I was writing a fantasy novel and in it, the captain and his troops were ordered to massacre a village (of fictional creatures); after the massacre the captain quit his position in anger and disgust; the captain had also smuggled a child out of the village.
When I mentioned this on a writing forum I was on, people got upset and everyone rebuked the idea that the captain would quit his position and defy orders because…it takes a long time and a lot of effort to become a captain.
This was supposed to be a positive reflection on the character, that he would be disgusted at being ordered to commit a genocide (it wasn’t JUST a massacre; absolutely no one from the village was to be allowed to live, including kids), but posters got upset because…it takes a long time and a lot of effort to reach such a rank and no one would quit their positions or disobey orders, that it was unrealistic; people were genuinely upset; PEOPLE WERE GENUINELY UPSET.
My conclusion? A rewrite of the character so he’s not a military dog, but someone else who would’ve been in the area and ignored. My novel has anti-colonial themes although they weren’t that central to the story; if the military are supposed to be jackbooted thugs then that’s how they’re going to be portrayed going forward.
I genuinely can’t believe people would actually be upset at this point when it’s supposed to reflect well on the character; this post was also an old one, as in around 2016-2018, so before the Gaza genocide or the Russian SMO. Absolutely disgusting bootlicking individuals.
Can I talk my shit again?
I have no doubt that the forum dwellers were a bunch of dorks. I just want to talk about narrative structure because it’s all the rage in my writing group and I want to synthesize something out of it.
Whenever a character needs a dramatic change of heart we go on and on and on about how we have to understand their internal state when they’re making the decision - it can never be a play by play until after the decision is made. It doesn’t need to be the amount of time passing, but we need to know why they’re personally so disgusted. But then I also get a lot of flak when it’s someone in only in their mind because a character is almost always more interesting when they are in relation to other people.
isn’t just sadly smoking because he feels lonely; he’s sadly smoking after hearing someone talk about him. So, in your story, if a superior is there talking shit or an underling gets emotionally overwhelmed and/or asks a resonating question before the change of heart it hits a little harder. It’s at its best when it’s combination thoughts and relationships, especially if you can show the emotions/thoughts through something like what Sanji’s doing.
I think you made a good decision doing some tooling of the character. At the very least, show him to be sympathetic to the plight of the targets of military might earlier in the narrative (or later on through flashbacks if you’re fancy like that). It’s technically possible that this is his first awakening of empathy, but it doesn’t serve narrative structure well to not lead up to a big outburst. Part of being a fantasy novel isn’t just being called to adventure, but also being thrust into it with little recourse because part of the authorship is letting the audience imagine what it’s like being forced into adventure instead of having to choose it for oneself. In the same way, if your audience really expects this captain to have emotional attachment to his years of military service, you should spend some detail having him acknowledge the time he spent. Maybe he can tell his superior where they can shove their commendations. The final thing is that such a decision demands some kind of sacrifice. It gives the moment a little more oomph to have to sacrifice or lose something at that moment. Maybe he vows to atone for all the horror he caused for so long. Maybe he brings a lower rank soldier with him. Maybe he kidnaps one and doesn’t know what to do with them. Maybe he has to kill a soldier on the way out so there’s no going back.
The issue here is that the novel starts off at the genocide; the lady (at this point the captain has been changed to a woman from an aristocratic lineage who was out hunting and followed the troops into the valley; she’s known to the person who ordered the attack so he doesn’t care that she’s tagging along) voices her displeasure at the attack and even says it’s ridiculous that all these troops, both foot soldiers and highly trained and well armored hussars are being used to kill a small village of creatures; she finds the child, feels sorry for it, and smuggles the MC out.
Most of the novel the lady is living with the MC and it follows the MC’s growth and their toxic relationship; the lady starts out seeing the MC as basically something above a pet but leagues below human, but the MC’s reactions akin to a human (because the MC is obviously a person) confounds the lady because despite the MC understanding words, she’s not becoming blindly obedient like her dogs. Getting over that hurdle of seeing the MC as a person takes basically almost the entirety of the story and only happens after the MC defies her by leaving, and then later when the lady comes back to try and murder the MC and gets beaten and left to live because the MC still loves her despite their toxic relationship and that’s when the the lady’s world view is finally fully changed.
One of the things I want to show about my setting is just how inhumane the people of the setting’s views are of non-humans; the lady here is herself cruel to any non-humans she encounters, even if not murderously so, because she is at her core a supremacist, but she’s also a huge pet lover and initially intended for the MC to be a new pet, something different to what she’s raised up to this point (although THIS aspect came with the rewrite of the character; the former character, the captain, was simply disgusted with the genocide and this is why he rescued the MC).
I think the rewrite of the character away from being military made this easier; her rescuing the MC isn’t a major act as even if she’d been discovered to be smuggling the child out it wouldn’t have been treated heavy-handedly by the military given she’s of noble lineage.
The lady, while beloved by the MC, is decidedly NOT someone the reader is intended to empathize with; she IS cruel, unintentionally abusive, and a fascist (she believes in the human cause and sees the exterminations in the past in a heroic light). Her change of heart on non-humans comes solely from her relationship to the MC.