Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

Man, villains are great, aren't they? I mean, what's not to love? They provide constant conflict, drive the plot, spark at least three unnecessary ship wars each, not to mention how evil they tend to be.

They can be cruel and sadistic, if that's your thing, or working towards what they believe is a necessary evil, or just a misunderstood puppy dog with a load of personal trauma, the possibilities are endless here.

The only requirement that makes a character a villain is that they oppose the hero, although if you want to get nitpicky, that technically makes them antagonists. But beyond that characteristic, you got a whole sandbox of possibilities. But do you know what's even better than a villain? A reformed villain! Because everyone likes a good bad guy, but everyone REALLY likes a GOOD bad guy.

Not only does it lead to the idea that there's a flicker of goodness inside all of us, but it also lets you take all of those great villain-hero dynamics you previously explored and protagonistify them into good quality banter between your newly expanded posse of heroes.

Now, there are a ton of reasons for villains to turn good. But they're almost always highly personalized, because they have to arise from the character of the villain themselves. This is also why the purely-cartoonishly evil bad guys rarely get to turn good. Usually, they don't have a lot of character behind the whole villain thing. In some cases, they turn good and reveal that their villainy had a legitimate character-driven reason behind it and become a much more well-rounded character in the process. But for the most part, Disney Evil is there to provide evil in opposition to the heroes. They don't normally get the chance to change their tune.

But a real well-rounded bad guy can find all kinds of reasons to fight for good. Reasons may include the realization that their motivations were lackluster compared to the heroes, a fundamental change of heart, or they woke up one morning and realize that a military uniform incorporating a skull might not be considered good. Their mind is your test lab and there are so many possibilities.

The trick is you're not flipping some morality switch and turn them from bad to good. You're arranging for circumstances where the villain SIDES with the heroes instead of opposing them. And those circumstances depend on the villain, the hero, and what circumstances drove them to oppose each other in the first place. These include the villain being misguided and have been tricked into villainy, in which case proof of their boss's malevolence is liable to be enough to shun them to the side of the heroes, being won over by the power of friendship, or their villainous higher-up treating them bad enough that they have a crisis of morality and side with the good guys just to spite their boss. Or it could be like a million other things!

Let's take Zuko as an example of the complexities you can dive into. And… I can't talk about him without going through his backstory, so for those of you that haven't seen "Avatar: The Last Airbender", here's a big spoiler alert!

See, Zuko didn't technically stop being a bad guy until episode 51...of 61. That's when he officially decided to join team good guy. In part because he realizes how screwed up his evil family is, in part because he re-examines his priorities and what exactly he wants out of his life, and in part because destiny said so.

Now, what makes it interesting is that fans have been rooting for him to turn good from episode 3 onward, which is when we first start to get a sense of how badly the rest of the Fire Nation treats him. He's been sent out on a fool's errand to capture the Avatar, someone everyone thinks is dead and when it turns out he's NOT dead, the entire rest of the Fire Nation starts doing everything in their power to capture him first, and Zuko was only doing this because he thinks it'll make his father care about him. A father who, mind you, spends his first major on-screen appearance BURNING HALF OF ZUKO'S FACE OFF!

He spends the rest of Season 1 running himself ragged trying to dodge the Fire Navy and capture the hero which, you know, capturing a hero is an objectively bad thing to do.

And then in Season 2, despite still being an antagonist for the most part, he officially becomes a fugitive from his own nation being hunted by his abusive, sadistic, and sociopathic sister who was harboring some pretty crazy favoritism issues of her own.

Now, not only is Zuko a bad guy, he's the first bad guy we're introduced to, and by far the one with the most intense drive to capture Aang. Everyone else is basically doing it to spite Zuko. He's objectively an antagonist, and one of the most persistent ones throughout the series, but it's really bad for him as a person. He's in a really bad place for most of the series, nearly killing himself in the process of trying to scrape up some semblance of love from his insane awful family. He's angry and unstable and not in a fun way, but in a "somebody get this kid a hug, a nap, a hot meal, and a friend" sort of way.

In a weird way, we've been rooting for both him and Aang, even though their goals are by definition opposed. But we're rooting for Zuko to figure out that his home life is terrible and he deserves to have good things happen to him, and when he finally does and in the process denounces his terrible father and becomes a hero, it's amazing!

Before that big heel-face turn, there are a ton of situation where Zuko sides with one or more of the good guys. One notable example involving actively breaking Aang out of prison very early on. These temporary pseudo-alliances where they're fighting on the same side even if they'd be fighting each other at any other time are the result of the fact that Zuko's villainous motivation is highly situational. If anyone else is around to capture Aang, Zuko is almost more dangerous to that guy than the good guys are. If not, he's the major threat to the good guys.

He's unquestionably an antagonist to begin with, but his character development leads up to him officially renouncing his big screwed up family and joining the side of good, a transition that's almost the end of his Character Arc, where is in a lot of other stories, getting good guys to stand on their forehead is step 1 of anti-villainous character development.

So this is a Redemption Arc done really, really right. It naturally arises from the character in his circumstances, his dynamics with the team are good both before and after he joins them, his goodness doesn't come out of nowhere, and the traits that made him bad are properly addressed.

Not only that, despite the intervention of his uncle, his decision to become a good guy is just that. His decision. He doesn't get turned by a heartfelt chat with the heroes where he learned their side of things, the terrible family doesn't do something extra terrible to push him over the edge, he basically comes to the conclusion on his own after bypassing several more typical plot-induced paths to heroism, that the life he thought he wanted is not the life he actually wanted and that propelled him into re-examining his priorities and ultimately joining the good guys on his own.

Now, there are a million other ways to turn your bad guys good and they basically fall on a sliding scale between all the villain's decision and all someone else's decision. Zuko is on the far end of the spectrum while more typical cases fall somewhere in the middle. The villain might change their mind after a heartfelt conversation with the hero, convincing them to join their side or get tipped over the edge by a villain on their side going really extra villainous, causing them to re-evaluate.

Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta is a good example of a middle range transition to heroism. He has a very, very slow journey to the side of good and it's got almost no moral component to it. And Vegeta is a major character in DBZ, so another spoiler warning!

The only thing initially motivating him is the constant assault on his pride by the fact that everyone keeps mopping the floor with him because his character is basically only there to establish how extra scary these new bad guys are. The first arc where he can be considered anything resembling a protagonist is the Frieza Arc, which is fairly early on, but that's just an enemy of his enemy desperation move. After that, despite being largely considered a good guy, or at least not explicitly a bad guy by the other good guys, he has a tendency to cause more problems than he solves, all because of his pride.

He lets Cell absorb Android 18 and reach his Perfect Form to get a good fight and therefore directly causes every problem in that arc, up to and including Goku dying, almost for real this time.

In the end, it's his family that anchors him to the side of good for reasons that extend beyond practicality for a change. His long suppressed or ignored love for his son flares up when the kid takes a laser to the chest and it suddenly occurs to him that he actually doesn't want most of these people dead, except maybe Goku sometimes.

After that, with one not-so-minor setback thanks to the pride thing again, he pretty much slides seamlessly into grumpy aggressive heroism thanks to the compassion he accidentally developed for the people in his life, which in turn is thanks to the fact that nobody in the DBZ universe bats an eyelash at rooming with someone that spent all of last week trying and/or succeeding at murdering them and everyone they love.

Favorable circumstances allow him to become a good guy and despite waffling back and forth a whole bunch, he does eventually bridge the gap on his own with a pretty cool act of self-sacrifice that, because it's Dragon Ball, obviously isn't permanent.

The convenient thing about DBZ is that even if redemption equals death, that usually just means they'll get to be redeemed and alive again in the space of a year at most.

Anyway, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Zuko, some villains are redeemed entirely through the actions of others, usually because they're evil because they're taken over by some kind of evil essence and they become good after getting that evil scrubbed off by a friendship laser or something.

That's a situation where their character has almost no bearing on their morality or lack thereof, so their moral flip-flop has almost no input from them. Also, that mostly shows up in like, kids shows.

Anyway, that pretty much covers how a villain can turn from bad to good. There's playing mechanisms which we largely categorized by how much introspection the villain in question did before transitioning to the side of good and how much of their own decision it was. That's all cool.

So what happens next? See, in some universe, the heroes brush off attempted murder like it ain't no thing. Doesn't matter if you're still swaddled in anime bandages from the last time you two interacted, if they're ready to be a good guy, that blood loss is suspiciously rusty water under the bridge.

But in others, the heroes might reasonably hold a grudge. Sure, maybe the villain has changed, or maybe they haven't, or maybe it doesn't matter because the last time you fought, they punched a hole in your chest and you're still grumpy. These are all fair reactions from your characters. So, what do you do?

Well, in some cases, the newly reformed villain doesn't explicitly join the heroes, which helps reduce any lingering grumpiness. They're not trying to join the friend group, they're just tangentially on their side. Conversely, sometimes the reformed villain doesn't want to join the squad, but the squad drags them in anyway. But in a lot of cases, they do want to join the squad but the squad might not feel the same way.

This can be tricky to make feel...convincing. The longer they've been a villain, the more bad blood you potentially have between them and the good guys. Maybe they did some really bad stuff, and at least one of the characters really doesn't want to forgive them for that stuff. The more convincingly villainous they were before, the harder it will be to convince the audience or the heroes that they've changed, so this can be a slow process.

Generally, they win over heroes gradually, maybe one or two at a time or with some grand dramatic act of self-sacrifice that demonstrates that they're willing to throw everything away for their new cause. Combining the two works pretty well.

Okay, so you've convinced the heroes. Your bad guy is now good, your good guys now have some funny banter about that one time your former bad guy dangled them over a cliff or something. Good times are had by all.

But wait! There's someone you forgot to convince. It's your audience. There are a number of ways you can lose your audience by turning your villains good. In the simplest of cases, they might like the bad guy less now that the bad guy is question is emotionally stable and probably not wearing quite so much black. In some cases, the bad guy may have done some seriously heinous stuff in the past and while the characters are willing to forgive and forget, the readers might not be.

That's actually a problem people say they have with Fairy Tail. For those of you deeper in anime circles than I am, you'll probably know better than I do that Fairy Tail had this thing where 90% of early villains in that show become heroes less than a season later. After like the third time this happened, everyone started being like "Oh boy. More bad guys. Can't wait to see how Natsu turns them good." And as a result, it almost seemed like the author felt the need to make every season bad-guy way more evil than the previous one, so no way would we expect them to turn good. "Oh, you thought the guy who crucified a teenage girl was bad? Well, these guys murdered their dragon parents, and this lady tortured the protagonist on screen and this guy invented Black Magic and uncontrollably kills everything in a 10 yard radius. No way can any of these guys be- Aw, damn it!"

Now, this can pull people out of the story a little. If the bad guys don't go anywhere or if they do go somewhere, but that somewhere is the expanding roster of tertiary good guys, it can get kind of old and lose its spark, and if the villains are too easily forgiven by the heroes, it can pull the audience away from the heroes and make it harder to relate. On the flipside, you can get cases where the audience WANTS the villain to be redeemed, but the heroes are mistrustful. This can also pull us away from the heroes but instead of pulling us out of the story, it pulls us toward the former villain, which can lead to some interesting sympathy scenarios where we've completely switched who we're rooting for. Again, they did this with Zuko, and it was awesome.

This is basically discussing the actual process and immediate consequences of the bad guy switching sides. But in the long term, there are some interesting stuff you can do with a good guy that used to be bad.

See, in a lot of cases, the heroes don't forget that their new friend used to be a bad guy. They might bring it up in a joking fashion or a not-so-joking fashion if the former bad guy seem to have retained some old habits from their erstwhile villainy.

And of course, on the more extreme end, what do you do if the former villain switches back? This is a pretty common story for redeemed villains, and it's easy to see why. A villain that has been redeemed by definition has a flexible sense of right and wrong. It's very plausible both for the audience and the heroes that maybe they switched back and they're up to their old tricks again. There are three ways to play this.

They really have changed back.

They were never really good in the first place.

They're lying their butt off to trick the heroes and whatever villains they allied themselves with, relying on their impressive villainy resume to get themselves to an advantageous position to backstab the baddie.

Of these three, the first two to me are a little… "Eh…" They're good for what they are and they do a good job of making your audience suffer, especially if they were rooting for that character to be redeemed. Hey, they managed to do that with Zuko, too. Thought that show was good. They're basically knife-twisting. You wanted the character to be good and they weren't, or maybe you didn't trust the character and you hate to be proven right. Bonus points if either of those sentiments were held by an actual protagonist.

But the third one is by far my personal favorite, because if you play your cards right, you can get all the advantages of the first two, plus some serious quality banter between the heroes when the ruse is revealed and at the climactic turning point, a potentially awesome reveal of the "bad guy's" true loyalties.

The difficulty here is convincing the audience that you're going for options one or two so that the true reveal is sufficiently revelatory. Usually, this means having your-totally-a-bad-guy-again do something suitably nasty, like torturing or killing someone or just beating the tar out of one of their friends, which is done to almost humorous effects in Dragon Ball.

During the Buu arc, when Vegeta gets "taken over" by Babidi's evil magic and becomes Majin Vegeta. This briefly looks like he's been possessed but it turns out he willingly took the evil power, because he thinks that pure evilness is the only thing that makes him stronger than Goku. It is kind of him briefly turning evil again before he gets over himself, but Goku does not believe that Vegeta is evil. To convince Goku that he's serious, he vaporizes half the stadium, taking out a good chunk of onlookers. Evil, right? But this is Dragon Ball. Literally the same day after he kills himself, the group summons Shenron and brought back everyone not evil that had been killed, including everyone Vegeta wiped out during his little power trip.

It was a major "Oh, snap!" moment right up until everyone remembered what show they're watching. But it did work, because even though it was a solvable problem, Vegeta hadn't murdered anyone innocent in seven seasons, so it was kind of a big deal.

Anyway, bottom line, villain redemption is complicated and a bit of a minefield, but potentially very rewarding if you play with it.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.