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Moral Event Horizon: Difference between revisions
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[[File:BlackholeDiagramSilly Laugh2 8331.png|frame|Once he crosses that red line, there's no turning back.]]
{{quote|''"Tarkin, if ever there was a shred of humanity in you or these twisted creatures of yours, it's dead now. ''[[Omnicidal Maniac|You're at war with life itself]]''. You are enemies of the universe... your Empire is doomed."''|'''Princess Leia Organa''', from the ''[[Star Wars]]'' radio drama, after Grand Moff Tarkin [[Earthshattering Kaboom|wipes out her home planet]].}}
Named for the boundary around a black hole from which there is no escape once crossed, this trope uses the black hole as a metaphor for evil; the '''Moral Event Horizon''' refers to the first evil deed to prove a particular character to be irredeemably evil.
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Note the word ''irredeemably''. It is a demonstration of ''permanent'' evil; as in, the first evil deed whose role in the story is to tell us they will always be evil.
While they may not have had a term such as this to define it, many authors clearly recognized it. [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Stranger in
Obviously, it follows from the definition that a character can't cross this boundary more than once. Crossing it implies going from redeemable to irredeemable, and that's it; the other way around contradicts the definition. Note that this does not mean their morality is always decreasing after crossing this; a character can cross this, then become much more horrible than they were when they crossed it, then become just a little better than they were after that, but they will never, ever commit an act that redeems them entirely.
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A character whom performs an act that should make them irredeemable but somehow gets away with it is a [[Karma Houdini]].
{{noreallife|calling [[Real Life]] people evil is [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment|an extremely bad idea]].}}
== Compare with ==
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* [[Jumping Off the Slippery Slope]]: A character skips over [[Slowly Slipping Into Evil|several progressively darker shades of gray]] and goes straight to the Moral Event Horizon.
* [[This Is Unforgivable!]]: An in-universe acknowledgment that the Moral Event Horizon has been crossed.
== Contrast with ==
* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?]]
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{{examples on subpages}}
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Spoilered Rotten]]
[[Category:Tropes of Legend]]
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[[Category:YMMV Trope]]
[[Category:Villains]]
▲[[Category:Moral Event Horizon]]
[[Category:Depressing Tropes]]
[[Category:Character Derailment Tropes]]
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