: Re: How soon is too soon for a redemption arc? My character, Day, is the son of a dictator and the director of state-sanctioned and sponsored torture of mutated humans, one of whom is my MC.

@Turnbaugh521

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The light is inside him; it just needs a path out. Not a big gaping doorway that opens all at once, but small tendrils. Think "many drips carve a rock", not sudden change.

How do you do that? In a lot of fiction that I've read (and I suspect there's psychology behind this, but I don't know), the first cracks come with perceived inconsistency and self-doubt. Your character has been raised with a certain worldview, has had certain ideas baked in from birth -- and that's all fine so long as he lives in a nice, tidy world. But put him in some situations where the reality in front of him seems to conflict with those ideas, and you have the beginnings of self-doubt and eventual redemption.

He probably doesn't just believe that mutants are bad, for example. He's heard his dictator father go on at length about specific ways that mutants are bad, same as we hear bigots in our world give "reasons" that their targets are bad. Suppose, for example, that dictator-dad has taught Day that mutants are bad because they're incapable of behaving morally -- their brains are wired differently or some such. So long as Day believes that mutants are really just kudzu with weapons, a nuisance to be removed with extreme prejudice, all is fine in Day's mind. But what happens when Day sees a mutant do something against the mutant's self-interest, like putting himself in danger to save a human from harm? Whoa, that doesn't sound like amoral kudzu now, does it?

Now, one mutant is a fluke; Day's programming won't be cracked that easily. (Dad is a successful dictator, after all.) But it's a crack. Let some time pass and then open another crack -- maybe Dad said that these vermin live like animals and don't care for their young or whatever, and then Day gets a glimpse of a functional mutant family.

Cracks grow and spread over time. One he can shrug off (but have him notice it or it's not really a crack). Two he might comment on (internal dialogue; he's not ready to confront Dad). Three he might start to question some less-important "facts" he knows. Over time, it adds up.

Think about any attitude you have held strongly but changed. Maybe it was a political ideal or a religious belief or a deeply personal matter of identity. How did you come to transform from one position to another? Most likely it was gradually, over time, bit by bit as you tried to fit new facts or encounters into your original frame and found that things didn't fit so well. While (I hope) you aren't starting from murderous demagoguery like your character, the process is still similar. It's just the magnitude that's different. And besides, you're trying to connect with your readers, who also have gone through changes (haven't we all?) but who mostly didn't start from murderous demagoguery. To connect with your readers you want to resonate with their experiences. Strict accuracy in turning a mutant-hating dictator's kid to the light side isn't as important as evoking your readers' feelings of recognition of change in progress.

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