There you are, mid-book. The good guy is face-to-face with the bad guy. The good guy knows that the bad guy, deep down inside, isn’t evil, that there is a chance to bring the bad guy back to the light. The bad guy scoffs! Indeed no! The good guy’s virtue is a weakness! But in a private moment, the bad guy has second thoughts. You are riveted. Will the bad guy come around? If he does, will he deserve forgiveness? Yes, you think. He will.
On that satisfying note, you put your book down. You blink in the light of the real world. You scroll your apps. There’s another accusation of wrongdoing against an author. In fact, the author wrote the book you just put down. The accusation is just one example of behavior that has been going on for years, one of SFF’s worst-kept secrets. No one on the convention circuit ever called him on it and now the simmering collective discomfort has boiled over.
Your anger is incandescent. The author is unforgivable! You’ll never read anything by him ever again!
OR
Your sense of outrage is red hot. How dare they ruin the author’s legacy with this garbage! You will defend the author until your dying breath!
Either way, the fan response to the accusation doesn’t leave much room for the author to have any sort of say over the outcome of the author’s own story. Neither friend nor foe is leaving room for moral nuance or growth. Why do we love redemption in a story but have no patience for it in real life? Perhaps it’s because the moral universe in a story is smaller and less complex. Or perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong redemption arc. Perhaps…the real redemption arc was the friends we made along the way.
Everyone Loves a Comeback
In A Christmas Carol, a horror fantasy about the True Meaning of Christmas™, Charles Dickens tells one of the most, if not the most, recognizable redemption stories in the Western literary canon. And we eat it up! There are so many available methods to consume this tale. Off the top of my head: (1) read the original story from 1843; (2) take in the beautiful chaos of the 1988 masterpiece Scrooged; (3) watch Michael Caine evolve from torturing Kermit to sending round a prize turkey in The Muppet Christmas Carol (which I’ve done every Christmas since 1992); or (4) perhaps watch TikTok hot takes on Dickens vs. late stage capitalism.
I have not checked to see if such TikToks actually exist, but if they don’t, the next best thing might be the surprisingly robust Christmas Carol discourse on Reddit. My favorite corner of Christmas Carol Reddit is a many-years-old post titled “‘A Christmas Carol’ has a horrifying message”[1] on the subreddit r/unpopular opinion. In this hot take, after recapping the plot in a pithy, internetty kind of way, the poster (a user with a now-deleted account, we’ll call him OP) sneers, “So what do you do with a man who [h]as grown a cold heart and a contemptuous spirit? Do you sit down with him? Or show compassion? Hell no! According to this book you scare the living s*** out of him until you make him see your way.” OP is primarily upset because, in his interpretation, the people around Scrooge blame Scrooge himself for who he becomes. OP believes they should, instead, try to understand how the events of Scrooge’s life led to the creation of the mean, detestable Scrooge we meet at the beginning of the tale. To OP, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are torturing Scrooge into submitting to the Ghosts’ “way” when they should be seeing and validating Scrooge’s angry feelings of victimhood after an unjustly cruel life. No mention is made by OP regarding whether Scrooge should change his behavior at all going forward. Tellingly, OP says his “biggest complaint” is that “they imply that Scrooge himself is the only one to blame for his demise.”
What I love most about this take is the beautiful irony. The Ghosts are walking Scrooge through some serious self-evaluation during which he peers into his past to see truly where the seeds of his current self were planted, and then looks into the future to witness the reaping. This is jarring and scary for him because honest self-reflection IS jarring and scary. Scrooge is almost undone by seeing his own death, and who wouldn’t be? But torture? No. What the Ghosts are doing is giving Scrooge a chance to mend his ways and save his own soul. Presumably, they could have chosen not to intervene and let Scrooge continue to live his life and meet his fate, which would have been a very different book. So, what are the Ghosts showing if not compassion? A chance at redemption is handed to Scrooge and, to our delight, he takes it. How happy we all are when Scrooge learns his lesson and turns himself around! How lovely that Scrooge will avoid the worst consequences of his own actions!
Human beings love to consume tales of redemption. Psychological researchers refer to the redemption arc trope as a “cultural master narrative,” that is, “a group-level narrative that guides personal story construction.”[2] In other words, redemption stories are told so often that they have become integral to how we define the world around us – they are, quite literally, a brick in the structure of (at least Western) society. The social world around us and our place in it makes less sense to us if we do not have tales of redemption. These stories give us instructions on how we are supposed to behave, what is to be expected from others, and what consequences exist if we do not meet cultural and social expectations. Redemption stories tell us what the world is and, by abstracting out the worst consequences of falling out of line, provide a map for navigating that world. Given this, it is no wonder that redemption arcs feature so heavily in science fiction and fantasy (SFF). SFF “is and has always been a popular culture art form [that has] mirrored the tenor of its time even while trying to extrapolate – sometimes quite successfully – from that time.”[3] SFF, at its best, is a vehicle for safely examining (and questioning) the mores of any given time. What better way to do that than to include a nice, familiar tale of redemption?
Getting Off Easy
Redemption, done properly, is an act. One must “redeem oneself” by doing. The act is necessary to sell the change. In our stories, audiences are delighted when a bad guy becomes a good guy as long as salvation and forgiveness is earned and not just granted by the Omnipotent Author God. Consider Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. (Warning: spoilers ahead, assuming a 42-year-old movie can be spoiled anymore.) Deckard is tasked with dispatching replicants, a synthetic form of life-like AI created by the Evil Corporation. Deckard sees replicants as non-human things while the audience is being taught they are more complicated than that. While there is no pat ending showing us Deckard was formerly wrong and is now right like we get in A Christmas Carol, Deckard does fall in love with and save the life of the replicant Rachael – the most redemptive thing he could do in the scrambled moral universe of the movie. In order for the audience to buy this ending, we must see Deckard learn about the experience of the replicants, watch him struggle with the right or wrong of killing the replicant Roy Batty, go through the weird twist of Roy saving Deckard’s life, and spar with Rachael.[4] Without all that, Deckard’s redemptive move at the end would carry no emotional weight whatsoever.
In other words, we intuitively get that someone is not “redeemed” when another person forgives them out of the goodness of their heart, or just chooses to ignore the bad that someone does. In those situations, a character is merely let off the hook – they maintain all their wrongness and move forward with no true redemption, no matter how much an author or a director tries to push the narrative in that direction. True redemption requires work, a journey of self, a floundering toward the light. No work, no reward. My favorite example of an unearned redemption is probably Darth Vader. (Is Return of the Jedi spoilable? If so, spoilers ahead.) What the audience sees is Vader destroying planets to scare his daughter, trying to kill his own son, and generally being an evil terrorist for three movies. We are told that embracing the Dark Side is a choice this person made. This is a man who killed children to serve his ends. Despite all the evidence of irredeemability, the audience is asked at the end to buy that Vader redeems all of this merely by killing the Emperor (and, sure, sacrificing himself).[5] Unfortunately, one momentary act does not a redemption make.
Nino Cipri wrote a personal and thoughtful piece on what they termed the “Bad Dad Redemption” trope for Uncanny Magazine.[6] In it, they discuss the bad-dad-to-self-sacrifice pipeline in popular culture. According to Cipri, the men in these stories have a history of poor fatherly behavior and, in order to atone for this, they take the opportunity presented by some dramatic moment to…die. Bad Dads in popular culture take many forms. To name a few: absent fathers, emotionally distant fathers, abusive fathers, fathers who are around but do not bother with forging a connection with their children. In this Bad Dad trope, the dad in question briefly acknowledges his shortcomings, leaps into action to save someone (usually his child), sacrifices himself, and then is presumed to have made up for all the years of Bad Dadness. Cipri mentions several examples[7], any of which could be an entire essay on his own. A standout in this very grim pantheon is Yondu Udonta. (Again: spoiler warning.)
Blue Yondu cuts one of the worst father figures in SFF. In Marvel Cinematic Universe canon, Yondu kidnaps Quill and raises him in the heart of his Ravager crew. By all accounts, Yondu is, at best, emotionally abusive and neglectful of Quill, leaving Quill to pine after his lost mother and nurse faint memories of her love. In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Yondu joins forces with Quill and the Guardians to fight against Ego, Quill’s father, and ends up sacrificing himself to save Quill’s life. But during GotG2 we also learn that Yondu helped Quill’s father, Ego, fill a planet-sized cavern with the bones of children. Despite a life of treating Quill cruelly and generally doing crime, at the end of the movie, the audience is meant to be on board with the idea that Yondu’s “he’s never been your daddy” moment earns Yondu an unqualified redemption. I believe Yondu’s arc in GotG2 was intended to show us that Yondu was attempting to atone for his past misdeeds by rescuing Quill, and that Yondu secretly loved Quill. But even if you accept that Yondu’s rescue of Quill was an act of atonement, the problem remains that Yondu doesn’t actually redeem himself to Quill. His entire life, Quill did not feel rescued, or loved, or protected. Quill felt abused, abandoned, and unsafe. So, as far as Quill was concerned, the only inkling he ever had that Yondu loved him was right at the moment of Yondu’s death. Quill had no chance to react, to discuss, to process. Yondu did not give Quill the chance to reject him. Yondu did not try to live his life as a better man, he just died. As Lin Manuel Miranda told us, dying is easy, living is harder.
With any Bad Dad self-sacrifice narrative, the question isn’t “did the Bad Dad love his family?” Most audience members would probably agree that Yondu, in his own way, loved Quill. The pertinent questions is, “did the Bad Dad make his family feel loved?” The fact of love isn’t enough, nor are good intentions, or unspoken self-reproach. The atonement is in making oneself vulnerable and accepting accountability for one’s failings. The redemption is in the living. If Yondu had lived, gone on to fly with the Guardians, spent time with Quill and forged a real relationship, that would have been a redemption worth rooting for. We want comeuppance, ramifications, consequences. Anything else is unjust. But what happens when this sense of injustice carries over into our real, lived experience?
I Have No Mouth. And I Must Scream
The internet is full of aggrieved people. Part of the beauty of the internet is the ready availability of like-minded people who will understand your complaint, no matter how niche. I’d hazard that the vast majority of grievances flare briefly and die – everyone vents and not all personal issues are actionable. But every so often, an accusation or exposed wrongdoing starts a conflagration that burns and burns. When allegations of bad behavior are made against beloved creatives in the SFF community, as a Very Online SFF fan I see people publicly wrestle with their own sense of justice (or injustice) despite having very little information, less power, and a lot of feelings. An attack on a creator can feel like an attack on the creator’s fans, so of course the fan will defend the creator as the fan would defend his or her or their own self. After all, we, as SFF fans, don’t merely enjoy a thing, we graft parts of content and content creators onto our own identities. “The object of fandom…is intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self, with who we are, would like to be, and think we are.”[8] What results is an emotional ouroboros in which fans cannot precisely discern where they end and the objects of their fandom begin. “What you like… is not just more important than who you are: the two things are one and the same.”[9] So – an attack can feel personal or, on the flip side, bad behavior by a creator can feel like a very deep betrayal. This begets a familiar existential crisis – what do I do with all this love now that its object has betrayed me?
Our tales of redemption have taught us that people can and should be held accountable for their actions, and that we can forgive them when they have sufficiently atoned. But when a creator faces accusations, this process is not available. We are powerless to hold someone we do not know accountable for anything. What would we require? How would we know they honestly delivered? It’s that powerlessness that leads to the endless hand wringing in comment threads and calls for cancellation. We pillory accused public figures in the town square of the internet as a collective vent of frustration. We call for cancellation because we are powerless to demand true atonement. “Canceling is a way to acknowledge that you don’t have to have the power to change structural inequality. You don’t even have to have the power to change all of public sentiment. But as an individual, you can still have power beyond measure.”[10] Cancellation is boycotting, and boycotting can be effective on a structural level. But cancellation doesn’t undo harm on a personal level or ensure that the canceled person will change. Perhaps this is why Americans are deeply ambivalent about it.[11]
An accused person disappearing from the public sphere on a wave of an inadequate Twitter apology is, essentially, the same thing as the Bad Dad trope. They are not held accountable and they avoid the hard work. This is unjust. But because the internet, famously, has a short attention span, we move on quickly. Often the accused simply slinks back onto the scene without notice and carries on. Cancellation is ineffective as a tool for true personal change. Cancellation is really only about a public figure’s ability to continue to work, and that has nothing to do with personal rehabilitation. More alarming, perhaps – cancel culture is a demand for perfection that gets more and more unforgiving as it goes along. If we demand perfection and eliminate people who fall short from the community, then we must also be perfect, or be subject to the same fate. We connect with a well-drawn redemption arc because we are familiar with the hope that anyone can overcome a bad act. We are familiar with that hope because not one of us is perfect and we have all screwed up. As Dederer put it in Monsters, “Everyone who has a biography – that is, everyone alive – is either canceled or about to be canceled.” [12]
Rather than jumping to cancellation, what if we took a moment to examine the only people we can control – ourselves? While we were watching the initial fall out of the Me Too movement set fire to so many cultural “norms”, Dederer asked, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”[13] Dederer posits that one of the thorniest parts of engaging this question is recognizing our own culpability in creating the monsters that then turn around and attack. “The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people…We are excited by their asshole-ness.” We ignore or excuse bad behavior “until it becomes synonymous with greatness.” And we do it for a very human reason – “We yearn for events!” Instead of excusing bad behavior because a person is a genius, Dederer suggests we created the concept of the genius “to serve our own attraction to badness” and so “we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle.”[14]
Harlan Ellison presents an interesting case study on this concept. The most delightfully understated description I’ve seen of Ellsion is: “Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself.”[15] He was a man known in SFF circles as much for his boundary-pushing, controversial writing as for his boundary-pushing, controversial behavior. Stories abound of his frightful behavior toward friend and foe alike, but he was tolerated for over 60 years, a wolf in the fold, because he was perceived as mostly harmless and his writing changed science fiction once upon a time.[16][17] Also, probably, because he was unpredictable and entertaining as long as you were not in his crosshairs. He was so comfortable with his boorish behavior that, in 2006, on stage during the Hugo Awards in front of a large audience, Ellison put his hand on writer Connie Willis’s breast without permission.[18]
After the ceremony, the 2006 SFF blogosphere was ablaze.[19] There were vehement defenders, but the majority of the comment warriors were aghast. Many addressed the elephant in the room: that the SFF community had permitted Ellison to get away with terrible behavior for so long that they had actually stopped seeing it:
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it seems that familiarity with this behavior breeds... if not complacency, then grudging acceptance. A sort of communal sigh of, ‘Oh, that's just Harlan, the pig.’ And that's a pity, because it means he's set the bar for his behavior so low, he can get away with almost anything instead of being called on it.[20]
Ellison definitely got called on this one, but the SFF community was also forced to take a good, long look at itself and ask, “Did we permit this to happen?”[21]
I have already discussed that feeling that there is no distinction between the fan and the creator. In the SFF community it’s especially murky because, here, creators are fans and fans are creators. Creators who are poorly-behaved do not spring fully-formed from a convention stage or a hotel room party. The call is coming from inside the house. Therefore, in order for true change to happen, individual members must realize that public condemnation isn’t something that happens to other people, rather it “applies to them and their potential or past actions, to their conscious and subconscious attitudes.”[22] If this happens, and the same is demanded of new entrants to the community, the specter of the Poorly Behaved Creator may be effectively banished. It’s the community’s redemption that matters here, not that of the figurehead who has been caught in the act. It was never actually about them. It’s about us.
On a very fundamental level, human beings understand the nature of redemption. We know what it feels and looks like when someone makes amends, and we know what it means to forgive someone. We understand the journey from wrong to right and we know what it looks like when someone does not make that journey. True redemption requires effort, perseverance, understanding, vulnerability, and time.
In the face of our inability to hold powerful people to personal account, perhaps the best move is to recall what our cherished redemption stories do and don’t do. They do not teach us to police others. They teach us how to be good people. They teach us how to show compassion. In short, they teach us how to govern ourselves. In the end, that’s the only power we have – the power to control what we, alone, do. There is power in deciding to look inward instead of outward, in doing the hard work to change, in treating our fellows with compassion, in doing what we can for each other instead of doing what we can to each other. In the end, that’s where we find redemption. I think Scrooge would agree.
Amy Salley is a longtime sci-fi and fantasy fan, having cut her teeth on teen urban fantasy and Star Trek:TNG in her youth. Amy resides in Atlanta where she lawyers as a day job. Her true calling, though, is converting the world to the Truth of nerdy pop culture. Her proselytizing vehicle of choice is Hugo, Girl!, the podcast Amy creates with her three besties, Haley Zapal, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson (shameless plug). Hugo, Girl! provides feminist (and hilarious) takes on SFF novels, stories, movies and other content. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!
Notes
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/6s1q74/a_christmas_carol_has_a_horrifying_message/
[2] McLean,Kate C., et al, “Redemptive Stories and Those Who Tell Them are Preferred in the U.S.” Brent Donnellan, Ed. Collabra: Psychology Vol. 6(1). University of California Press, 2020. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.369 . Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.
[3] Cadigan, Pat. “Ten Years After.” Gardner Dozois, Ed. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Vol. 17(14), p. 4. Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines, December 1993.
[4] My interpretation of Blade Runner is, of course, debatable. I think my take is supported by Blade Runner 2049. In any event, in the immortal words of Trixie and Katya, this is my article and not yours.
[5] Also see: Kylo Ren.
[6] Cipri, Nino. “The Bad Dad Redemption Arc Needs to Die.” Uncanny Magazine, 2021. https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-bad-dad-redemption-arc-needs-to-die/. Accessed Aug. 4, 2024.
[7] Cipri’s discussion of Black father figures in SFF in their essay is worth a read.
[8] Yodovich, Neda. Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom. Louise Geddes and Lincoln Geraghty, Eds. Palgrave MacMillan, Palgrave Fan Studies series. 2022.
[9] Dederer, Claire. Monsters. Vintage Books, 2023, p. 52.
[10] Dudenhoefer, Nicole. “Is Cancel Culture Effective?“ Pegasus Magazine, Fall 2020. https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/is-cancel-culture-effective/. Accessed Aug. 4, 2024.
[11] Vogels, Emily, et al. “Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment.” Pew Research Center, May 19, 2021.
[12] Dederer, p. 50.
[13] Dederer, Claire. “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” The Paris Review, Nov. 20, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/. Accessed Aug. 4, 2024. “Men”, here, also includes women, which Dederer fleshes out in her book Monsters.
[14] Monsters, p. 109-110.
[15] Britt, Ryan. “The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison.” Inverse. April 22, 2024. https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/harlan-ellison-greatest-hits-j-michael-straczynski-
Interview-star-trek-star-wars. Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.
[16] Opinions vary on the merits of the movement, but Ellison’s anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions put New Wave on the map. It was a deliberate movement away from pulpy, hard science fiction toward more cerebral, psychological subjects. Traditional form, style, and syntax were all challenged. It was new, grown up science fiction. (https://www.sfsite.com/03b/dv148.htm. Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.)
[17] Ellison would not be happy that I’m calling him a science fiction writer. He once said, “Call me a science-fiction writer and I will come to your house and nail your dog’s head to the coffee table!” I don’t have a dog, though, so I’m going to chance it. (https://www.vulture.com/2013/07/harlan-ellison-
Isnt-dead-yet.html. Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.)
[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxd1jFDXzsU. Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.
[19] Choice LiveJournal reading in date order, all accessed Aug. 3, 2024. https://pnh.livejournal.com/25131.html; https://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/364284.html; http://blog.shrub.com/the-harlan-ellison-incident/; https://matociquala.livejournal.com/881156.html; https://matociquala.livejournal.com/882123.html; https://skzbrust.livejournal.com/19163.html; https://tacithydra.livejournal.com/957.html?format=light; https://scendan.livejournal.com/586135.html
[20] https://scendan.livejournal.com/586135.html?thread=5099927#t5099927 . Accessed Aug. 4, 2024.
[21] Ellison, for his part, did not publicly take much responsibility. He issued a species of apology, but then two days later he essentially rescinded it, saying that he was within his rights to touch Willis’s breast without permission because of her “very frequently demeaning public jackanapery toward me.” (Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20060901160904/http://harlanellison.com/heboard/unca.htm, see Ellison post dated August 31, 2006. Accessed Aug. 3, 2024.)
[22] https://leahbobet.livejournal.com/120016.html. Accessed Aug. 4, 2024.