Moral Event Horizon/Literature: Difference between revisions
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** On the other hand, Victor crosses it simply by ''allowing'' the poor nanny to hang for a murder he knows she's innocent of. Sure, nobody would believe him if he told what really happened, but he doesn't even ''try'' to suggest the poor woman was framed.
* 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.
** In the Akallabêth, after the Silmarillion but before the events of the [[The Lord of the Rings]], Sauron crosses it when he engineers the destruction of Númenor by corrupting its king; like Morgoth, after this action he can never again take an appearance that is not evil.
* Saruman in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' crosses the [[Moral Event Horizon]] at the very end, when does everything possible to destroy the Shire out of pure spite. Up until that point, he'd done plenty of awful things, but had continually been offered (and refused) opportunities for redemption. The destruction of the Shire shows that he's irrevocably fallen from a wizard who was once great and wise to a bitter man with nothing left but hatred and the desire to harm others as much as possible.
* 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.
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