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@the-inkspiller

Despite the information you gave me (fun to see some of the inside scoop :P), I think it’ll take me too long to sort out everything and still give decent advice – so I’m going to see if I can approach this from a more global perspective, tying into what you seemed to be getting at with your concluding sentence:

“I want to lead the reader to God, through my characters’ wickedness – not just their wickedness in and of itself.”

When it comes to karmic justice – or to put it in better Christianese, reaping what you sow – I believe that we have a few options, and each of them have the potential to underscore powerful truths.

For the sake of my own preferences, I’m going to be pulling from Lord of the Rings characters. I believe there is a deeper reason behind this, because Tolkien truly was a master at demonstrating the nature and place of evil within his storytelling. He’s downright Augustinian in his philosophical approach to the nature of evil, I tell you. Anyway. Nerd alert. Etc, etc, etc…

There are a few ways you can lead your readers to God through the negative traits and actions of your characters. I’m going to classify these ways into character types:

1. The negative character that does not end up redeemed, and receives their just deserts.

Examples: Sauron. Grima. Saruman. Gollum. Denethor.

This is relatively simple to navigate. Character does evil and bad things, and comes to a bad end. Poetic justice is intact, and good wins in the end. Yay!

But really. Good wins in the end. That’s the superstructure of the reality in which we live. So while we want to introduce a bit more complexity into our stories at times, and take our readers through the depths of questioning this, I believe it is not writing true to reality if we leave our readers there without coming back up in some way to the universal truth that evil triumphs only for a moment. Good wins in the end.

Keep in mind that this is point one. There are more ways to demonstrate the relationship between good and evil. This is only one of them, and perhaps doesn’t always have to be present. Though that’s really pushing a line, I think. It’s complicated.

2. The negative character that does not end up redeemed, but does not receive their just deserts.

No examples of this from Tolkien. And, come to think of it, I don’t know of a negative character in fiction that doesn’t end up receiving their just deserts in some way.

This is significant, in my opinion. I think it can be done, but only temporarily. Again, pulling from Tolkien’s pages, he handles it in this fashion: good is merciful today, evil destroys itself tomorrow. For example, look at Gollum (at Mount Doom) and Saruman (who is eventually destroyed in the Shire when his continual brow-beating comes back to bite him by the knife of Grima).

Interestingly, I think this is where you’re struggling. You have bad characters who have done very bad things and (as yet) have not received their karmic comeuppance. As far as I’m concerned, this kind of character can only be done temporarily. That is, eventually they do get what they have coming to them, and therefore end up in the first category of characters.

However, you can drag this stage on for quite a while, and your readers will understand that something is coming which will set everything right in the end. They are remarkably patient when they can build up more and more hatred for a bad character. XD All the more satisfaction when they reach their demise.

Notice, however, that you can do this in more than just one way. Gollum received his just deserts by getting exactly what he wanted, and that is precisely what destroyed him. Sometimes you don’t need to have an evil character be destroyed by the good guys, or by another bad guy. Sometimes they can destroy themselves through the gradual withering of their own being because they have gotten what they sought. The destroying quality of evil is a prominent part of its nature (from Tolkien, consider the Ring itself). It’s worth pointing this out to your readers by how you wrap up the storyline of some of your evil characters.

3. The negative character that does end up redeemed.

Tolkien’s stories do not feature themes of complete transformation/conversion. The lines between good and evil are firmly entrenched, and rarely budge. But this lack is due to his thematic emphasis on the specific struggle between good and evil as diametrically opposed, cosmic principles. In the story, we often see fundamentally ‘good’ characters drawn towards the darkness and then redeeming themselves (next point), or on the other hand, a fundamentally ‘bad’ character drawn towards the light and then falling back (e.g. Gollum); but we don’t see (onscreen, anyway) complete transformation between the two sides. And when we do come across those characters who have crossed the line between good and evil, they are only negative examples, and the process has already been finished (Denethor, Saruman).

This is a potential weakness in Tolkien’s works. Weakness, in the sense that it does not adequately portray a well-rounded perspective of the truly transformative power that goodness has over evil.

Note: this power of goodness is addressed thematically; that is, after all, the entire point of the saga. But it is done much more clearly through the happenings of the plot than in the arcs of specific characters. For example: Gondor is a bright city at the end; Ithilien is also cleansed and made new; the evil machinations of Orthanc are ended, and a far more natural, good order is restored; the Shire is scoured clean and bright again, and even brighter than before (by way of the seeds that Galadriel gave to Sam); Middle-Earth, as a whole, is cleansed and made new by the power of goodness, and a great evil is defeated. This is represented by the establishment of a new (fourth) age. The old age had been tainted and twisted. Now a new one was being established. So the power of good over evil is well and thoroughly addressed. It is simply not addressed as a transformative power in the lives of evil characters. This is, I believe, an area of weakness when it comes to strong Christian storytelling, because personal transformation is quite literally the crux of our personal experience of the Gospel.

So, while it is difficult to navigate this kind of character, I believe it is worthwhile. However, because of complicated reasons that I still haven’t fully worked out, I don’t believe it’s absolutely necessary to include them in every piece of fantasy fiction, either. As I showed, Tolkien doesn’t have this kind of character and still manages to accurately portray the power of good over evil.

There is another kind of redeemed character that falls under this category in a slant way; that is, the good character who starts to turn bad and then redeems themselves in the end. The most glaring examples of this are Boromir and Thorin. While not exactly pertinent to the question you were considering, it is worthwhile to note that both of these characters redeem themselves at the cost of their own lives. I think this may subtly point to the fact that they still paid somewhat for their deeds, even though at the end of the day, it was a noble self-sacrifice (Boromir), and a death-bed of forgiveness (Thorin). They reaped what they sowed, but in a way that warms the heart and makes us fall in love with goodness and nobility.

 

At the end of the day, the point of all of this is that there are many ways you can point your readers to God through the evil deeds of your characters. Much of the pay-off happens at the ends of these character’s arcs, where all of the building injustice of their lives and deeds has been gnawing at the reader until they cannot wait for them to receive their reward. This deepening of a dislike/hatred of evil is a good thing. It’s pointing to a truth about the world: evil is destructive, horrifying, and ruins lives.

With redemptive story-lines you can demonstrate the triumph of good over evil and give your readers hope.

With more negative story-lines you can demonstrate the natural consequences of evil – either when it faces goodness, itself, or is left alone. All of those these are worthwhile, I think.

The reason I was careful to point out the different kinds of characters and ways that you can point to God through evil characters, is because I think it’s important to vary the ways that evil characters are rewarded for their evilness. God does not always rain down fire and brimstone. Sometimes He leaves people to themselves. And that’s just as terrible.

Well. It’s late, and I could keep rambling forever if allowed. This is probably more than sufficient. Please feel free to discuss further. In zooming out to a broader topic, I may have missed the point of your questions entirely, which would be quite unfortunate, but not unheard of. XD