Good characters who do horrible, horrible things

Cafe Society
1

In which we discuss good characters whose creators just heap on reasosn to feel guilty. But first a couple of notes:

  1. By good character, I don’t necessarily mean engaging or well-written ones (though such are obviously welcome); I mean characters with whom the audience is intended to think heroic and/or feel identification or sympathy, and who are NOT villainous, evil, wicked, or what have you. In other words, Hannibal Lector, no matter how compelling you find him, is not a good character, while movie-Aragorn, no matter how irksome I find him, is.

  2. I’m not so much interested in bad things happening to characters; I’m interested in actions the characters perform out of necessity or desperation that nevertheless leave them with a big ole heaping of guilt.

  3. I’m also not interested n things formerly-villainous characters did before reforming. Yeah, I know Warlord!Xena killed 40,000 people in a single week once, and Angelus probably eviscerated half the nuns in France in his day; that’s not what this thread is about, because at that time neither of them was good at that time in their lives.

  4. I’m more interested in literary characters than those from television, drama, or film. But some people find such constraints vexing, and if the thread gets any traction people would ignore it anyway, so the hell with it.

In sum: Sophie Zawistowska is the sort of character I’d like to talk about. Thoughts, anyone?

2

From the promo for the coming season of Doctor Who:

The Silence: Fear me. I’ve killed hundreds of Time Lords.

The Doctor: Fear me. I killed them all.
Man, I love that show.

3

Yeah. The whole Lissar household is eagerly waiting for next weekend and the first episode of season 6.

4

Ender Wiggin seems like a canonical candidate for this.

5

Not for the obvious reason, though - the OP seems to at least imply that the characters must have chosen to do the horrible, horrible things in question. The xenocide doesn’t count, because Ender had no idea what he was doing.

That being said, Ender did take a distinctively brutal approach to bullies: He would respond to violence in kind once, and only once - but he would make certain that only one application of violence could ever be required.

6

I would nominate more or less the entire crew of the Battlestar Galactica and many on Pegasus, depending on the extent to which you’re willing to stretch “good.” Torture, summary execution of prisoners, coups d’etat, attempted genocide, attempted electoral fraud - honestly, it’s hard to think of a horrible thing the “good” characters haven’t done. If you’re willing to put Admiral Cain in the “good” camp - and I think there’s a fine argument to be made that she belongs there -you can add in additional summary executions of friendly civilians and the use of rape as a weapon of war.

This is actually one of the only ways in which the series finale made even a tiny bit of sense: When you step back and look at them, everyone on this show is so deeply fraked in the head it isn’t funny.

7

Since The Doctor, the archetype for this thread, was already mentioned, I’ll add Jack Bauer and Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

8

You’re right on the money. I’m looking for cases in which a character makes a choice to do something because the alternative is even worse – or, at least, unacceptable to him or her.

I already mentioned Sophie’s Choice, but here’s another example. In Mortal Stakes,m the third Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker, the titular gumshoe

[spoiler]ambushes and kills a mob boss and his chief assistant to save a woman from being blackmailed and humiliated, and her husband from being ruined. It’s not quite murder, because the two crooks were planning to kill him; nonetheless it’s not quite self-defenese, either, because he deliberately manipulates the situation so that the two crooks try to murder him within a particular time frame, to prevent the woman’s secret (a history in porn & prostitution) from being revealed. In short, he calculates that he is capable of “outquicking” his opponents and does so.

He’s not easy about it.[/spoiler]

And of course, in a later Spenser novel, Ceremony

[spoiler]
Spenser is hired to find a sixteen-year-old girl, April Kyle, who has left a household that is clearly emotionally abusive, and possibly physically and sexually as well. April has become a prostitute and refuses to go home, and Spenser is very cynical about social workers and therapists being able to help her if she is unwilling. The only resolution he can devise is to refer the girl to a certain high-class madam (met in the aforementioned novel) whom he trusts will not be abusive to April and may help her eventually get out of the life, as she’s has done that once before.
[/quote]

That being said, Ender did take a distinctively brutal approach to bullies: He would respond to violence in kind once, and only once - but he would make certain that only one application of violence could ever be required.[/spoiler]

Assuming you’re referring to the fact that

Gibbs flat-out murdered his wife & daughter’s killer,

I’m not certain he feels guilty about it or would describe it as a horrible, horrible thing.

9

Does Dexter count as a “good character”, or a bad character trying to do good?

And of course, there’s the world’s greatest action hero, Agent Michael Scarn, who apologetically murdered that skater in order to qualify for the Olympics…

10

And presumably you’re not interested in things that good characters did while

[ul]
[li] possessed[/li][li] under the mental influence of an evil Professor Xavier-style character[/li][li] hypotized[/li][/ul]

and the like, right?

11

That cracked me up.

12

Nope. Particularly not the first two, as the person in that case is not really doing anything; she or he is merely a tool in another’s hands.

13

Well, in fiction, hypnosis means that as well. Which is pretty much what I was getting at. I wrote that before your post (specifying that you were interested in people choosing to do bad things because the alternative would be worse) was up, by the way, just to clarify that I’m not stupid. :wink:

Incidentally, man, am I annoyed at the now-un-editable typo in “hypnosis” up there.

14

Never point out your own typos. It’s a sign of weakness.

15

Haven’t read the books, but I understand that Thomas Covenant falls under this trope…

16

Reservoir Dogs:

An undercover narcotics cop takes part in an attempted heist which falls apart. While making a getaway, the narc & another member of the gang steal a car from an old lady who pulls a gun on them. The narc shoots her dead.

Captain Jack Harkness on “Torchwood”:

Shown numerous times doing morally questionable things for ‘the greater good’, but the defining moments are during the “Children of Man” mini-series, in which it’s revealed that Harkness handed over a busload of innocent children to a mysterious alien race for a horrible fate in order to save the rest of the world. Later, Harkness allows his own grandsonp to be horribly killed in a scheme to save millions of other children.

Xander from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”:

When Angel has become Angelus, Willow has deciphered a spell to revert Angel back to his good personae. Willow tells Xander to relay the information to Buffy (who is marching off to stake Angelus). He catches up to her, but deliberately with-holds this vital information, instead saying “go get 'im!”(because Xander is spitefully jealous that Buffy likes Angel, not him.)

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:: takes swig of liquid courage before embarking on this perilous course ::

The Xander thing doesn’t count. Not only is it not especially horrible, but it’s the exact right thing to do.

That information was anything but vital. It was the opposite of vital; knowing it was likely to get Buffy killed.


Buffy wasn’t going off to fight Angelus for the hell of it. She was going off to fight him at that particular time and place because he was about to unleash Hell upon the world, and only she was in a position to stop him. But as she was still in love with his Angel persona, she had at least once previously been unable to kill Angelus when she should have; her love gave her qualms. But Angelus had no such scruples, and he was too personally powerful for her to fuck around with. Had Buffy known of Willow’s ill-thought and irresponsible scheme (which succeeded only because of divine intervention anyway) she might well have – probably WOULD have – approached the fight not intending to kill him, but to restrain him. That ends up with her dead and the world overrun by demons or, worse, Etruscans.

18

Not really. For him to qualify for this dicussion* he’d have to arouse sympathy or admiration from the readers, whereas the typical response to Covenant is, “Well, I suppose killing him is, technically, wrong. I’m not sure why though.”

*Not only will I not use the T word, I won’t even quote it!

19

All true. But was Xander thinking about any of that? As I recall the scene (and it’s been a while), it was played very much as being motivated by Xander’s jealousy, and nothing more. It’s certainly fortunate that Xander was jealous. However, in his own mind, Xander was telling his best friend to go kill her lover when he believed that a safe, workable alternative existed, because he was jealous of that lover and wished him dead. Ender’s xenocide wasn’t a horrible choice because even though it had a horrible outcome, it wasn’t his choice. Xander chose to set up an innocent man for execution - the fact the decision had very positive externalities doesn’t make it a less than horrible choice.

20

<bowing> I have much to learn at your feet, master. <shuffle out of room backwards while bowing repeatedly>

Hmm… should I have said “sire”?