#fucking good storytelling and fucking Jungian fucking storytelling AND redemption arcs AND romance at the centre of it all

[onewomancitadel]

I think that's the strange thing about the media landscape now (and then?) is that the mythically-loaded epic fantasy redemption arc landscape is pretty... dire? Let alone for anything involving romance which is my wheelhouse. Raistlin is probably the chief example I can think of for a bad wizard who is redeemed (Dragonlance canon is.. kind of nuts) but his love interest Crysania is sent to the house for naughty girls who like bad men (written out of a narrative role).

I can certainly think of stories about redemption (for some reason True Detective Season 1 is the first which comes to mind, mostly because I've encountered a perception that it validates the nihilism of the deeply wounded character or that it fails narratively because it doesn't do so, and also of course Crime & Punishment in terms of literature and probably others I'm not even thinking about)...

Obviously it's a thing in anime and a well established thing in anime for that matter with certainly not the same controversy, which is a different question altogether (especially for R/WBY)...

But again there's that interesting thing where a) it's always about Vader and Zuko and b) apparently there are 'too many redemption arcs' in media and it's a really really really hot button online issue and I don't know why. It's just one type of character and story structure plz stop

Anyway it's just interesting that everybody and their mother and their dog has some reason or another for why Redemption Arcs Bad but they also don't get redemption arcs structurally, but also where are our narrative examples of them because this is probably genuinely contributing to the issue at hand. Because it's pretty obvious that Vader taught us sometimes you're too evil so you die, and then Zuko taught us that sometimes you can be not too evil and then you're allowed to be good, and I guess end of discussion. So that's actually a serious contributing factor. Like, your media response is informed by many other hundreds and thousands of other artistic responses (which is why myth/fairytale stuff is potent).

I think my broader point is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, discourse about redemption arcs is poor because there aren't enough true examples and it's just not as much a normalised structure of storytelling? Also also see other ceaselessly annoying posts about death of media criticism, narrative, etc. etc. have to watch True Detective Season 1, to cope.