: 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.

@Candy753

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Great answers about the process of redemption.

I want to focus narrowly on the actual question asked: How soon is too soon?

When we look from a psychology angle at change in people, we see that there are typically three layers identified, named with different terms. I'll call them appearance, actions and identity here. You can also find terms such as habits, behaviour, personality and many others.

The key point is that this guy does not appear on the surface to be evil, but actually he is just pretending and is doing everything for the greater good in which he believes. That would be an "evil appearance" character. Severus Snape is an example of such a villain that isn't really a villain. For these characters, a sufficiently important reason to break their facade is enough and believable, if you can demonstrate to the listener that it really was just the appearance that was evil.

Your character does evil actions and believes in them. That means evil runs deeper and requires a stronger reason and longer timeline. Typically, serious experiences trigger such changes in people. The death of a loved one, the total disaster of a enterprise they are invested in, a personal crisis. As a writer you can show how these people still have a good personality and were the victim of circumstances. Darth Vader may belong to this category, or the drug lord who grew up in the ghetto.

But I think your characters evil goes deeper still. Killing your own sister as a gesture is pretty deep. That hints to an evil personality (or identity), the deepest layer. Someone who actually is evil to his core.
We know from psychology research that it takes a lot to change the personality of a person, but it is not unheard of. This is where we find life-changing experiences. Most of them are rather sudden. It is far less likely that someone goes on a year-long search for himself and comes out a different man than it is for someone to have a single, life-changing experience and return home the same day with a different view on life.
These experiences are typically profound, personal and beyond what the old personality can cope with. The most common of them are destructive, we call them traumas.

From a storytelling perspective, such an experience is by necessity a climax. Maybe not of the entire story, but definitely of a part or subplot. Which means you need to build it up. So "how soon is too soon" becomes "anything sooner than the construction of a believable life-changing event". On a time axis, you can prepare this even in the background and it can happen relatively quickly after the last evil act, but in order to not toss the reader around too much, there should be enough pages and enough in-story time between that it doesn't appear forced. It also helps believability if it doesn't immediately follow an evil act, but things settle down a bit before it happens.

So, the tl;dr answer is essentially: As soon as you can drive the character beyond the zone of things that he can handle mentally with his evil personality. Change occurs when it has to occur and not sooner. As long as his old ways work for him, there cannot be believable change.

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