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[sandersspectrum]

Which Side is Most Likely to Go Dark - Analysis

We’ve all heard the story - The hero, disheartened by his failures or seduced by the wins of the villain, leaves their life of honor and instead joins the morally-corrupt side, leaving behind their friends who must then fight to get them back. It’s not an uncommon plot, and it’s a favorite one of mine to theorize over. So the question is, if Thomas was to decide to take the plot in this direction, which side would he choose? 

When I first started this analysis, I set off with two main suspects. But as I dug deeper, I ran across a unique phenomenon that throws a wrench into pretty much any Sanders Sides analysis... The characters aren’t just characters, they’re representations of experiences and mental states, and therefore their character arcs will tie back into what they represent. As an example, we see a beat in Patton’s story that he holds a morally high standard to those around him, including Thomas, to a level that can be harmful to Thomas’s mental state. This isn’t a beat that I would normally expect to see in a character who is as bright and accepting as Patton normally is, but it is a beat I would expect to see from a character that represents the concept of “morality”, of being a good person and having good values and purity. Therefore, analyzing them the way I would a normal character is doing a disservice to the concept of the show, so I started over, and I found an unlikely angle on this analysis - they’re all likely suspects, but for different reasons. Let me explain. 

Logan - The Characterization Angle 

From the point of view of a character build, Logan is yards beyond any of the others in his natural pull towards The Dark Side. As a core part of his character, Logan rejects the notion of emotion and sentiment, and this leads him to very often being harsh or dismissive towards the other sides’ issues, including Thomas’s. This already gives him a darker tone as a base; he’s willing to ignore important parts of Thomas simply for the Most Efficient Path, and this could even be true from day one. Logan doesn’t need a character arc to convince him to be a dark side - Logic, if too heavily relied upon, could easily have been a dark side from day one. All he needed was Patton to be a little less vocal and just like that he’s the side suppressing the others in the name of Productivity. However, Logan has another, directly contradicting trait that gives makes a dark side twist a possibility: He doesn’t only dismiss others emotions, he dismisses his own. 

In Learning New Things About Ourselves, we see Logan lash out in anger. Roman calls his need to always state “literal” or “figurative” stupid, and Logan screams and throws a wad of paper at him. The other sides seem slightly concerned, but Logan himself seems taken completely aback, as if the reaction was so far out of the realm of possibility that he wouldn’t have considered himself capable of it until he did it, which very much reflects what we see from Logan throughout the series. He’s consistently denying that he experiences any emotion, saying that he is “fearless, therefore powerful” in Phases and flat out that he “doesn’t feel anything” in Selflessness vs. Selfishness. However, both of these occurrences are pointed up in universe, first with skepticism from Thomas and then with patronizing reassurance from Deceit, to be untrue. This could foreshadow a huge twist in Logan’s character, one where Deceit reveals to Logan that he’s been lying to himself this whole time and Logan is, in fact, suppressing a lot of Thomas’s “negative” reactions by claiming that they’re irrational. In much a similar way to Remus, however, ignoring Anger doesn’t make it go away, and it’s possible that in devastation that logic can’t get rid of these irrational feelings, Logan becomes consumed by these emotions and turns evil in that manner. Instead of being the voice of reason for the group, he becomes aggressive and emotional, forcing the other sides to be the level-headed ones for once and encouraging him to stop trying to paint anger as a Bad Thing that only Illogical People experience and instead accepting it as a natural part of human nature, a feeling that All People Have and there are Healthy, Logical ways to deal with it. Of course, this could also be something that is explored through the side that contrasts Logan - Anger would certainly be a good fit for the color Orange, don’t you think? 

As it stands, Logan is probably the most likely side to go dark from just Character Arcs alone. However, he’s not the side who is most likely to go dark from a storytelling perspective. 

Roman - The Story Angle 

At the core of who Roman is, he is a Fairytale Hero. He almost has his own world he lives in where he’s a prince and his brother is an evil duke, he fights Dragon Witches and has a Sworn Duty to one day raise Thomas up to the status he deserves in this world. And this fact makes the concept that if Roman were to turn dark it would be almost Cinematic in nature so, so sweet. Unlike Logan, Roman’s fall from grace would be just that - a fall. Instead of being shown the darkness in him all along, Roman would have to be broken to be pulled to the dark side. Deceit would finally have to wear him down, convince him that being Honest and Honorable isn’t how the world works, and that no one has ever become famous by being honest. It would be one of the hardest falls for the character themselves to handle as well. Roman’s personality has always been easily wrapped up in the fact that he’s idealistic. He lives in a world of Heroes and Villains, where people are Good and Evil, and while Deceit is a master of exploiting this weakness by twisting words and stringing Roman along on lines of compliments and subtle jabs, Patton is also very good at using this to keep Roman on the straight and narrow. It would take a pretty big setback for Roman to lose his faith. But... They’re certainly not moving away from that direction in the story, are they? 

Let’s look at some of Roman’s story beats so far, shall we? Firstly, his pride is wounded by messing up during an audition to the point of not being able to show his face in a video. Secondly, the side that represents what he considers “the one big thing that gets in the way” of his job is suddenly starting to be listened to, heeded, worked with. And while that’s a good thing, and Virgil stops being a massive stumbling block and instead just a voice of caution, it certainly can’t help Roman’s pride much. Thirdly, Roman is consistently shut down and berated for his desire to rekindle an old romance of Thomas’s, then soon after he’s knocked down by Logan calling him delusional and unrealistic, then THE NEXT EPISODE Logan gets recognition for a passion that Roman himself shares, and then two episodes after that Roman gives up on the biggest opportunity that Character Thomas has ever received and then spends the next episode out cold while his evil twin corrupts the very idea of creativity for Thomas. That’s... A lot, you guys. You can’t ignore that out of all the characters, Roman probably takes the roughest plot beats and throughout all of it he’s played for an upbeat, idealistic dreamer. But dreamers and hopers tend to be fragile, and I can’t imagine that Roman can take too much more of this until he cracks. And like I said, the character arc would be almost cinematic. Thomas’s creativity, the side that controls his livelihood and his passions and his drive, finally breaks under the pressure and gives up his naive and idealistic worldview in order to side with Deceit, saying that the only way Thomas will ever succeed is by sacrificing being “a good person” in order to accomplish. Maybe Thomas even goes in for this for a bit, and it works, but he finds that he hates life at the top if it means that he has to shut his empathy and hope down and become distrusting of everyone and deceitful. 

So now we’ve covered the two sides that I started this analysis for... But what about Patton and Virgil? What about that Conceptual Factor I mentioned earlier? Well. 

Patton and Virgil - The Concept Angle 

Sanders Sides is a story about emotions, about understanding aspects of personalities. These aspects themselves can’t be treated like normal characters, because they’re not really people. They’re representations of metaphysical ideas, and that brings its own ideas to consider, the first idea being that what Patton and Virgil represent would both be served well by being represented in a dark light. 

If you’ve been in the fandom for more than about a month, you’ve likely heard the phrase “unsympathetic Patton”. This is a headcanon/AU that centers around Patton being manipulative and controlling, although it can be extended much further than the story itself shows, what I found interesting about this view on Patton is that it’s actually a legitimate criticism of Patton as a character and even for what his basis is - Morality. You see, from almost the start of the series we see Patton holding Thomas to a high standard and throughout we see it continually damage Thomas. Heck, we even got in-universe confirmation through Remus that Patton freaks out whenever Thomas so much as considers something that Patton considers “morally unacceptable” that he’s willing to ignore and shut off entire sides of Thomas he doesn’t wish to acknowledge. This could be indicative that they’re planning on taking Patton’s character in a bit more of a darker direction, in fact one thing I’ve found interesting is that the other sides seem to be able to forcefully influence the others when they grow too strong such as Deceit keeping their mouths shut or Anxiety driving them to panic in his room, and we see Patton himself use this power on Roman a few times via stern glance that makes Roman immediately walk back whatever morally grey suggestion he makes. In the narrative Patton’s intentions are good, he wants Thomas to be A Good Person, but the lesson that viewing your understanding of morality as hard and fast rules and any deviation from it automatically makes you Bad can be severely damaging. It’s a lesson that isn’t represented much in fiction and I honestly think Patton could be a good conduit for exploring that.

However... there is a huge negative that I feel necessary to address with that analysis and it’s that turning Patton, even temporarily, into a dark side would be a massive base breaker. A Base Breaker is a character or an event that is so controversial to an established fanbase that it ends up driving away some of the fans, and I honestly believe that this would break the base of the Sanders Sides fandom. See, the fandom is made up of a decently diverse spread of personalities and the idea of Unsympathetic Patton is an established AU, but a good amount of Fanders consider Patton to be a character they can relate to or admire. He represents something warm and friendly, a father figure from day one who accepts Anxiety and encourages the sides to fight for what’s right and I honestly believe that taking him in a direction that is darker would corrupt that concept for a lot of fans and it would be a controversial move that would be hard to accept. I think that the best way to handle this story arc would be to keep it as a B-side arc, where it’s developed quietly through episodes like Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts where other sides take center stage and Patton merely acknowledges and learns from being too strict instead of turning him into the center of an arc and causing him to go Full Dark Side even if it is an important lesson. 

Virgil’s a similar case - as a character, Virgil has already been redeemed once and it would make sense to keep his character as a reactionary character where he reacts to Deceit turning up and he interacts with the light sides based on his experiences as a dark side like he has been. However, Virgil represents Anxiety, and it would be a similarly important lesson to get across that recovery from anything, be it anxiety or depression or intrusive thoughts, isn’t a straight line. Accepting that you have anxiety isn’t always the end-all-be-all, and situations can catapult you right back into a state where anxiety might be working against you again and you need to deal with those issues. 

This has the downside of the fact that it’s hard to have the same antagonist twice. It’s hard to redeem a character and have them relapse without making the audience tired and feel cheated. There’s some pretty decent groundwork laid out for it, such as the fact that Virgil was much more laid back as an antagonist and seems much more out of his element when he’s with the light sides as well as the others refusing to say the word “paranoid” as if Virgil has some sort of symbolic “final form” dark side, however much like Patton I’m not so sure that this is the direction Thomas and Friends will take this series, although less because it would be a controversial move and more that it would just be a little bit harder to pull off from a storytelling perspective than, say, Roman. 

Your TL;DR is that all the sides hav e a possibility to go dark, although my personal favorite would be finally seeing Roman break and turn evil. Of course, it’s entirely possible that none of the sides will “go dark”, after all we have a perfectly presentable sympathetic antagonist in Deceit and there’s still the possibility of one or more sides cropping up in the future, this is simply just a fun analysis about some possible directions the series could take. However, if you can think of any more fun reasons the sides might go dark, leave them in the notes or send me an ask! For now, take it easy, fanders, see you next time! ^_^