How Come? ...

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Then I suppose you could enjoy the irony that the most irredeemable of people wind up helping to save the day.

I don't think Angus' life is going to be pleasant, despite having arguably the best human ship in the galaxy. He can't go to any illegal port (without paying huge bribes to the locals) and the possibility still exists that the Amnion might risk an incursion into human space to hunt him down--they still have their near-c experimental gap drives they have been working on. He can't show up at any major human port or he'll come to the attention of the new GCES cops.

His only real option is to head away from Amnion space and find out what's on the other side of human space in that direction. If he is lucky, he'll find a habitable planet that has either not been colonized or is a planet from a civilization that has never heard of humans. Without some other source of food, he'll most likely be dead in a few months, anyway.

[drew]

Then I suppose you could enjoy the irony that the most irredeemable of people wind up helping to save the day.

Well, yes and no.
I'm glad it was Angus that saved the day. Hell yeah, he should have saved the day and then some.

But its not like he broke out of prison, and tried to right the wrongs in the galaxy. He really had no choice in the matter.
Dios could have used any criminal, or any non-criminal he wanted. Angus was more or less just a good choice.

The story writing is great, the way that he ended up having to work with Nick, and Morn. I liked that. THAT was good irony.

DOn't get me wrong, the GAP is one of my very favorite series' I've ever read. I just wish that Angus, at the end, was a little bit remorseful for all the trouble and pain he had caused.

[Zarathustra]

I'm glad Angus didn't go all weepy and contrite. I think he had an Angus-style ending that fit his character. He went out in style.

You don't have to think of him as a redeemed villian. Just think of him as a badass villian. Not all the bad guys get what's coming to them. In fact, a morally ambiguous ending that keeps fans debating for years later is much better than a neat and tidy ending where everyone gets what they deserve.

[Orlion]

I'm glad Angus didn't go all weepy and contrite. I think he had an Angus-style ending that fit his character. He went out in style.

You don't have to think of him as a redeemed villian. Just think of him as a badass villian. Not all the bad guys get what's coming to them. In fact, a morally ambiguous ending that keeps fans debating for years later is much better than a neat and tidy ending where everyone gets what they deserve.

That's the strength in Donaldson's work, I think. You get the idea that something important is being said... but what, exactly, is it? You find out by talking with different people that it is different things.

[singingstone]

I agree with all the points listed here, especially those of Zarathustra, Drew, and Savor Dam.

Obviously Good deeds don't cancel out bad ones, and he may have had no choice when he started as a cyborg, but he did change. As he dealt with his feelings of abuse he started making better choices. His violence was a force for good near the end. His euthanasia of Norna Fastner at the end was brilliant! He said "I'm not a gentleman. I don't know what honor is. I don't even know your name. But I wouldn't leave a @#$%ing Amnioni like this."

That to me said it all. One of the biggest sonofabitches in the Galaxy wouldn't leave her like that! He might of in The Real Story, but he wouldn't by the end. Her condition horrified him in a way that appealed to his own helplessness as a child.

I too felt raw by the fact that he got away, but I have learned to let it go. He is not safe in Human or Amnioni space, so I would like to think that he left for uninhabited space, effectively removing any threat of him in the future. That is the purpose of Prison, not punishment.

[singingstone]

By the way, I love your explanation of the Badass Factor, Zarathustra!

[CovenantJr]

I don't feel that Angus was in any way redeemed by his actions. Ok, he took out Holt Fasner. So what? Holt's physical death was just the icing on the cake of bringing down the edifice he had built for himself. Even if it was more than that, Angus didn't do it because it was right or just. Doing something that coincidentally happens to be just doesn't get you any sort of pass.

Having said that, I don't have any problem at all with Angus getting off scot-free. Maybe he deserved more punishment than he received, but that's how life goes sometimes - and it's certainly how the Gap goes. Almost no one got what they deserved, whether good or bad. Though Holt's regime was over, the situation that followed it was scarcely better. Humanity wasn't ready to face the Amnion. I appreciate the absence of a neat conclusion where everything works out for the best, and Angus' freedom is part of that.

Oddly enough, the only example of someone not getting what they deserved that actually bothered me, and still bothers me now, was Nick. For all that he was an awful, awful person, he deserved better than the end he received. He was so pitiful by then, and yet at the same time managed to pull off a classic Nick manoeuvre by boarding the ship singlehanded. This combination left me feeling like I wanted the poor, miserable bastard to at least get the one thing that had driven him all his life.

Anyway, to get back to the original question, I think the key to making Angus less objectionable than his actions merit lies in his complexity and change. At the outset he's barely more than an animal. By the end, he's a huge mass of confusion and contradiction - pain, cruelty, sadness, spite, violence, fear. He's not a neat package; personality/character-wise, he's all over the map - just like a real person.

[Avatar]

...just like a real person.

Good post.

--A