You Can’t Speedrun a Fallen Hero Arc

Had a bit of a trash week, but no one cares and also I have a cool weekend! A little vacation, if you will. I finished The Recruit on Netflix (which has James Purefoy in it???), and on Hulu I’m alternating between Elementary and Burn Notice.

Now our conversation turns to that subject that our minds always return to when we wish to stimulate deep thought: BIONICLE.

You Can’t Speedrun a Fallen Hero Arc

I recently re-watch (and live-blogged!) BIONICLE 3: Web of Shadows, which is a distilled version of, and completion of, the 2005 storyline, in which the Toa Metru are mutated into bestial Toa Hordika, half-animal creatures that struggle with their animalistic rage. The movie itself has Vakama, the team’s leader, turn evil for a little bit, having given into his beast side. Notably, the lead writer for BIONICLE, Greg Farshtey, did not like this development–he didn’t write the movie, but he had to write the books and comics leading up to it, so he tried to give his own ideas about how Vakama might briefly turn evil.

Of course, the movie doesn’t go with any of those reasons. The movie has it just be that he has his bestial side, that he doesn’t get enough respect as a leader, and the villains are tempting him with… villain stuff, I guess. At one point, Roodaka, one of the leaders of the evil army, tells Vakama that if she joins, then she’ll make him ruler of Ta-Metru, the district of the city he used to live in. And this seems to work! Except… the city district is now empty, in shambles, and covered in evil spider webs. 

In short, the villain has successfully tempted the hero into betraying his friends by promising him… a set of empty buildings. He would be king of nothing and no one.

It’s also frustrating because this was never something that drove Vakama. The previous movie showed how much he didn’t want to be in charge of his six-person team; the idea that he would want to run a district or a city is out of nowhere. Our villain is tempting the hero with something he does not want, even if it weren’t an empty prize! I strongly suspect someone looked at a list of ‘Standard Evil Motivations’ and slapped on something from that.

You cannot rush this sort of process. Maybe you have time constraints, but that doesn’t justify rushing through the process of turning a character evil. At the very least, you need to look at what a character cares about, and why this might turn someone evil. When the writing is done by an absolute hack, that usually means that it’s just that the fallen hero had his or her love interest get killed.

To be fair to George Lucas here, there are other motivations for Anakin Skywalker’s fall, other than Padme’s death. There is his deteriorating relationship with the Jedi, and Palpatine feeding his ego and gaining his confidence; Padme’s death is the focal point, but not the only thing. Compare this to Mordred in BBC’s Merlin, in which he has plenty of reasons to turn evil if he wanted to, but he still remains committed to the side of good… until the show writes him up a never-before-mentioned love interest out of nowhere and then kills her off, much to his dismay. I want to emphasize again that she has never been so much as referred to before the episode where she’s introduced and killed, in which she’s suddenly the most important person in the entire world to young Mordred.

[Said love interest was also attempting to assassinate the king, but apparently that doesn’t matter to Mordred.]

That’s hack writing.

This character does not turn evil, but he starts to lean that way for a bit before going back to the light: Ezra Bridger. In Rebels we see him struggle with the Dark Side, but the reason for that is because he wants the power to defend his friends. He wants to be able stop the villains from hurting them, since they keep coming back, and he starts to think using anger and the Dark Side might be the only way to do it. This arc is clumsily tied up, but the setup–that he might become evil because he thinks it’s the way to stop evil from happening to those he cares about–that is a good idea.

Or heck, what GregF tried to do with Vakama had promise. In the books, he works so hard to overcome his self-confidence issues to become a good leader, because that’s what his Destiny is… only to seemingly discover that it wasn’t his Destiny to become a hero at all. It was all some kind of mistake, probably done by the villain to try to make sure that the good guys could never win. In a world in which ‘Destiny’ is one of the Three Virtues, something everyone takes seriously, the notion that you’ve screwed it up somehow is going to be a Big Deal. Thinking that he was some sort of cosmic mistake, and never meant to do anything worthwhile, could absolutely shatter a character and make him more susceptible to evil.

A character, a hero, becoming a villain has to be based on something established about the character. You can’t just introduce a new character trait, or a new relationship, and expect that to suddenly work as motivation. It has to be something consistent with the character! It has to be something that makes sense with what we already know. Not just nonsense.

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