Moral Event Horizon/Literature: Difference between revisions

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* In Tolkien's ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', Melkor's destruction of the Two Trees, murder of Finwë and theft of the Silmarils. After this, he can never again take a form that looks anything other than completely evil, and is named as Morgoth, the Dark Enemy of the World.

* While never a morally upstanding guy, Turin is one of the few sympathetic characters in Middle Earth to pass this, at the climax of [[The Children of Hurin]] when he murders a lame man in a fir of rage, leaving even himself so disgusted that he commits suicide.

* [[Battle Royale|Kinpatsu Sakamochi]] crosses it when he reveals to the class that he raped Shuya and Yoshitoki's caretaker. Just to add insult to injury, he {{spoiler|kills [[Disproportionate Retribution|Yoshitoki for having a rightful outburst from the revelation and Fumiyo for whispering]]}}.

** Vilu Daskar from ''Legend of Luke'' also qualifies. He had done many evil deeds in his time, but the worst chronicled was the incident where he [[You Said You Would Let Them Go|promised a family of hedgehogs he'd release them]], if they showed him the hiding place of their secret stash of grain - then "released" them, tied up in their own grain sacks, weighted down with stones! He also murdered {{spoiler|Martin's mother, Sayna}}, [[Evil Laugh|laughing his head off]] all the while!

* In the [[Harry Turtledove]] novel ''[[The Guns of the South]]'', the AWB crosses this when they gun down Robert E. Lee's family in the middle of a crowd. The fact that they would be so single-mindedly callous turns pretty much the entire Confederacy against them.

* The famous Swedish ''[[The Millennium Trilogy|Millennium]]'' trilogy has a both gruesome and realistic crossing of the [[Moral Event Horizon]]. From his first appearance, the lawyer Nils Bjurman is smug and arrogant. He is the legal guardian of the protagonist Lisbeth Salander - she is borderline-insane and thus declared unfit to be independent. Bjurman gradually abuses his position more and more: first interrogating Lisbeth about her sex life, then blackmailing her into giving him a blow job. However, on their next meeting he crosses the [[Moral Event Horizon]] in a spectacularly disgusting way: he binds and handcuffs her to a bed, then anally rapes her all night. He really [[Humiliation Conga|gets what's coming to him though]].

* [[Alpha Bitch|Chris Hargensen]] attained this status in [[Stephen King]]'s first novel, ''[[Carrie]].'' It's made clear in dialogue and descriptions that she is a cruel, manipulative, sadistic creature (one of her earlier exploits involved putting a firecracker in another girl's shoe, nearly causing the girl to lose some toes) who has never really faced consequences {{spoiler|prior to being excluded from the prom}} because of her father's status and willingness to use it. [[Mugging the Monster|She sets off the destruction of the whole town]] with the [[Prank Date]] she arranges, and [[Karmic Death|nobody is sorry when she finally gets it.]]

** Dumbledore invokes this trope himself in relation to Voldemort, describing the {{spoiler|creation of a Horcrux}} as "moving beyond the realm of what we might describe as 'usual evil.'" Considering the implications of {{spoiler|tearing one's soul apart}}, this is probably justified.

** Also crossed when Bellatrix, Barty Jr., and two other Death Eaters subject Alice and Frank Longbottom (Neville's parents) to a [[Fate Worse Than Death]] - prolonged torture by Cruciatus curse until they became insane, unrecognizable vegetables. It's even worse that they did it after Voldemort was gone.

** Wormtail is an instructive example of where true event horizons lie. While {{spoiler|betraying Harry's parents to Voldemort, supposedly his best friends, causing an explosion that killed a dozen innocent people and pinning his mass murder on Sirius, ensuring Sirius' twelve-year psychological torture in prison}} was certainly ''evil'', he could have still been redeemed. But after he {{spoiler|found Voldemort in Albania and helped restore him to full health, and killing Cedric,}} he had crossed the line permanently.

*** I'd say, after the initial betrayal he at least had a meager chance to start the life anew, probably in another country. When he resurrected Voldemort, he truly cemented his place in darkness and ensured that the casualties would be much worse than those he caused himself.

* In ''[[Catch-22]]'', the character Aarfy is portrayed as a bumbling fool, more of a constant nuisance to the protagonist Yossarian than anything else. Throughout the book the reader is given very small glimpses and hints that he may be more than a little odd in the head. This finally culminates in Aarfy raping and murdering a woman, and getting off unpunished.

** One could also point to Milo Minderbinder. He's a sleazeball war profiteer from the beginning, but he really crosses the horizon when he arranged for his own base to be ''strafed''. He is rather smug and amused by the incident, too.

* Jefferson Pinkard remains a sympathetic character for amazingly long in [[Harry Turtledove]]'s ''[[Timeline-191]]'' series, despite being a member of the Nazi-equivalent Freedom Party, as we've known him since long before he joined and understand exactly why he's bitter enough to do it. At most, the reader is probably hoping for a while after he joins that he'll realize the path he's on before it's too late. However, when he comes up with a way to mass murder black people using truck fumes, the line is finally crossed definitively.

** In my opinion, he'd crossed the line before that, given the way he treats his wife earlier in the series. You could say his actions are somewhat justified, as he walked in on her cheating on him, but he hadn't stayed true to her either, which blows his reaction waaay out of proportion. I personally wasn't at all shocked at his masterminding the Freedom Party death camp policies by that point.

* [[Legacy of the Force|Darth Caedus]], the [[Face Heel Turn|villainous]] [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|Jacen Solo]], was apparently intended, to be morally grey at first, sliding down into worse and worse acts of [[Necessary Evil]] until the Evil overwhelmed the Necessary. It didn't really turn out like that, considering what he did, including {{spoiler|fridging his own aunt, bombarding [[Throwaway Country|throwaway planet]] Fondor after they had already surrendered, and lighting decidedly NON-throwaway planet Kashyyyk on fire from orbit.}} Fans lost all sympathy for him long before this was intended to happen.

** Interestingly, what his family considered to be his [[Moral Event Horizon]] was comparatively minor, {{spoiler|using a Nightsister Blood Trail to track Jaina to the Jedi's secret base.}}

*** In the current series, ''[[Fate of the Jedi]]'', Daala initially seems fairly reasonable -wrong, but reasonable- about the Jedi and their role in the Galactic Alliance, especially considering the actions of Jacen Solo. She even shuts down her "Jedi Court" when the parents of one of the Jedi that went berserk revealed that it's head judge was using the imprisoned jedi as wall art. Then, in Allies, she attempts to force the Jedi to bend to her will and surrender all Jedi that have snapped (despite the Jedi Temple being far better equipped to hold a mad force user.) by laying siege to the Temple with a Mandalorian Battle Fleet, with orders to "do what is necessary." The Jedi respond by sending out the Grand Master's personal assistant, a young apprentice (on the grounds that nobody could possibly misconstrue it as an attack, but she has the standing in the order to show good faith), wearing no armor, carrying no weapon, intending only to negotiate. The Mandalorian Commander, after ascertaining that she is neither of the Jedi he was sent to "arrest", calmly informs her that "My orders make no provision for negotiation." and pulls out his sidearm and shoots her down without warning. He then proceeds to announce that if the mad Jedi are not turned over promptly, he will order his fleet to vaporize the entire temple, and that anyone who tries to leave will be slaughtered without warning. Daala's response, on seeing the LIVE BROADCAST TO THE ENTIRE GALAXY, in which troops operating under her direct orders shot a teenaged girl down in cold blood and then threatened to massacre thousands of people? "Good. Now they should take me seriously." These words make her administration look like a terrorist organization.

**** That is a good example of why Daala is an evil ruler, but she crossed the Event Horizon ''long'' before that. She had standing orders from Tarkin himself to watch over a secret weapons facility situated in a black hole cluster, so when he died on the Death Star these orders were never replaced. So decades went by with she and her group of scientists completely unaware of outside events, such as the fall of the Empire, until Han Solo and some others stumble upon the facility. After realizing that her orders no longer matter, she takes her few Star Destroyers and sets about attacking civilian outposts and peaceful planets throughout the galaxy as a show of rebellion against the New Republic. Her targets? One is a completely unarmed and helpless outpost on Dantooine, simply because they had ties to the New Republic, and they are killed to the last citizen. Later on, she sees a Jedi of a particular species (ironically, the ''only'' member of that species that is even connected to the New Republic), decides that the entire planet is in bed with the Republic, and razes some of its major cities to the ground, killing countless civilians. She represents the worst that Imperials had to offer: completely amoral with a preference for killing civilians to make a point.

** [[The Thrawn Trilogy|Joruus C'baoth]] cements his status as an [[Ax Crazy]] [[Complete Monster|monster]] when he [[Mind Rape|Mind Rapes]] General Covell into a mindless extension of his own will, and reveals his plan to do the same to the rest of the Empire.

* In [[Michael Crichton]]'s (may God rest his soul) second-to-last novel ''Pirate Latitudes'', the Governor's new secretary, Robert Hacklett, {{spoiler|first takes over the island and throws Captain Hunter in prison after his return, but crosses the Horizon when he allows his wife to be raped, right in front of him.}} At least he gets his due when {{spoiler|said wife shoots him in the groin with a flintlock pistol.}}

** ''By Heresies Distressed:'' Orders the assassination of {{spoiler|Prince Hektor and his sixteen year old heir}} with the expectation that Charisian Emperor Cayleb take the blame.

** ''A Mighty Fortress:'' Upon learning of a Reformist movement within the Church of God Awaiting, orders the arrests everyone directly involved he can get to, their families, every member of their personal staffs, and ''their'' families.

**** So heinous is this particular Moral Event Horizon that the long-awaited declaration of Holy War against Charis is rendered an ''afterthought'' by comparison.

* In ''[[The Dresden Files]]'', Nicodemus Archleone comes off as [[Affably Evil]] and even portrays himself a [[Noble Demon]]...except {{spoiler|he gleefully tortured Shiro to death for the sole purpose of gaining more power.}} At this point, while he's still ''very'' affable and polite and erudite, there's no doubt that he is ''not'' sympathetic at all.

** A later book in the series reveals that he actually crossed the MEH ''centuries'' ago. By unleashing something terrible on the world. Even if you haven't read the books, you've probably heard of it. It's called the ''Black Plague''.

** This trope is notably averted by "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone. At first, he seems to be an irredeemable heartless mobster, who is willing to murder his enemies in cold blood. But every now and then, Marcone shows that there are lines that he is not willing to cross (e.g. hurting a child) and Harry realizes that Marcone can't simply be dismissed as a complete villain.

** In the short story ''Aftermath'', Murphy deals with what appears to be a mob of nasty fish-people called the Fomor. The lead Fomor callously tells it's [[Mook|Mooks]] to kill {{spoiler|Billy and Georgia's unborn child.}}

*** The villains of the book Arianna Ortega and the Red King easily cross the line soon after they are introduced. Arianna kidnaps Harry's daughter Maggie (while also having Maggie's foster family massacred) to use her in a sacrificial ritual. The reason she wants to do this? Harry's grandfather killed her asshole of a husband; the kicker is that Arianna didn't even love her husband (in fact she outright hated him.) She just felt that Harry and Ebeneezer had insulted her. She finally crosses it for good when she not only announces that she plans to go through with murdering a child in a few minutes while also saying that it's essentially "just business". Needless to say her [[Cruel and Unusual Death]] was VERY WELL DESERVED. Her Daddy the Red King manages to be even more repulsive; at first he appears to just be a Caligula style junkie (he even manages to help Harry out by ensuring that Harry not only gets to face Arianna before the sacrifice, but also ensures that the weapons to be used will be ones that will give Harry a fighting chance). Then, he reveals that it's essentially a massive act; he can actually speak perfect english which means that his junkie temper reactions to Harry's insults were all staged. He then tries to sacrifice Maggie himself just to gain the prestige Arianna would have gained. And he's the one who orchestrated the Red Court system, meaning that all of their atrocities (which include centuries, maybe even millenia) of slavery, murder, and torture of the people of South and Central America are his doing. Needless to say, the King's death at the hands of his own Bloodline Curse is also very satisfying. Both of these villains only show up in person in less then 100 pages (Arianna appears in two chapters, the Red King in five,) yet they still manage to be greater [[Complete Monster|Complete Monsters]] than even Tessa and Nicodemus.

* Count Olaf of ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' arguably crosses the line with his habit of abusing children (both mentally and physically), blackmailing, murders and attempted murders of numerous people (if we count in those who he burned to death), multiple hoaxes and kidnapping of at least three people, while one of them being about 2-years old toddler. And who knows what else he got up to before the books.

* Achilles from the ''[[Ender's Game|Ender's Shadow]]'' series is decidedly a [[Complete Monster]] who kills out of the most psychopathic need to prove his own superiority to his victims. He enters the Moral Event Horizon as soon as he kills Poke. But before he kills Poke, and to any character who doesn't know about his killings, he seems normal enough that the people worried about him killing someone appear to be the paranoid ones.

* In ''[[Rainbow Six]]'', one member of a group of Basque separatists seeking to spring prisoners from jail coldly murders a [[Littlest Cancer Patient]] on live TV. No one really objects, though Ding does give a perfunctory dressing-down, when one of the team's snipers puts a round through the killer's liver so that he bleeds painfully to death rather than taking a [[Instant Death Bullet]] [[Boom! Headshot!]].

* The [[Christopher Pike]] teen horror novel ''Chain Letter 2'' is all about invoking this trope. Each of the protagonists is given a task to complete which will push them over the horizon. If the task is not completed, the character in question will be killed, effectively giving each of them the choice between death and damnation. The tasks given ranged from the truly horrific ( {{spoiler|Kip's was to set his younger sister on fire and burn her right arm off}}) to the [[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?]] ( {{spoiler|Brenda cutting off her own finger and delivering it to one of the other characters was definitely a moment of [[Squick]], but it's hard to see it as something worthy of eternal damnation}}).

* Napoleon of ''[[Animal Farm]]'' has crossed the line several times, such as by {{spoiler|purging the farm of so-called traitors}}, but his ''definitive'' crossing of the Moral Event Horizon, the moment when you ''know'' he has become no better than Farmer Jones, the animals' original oppressor, is when he {{spoiler|sells Boxer, the most hardworking and loyal of all the animals on the farm, to the knacker because he is injured and no longer able to work}} in a cruel and heartless [[You Have Outlived Your Usefulness]] moment. At least in the [[Animated Adaptation]], {{spoiler|Napoleon gets his comeuppance big-time}}.

* In the [[Father Brown]] story ''The Sign of the Broken Swords'', we learn that {{spoiler|a brilliant but amoral general had betrayed his country, in wartime, [[Pride|so that he could appear wealthy to his daughter's beau]].}} And as if that weren't bad enough, {{spoiler|he murdered a subordinate [[He Knows Too Much|who knew too much]], and, when he saw he'd broken his sword, he [[The Uriah Gambit|led his men on an intentionally foolish charge]] to make said subordinate look like a casualty of war.}}

* In ''[[Star Trek: A Time to...|Star Trek: A Time to Kill]]'', Prime Minister Kinchawn crosses it rather early, after he uses his illegally-acquired weapons to shoot down 10 Klingon ships in orbit of Tezwa, killing 6,000 warriors. If this didn't represent his crossing the line, his casual willingness to see millions of Tezwans killed in a Klingon counterstrike, including his own family, certainly does. What makes it worse is his apparent self-image as a [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]], when he's really totally [[Drunk with Power]]. He sees his own children's death as merely a means to acquire more sympathy and thus more support and power, and seems to truly believe this is somehow reasonable.

* {{spoiler|Ivo Corbière}} from the ''[[Brother Cadfael]]'' novel ''Saint Peter's Fair'' has already stooped to murder to get his hands on {{spoiler|a list of Empress Maude's partisans to give to King Stephen, so that he, Corbière, can win an earldom at least}}. {{spoiler|Emma has it, and Corbière}} crosses the Horizon when he {{spoiler|threatens to rape her to get it--and enjoy doing so}}. The readers cheer when {{spoiler|Emma, in resisting him, knocks the brazier over and he burns to death.}}

** This is how Beringar regards {{spoiler|Renaud Borchier, alias Cuthred's betrayal of his liege in her darkest hour}} in ''The Hermit of Eyton Forest''.

** Gregor Clegane's MEH came before the start of the series, when he {{spoiler|murdered a baby by dashing its head on a wall, then raped the mother with the boy's brains still on his hands.}}

** One of the most chilling MEH's of the novels comes when we find out what happened to [[Psychopathic Manchild|Ramsay Bolton's]] wife: He locked her in a tower with nothing to eat. [[Nightmare Fuel|They found her with no fingers and blood around her mouth.]]

** In-universe, the two crimes that the people of Westeros see as crossing the moral even horizon are kinslaying and breaking [[Sacred Hospitality|guest-right]].

** Also played with early in Game of Thrones when Jaime Lannister {{spoiler|pushes the young Brandon Stark out of a window for witnessing him and his twin sister, the queen, having sex}}. This seems at the time to be a definite moral event horizon, but Jaime later becomes a gradually more sympathetic character after he undergoes extreme suffering over the course of the story, which prompts definite change in his moral character for the better. Whether he is likable after this and/or deserves forgiveness for his previous atrocities is a matter of opinion.

* The Libertines in ''120 Days Of Sodom'' are perhaps the most sadistic characters in classical literature. They kidnap several people, including their own daughters, and subject them to 120 days of violent, nightmarish psychological, physical, and sexual torture just [[For the Evulz]]. They go as far as to {{spoiler|disembowel pregnant women and maim their own daughters violently}}, and [[Moral Dissonance|the author treats the characters as heroes with minor quirks!]]

** The author in question is none other than the [[Marquis de Sade]], whose very name gave us the very word "sadism." And there's quite a bit more where that came from -- in the Sade novel ''Philosophy in the Bedroom'', Eugenie crosses the Horizon with the horrors that she, Dolmance and the other libertines visit upon her own mother, Madame De Mistival, who came to try to rescue her from her corruption, up to and including {{spoiler|having her raped by a man with syphillis and then ''sewing her genitals shut'' so that the polluted seed will be kept inside, which will most likely lead to her death}}.

* Alongside being killed and failing to save their planet, crossing this is one of the [[Animorphs]] greatest fears.

{{quote|Jake: "He's right. We have to win."

** A number of readers are convinced that the Vigilantes themselves crossed this in ''Vendetta''. John Chai, son of the Chinese ambassador to the USA, had drunkenly hit-and-run Barbara Rutledge and her unborn child, killing them both. He then pulled a [[Karma Houdini]] with [[Diplomatic Impunity]]. The Vigilantes decide that the best punishment for the guy is to ''skin him alive''! Certainly, he was a creep, and was being used by the author to personify [[Yellow Peril]], but his deeds simply did not warrant that level of [[Disproportionate Retribution]]! Not only that, but the Vigilantes just shrug off what they've done afterwards. The fact that they are basically [[Villain Protagonist|Villain Protagonists]] who become [[Karma Houdini|Karma Houdinis]] themselves, and the author expects readers to see them as heroes fighting injustice wherever they see them just makes it worse!

* In ''[[The Tomorrow Series]] ,'' {{spoiler|Major Harvey}} looks like nothing but a [[Jerkass]] at first...but rapidly speeds past the [[Moral Event Horizon]] when it's revealed that so far from being a member of [[La Résistance]], he's [[Les Collaborateurs|an enemy collaborator,]] before advancing to full [[The Quisling|Quislinghood]]. {{spoiler|He takes the lead in interrogating Ellie and her friends, doesn't protest at all when they're condemned to death, and it's no fault of his that they escaped.}} Nobody who reads the books feels sorry for [[Taking You with Me|his eventual fate.]]

** Caine probably crossed it when he was too apathetic to stop a bunch of coyotes from feeding on young children when all it would've taken to stop them was asking them nicely. An alternate one would be his treatment of Diana in ''Plague'', which, although not anywhere near as bad as what he'd done before, was [[Kick the Morality Pet|destroying the one thing that kept him human.]]

** Diana herself sees {{spoiler|cannibalizing Panda}} as her own MEH, but, seeing as it partially prompted her {{spoiler|[[Heel Face Turn]],}} possibly not.

* Invoked at several points in ''[[Literatuve/The Monk|The Monk]]'', but when Ambrosio makes his Deal with the Devil, it's obvious that according to the rules of the story, he's gone too far.

* In ''Legend'', [[Complete Monster|Commander Jamerson]] was already portrayed as someone suspicious, but it's only near the end of the first half of the story is where her true colors are revealed. Case in point, {{spoiler|She orders her men to murder Day's mother. ''While Day is watching.'' '''''[[I Lied|AFTER saying that no innocent people would be killed.]]''''' Is it any wonder that [[The Hero|June]] decides to save Day after this?}}