The fictional concept of morality is really interesting. In real life, morality has a major subjective component. Everyone's the hero of their own story, so, to a certain extent, it's impossible to determine any kind of truly objective parameters for heroism. Conversely, real-life villains also have a subjective component. Doesn't matter how truly awful someone has acted, there will be some people that think of them as a hero and even more people that just don't care enough to think of them as villains. Every human on the planet seems to have their own idea of what 'good' and 'evil' mean. Now, of course the main problem we run into here is that people aren't actually consistent. Lots of people can rattle off their own definitions of right and wrong or good and evil, but human minds aren't axiomatic, and those definitions usually don't extrapolate fully into how that person actually treats moral crises. A personal example, if I had to give my definition of evil, it would probably be the act of causing suffering unnecessarily. It makes sense at the outset, it's pretty vague and wide in scope, and most people agree that hurting people for no reason is bad. It handily covers stuff most people consider evil, like murder, or theft, or being mean to strangers on the internet, but it falls apart in the specific cases. For example, what does "unnecessarily" mean? Is it enough for that person to really think that they have a reason to hurt someone? Were 18th century doctors evil for practicing the frequently fatal and medically pointless art of "bloodletting", even though they didn't know it didn't work? I'd say "no". Is it evil to hurt a dog, even though a dog isn't a person? I'd say "yes" and also "How dare you?!". The annoying reality is that the morality of an action pretty much has to be judged on a case-by-case basis, and no concrete system of rules will be able to judge the morality of it to everyone's satisfaction, or even anyone's satisfaction. And that's not even touching on how we reflexively judge the stuff that might not be morally wrong, but still makes you want to puke for whatever reason. Point is, in the real world, morality is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface, but in fiction, morality is a lot simpler than it looks. It's got two major categories: Heroes and villains. These are basically just simplified extensions of two real-world categories: allies and enemies. Interestingly enough, ally and enemy have no inherent moral characteristics. They just describe whether someone aids or opposes you on something. The morality of the situation is entirely determined by what that "something" is, not by whether or not someone is on your side. But in fiction, hero and villain are explicit moral categorizations. Villains aren't just people that do bad stuff, they're bad people. Heroism and villainy are states of being, not just action. And while you have characters that
might fall into gray areas (anti-heroes that do what they think is right, no matter what the cost, or villains that still have people they truly care about and want to protect), practically speaking, most of them are going to be considered one end of the spectrum or the other. Fictional moral absolutism is a powerful thing. So why did I just spend over a minute rambling about absolutist morality? Because today we're gonna be talking about fallen heroes, and something about that concept really felt like it needed to be properly contextualized when I went into it. So, broadly speaking, the fallen hero is a character who was once a hero, but for whatever reason is now a villain. Sometimes the fallen hero was manipulated or transformed by circumstance into some dark parody of their former self. Sometimes the fallen hero hasn't actually changed that much at all from their time as a paragon, and their once positive traits are just manifesting in a much nastier way, and sometimes the reason is somewhere in between. The bottom line is: they used to be good and have now become "evil". It's a very simple trope conceptually, but the execution can get a little complicated. There are two major archetypal "fallen hero" stories, each one corresponding to a different type of fallen hero. The first one is Satan, who is the archetype of the hero doomed to fall by their nature, and the second one is Adam, the archetype of the hero tricked into falling by another. Eve could also technically fill that role, but people don't usually characterize her that way. Dissecting this a little, Lucifer was always going to fall because it was in his nature to rebel. This corresponds to a modern fallen hero archetype where the hero doesn't actually go through any major character changes in the process of falling. Their character is consistent before and after their transition from heroism to villainy, it's basically just a matter of their circumstance. Let's call this a "type 1" fallen hero for the sake of efficiency. Notable examples of this kind of fallen hero are Light from "Death Note" or Griffith from "Berserk", both characters whose transition from heroism to villainy was totally in character, and they didn't really change in the process. Meanwhile, Adam and/or Eve is the fallen hero screwed over by circumstance. They're basically a victim and, their fall is provoked by some outside force. They might have had the potential for evil before, but they didn't properly fall until somebody else pushed them. Consider Harvey Dent from "The Dark Knight", or prequel-era Anakin Skywalker, as good examples of this kind of fallen hero. And let's call them "type 2" fallen heroes. Now, the thing that makes a fallen hero feel extra-tragic and uncomfortable is actually related to all that realistic morality stuff I was talking about earlier. See, essentially, the fallen hero violates the sanctity of being a good guy. The fragility of their heroism draws attention to the fact that the very concept of "good guy" is an inherent fiction and forces the audience to contemplate the much more realistic side of the question "what makes something evil?" "Good guys" and "bad guys" are, broadly speaking, a literary crutch to keep the audience from questioning the morality of situations all the time. The author can just say "these guys are right, these guys are wrong" and the audience will know who to root for and what potential moral failings to excuse or dismiss. Good guys do good by nature, no matter how functionally reprehensible their actions might be when stripped of that context. And bad guys might have the occasional act of good, but it doesn't change their inherent "bad-guy-ness". But the very existence of the fallen hero forces the audience to question that paradigm in a way that the existence of the reformed villain doesn´t. We kind of expect rational people to side with the good guys or, more realistically, to side with us, because we're rational, obviously. And if they don't, it's cuz they're jerks, or manipulated, or possessed, or something. A villain seeing the light and joining the heroes feels natural in the context of the story. A hero abandoning the side of good and straight up opposing them feels horribly unnatural in that context, and it pulls the audience out of that comfortable black-and-white "good guy/bad guy" paradigm that much of fiction cultivates these days. Suddenly, your good guys aren't unassailably good. Suddenly, in universe, that entire dynamic is being treated as a fiction. Which, you know, it is. But it can be kind of uncomfortable to have that acknowledged. Now, this can make this an incredibly useful trope. It's a really easy way to seriously freak out your audience. Or, on the flip side, if you make a point of throwing out the moral compass early on, your audience might actually be able to enjoy the story without having to worry about whether or not the protagonists are good people. I've been told that this is why people love "Death Note". The main character, starting off as a heroic idealist who wants to make the world a better place, quickly spirals into a murder-happy God complex and falls hard and fast into full-on villainy. Sure, it's freaky, but the point of the show isn't to watch good triumphs, it's to watch this magnificent asshole play the chess master while he spirals into total insanity. By pulling the rug out from under the notions of traditional heroism at the very beginning, the audience is suitably prepared to watch and enjoy a show where the "good guys" and "the protagonists" have zero intersection. But this is a pretty extreme example, not many stories actually have their main character be a fallen hero. But even without going to that kind of extreme, the moral uncertainty caused by the presence of a fallen hero in a story can bevery useful. For a rather dated example, let's look at Jason Todd. Now, in the current run of comics, as far as I know, Jason Todd is back to being a nominal "good guy", but, back in the day, stuff got real bad. See, Jason Todd was the second Robin, working with Batman after the first robin went off with the Teen Titans. A bit of a reckless kid, but he had a good heart, and Batman thought channeling that anger into some healthy "vigilantism" would help steer him away from a life of crime later on. Only, then Jason got murdered by the Joker and, suddenly, "child endangerment" was a thing everyone remembered existed. So that was bad enough, but then he came back to life significantly less heroic and mad as hell that Batman didn't avenge him by killing the Joker. He went full supervillain for a while and became "The Red Hood", a walking talking reminder of why kid superheroes sound like fun on paper, until one of them dies. Jason Todd is basically a living, or undead, reminder of Batman's biggest failure, both in cannon and in characterization. In cannon, Batman failed to save him and refused to break his "no killing" code to avenge him, and now, Jason is back and killing criminals because it's the one thing Batman refuses to do. From a more meta perspective, "Batman and Robin" is a fun wisecracking Father-son relationship until you are reminded that he's a child fighting super-powered murderers, and the mere existence of Jason Todd is a pretty eloquent reminder that all of this wacky Young Justice/Teen Titans "hero-ing" has the potential to wind up unbelievably tragic. Most other comic book character resurrections are played so casually, that people forget about them pretty quickly, but nobody forgets Jason Todd. Now, sometimes, the fallen heroe´s influence on the story is rather more direct than just reminding the audience that stuff can get complicated. Sometimes, the fallen hero has some very obvious parallels to a current hero, and everyone winds up quietly worried the hero might fall in a similar way. One example of those parallels shows up fairly late in "Avatar" in the character of Hama. Now, Hama was a Southern Water Tribe water-bender who'd been captured by the Fire Nation and imprisoned in unbelievably terrible conditions. Out of desperation, she figured out "blood-bending", the thoroughly icky art of puppeting someone's movements by using water-bending to control their blood. She used this to escape and proceeded to spend decades imprisoning and torturing random Fire Nation citizens on the grounds that they were Fire Nation and, therefore, evil. Now, she has obvious and explicit parallels with Katara: they're both powerful water-benders from the Southern Water Tribe and they both have a lot of reason to hate the Fire Nation. So, obviously, Hama's character is disturbing by how similar she was to Katara back in the day, but she's also kind of disturbing because she's the first villain from the Water Tribe we've seen in the story, and she kind of breaks this invisible assumption the audience has had that the Water Tribe were all obviously "good guys". On top of that, she invented a truly disturbing form of bending that isn't really matched in creepiness until "Legend of Korra", when somebody air-bends all the air out of someone's lungs. Basically, she's creepy all around, but a lot of what makes her creepy is that she's a perversion of all these things we've only ever associated with "good" stuff. Water-bending is the soft-Tai-Chi-healing kind of bending, the Southern Water Tribe is the small friendly group of people, and Katara is the most overall heroic and compassionate member of the gang. Seeing all those parallels twisted into this terrifying puppet master is very disconcerting. Nobody's really worried about Katara going the same way she did and turning evil, but it's still really unsettling, and it becomes more unsettling when Katara starts using blood-bending later. Again, nobody's afraid of her falling from grace, but it blurs the lines between hero and villain, which is actually something of a theme in season 3, so I'm not too surprised they included it. Now, Hama is also skirting the edge of a slight variant of the fallen hero´s story. Sometimes, the real tragedy isn't that the hero was willing to fall, it's that truly terrible circumstances forced them to fall. This is basically the type 2 taken to extremes. Maybe their faith in humanity or a higher power was shattered and they went off the rails, or maybe they lost someone really important to them and, with that person, their ability to care about humanity as a whole, or they were very carefully driven mad by someone or something outside of their control. This variant of the fallen hero is disturbing because instead of emphasizing the complexities of human morality, it emphasizes the fragility of a human's existence, and how essentially everything that makes you care about being "good" can be ripped away from you. This one's freaky because it could theoretically happen to anyone. It's also fun because about half the time, one of the protagonists explicitly disproves that it could happen to them. See, fallen heroes of this variety are frequently desperate to prove to themselves, or the world at large, that they had no choice but to go off the deep end. This isn't restricted to fallen heroes, either. You can get fallen normal people with this exact thesis, it's pretty much the Joker's characterization from "The Killing Joke", along with a major central theme. But, basically, this variant is trying to convince themselves and everyone else that they HAD to fall. It's not really their fault, and, most of the time, they do this by trying to force whatever character they relate to the most into falling the exact same way. Usually, this means doing all kinds of thematically familiar terrible things to that hero, and going into "crisis mode" when the hero opts to not turn evil instead. In general, this is used when the author wants to get across the idea that doing evil stuff is always a choice, and the nasty stuff that led you to that point doesn't justify the bad stuff you do as a result. This is one of the only actually hopeful messages you can get out of a fallen hero story: the idea that the fallen hero was "bad news", but that doesn't mean the current heroes are doomed to follow in their footsteps. Alternatively, you get stories where the fallen hero does actually force the hero into similarly falling, which usually happens when the author wants that good old angsty message that "goodness" is the real fragile state of being and "evil" is natural or something. This one is also not restricted to fallen heroes and is, in fact, a favorite tactic of the Joker in his many forms. It's... "Eh"... I don't know. It's not a thesis on humanity I particularly agree with, and most stories of that form just tend to be mindlessly depressing, but if you can make it work, go for it. Now, there's one other interesting thing that fallen heroes are frequently used for, but it's also very weirdly specific. Sometimes, the fallen hero is your protagonist from the future. Now, the implications here are obvious: You're shining hero is doomed to fall because... "It's already happened". This variant takes the whole fallen-hero-exposes-the-fragility-of-heroism-itself thing and clubs you over the head with it. Not only is heroism in general fragile, but your hero specifically is totally capable of turning "super evil", and we know this because their evil future version is right there, probably laughing maniacally and waxing nostalgic over seeing all their old friends alive and kicking again. Very frequently, this variant relies on something horrible happening to the hero or their loved ones causing them to spiral into villainy in response. It's a lot rarer for future villain versions of the heroes to be natural extensions of their modern characterization, although, sometimes they do that in order to show the modern hero that they have to shape up or risk going full "supervillain". Also they sometimes kind of invert it by having a modern villain interacting with a past heroic version of themselves, and their past heroic-self is all "I'll never turn into you", but then, the modern villain is all "Oh, but you already have", and... I don't know. It's basically the same thing from a different angle. Anyway, and finally, it is occasionally possible for fallen heroes to be redeemed, but it's a lot harder than redeeming ordinary villains. The key difference is fallen heroes have explicitly abandoned their heroism, where regular villains frequently just haven't discovered theirs, yet. Meaning, rather than just learning to be better, a fallen hero has to re-learn to be better and confront what made them worse to begin with. A lot of the time, fallen heroes suffer from "redemption equals death", where, in order to redeem themselves convincingly, they have to die immediately thereafter. This lets them redeem themselves with a single heroic act, rather than having to actually atone for everything they've done. A lot of the time, fallen heroes are explicitly considered irredeemable, in which case, "redemption equals death" is almost their only option to escape their villain status. If they can't actually redeem themselves, then going out in a blaze of heroism at least proves that they were trying. Another factor is that, a lot of the times, when a fallen hero looks for redemption, it's coupled with a "my God, what have I done?" crisis, since spontaneously regrowing a moral compass can kind of sting. Your fallen hero can easily turn into a self-sacrificing death seeker if they see it is the only thing they deserve. This just got a little dark. But, anyway, the fallen hero is, basically, a very simple trope that can be useful if you want to shake up your audience and rattle their suspension of disbelief, and there are a few fun storylines you can explicitly do with a fallen hero that can give you a lot of mileage. So... yeah.
