Thursday 16 October 2008

On Mir and redemption.

So I was musing about something I said to elhermano/Dustiferous back in a comment on one of my earlier entries: about how Mir didn't want redemption.

Redemption is a tricky phrase to clarify. There are a number of concepts involved in treating your enemies sympathetically and giving to them rather than defeating them, and the associated changes that might occur in them, and I think "redemption" gets used as a catch-all; it's the word for "what happens to villains when you don't kill them", but that's not always it. Redemption implies saving someone from themselves, taking them out from under the weight of their own cruelties and giving them perspective.

I was saying that Mir didn't want redemption, and I think that that's not strictly true in that sense of redemption; I do think she wanted to be saved from her own cruelties. But I think I had an impression of what redemption meant at the time that wasn't quite correct. I was sort of thinking of... a heavy-handed kind of redemption where someone goes up and goes "by the superior moral wisdom invested in me, I hereby declare that you were utterly wrong by some absolute standard, and now you'll turn into a contrite little bundle of tears and regret as I lift your sins from you". Which... sort of is what happened, but not quite; I think the word was implying to me at the time that she was a capital-V Villain who needed to be forced out of her normal personality and made to see the error of her ways, rather than someone who fundamentally could have seen them anyway and just had a layer of confusion laid on top of that.

Basically, I got the feeling that what Mir needed was not to be subjected to litanies about why she was bad in order to make her contrite, but to have the part of her that would have naturally contradicted those things shine through. "Redemption" implies that something fundamental about her needed to be altered; we say things like "this program/project/piece of art can be redeemed if we just add this and this to change it, to shift it from its original intent". Mir's heart was already good; she didn't need to be changed. She just needed to be realigned with her original intentions. She was right (she wanted a peaceful world), she was just doing the wrong thing, and telling her she needed to be redeemed would have only got her hackles up and made her defensive, because she knew she didn't want anything bad, she was just having a hard time seeing her way to it.

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