This is incredibly well put, and gives me a new perspective to redemption.



I'm surprised, I always thought that for a redemption to be done, forgiveness has to be earned. That if you can't make amends at best you're just still on the path but not fully truly redeemed.

But I didn't know you can just change without their permission.

Well that sounds wrong and hindsight it probably was eh, but I still assumed it was like that.



I thought that for a redemption to work you needed to do good deeds to offset the bad actions you've done. Otherwise the redemption is wrong or flawed.

Although I guess that concept doesn't conflict directly about your next point



That is succinctly put and interesting. I guess I could ask about then about if a person intends not to do it but also is afraid they'd do it. But then again it wouldn't be a proper redemption since the examples you made with Kratos in regards to Baldur, he doesn't want to go back to God killing but he does it anyways.

Honestly the talks about him being a single dad to Baldur was an interesting story and I would like to see something like that but I have a weakness for stories with good dads.


I hadn't played the GoW games so I only have your word to go for it, but it does sound like the writers made excuses for Kratos to go back fighting.

Normally I'd point out what if there was no other way, for example with the army part. But you've noted there was an actual alternative solution that could've been done. So I understand that.


All in all it was nice to hear about your points about redemption and will tentatively integrate it maybe.


I am curious of your thoughts on limits of redemption, like is there a barrier when you've gone "too far" and can never be redeemed, and is there like a quota of time and effort that needs to be done. Obviously I can infer that redemption needs true change instead of meaningless attempts at flattery or good peepo points but figure I'd ask for more thoughts even if what's already available is much appreciated.

I always figured you needed to fulfill a karmic quota and requirements before a redemption can be truly official. I still think it is tbh, if not for how it should be, but more rather that's the natural state of things. But the alternative insight was something I enjoyed reading.
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There's no such thing as official redemption. Redemption isn't a specific thing that can be cleanly identified, it's a narrative people create about the much messier thing that is human behavior. We can talk about it as though it's a specific definable thing in fiction because fiction is made of narratives but even that's misleading, whatever the exact events a redemption is a redemption if the audience thinks it's one. That usually entails the character doing certain actions, receiving forgiveness, etc., that the audience recognizes as common to redemption plots but a good writer can sometimes sell it without those.
 
There's a line in a story that stuck with me. While I don't remember the exact wording it was something like, "maybe we can't change who we really are, but we can change what that means."

Kratos is someone born from violence, but he can change whether that violence is performed in pursuit of revenge or whether it's done in order to protect what's important to him.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
I'm surprised, I always thought that for a redemption to be done, forgiveness has to be earned. That if you can't make amends at best you're just still on the path but not fully truly redeemed.

But I didn't know you can just change without their permission.

Well that sounds wrong and hindsight it probably was eh, but I still assumed it was like that.
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Two soldiers fight in a war. Both of them kill squad mates the other cares about. War ends, peace treaty rolls along, now they have to go back to civilian life.
A kid is bullied in school. Ten years later, his once-bully is now an advocate for anti-bullying policies.

Neither of the soldiers is required to forgive the other in order for them to be anti-war diplomats after the fighting ends. The once-bully does not require his once-victim's forgiveness to become a person who meaningfully opposes what he once was.

Forgiveness is one of those things where it's real and deserves consideration when judging whether or not someone is redeemed, but because people have divorced it from its roots many people badly screw up when and how it applies. Mostly by applying far too much weight to it.

BlackCat-055 said:
I thought that for a redemption to work you needed to do good deeds to offset the bad actions you've done. Otherwise the redemption is wrong or flawed.

Although I guess that concept doesn't conflict directly about your next point
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Not technically wrong, but the problem here is twofold.

If you can't repair the damage you have done, then there is no good deed you can do to make up for a sufficiently bad deed. Kratos can't exactly haul that poor ship captain out of the hell he literally kicked him into (at least, he can't after he killed Hades and ruined the entire afterlife), and if somebody is tortured into PTSD then "I will never torture again" doesn't exactly give the once victims a clean mind.

If you're doing good deeds now, but doing bad deeds of a different kind when no one's looking, were you ever really redeemed in the first place or just a liar?

Somebody who is redeemed will in general try to be a better person and do more good deeds, but good deeds are not something that creates redemption just because you meet a quota of good deeds for the [].

BlackCat-055 said:
That is succinctly put and interesting. I guess I could ask about then about if a person intends not to do it but also is afraid they'd do it. But then again it wouldn't be a proper redemption since the examples you made with Kratos in regards to Baldur, he doesn't want to go back to God killing but he does it anyways.

Honestly the talks about him being a single dad to Baldur was an interesting story and I would like to see something like that but I have a weakness for stories with good dads.

I hadn't played the GoW games so I only have your word to go for it, but it does sound like the writers made excuses for Kratos to go back fighting.

Normally I'd point out what if there was no other way, for example with the army part. But you've noted there was an actual alternative solution that could've been done. So I understand that.

All in all it was nice to hear about your points about redemption and will tentatively integrate it maybe.
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Glad I could be of help. Good luck on your story! :D

BlackCat-055 said:
I am curious of your thoughts on limits of redemption, like is there a barrier when you've gone "too far" and can never be redeemed, and is there like a quota of time and effort that needs to be done. Obviously I can infer that redemption needs true change instead of meaningless attempts at flattery or good peepo points but figure I'd ask for more thoughts even if what's already available is much appreciated.

I always figured you needed to fulfill a karmic quota and requirements before a redemption can be truly official. I still think it is tbh, if not for how it should be, but more rather that's the natural state of things. But the alternative insight was something I enjoyed reading.
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The limits of redemption depend a lot on who/what you consider the final arbiter of existence.

Catholics/Orthodox will tell you that there is no limit to redemption, while Jews, Protestants and Muslims don't have a strict central authority so it varies by denomination. For similar reasons, philosophy as a rule has no consistent opinions on the limits. Buddhists also subscribe to a variant of no limit, but because of the cycle of reincarnation it's possible for someone to never actually reach Nirvana.

The legal opinion on redemption generally declines to comment on the topic because they don't care, as long as punishing criminals preserves whatever society the law is designed to uphold.

Ford Prefect said:
By this logic then Kratos is actually redeemed. The Kratos seen at basically any point in the Norse saga games would not have done the things that Kratos did in the Greek era. Speaking personally I don't really think the Norse games are about redemption in any case, Kratos has had exactly one real opportunity for redemption and it was in God of War III, and to some degree the whole original trilogy was Kratos trying to make up for his mistakes with Lysandra and Calliope. He failed. The Norse games are more about coming to terms with what you've done and learning to live.
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My original point isn't that redemption is a core part of the games or was intended to be. It's that refusing to give redemption arcs their proper place in the story, especially when they're trying to sell you on "Look at Dad-tos/Mom-ya, so sexy respectable!", led to bad writing and bad storytelling. The rest of it is just giving BlackCat a thorough answer.

If the only point where Kratos could have had a real opportunity for redemption is GoW 3 (I don't agree, but that's delving into the theoretical limits of redemption so see above for that), then it rather sours the idea of having any Kratos-centered games beyond that. Why should anyone waste their time on a story where "god(ess)" doesn't actually mean anything except superpowers? Why should I respect a man who lectures his boy on being better and actions have consequences, then dances off into war and slaughter he says he doesn't want when a prophecy (altered from the original by the scriptwriters so the player doesn't have to feel bad) says "It'll be fine, it's not actually that bad" and a bunch of people say "innocent people are being used as meatshields, just go kill them so we can get this over with"?

And that's the fundamental problem. You say Norse Kratos wouldn't have done what Greek Kratos did...except he did do a lot of that same stuff. He killed a god he didn't have to out of habit, and brought ruin upon all the realms thereby. He brought apocalypse and mass murder upon an entire realm just to kill Odin.

Norse Kratos might be less gratuitous in his destruction than Greek Kratos, but if the only major difference is in degree...
 
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Speaking of redemption and following on the incidental Dragon Age example, the backstory given for Thom Rainier is actually so deranged that it annihilates any sympathy for him.
 
CanYouMeme said:
Buddhists also subscribe to a variant of no limit, but because of the cycle of reincarnation it's possible for someone to never actually reach Nirvana.
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Getting into the weeds here, but that's not actually true. Honestly escaping the cycle of reincarnation is rather divorced from ideas of redemption to begin with.
 
CanYouMeme said:
And that's the fundamental problem. You say Norse Kratos wouldn't have done what Greek Kratos did...except he did do a lot of that same stuff. He killed a god he didn't have to out of habit, and brought ruin upon all the realms thereby. He brought apocalypse and mass murder upon an entire realm just to kill Odin.
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Everything else is just down to opinion, but none of this is factually true.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
What would be so bad that he'd be beyond redemption?
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Basically
Thom Rainer was a Solider or at least a lower office in a land that was hodgepodge of various version of France. Long story he follows an order to go attack a noble carriage and be a part of a political struggle, and he knows this. He finds out it gets some children killed and he deserts. He meets a Grey Warden (An order of warriors, it's a long ass story about them, but they take all manner of people and to join them is something of a death sentence) by the name of Blackwall, he considers joining the Grey Wardens but Blackwall ends up dead. So Thom takes up his identity and basically serves as something akin to a knight a shining armor even if real Grey Wardens can be as far from that as possible.
 
BBadolato said:
Basically
Thom Rainer was a Solider or at least a lower office in a land that was hodgepodge of various version of France. Long story he follows an order to go attack a noble carriage and be a part of a political struggle, and he knows this. He finds out it gets some children killed and he deserts. He meets a Grey Warden (An order of warriors, it's a long ass story about them, but they take all manner of people and to join them is something of a death sentence) by the name of Blackwall, he considers joining the Grey Wardens but Blackwall ends up dead. So Thom takes up his identity and basically serves as something akin to a knight a shining armor even if real Grey Wardens can be as far from that as possible.
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This isn't exactly accurate, it's a little too soft on the guy.

Thom Rainier was a captain in the Orlesian army, he finds out about the children in the carriage with enough time to call off the attack, but chooses not to do so since he doesn't want his men to find out what he did, he's aware the carriage was full of innocents but lied to his soldiers since he personally would be made a rich man from the attack, and when the massacre went public Thom deserted and ran to avoid the consequences, becoming a mercenary.

He meets a Grey Warden after this and considers joining the Wardens, but the Warden dies and Thom takes his identity since he's terrified that if he went to the Wardens himself they would kill him under suspicion that he killed Blackwall himself.
 
Squirtodyle said:
This isn't exactly accurate, it's a little too soft on the guy.

Thom Rainier was a captain in the Orlesian army, he finds out about the children in the carriage with enough time to call off the attack, but chooses not to do so since he doesn't want his men to find out what he did, he's aware the carriage was full of innocents but lied to his soldiers since he personally would be made a rich man from the attack, and when the massacre went public Thom deserted and ran to avoid the consequences, becoming a mercenary.

He meets a Grey Warden after this and considers joining the Wardens, but the Warden dies and Thom takes his identity since he's terrified that if he went to the Wardens himself they would kill him under suspicion that he killed Blackwall himself.
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Reading BBadelto's version. It didn't seem like the man was a horrible person.

Yeah he did a warcrime but he didn't know there was innocents until then, and he strived to do better, did a dumb thing by impersonating someone but...yeah I can't really excuse that.


But yours paint a more bleaker picture on him. Honestly I find it more deplorable. The worst part is that it doesn't seem he's even striving to be better. Especially with that identify theft, because that's a thing he still does judging from your accounts. He isn't fighting to be better and he's constantly tarnishing someone else's name with his actions out of cowardice. Albeit it's one I understand because fear of a craven man turns them to go far deeper than they think they could have.

I just find it really sad. But at least it's a character so I don't have to think about could haves.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
But yours paint a more bleaker picture on him. Honestly I find it more deplorable. The worst part is that it doesn't seem he's even striving to be better. Especially with that identify theft, because that's a thing he still does judging from your accounts. He isn't fighting to be better and he's constantly tarnishing someone else's name with his actions out of cowardice. Albeit it's one I understand because fear of a craven man turns them to go far deeper than they think they could have.
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To be clear, what happens is that Rainier is inspired by the sacrifice of the real Warden Blackwall and takes up his name so he can fight as a force for good in the world. When you meet up with him, he's been "Blackwall" for some time, and has unfailingly used that time to help and support others, even rescuing people in the moment where you find him. He'll typically advocate for mercy and kindness and does his utmost to uphold the name of Warden Blackwall as essentially a straight up knight in shining armor, since that's who Blackwall was for him. His desire to repent and redeem himself is 100% earnest.

By the time he joins your party, he's left behind any of his cowardly actions save for the fact that he's lying about his identity, and ultimately as you progress his story he reveals his true name and history and surrenders himself to be judged by the Inquisitor, whereupon you get to choose his fate.
 
Squirtodyle said:
To be clear, what happens is that Rainier is inspired by the sacrifice of the real Warden Blackwall and takes up his name so he can fight as a force for good in the world. When you meet up with him, he's been "Blackwall" for some time, and has unfailingly used that time to help and support others, even rescuing people in the moment where you find him. He'll typically advocate for mercy and kindness and does his utmost to uphold the name of Warden Blackwall as essentially a straight up knight in shining armor, since that's who Blackwall was for him. His desire to repent and redeem himself is 100% earnest.

By the time he joins your party, he's left behind any of his cowardly actions save for the fact that he's lying about his identity, and ultimately as you progress his story he reveals his true name and history and surrenders himself to be judged by the Inquisitor, whereupon you get to choose his fate.
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That sounds nicer but I realize there's a good chance by making this post someone is gonna go up and say "AH BUT HERE'S THIS EVEN EVILER THING HE DID!" And then I'd say oh no that's bad! And then someone goes up to defend him again

And then somewhere down the line I realize that people have been subtly adding more and more exaggerated stuff about him so he's either secretly an Angel or secretly a goose named Lucy.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
That sounds nicer but I realize there's a good chance by making this post someone is gonna go up and say "AH BUT HERE'S THIS EVEN EVILER THING HE DID!" And then I'd say oh no that's bad! And then someone goes up to defend him again

And then somewhere down the line I realize that people have been subtly adding more and more exaggerated stuff about him so he's either secretly an Angel or secretly a goose named Lucy.
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I'm pretty sure I got everything about him tbh.

I have some complicated feelings about Blackwall that have been exacerbated by replaying Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, but in summary I think that I prefer it when a redemption narrative has someone actually do terrible shit in the past that they feel they have to atone for as opposed to doing their best to make the character sympathetic and accidentally-or-on-purpose making it seem like the stuff they did wasn't that bad.

It's a complicated tightrope to walk because you do still want the audience to be sympathetic to the character somehow, but I feel like redemption narratives that don't have a bit of teeth to them are kind of indulgent nonsense.
 
Common plot points regarding redemption are cases where "are you the same person you were before" is answered with "no, but not through any effort on my part".

Stuff like magical amnesia, whether deliberately induced or otherwise. Revan from the Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic stories is the obvious example. There are also a fair number of games where the player character has their sins prior to the game revealed, but the player wasn't there for it, and just happened to be controlling the player character after all of that.

There are also the stories where a heinous criminal is mind-altered (sometimes via magic or sci-fi surgery) into a completely different personality. I vaguely recall one episode of Babylon 5 dealing with that. It used to result in pages upon pages of debate on fan forums, but I think by now everyone is already tired of it.
 
Adloquium said:
Stuff like magical amnesia, whether deliberately induced or otherwise.
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What if the person intentionally gave themselves Amnesia because they don't feel they, the current state is incapable of pushing on with proper change, but by giving themselves a blank state. They can finally have the ability to push on and fix their wrong doings without being dragged down by it.

I dunno I just wanna explore the magical amnesia angle.
 
BlackCat-055 said:
What if the person intentionally gave themselves Amnesia because they don't feel they, the current state is incapable of pushing on with proper change, but by giving themselves a blank state. They can finally have the ability to push on and fix their wrong doings without being dragged down by it.

I dunno I just wanna explore the magical amnesia angle.
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That's literally the plot of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
 
While I've since dropped Arknights for unrelated reasons, the way in which it handles the main player character's amnesia is pretty fun. The Doctor, as they're called, is completely bereft of their memories from before they were sealed in a strange "sarcophagus", and when they awaken they've got no clue what's going on. The catch is that they retain their skills as a battlefield commander, rapidly taking control of the unit that rescued them and directing them to incredible success right away, and the hidden second catch is that the Doctor's original self was a major player in the world and in the precursor organization to the one they're recruited to, Rhodes Island.

This means that people have memories, feelings, and opinions about what the Doctor did before they lost their memory, and as the story goes on it becomes clear that the person they used to be was a monster, a brilliant scientist, neurosurgeon, and battlefield commander who consistently terrified everyone around them because of their sheer ruthlessness. The Doctor as you play them retains their intelligence and can often rediscover things the old Doctor knew with slight prompting, but never actually any of their memories, which is very interestingly handled in the character of Kal'tsit, essentially the real head of Rhodes Island who fucking despises the Doctor's previous self for their part in the death of someone she loved. Some of the most interesting stuff in the game is wrapped up in Kal'tsit struggling to internalise the fact that the person she's speaking to isn't the same one who killed her loved one, and it's a constant push and pull between her desire to be fair to the essentially new person that she's working with and her inability to let go of her rage and how that affects the way she treats the Doctor.

Limbus Company is another fun track on the amnesiac protagonist, because very early on the characters discuss in-story what kind of person the main character Dante might have been before the incident that cost them their memories (and replaced their head with a flaming clock) and Dante themself is unnerved and disquieted by the idea that they could have been a monster beforehand, with a handful of hints from people who knew them prior to the transformation and memory loss giving away very little.
 
CanYouMeme said:
Redemption is nothing more and nothing less than a single question, usually spun one of two different ways; Are you the same person you were back then/If we turn back the clock and put you back there, will you do it again? If the heartfelt answer is a Yes, then you are not redeemed. If it is a heartfelt No, then you are. That's it.
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Redemption isn't anything. It's a purely abstract concept rooted in religious thinking that people on the internet use to be self righteous pocketwatching characters' (and real people's) moral and personal development.

As long as Kratos isn't being a psychopathic rage monster destroying civilisations and using innocent people as puzzle props and fucking over that one random sailor over and over then I'm pretty sure he's doing fine.
 
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