User blog:RRabbit42/What it means to reform

In many stories, you have situations where the villain or just an antagonist helps the hero(es). When this happens, those characters are often given a "reformed" label. But is it really reforming or is it temporarily not doing bad things?

A reformed criminal
People that commit a crime and get caught serve jail or prison sentences. When those are complete, they are released. Are they reformed right then? At that moment, we don't know. We can't say one way or the other without further information.

In order to reform, the person has to make a decision to change their behavior. Obviously, they can't commit any more crimes, but they also have to avoid situations that would lead them into committing more crimes. Some people have parole officers assigned to them to verify that they're doing both things.

So at that point, they're a former criminal, but are they a reformed criminal? The answer is we still don't know yet.

A temporary criminal
There are crimes people commit for reasons like desperation, opportunity or they don't feel like they have any other alternatives. These would be cases where they don't intend to be a criminal for a long time. They commit the crime and that's the end of it, either because they got what they needed or they got caught and after they're released, they don't continue committing crimes.

In these situations, they were just a temporary criminal. Reforming would be separate, as shown below.

What it means to reform
If you're going to say a character reformed, then the story needs to show them reaching a point where they are confronted with information that makes them say, "I can't do this any more. I have to change."

For example, Mirage in The Incredibles was Syndrome's assistant. She actively recruited Supers to fight a robot and lied to them about why they were going to do it. She knew each of them died. By the time she meets Mr. Incredible, she's comfortable in doing this and sees nothing wrong with continuing to do so.

It wasn't until after Mr. Incredible threatened to kill her that she realized, "Syndrome doesn't care if I die. He actually dared Mr. Incredible to kill me and he was willing to kill children. I can't help him kill Supers any more." She points out to Syndrome that he's wrong about what he thinks is weakness, and when he tries to dismiss what happened, she angrily tells him, "Next time you gamble, bet your own life." She then freed Mr. Incredible and later helped his family escape.

That's a clear case of reforming. We see her make the decision and we see her take steps that support the new direction she's decided to take.

Temporarily helping the hero
Many stories end before we see what happened to the characters. We don't get to see actions like we did with Mirage where we could say, "That character definitely reformed." The information that would allow us to say that is not there.

What we usually see in these situations is a character starts helping the hero and their reason is basically that it works to their advantage to do so at that time. That reason could be something like they wouldn't die, they would get a share of the profits, or "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

But that's just temporarily helping the hero. We need to see more. We need to see further actions that prove it wasn't a temporary thing being done out of self-interest. Those actions have to prove that the character made a distinctive change in their behavior for the better and is working to keep going in that new direction.

With many movies, the story ends before we would see those kinds of actions. If there's a sequel or spin-off, then maybe we'll get to see what that character has done after they helped the hero in the first movie. If they haven't gone back to doing what they did before and are actively working to keep doing good things, then that's the proof that they did more than just temporarily helped the hero. We see the proof that they reformed.

If you don't get that sequel or spin-off, you really can't say one way or the other. Maybe they reformed, maybe they didn't. But if what they did can best be described as just temporarily helping the hero, don't try to force them into being reformed. That's what you want and may not be what is in the story.

Characters who aren't revealed to be good at first
This is often used for a character that's said to have reformed, but it's actually different than reforming. A phrase like "not revealed to be good at first" means the character was always good at heart but may have had to do bad things during the story.

Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series is great example. In the first six books, he's a jerk and deliberately kills someone. In the seventh book, we find out why he acted that way and what his motivations were. In that series, he really was a person that wasn't revealed to be good at first.

As shown above, someone that reforms is someone that was bad until they made a deliberate decision to change their behavior. They weren't good and weren't planning on being good until they got the info that made them realize what they were doing wasn't going to work for them any more. That's a distinct change: bad up to Point A and good afterwards. It isn't being good all along and we just didn't know it.

Careful with the "hero" label
The "not revealed to be good at first" label often has "Heroes" in front of it. Similarly, there's "Heroes that were turned to the dark side". I've covered that in a separate blog, but in short, the people who use it typically have the reasoning of "they're bad now, so they must have been good before, so that means they used to be a hero".

That isn't always the case. There are many people who are just doing their jobs and aren't heroes. If they start doing bad things, don't assume they were a hero. The story has to show them being a hero for this to true. Whether they fit a "not revealed to be good at first" or "turned to the dark side" label, be careful about elevating them to hero status if the story doesn't show them being heroic. Again, that would be something you want rather than what's in the story, and too often, people try to force the characters to be heroic when they really aren't.