Elijah David

I'm a sucker for a good redemption arc. Heck, I'm a sucker for a redemption arc, period. There's something thrilling about a character turning from bad to good, from being a villain to being a hero (or at least on the side of the hero). It gets my story-loving soul stirred up in ways few other tropes can. I've been thinking about what makes a redemption arc powerful (and what makes a good one). My friend Mirriam has posted recently about good and bad character deaths and what makes a good story  and she's even shared her hopes for Hive to be redeemed on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Another friend shared the news that Benedict Cumberbatch is voicing the Grinch in a new animated movie and that turned into a conversation about how the live action film basically destroyed the Grinch's redemption arc by making him the victim of the materialistic Whos. While there's nothing wrong with multiple redemption arcs in the same story, in that case, they jus...

Last time , I wrote about my definition of a true hero and some examples of characters who aren't true heroes (at least in the stories that we have of them). Today I want to talk about someone who is. I'm going to choose Bilbo Baggins because his status as hero was what started this exploration. Let's look at the first half of my definition of a hero: doing the right thing even when the easy path is open or something you've chosen in the past. The shining moment in which Bilbo does this is when he is in the goblin caves with Gollum, wearing the Ring and holding the sword Sting. Bilbo knows that Gollum would kill him without a second thought if their situations were reversed. He also knows that Gollum has already been a threat to his life. Yet, Bilbo determines not to kill Gollum if he can avoid it. He chooses to see Gollum for the pitiful creature that he is, and that pity goes on to not only keep Bilbo's own soul untainted by murder but to inspire Bil...

Recently, a friend of mine posted that about a revision of The Hobbit in which Bilbo was gender swapped. One of her main issues with this is that instead of creating a new female hero, the reviser simply did damage to one of the few true male heroes in existence*. She listed the three true male heroes she has encountered as Bilbo Baggins (of The Hobbit ), the Doctor (of Doctor Who ), and Agent Coulson (from the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Obviously these are all fictional characters, but the conversation seemed to be concerned mainly with fictional characters rather than real-life heroes. This post will be following in the same vein. In reading her post and the ensuing discussion, I started to think about heroes I had watched or read. I also began to wonder about my own characters and whether I had written any true heroes of either gender. That thought led me back to something I had written in a previous discussion on heroism with another friend: Heroism is a)...