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Deleted member 2254

user requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
21,467
The only good villain forgiveness:


(timestamped at 1:10, skip there if it doesn't work)

Spoilers, obviously.
 

MistaTwo

SNK Gaming Division Studio 1
Verified
Oct 24, 2017
2,456
Sasuke from Naruto is one of the worst (best) example of this. It's so goddamn annoying.

I understand the Obito stuff, but Sasuke walks the line enough that it makes perfect sense for him to be won over by Friendship no Jutsu.
Most people saw that coming by like a decade.

Hell, he actually kills more Akatsuki members than any of the good guys!
 

balohna

Member
Nov 1, 2017
4,169
Mass Effect 2 had a moment where the paragon choice in a mission is to spare a crime boss. I was playing 99% paragon but... I had just killed like 10 of his henchmen. Why would I spare him after killing some poor thug that probably just really needed the money or got indoctrinated or something? I'd rather kill him and recruit his men, but that wasn't a choice so everyone just died.
 

Neoriceisgood

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,144
Lmao, a lot of good examples in this thread.

I think it's especially bad when in shows like Naruto there's a very clear sense that the main character's morals are the defacto "good" ones & we're supposed to relate to their forgiveness.

(Steven Universe is running into a similar issue in that regard)
 

SinkFla

Member
Oct 26, 2017
9,442
Pensacola, Fl
I sat through several seasons happily but for awhile now (and with me being a creature of habit) the show has just been a slow burning car wreck I can't help but rubberneck at lol. It falls victim to a lot of absurd tropes because the biggest problem with the show?

The characters do not organically develop and evolve nor act logically within the parameters of the behavior previously witnessed of each character over the years. They are living, breathing plot devices with dialogue whose only purpose is to adapt with whatever storyline is coming in the immediate future. The characters do not drive the story, the story drives the characters and poorly at that.

The Rick we've seen established would not in anyway whatsoever (with or without Carl) logically spare Negan. Sorry I'm ranting lol.
 

Blade24070

Member
Oct 26, 2017
7,002
This is frankly prevalent in Sailor Moon to the point that it's annoying. The biggest example to me is Nehelenia. After all that bitch had done for the DUMBEST of motivations (wanting to remain young and pretty and adored or some bullshit IIRC), she deserved to die. But no, instead she's given a reset on her life (again, IIRC). Most villains that do die are never killed by Sailor Moon (talking about major villains, not monsters of the week).

Tales of Xilla 2 also has the previous game's two villains as party members, though at least they acknowledge their previous status as villains and the party is wary of Muzet for a bit.
 

SatoAilDarko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,824
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Naruto is fucking trash.
 

Jindrax

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,454
Fucking hell OP, you seriously could have put TWD in the title
 
Oct 27, 2017
772
I've always felt jojo has gotten real close to this but there is never a character so far evil that it's bullshit that they should be forgiven. That is so far in the anime, I don't know about the manga. Bruno was super close but it didn't specially say he killed anybody just had some body parts of the person his boss killed.

Though it's been very good with explaining why the people are forgiven.
 

boontobias

Avenger
Apr 14, 2018
9,539
Sasuke is the ultimate example of this
At least nobody (that we know of) from Rick's group is gonna fall in love with Negan
 

JCG

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,537
There's a qualitative difference here, I would argue, when it's still ultimately left up to the audience to take the final step and "forgive" a character (or not) versus when you are actually seeing the cast of characters explicitly come out and forgive them.

If it's not spelled out as almost a mandate for the audience by other characters, this trope rarely bothers me that much, because we can find out that someone had certain sympathetic traits or went through partially extenuating circumstances such as a traumatic childhood yet still come to conclusion that they remain an awful person.

In those cases, it's not a mutually exclusive situation in my view. You can in fact understand where someone is coming from on paper and simultaneously believe them to be absolutely wrong, foolish, insane, disloyal, etc.
 

NippleViking

Member
May 2, 2018
4,486
Agreed OP, but unlike some others I don't mind Vegeta's situation so much. Between the general insignificance of death in DBZ, Vegeta's several sacrifices against Buu and Cell, Goku's reasoning for keeping him around (i.e. not some cloying heroic reason, but a selfish one), and the light tone of DB, I find it easy to hand-wave.

I'm happy to file his genocidal past under 'Just a phase', and he's still not exactly warmly welcomed with open arms among the Z Fighters.
 

Pluto

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,449
But... you realise people can't know what media has this trope before they experience it, correct?
So what? The thread title indicates there will be spoilers in this thread. This is also a topic that's hard to talk about when everything's hidden behind spoiler tags. Open spoilers is the way to go for this.


This is frankly prevalent in Sailor Moon to the point that it's annoying. The biggest example to me is Nehelenia. After all that bitch had done for the DUMBEST of motivations (wanting to remain young and pretty and adored or some bullshit IIRC), she deserved to die. But no, instead she's given a reset on her life (again, IIRC). Most villains that do die are never killed by Sailor Moon (talking about major villains, not monsters of the week).
That's only a thing in the anime, in the manga all villains are killed off, Sailor Moon isn't big on forgiving anyone, she just blasts them into oblivion.
 

Kain

Unshakable Resolve - One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
7,604
I like how in Bleach they pulled the "he's too cool to hate" thing with Aizen that Kishimoto never ever ever could with stupid Sasuke. For all the deserved shit Tite takes he at least could nail that.

Fuck Sasuke, Deidara got robbed.
 

Deleted member 283

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,288
Even though I gave the Xeno games guff for this (and again, it's deserved for Xenogears, fuck Krelian so much), I did like the way Xenoblade Chronicles 1 handled it.

Shulk spent 90% of the game driven by vengeance, and not a single party member ever tried to talk him out of it. When he reaches the Mechon village, that's where he learns that there are sapient Mechon and not all of them were mindless machines driven to eliminate humanity.

Plus I like the way he just casually sits down with the Big Bad after beating him. The dude was still a shit who caused a lot of suffering, but it still felt more appropriate than most other examples of this.
Yeah, I generally speaking dislike this but Xenoblade 1 is one of the few games that pulls it off well. Especially since way before the big fight with the Big Bad we have a scene of Shulk questioning his reasons for continuing to fight and if revenge even makes any sense for him anymore in the Hidden Machina Village. And even before that, there's the big fight with Metal Face and the conclusion Shulk comes to there. It's all set up in a way that actually makes sense.

And also, it's not like Shulk was just going to keep on letting Egil continue to do whatever in the world he wanted, or naively thought he could change him with words alone. He understood that Egil would continue to fight back. But as he said, if he did, he'd stop him once again, however many times it took, and it's just handled in a way that's believable for both Shulk and Egil.

And then everything that happens after that, after Shulk makes that decision and where things go from there, doesn't hurt either.
 

Deleted member 27246

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 30, 2017
3,066
Do you? Because that had literally nothing to do with it.

In fact, Negan's "redemption" in the comics is one of the best things to look forward to right now in the TV show. So it's a bad example.

So what were the reasons it hit record low numbers? Also are we sure there will be a redemption arc (non-comic readers have no idea about btw, talk about spoilers) in the series?
Any sane person would have killed Negan a thousand times. Carl with his bs letter being the reason he is in prison is utter bullshit... and some potential good arc that might come out of it doesn't change that at all. So no, it is a great example.
 
Oct 27, 2017
5,494
I'm not a Star Wars fan, so maybe I'm missing something big but... Darth Vader? How could he be so easily redeemed? The guy is a mass murderer. He killed all those kids when he was still Anakin, he is directly involved in the destruction of a whole fucking planet with millions, if not billions, of people in it. And that's not counting all the people he killed in related media, like canon comics and games.

But he has a brief moment of clarity when he's all but dead, attacks the Emperor and... all is forgiven? He becomes a Force ghost? Is it really that easy?

Bullshit.
 

SerAardvark

Member
Oct 25, 2017
986
The vast majority of the galaxy didn't consider Vader redeemed - that was basically just Luke. I can't speak to the Force ghost bit though.
 

Markitron

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
12,510
Ireland
I fully expect that to happen, even if that arsehole is completely undeserving of it.
I love Kylo Ren but I want Rey to murderise him after what he did. Honestly though, I don't expect a huge redemption angle in Ep 9, as far as I'm concerned they got that out of the way in TLJ. He's made his choice.

I'm not a Star Wars fan, so maybe I'm missing something big but... Darth Vader? How could he be so easily redeemed? The guy is a mass murderer. He killed all those kids when he was still Anakin, he is directly involved in the destruction of a whole fucking planet with millions, if not billions, of people in it. And that's not counting all the people he killed in related media, like canon comics and games.

But he has a brief moment of clarity when he's all but dead, attacks the Emperor and... all is forgiven? He becomes a Force ghost? Is it really that easy?

Bullshit.
He is most certainly not been forgiven. The whole reason Leia started the Resistance in the first place is because she was disgraced as a politician when people found out that Vader was her father. He is still considered the galaxy's biggest monster, it's just in the eyes of a few that he was saved from the dark side, yet still not redeemed. He had already turned to the Dark Side when he killed those kids.

IIRC the force ghost was explained by GL as the version of Anakin before he turned, which is why he changed in to Hayden Christensen in 2004. You might consider it bullshit but it's a justification of sorts I suppose.
 
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ara

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,013
The Xeno games love this trope, with nearly every single main villain, no matter how horrible their deeds, ends up having the main character give them this speech. It was the absolute worst with Xenogears, with a villain who committed horrible atrocities for thousands of years (children included) and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. He even got what he wanted in the end and faced no punishment whatsoever, but the main characters forgave him because he was, like, sad and stuff at the very end.

Lol, Xeno games came to mind immediately when I saw the title.

I fucking hate this trope with passion. Probably hated it in Xenoblade too, though I kinda hated most of the cast and the story of that game anyway, so obviously in a story like that my reaction would be even stronger lol.

As always, there are cases where I'm fine with this, but damn if they aren't few and far between.
 
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Sander VF

The Fallen
Oct 28, 2017
25,960
Tbilisi, Georgia
I've always felt jojo has gotten real close to this but there is never a character so far evil that it's bullshit that they should be forgiven. That is so far in the anime, I don't know about the manga. Bruno was super close but it didn't specially say he killed anybody just had some body parts of the person his boss killed.

Though it's been very good with explaining why the people are forgiven.
Stroheim.
 
Oct 27, 2017
11,510
Bandung Indonesia
I love Kylo Ren but I want Rey to murderise him after what he did. Honestly though, I don't expect a huge redemption angle in Ep 9, as far as I'm concerned they got that out of the way in TLJ. He's made his choice.

I am thinking more of a "while dying, he realizes the error of his ways" or "sacrificing his life to save the heroine's" variety of redemption. But we'll see... I really hope that won't be the case.
 

Boxy Brown

Member
Oct 27, 2017
8,503
I thought the only reason Orochimaru is alive was because of his research and how it could help in the future against the Otsutsuki clan. I equate it to when the US used Nazi scientist after WW2.

Sasuke is annoying, but the only people who he actually were bad people. (And samurai, but fuck those dude.)
 
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Keldroc

Member
Oct 27, 2017
11,986
Kylo will be redeemed, goddamnit!!

EDIT: oh no I'm the one turning this into a TLJ thread this time! ;__;

If Abrams tries to redeem Kylo Ren, it will be the most egregious misstep in the franchise's (film) history. You cannot redeem the man who murdered Han Solo, let alone his own father. Luke knows this in RotJ, when he refuses to kill his own father; patricide is pretty much the greatest imaginable sin in Star Wars, apparently.
 

Markitron

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
12,510
Ireland
I am thinking more of a "while dying, he realizes the error of his ways" or "sacrificing his life to save the heroine's" variety of redemption. But we'll see... I really hope that won't be the case.
If he had spent the whole of TLJ in full-on evil mode I'd expect this ending too, but that film went to great lengths to show the fallout of killing Han and how he came out on the other side of that confusion. When Rey turned her back on his offer, and then Leia and Luke agreed that he was gone for good, that was the last chance of a redemption gone IMO.

If Abrams tries to redeem Kylo Ren, it will be the most egregious misstep in the franchise's (film) history. You cannot redeem the man who murdered Han Solo, let alone his own father. Luke knows this in RotJ, when he refuses to kill his own father; patricide is pretty much the greatest imaginable sin in Star Wars, apparently.
Luke refuses to kill Vader because he rightly believes that when the time comes, Vader will choose Luke and destroy the Emperor. Either way I don't see this happening in Ep 9.