What the Star Wars prequels should have done.
No character arcs are fumbled more frequently than those that send good characters down dark roads. That’s probably because it’s difficult for us to grasp how someone could become evil. However, when these arcs are done well, they are incredibly powerful. To help you master them, I’ll take you step-by-step through my framework for making heroes fall from grace. It’s not the only method you can use, but it gets the job done.
Spoiler Notice: The 100 season 1, Avatar: The Last Airbender season 3.
1. Pick a Fatal Flaw
The first step is to give your character a flaw. This isn’t just any flaw; it’s one that causes your character to react inappropriately to tough situations. It should prevent them from making wise decisions at critical moments. Many possibilities are available. Here are some to get you going:
- Arrogance: Your character is overconfident or self-righteous, refusing to listen to others or learn from them. After this character makes an innocent mistake and hears criticism, they’ll double down instead of correcting course. If your character is insecure, they may overcompensate by appearing arrogant.
- Wrath: Your character has an uncontrollable temper or spiteful personality. They prioritize punishing those who have wronged them over their own welfare or even the welfare of the people around them.
- Obsession: Your character is so focused on a particular goal that they’re willing to do harm to accomplish it. This goal could be protecting a loved one or completing a mission.
- Hatred: Your character has a profound and irrational dislike for something important in your world. It might be a specific group of people or some form of magic or technology. The character avoids this thing even when it’s necessary.
By establishing a fatal flaw during the early portions, you can foreshadow later trouble. Think of the Back to the Future movies, which demonstrate right away how the hero, Marty, is easily taunted by villains. That’s used throughout the stories to create conflict.
It can also be appropriate to give your character a fatal flaw as a result of something bad that happens to them. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko’s backstory shows how his father mistreated him, making him act arrogantly to compensate for his feelings of shame. However, I recommend keeping this tragedy onscreen instead of in backstory. In this case, just save their tragic event and resulting flaw for Step #3.
2. Create Positive Influences
Your character will start the arc as a hero, so they must have positive influences that balance out their fatal flaw. Those influences will also give them the opportunity to turn their life around once it goes downhill. Create several features that could pull them back from the brink. Let’s look at some categories to consider.
- Moral Strengths: Your character wants to be a good person or simply feels terrible when they see others suffer. This causes the character to regret their bad decisions and try to redeem themselves.
- Sacred Ideals: Your character has ideals that they don’t forget on their dark path, such as putting others first or being charitable. Ideals like duty or loyalty can be both fatal flaws and redeeming features.
- Positive Relationships: Your character has one or more strong relationships with good people who won’t give up on them easily. These characters will become incredibly useful later.
- Stabilizing Habits: Your character transforms turmoil into tranquility by painting, riding through their lands, or putting their home in order.
In the 100, Bellamy Blake promised his mother he would protect his younger sister. This sacred ideal both leads him astray and motivates him to redeem himself. As he forms a bond with the hero Clarke, she also inspires him to be a better person.
3. Make Tragedy Strike
Next, something terrible happens to make the character feel unhappy, disillusioned, and likely to strike out. While their flaws may have invited this terrible event, they by no means deserve it. They are the victim of something much larger and more powerful.
After this event, they shouldn’t be able to continue their life as it was. Choose something vital for them to lose, preferably something that is also one of their positive influences. You can axe a loved one that kept them in check or burn down lands that they used to tend to control their temper. The fallout should position the character to desperately strive for a goal, whether it’s getting revenge, regaining what they had, or merely surviving.
What’s more, something important in the world should now be against them, eliminating most constructive paths to achieving their goal. They could become a fugitive from justice or a social outcast. Perhaps their once-trusted leaders refuse to recognize the crime committed against them and forbid them from pursuing justice.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Prince Zuko is beaten by his father and banished from the Fire Nation. He can only regain his former position by capturing a person that’s been missing for 100 years, so that becomes his obsession. However, he has only limited resources from his father, and the other nations oppose his quest.
4. Depict a Wrong Yet Reasonable Response
Now your character’s flaws come into play; they respond to tragedy in a way that is morally wrong or simply unwise.
But they aren’t murdering children yet, not by a long shot. One of the biggest mistakes storytellers make is rushing the moral degradation in this arc. Your character still has redeeming features, and the audience should still sympathize with them at this point. So while their choice is poor, it should still feel understandable, the kind of choice a gritty anti-hero would make.
This reaction might include:
- Slaughtering people who try to kill them or kidnap loved ones.
- Committing crimes against someone they suspect of being responsible for their tragedy.
- Flouting restrictions that have been given to them by authorities.
- Stealing supplies to fuel their pursuit of justice or their attempts to recover what they lost.
When your character is making a bad decision, it’s a good time to bring out one of their positive influences. Show the struggle between good and evil. Perhaps they hesitate before making their bad decision, wondering about the people who could get hurt. One of the good people who cares about them could show up and warn them not to do it. But their fatal flaw wins this struggle, and they do it anyway. The positive influence loses some of its power and usually disappears until later in the story.
In Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Gul Dukat’s homeworld is invaded by another race. He leads a rogue military force against the occupiers, but he can’t win without help. Desperate, he joins the Dominion, an aggressive empire that wants to conquer that region of space. There’s one problem: his daughter knows it’s wrong, and she refuses to go with him. His loyalty is torn, but he chooses the Dominion, leaving his daughter behind.
5. Punish the Character for Their Poor Choice
The character doesn’t get away with their unwise decision; instead it blows up in their face. As a result, the separation between them and the rest of the world is even bigger. Perhaps they make a new enemy they didn’t have before. Maybe the character was under suspicion before, but now that they’ve been caught committing a crime, the police take them into custody. Their situation becomes even more desperate, encouraging them to behave even more recklessly and immorally.
You can also use the punishment to give the character an additional fatal flaw. Maybe the character has a new hatred toward authority in addition to the arrogance they started with. Now even if they find evidence they can take to authorities, they won’t do it.
In the 100, Bellamy loses everything when his mother is executed for having a second child, and his sister is imprisoned for being a second child. To continue keeping his sister safe like he promised his mother, he makes a deal with a powerful traitor. He shoots the chancellor, and the traitor gets him on the ship with his sister. But as a consequence, Bellamy becomes a wanted criminal. If the ship stays in contact with the authorities, he’ll be arrested and executed. So he starts destroying communication devices, leading to greater losses than the life of one chancellor.
6. Rinse and Repeat
The character once again does something foolish and again ends up worse off for it. How many times you repeat this cycle depends on the length of your story and how far you’d like your character to fall.
Each time the character acts out and gets a harsh reaction, the conflict should escalate. They could cut themselves off from resources they need or inspire others to treat them more harshly. As their desperation increases and they gain emotional scars, your character should engage in increasingly immoral behavior.
The result is a downward spiral they can’t get out of. As they become more villainous, your audience will slowly lose sympathy for them.
In Breaking Bad, Walter White is diagnosed with cancer. He doesn’t have the money for treatment, let alone to make sure his family is okay after he is gone. He resorts to cooking meth to get the money he needs. As a result, he ends up in escalating battles both with the civil authorities and other drug lords, forcing him to engage in increasingly violent behavior to stay in business.
7. Open the Redemption Door
At the climax of your arc, you must give the character a chance for redemption. Take one or more of the positive influences you chose, and hit your character with them really hard. For instance:
- A loved one the character thought was lost pops out of the woodwork and begs them to change their ways.
- The character finally faces the devastation they’ve caused and feels remorse.
- The authority whom the character is pledged to orders them to stop and return home.
If you’d like your character to make a comeback, they can walk through the redemption door. If they do, they will begin a long, grueling, and humbling process of trying to make up for their past crimes. For instance, Bellamy Blake feels remorse after he discovers how many people died because he sabotaged a radio. His sister now hates him, and he contemplates running away. But ultimately he decides to accept responsibility for his actions and work to protect her and the rest of the community, whether or not they forgive him.
It they don’t walk through the door, it should shut and lock. Destroy any significant positive influences they still have. You don’t have to eliminate every chance of redemption, but it should be significantly reduced, and their choice should feel permanent. In Avartar: The Last Airbender, Zuko is offered a chance to side with the heroes but instead joins his ruthless sister. As a result, his wise uncle, Iroh, finally turns against him. In Star Wars, Darth Vader becomes an enemy of his mentor, Obi-Wan, and believes he killed his wife, Padme. He doesn’t get a another chance at redemption until he meets Luke a generation later.
Once you get the hang of this framework, don’t be afraid to experiment. The tragedy at the beginning might be replaced with a slow decline. You can have several redemption doors; perhaps your character walks through one only to descend again. What’s important is that you can both understand your character’s descent and sympathize with their plight. Fallen heroes show us what we’re capable of when we let our weaknesses win.
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This is one reason I’ve become a regular. You have to make the descent believable.
As much as I enjoy the Star Wars setting, the Dark Side has started looking like a lazy way to grease the slippery slope. Watching some Star Wars video game LPs didn’t help: It seems like Jedi are always one temper tantrum away from becoming megalomaniacs bent on conquering the galaxy.
“Join me, and together, we can end this destructive conflict!” That could have been a good basis for creating his descent arc: Peace and security versus freedom. They could have had Anakin seeing the toll of the Clone Wars made worse by senatorial squabbling, and foreshadow his betrayal by making him choose stability and order over freedom and justice. All the way, he sees himself working for the greater good, even if he doesn’t like the means he uses.
Part of what makes the clone wars series actually good is that they actually work that angle with annakin, showing him as a guy trying to finish the war and protect his men and his family doing so while being hindered by the corruption and stupidity of the republic and the jedi.
Yes, Anakin’s whole story arc in the prequels is extremely lazy. There are so many better ways to explain how Anakin was lured in by the Dark Side, especially given how good Palpatine is at twisting the truth.
In the now-defunct extended universe, basically every other Jedi has had a brush with the Dark Side, which makes you wonder why there’s not more Dark Jedi around. Fact is the whole ‘anger leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side’ idea is a very lazy explanation.
The ease of using that lazy explanation has one effect the creators might not have expected, but should have: As a member of the audience, I no longer fantasize about being a Jedi.
I entertained a possible character arc for my Edge of the Empire character, Tresk Saiga’skra. I might get him Force Sensitivity down the line, have him use it to improve his swoop racing skills, and have him avoid both Jedi and Sith indoctrination. He’s also seen what a lightsaber can do to a person, and wouldn’t want to handle one.
Or he could be a Grey Jedi.
It’s basically impossible for a normal human being never to feel anger, which means every human or mostly humanoid Jedi should have at least one close brush with the Dark Side. Sure, most of them recover from it, but still, it would leave that galaxy far, far away with more than just two Dark Jedi (although not every Dark Jedi is a Sith … that’s a different type of training which means that theoretically there should be something like a Light Sith out there, too).
I’m not sure how to explain my recent unease with the Force. Yeah, the number of Dark Siders is lower than my perception would imply. If anything, this is an additional source of confusion that removes the feeling of consistency. I can’t help but feel like I’d wind up bouncing from Jedi teacher to Jedi teacher as an uncooperative student who doesn’t trust authority or the Force before going independent Gray non-Jedi.
Well, the Jedi as portrayed in the Prequels is a creepy cult of emotional suppression and that shit aint healthy so I think your discomfort is well founded.
I’ve occasionally wondered if the Dark Side is actually “supposed” to be the passionate/driven side, and the only reason it’s evil is that for thousands of years the Sith have been the only ones who’ve sought to interact with it, and now that feeds back into any Jedi who brushes against it.
Interesting point, Nick. The Jedi claim that the Dark Side corrupts and regular users like the Emperor seem to suffer a certain corruption, but someone who doesn’t only rely on it might actually get off easy.
Also, the Emperor is a Sith Lord, so the techniques which the Sith use to interact with the force might be to blame in his case.
The whole suppression of feelings (especially towards others) seems rather unhealthy to me.
I think it was poorly executed, but there were a lot of Buddhist principals as part of the whole Jedi thing. The idea of controlling/working through passionate emotions, not lingering over ties to specific people does come from Buddhism.
But the idea is that attachment is part of the whole cycle of suffering. You can absolutely love and be with someone, but the ideal is to care and be compassionate to everyone. Attachment to one or a few people not only can lead to poor actions when you put their needs over others, but it can hurt and make someone act rashly when you expect things from them and they don’t deliver.
Anger and hatred doesn’t make you evil but they are emotions that often lead to suffering for yourself and others and are meant to be dealt with and worked through. The very state of anger is suffering, and if you want to end that you need to understand why you are angry and then work through it, eventually becoming more practiced at it. Someone can act for the better good on an injustice and still not be angry, and can do so better without that clouding their judgement.
Of course this was borrowed for the Jedi and part of the influence, but also weirdly messed with. Since Dark side becomes its own philosophy instead of just being suffering/”temptation”. And the Force is actually neutral with two competing philosophies on how to handle it. In their hurry to show emotions leading to suffering, they overplayed it and made Jedi into hair triggers. I’m not Buddhist but it’s what i got from it.
I think Zuko’s character arc absolutely needs the step it takes at the end of season two (when he betrays Katara and Aang and joins his sister). Without it, his development wouldn’t be complete.
In season one, Zuko is possessed by the thought of finding the Avatar and redeeming himself. He’s still young (Zuko is, perhaps, four to five years older than Aang would be, if he hadn’t been frozen for a century) and he wants to go back home, perhaps more for his mother’s sake than for that of his father and his sister.
In season two, he tentatively builds up a new life and identity for himself, which even leads him to team up with Aang at one point (where he frees Aang from the Fire Nation, but makes no attempt at snatching him afterwards). He is shown another possibility: settling down in the Earth Kingdom with his uncle. Even though Zuko is not as obsessed with tea as Iroh is, it would be a more or less peaceful life.
At the end of season two, Zuko is suddenly offered the chance of his life – the chance to return home, to take his rightful place as the crown prince again, to fulfil his deepest wish. He gets, by betraying Katara and Aang, what he always wanted.
In the first half of season three, Zuko begins to realize that what he thought he wanted is not what he really wants, which leads to him facing off his father during the eclipse and then joining Team Avatar. Through this move, he not only becomes more reliable (he’s had and has fallen for his seduction), he also gains new insights in his life – at the beginning of his time with Aang, whom he’s supposed to teach about firebending, he finds himself unable to bend fire. Like this, both he and Aang return to the roots of firebending, which is why Aang can this time succeed at learning it. It’s no longer about unleashing their anger, but about something more peaceful and connected to Aang’s own upbringing.
From his final change in sides, Zuko becomes a vital part of the group, redeeming himself in the eyes of Sokka and Katara by working with them.
Zuko’s arc needs this moment when he has what he wanted, but realizes his success is a hollow one. It allows him to completely rethink his goals.
I just wanted to say that this article was (and still is) incredible. When I asked you to translate into Spanish I forgot to say that it was sublime. So, here it is: Transform a hero into villain in seven steps is a sublime article, very clear in its arguments and written by a profesional.
It is helping me a lot while I write my next novel and is gonna save me a lot of time strenghing the characters. So, thanks!
Keep up the good work, Chris!
Iroh: I was never angry with you. I was sad, because I was afraid you’d lost your way.
The young prince full of fire. Burning up inside. He should have been a hero to lead his family into a new world… and he was, though the road was shorter and full of trials. Forged in fire, and tempered with wisdom.
And now we have Daenerys.