: Re: Painting ritualistic murder in a "good-guy" light? My good guys murder people. They slowly carve runes onto them to help defeat the bad guys. Sure they try to use "society's worst" people for

@Gail2416123

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Ritualistic murder is all about compromise.

First, your main character sees a reason not to shun and dismiss the ritualistic murderers completely. Maybe he has a goal that can only be achieved by slowly carving runes into somebody until they die. Maybe he wants to change the system from the inside; either to minimize the amount of ritualistic murder, or to help guide it towards more deserving targets. Maybe he's surrounded by people that believe in the murdering strongly enough that he can't openly speak out against it.

This is reinforced when it turns out to work. Maybe the "good guys" aren't perfect, but by golly, look at them getting things done. Meanwhile, perhaps some other group of people is trying to do good without any murders involved, and they turn out to be completely ineffectual, only capable of trite moralizing and having to be rescued by the ritual murderers.

Once your main character has taken so much a single step towards accepting ritual murder, have that step be one step too far. Anyone else who thinks that killing people by carving runes is bad should decide that by failing to decry ritual murder at every possible opportunity, the main character is as good as one of the ritual murderers himself. (If your main character refuses to take this first step, this can be due to a misunderstanding instead.)

Meanwhile, the ritual murderers welcome the main character. Some of them are perfectly nice people aside from the torture. Maybe they even punish excesses, and look down on anyone who looks like they're enjoying the ritual murder too much. All other options failing, the main character has to work with the "good guys" to accomplish anything.

It's nice if the main character can point to concrete good things he's achieved, and moral lines he hasn't crossed, only to have the people that are inexplicably anti-ritual-murder dismiss them entirely. This will certainly drive the main character further into the ritual murdering crowd, and as a bonus the readers will get defensive on his behalf.

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