Thread:Mesektet/@comment-27729149-20150404030126/@comment-3581997-20150404113142

It's a heavy concept and it can vary on the situation. Check out here if you want some food for thought on the subject. It really depends on how sorry tthe person is, the feelings/condition of those wronged and, often overlooked, how much of a choice they had in the situation.

Example: On the shows Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire, Angelus is a heartless, sociopath, he slaughters whole towns, deliberately hurts children, rapes woman, tortures people and is even willing to turn on his friends and lover so casually that neither he nor they take it as anything personal. Angelus has no soul, but when he is cursed with one he instantly regrets everything he has done up to that point and spends the rest of his life (Basicly the entire series) trying to make it up and is genuinely sorry. Some people can forgive him easier than others but in that case I 'd say even with all he had done he is redeemed because he had no capacity to appreciate what he was doing prior was wrong in any way.

However to use another example Malaise from City of Heroes is a schizophrenic, He started out as an insane super-villain but after meeting the psychic, Sister Psyche, she changed his mind manually, readjusting him as a well balanced mutant, he was remorseful and became a super hero to make it up to her and the city. However he goes off his psychic meds twice; The first time is when Psyche is incapacity after an accident but Malaise is is forgiven shortly after they beat some sense into him, but the second time he turns Psyche into a mental time bomb and forces her to be killed by her husband to stop her from taking out the entire city with her, pretty much because she was "shackling his mind with the prison of sanity". Psyche dies trying to give Maliase some redemption but most players, her side-kick, Aurora and of-course her husband, Manticore (less than happy about needing to kill his wife), are all too happy to see the poor crazy killed with extreme prejudice for what he did to Psyche' even if he wasn't in his right mind. In Malaise's case even though he did less horrible things than Angel and is unable to control himself I'd say there is no room for redemption, at a certain point a person has just gone beyond any further benefit of the doubt.

In God of War, one of the few Gods to be on Kratos's side is Helios, yet Kratos beheads the guy pretty much just to use it as his own personal flashlight. He does numerous horrible things and while he is redeemed for them in the first game and functions as a hero there in the following games he goes further and further off the slippery slope all the while going "Oh poor me" even while flooding the world, blotting out the sun and destroying the after-life. At a certain point I for one just wanted to stop playing cause the notion of redemption seemed hollow. Either Kratos is beyond stupid and can't actually stop to think about his chosen path or he is just a drama-queen and wants to think of himself as the poor lost soul with no other options (I wouldn't rule out either). It's hard to say how to judge him from a conceptual stand point but for purposes of this wiki he still counts as a protagonist if only because of his role in the first game