ladyloveandjustice:

Actually, thinking about Scar and how he showed pretty consistent values throughout his entire arc despite how radically he changed makes me hit on part of what makes a character having a heel face turn believable. 

Scar is shown, in flashback, to have always been someone who is wholly and deeply devoted to his community, deeply disciplined and devoutly religious- serious, passionate and a little unable to chill, to the point his brother makes fun of him for it. His understanding of his religion means he’s against violence and distrustful of alchemy.

Then boom, he loses his community. What he’s devoted his whole life to is gone. So, as a passionate, devoted person his thought process is that he has nothing left to live for, except wholly throwing himself into avenging his community. He decides he will set aside his religion to do this, by turning to violence and alchemy, but thinks he’s damning himself by doing this and decides he’s a worthless being not even worthy of a name. He wants to die, and he wants to suffer, so he does what’s most likely to cause the most pain for him.

 Thus, we see that Scar’s relationship with his religion is tied deeply to his community- once the community is gone, he can’t bring himself to worship. He still believes, and can’t help invoking God a lot, but ultimately he becomes disconnected.

It’s only when he sees there’s hope for rebuilding his community, that there are other Ishvalans out there trying to enact change in different ways, that his direction changes once again. It’s also because the definition of his community expands a bit- he starts to care about and empathize with a couple of people who aren’t Ishvalan too, most prominently May, He also comes to feel he owes a debt to other people outside his Ishvalan community, namely the Rockbells. 

Ishval is part of the country, so he needs to protect the country, so he needs to ally with people he doesn’t necessarily like, and hey, a couple of non-Ishvalans he cares about exist and (like May) may be struggling in ways he can relate to, so. He has a community, or hope for one, again, so he does what he sees as the most effective way to protect it. Suffering and dying actually wont do that. So now his connection to his religion strengthens again, and he reconciles alchemy with his religion because alchemy is pretty essential to rebuilding that community…

Basically, with Scar, it’s not someone who flips a switch from “good” to “evil” (he was never wholly either of those), but someone who always had sympathetic desires and values and his perspective shifted on how best to act on those values as various things impacted him. 

It’s similar with Zuko- at the core of his actions is always his desire to be loved by his family and to help the Fire Nation- but his definition of his family, and his view on how best to help his people, shifted and expanded as experience changed him.

I think that’s really important for a transformative/redemption arc- that the antagonist HAS sympathetic values and desires from the start, but maybe expresses them in a harmful way, only for that to change as their perspective changes. It feels a lot more consistent and natural than a complete personality overhaul. You need that hook.