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selenak1) Londo Mollari, in Babylon 5. Undisputed all time winner in my heart. I've gone on about this at length in my Londo essay for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
idol_reflection, and it's tricky to be brief about the greatness of Londo's storyarc in B5, but for the purpose of this meme: it's about the only one I can think of where the fall is given equal narrative time to the redemption. In most other stories, the things a person has to redeem himself/herself for are usually shown only in flashback and thus briefly. Whereas with B5, we know exactly what Londo is guilty of because we were shown what he did at length, and were given several individual characters to love who suffered through his actions. And the road back doesn't happen overnight, either. As with the fall, it takes two seasons. His ultimate fate is both tragic and yet, in lack of a better term, redemptive. He faces his greatest fear with courage and grace, goes through fifteen years of hell, and in the end dies for his people.
2) Faith, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series. You know, one of my all time pet peeves are posts or fanfiction that postulate Faith's fall was entirely Buffy's fault/what she did wasn't that bad anyway/she was completely a victim. Because that takes away the magnitude of Faith's achievement in coming back. Yes, she had a bad deal from the start, but no, that doesn't absolve her from responsibility. At her lowest, she killed people - the Professor at the start of Graduation Day, most prominently - without even caring about the reasons, just because the Mayor told her to. What she did to Xander in Consequences was sexual assault plus attempted manslaughter, at the very least. And of course, in Five by Five, she tortured Wesley. Faith did all those things, and we saw her choosing to do them. But we also saw her come back. Step by step, starting with Who Are You in BTVS. (Another pet peeve: when people claim Faith's entire redemption line happened over at AtS, and that hence she's "really" an Angel character. No, it didn't, and no, she is not; she's a character of both shows. The start of Faith's redemption was her choice not to make her safe getaway in Who Are You but to go back to save a couple of strangers in a church, and the extraordinary outpouring of self hatred that was her fight with Buffy later. This didn't immediately change everything - torturing Wesley as a way to commit suicide happened later, not before, after all - but it was the first step. Accepting responsibility, going to prison was the next. By the time both shows have ended, Faith has saved her "sponsor", Angel, has returned to Sunnydale and faced her old demons there, and she and Buffy made a tentative peace with each other. Both BTVS and AtS have other redemption storylines, and I like them in varying degrees, but Faith's is my favourite in that universe.
3) Bialar Crais in Farscape. Crais starts out as Crichton's season 1 nemesis before near the end of the season Scorpius takes over the job and does it ever so much better; a standard crazed vengeance-swearing villain who can't be reasoned with, and an officer of an organization coded as fascist to boot. Then he loses his job and his Peacekeeper identity, and lo and behold, we get both a fascinating character and a fascinating storyline. As with my other favourites, Crais doesn't change overnight, and he starts his own way to become different by pulling one over Our Heroes and stealing a baby (which happens to be a big newborn living ship whose conception he engineered); but his bond with said ship, Talyn, and his relationship with Aeryn Sun, the other person Talyn has a bond with, are crucial for Crais' development. Aeryn and Crais have put each other through hell - he kicked her out of the Peacekeepers at the start of the show, she put him through the torture of Scorpius' machine - but they share a background, they share a determination to become more, and they both do. And Talyn isn't just the "child" that helps Crais care; he's simultanously the embodiment of Crais' guilt, because Talyn's inherent instability and the fact he has arms which make every teenage tantrum life threatening are entirely Crais' fault. Their final fate, starting with Crais' goodbye to Aeryn - with her silently touching his cheek, which is one of my favourite images in FS - and ending with Crais and Talyn saving the day by basically committing suicide is operatic, tragic and the end of one of Farscape's best storylines.
4) Emma Frost, in Astonishing X-Men. Well, in a lot of other X-Men comics, too, but as I argued here, Joss managed to make the very different Emmas from various comics into a unified whole, and took her past as a supervillain as seriously as the way surviving a genocide had to impact her. The last AXM arc isn't yet completed - with one issue still due - but Emma's personal storyline in it is, more or less, and she came out of facing past and present as a bruised but tough survivor who lives to snark another day, and the unity she and Scott have achieved feels earned and real.
5) Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. I can hear the outcries already: saving your son and giving your life to kill an evil overlord does not a redemption make if it's preceeded by 20something years of being a bloody dictator's right hand man. It certainly is a very different type of story from the other five I listed. Which is partly connected to SW being a fairy tale - and a sequence of movies - as opposed to the novelistic approach the tv and comics narratives I named take. And of course to subtlety not being named George Lucas. But I'd be lying if I didn't list this, because I really do love Vader's storyline in the classic trilogy and Anakin's in the prequels. (Talk about a minority opinion regarding the later.) As a whole, it works for me, I grieve when I see Anakin fall, the confrontation with Luke in ESB is the most emotionally stirring moment in the movie for me, from both participant's pov, and "I wanted to save you" - "You already have" from RotJ makes me misty-eyed and kills me every time.
idol_reflection, and it's tricky to be brief about the greatness of Londo's storyarc in B5, but for the purpose of this meme: it's about the only one I can think of where the fall is given equal narrative time to the redemption. In most other stories, the things a person has to redeem himself/herself for are usually shown only in flashback and thus briefly. Whereas with B5, we know exactly what Londo is guilty of because we were shown what he did at length, and were given several individual characters to love who suffered through his actions. And the road back doesn't happen overnight, either. As with the fall, it takes two seasons. His ultimate fate is both tragic and yet, in lack of a better term, redemptive. He faces his greatest fear with courage and grace, goes through fifteen years of hell, and in the end dies for his people. 2) Faith, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series. You know, one of my all time pet peeves are posts or fanfiction that postulate Faith's fall was entirely Buffy's fault/what she did wasn't that bad anyway/she was completely a victim. Because that takes away the magnitude of Faith's achievement in coming back. Yes, she had a bad deal from the start, but no, that doesn't absolve her from responsibility. At her lowest, she killed people - the Professor at the start of Graduation Day, most prominently - without even caring about the reasons, just because the Mayor told her to. What she did to Xander in Consequences was sexual assault plus attempted manslaughter, at the very least. And of course, in Five by Five, she tortured Wesley. Faith did all those things, and we saw her choosing to do them. But we also saw her come back. Step by step, starting with Who Are You in BTVS. (Another pet peeve: when people claim Faith's entire redemption line happened over at AtS, and that hence she's "really" an Angel character. No, it didn't, and no, she is not; she's a character of both shows. The start of Faith's redemption was her choice not to make her safe getaway in Who Are You but to go back to save a couple of strangers in a church, and the extraordinary outpouring of self hatred that was her fight with Buffy later. This didn't immediately change everything - torturing Wesley as a way to commit suicide happened later, not before, after all - but it was the first step. Accepting responsibility, going to prison was the next. By the time both shows have ended, Faith has saved her "sponsor", Angel, has returned to Sunnydale and faced her old demons there, and she and Buffy made a tentative peace with each other. Both BTVS and AtS have other redemption storylines, and I like them in varying degrees, but Faith's is my favourite in that universe.
3) Bialar Crais in Farscape. Crais starts out as Crichton's season 1 nemesis before near the end of the season Scorpius takes over the job and does it ever so much better; a standard crazed vengeance-swearing villain who can't be reasoned with, and an officer of an organization coded as fascist to boot. Then he loses his job and his Peacekeeper identity, and lo and behold, we get both a fascinating character and a fascinating storyline. As with my other favourites, Crais doesn't change overnight, and he starts his own way to become different by pulling one over Our Heroes and stealing a baby (which happens to be a big newborn living ship whose conception he engineered); but his bond with said ship, Talyn, and his relationship with Aeryn Sun, the other person Talyn has a bond with, are crucial for Crais' development. Aeryn and Crais have put each other through hell - he kicked her out of the Peacekeepers at the start of the show, she put him through the torture of Scorpius' machine - but they share a background, they share a determination to become more, and they both do. And Talyn isn't just the "child" that helps Crais care; he's simultanously the embodiment of Crais' guilt, because Talyn's inherent instability and the fact he has arms which make every teenage tantrum life threatening are entirely Crais' fault. Their final fate, starting with Crais' goodbye to Aeryn - with her silently touching his cheek, which is one of my favourite images in FS - and ending with Crais and Talyn saving the day by basically committing suicide is operatic, tragic and the end of one of Farscape's best storylines.
4) Emma Frost, in Astonishing X-Men. Well, in a lot of other X-Men comics, too, but as I argued here, Joss managed to make the very different Emmas from various comics into a unified whole, and took her past as a supervillain as seriously as the way surviving a genocide had to impact her. The last AXM arc isn't yet completed - with one issue still due - but Emma's personal storyline in it is, more or less, and she came out of facing past and present as a bruised but tough survivor who lives to snark another day, and the unity she and Scott have achieved feels earned and real.
5) Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. I can hear the outcries already: saving your son and giving your life to kill an evil overlord does not a redemption make if it's preceeded by 20something years of being a bloody dictator's right hand man. It certainly is a very different type of story from the other five I listed. Which is partly connected to SW being a fairy tale - and a sequence of movies - as opposed to the novelistic approach the tv and comics narratives I named take. And of course to subtlety not being named George Lucas. But I'd be lying if I didn't list this, because I really do love Vader's storyline in the classic trilogy and Anakin's in the prequels. (Talk about a minority opinion regarding the later.) As a whole, it works for me, I grieve when I see Anakin fall, the confrontation with Luke in ESB is the most emotionally stirring moment in the movie for me, from both participant's pov, and "I wanted to save you" - "You already have" from RotJ makes me misty-eyed and kills me every time.
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