Exchange of Realities

If you’re like most ex-protagonist recruits, you’ve come from either a heroic ensemble or a long-standing rivalry. This means that your former teammates, or that idiot you’ve been trying to surpass, will come and try to get you back. In your inevitable confrontation, you will have several advantages. One: Unless you have done something to irritate them beyond the improbable forgiveness shown by protagonists everywhere, they will be trying not to kill you. Two: You are probably more intelligent than they are. (After all, isn’t it always the smart ones who understand?) Three, due to the likely upgrade you will have received upon joining our organization, you will know more about their abilities and tactics than they do about yours. You’d think this would be a recipe for success, wouldn’t you?

It should be. But ex-protagonists like you almost invariably make the same few mistakes and lose your advantages.

One is pre-emptive failure. This is usually done by not being decisive about how to deal with the team when leaving. A good departing protagonist does one of two things: either leaves everyone alive or kills everyone who might interfere with him. You need to choose which early, and stick to that choice. Just killing one of them will not only remove the partial immunity you get from being an old friend of theirs, it will reverse it. (See the Vicious Axiom: Once one member of a protagonist group dies or appears to die, narrative causality directs the determination of the survivors towards the destruction of the killer, increasing their tendency towards lethal conflict and their accuracy with their chosen weapons.)

In short, know what you’re doing.

Now, let’s assume you left them alive. You’ll probably have to fight them; narrative causality pretty much demands it. This is where most rookies from the good side are lost, for one important reason: they fight like good guys. Good guys don’t really have self-preservation instincts: between narrative causality and plot immunity, it ends up being favorable for them to fight to the death. What this means is that when they turn to our side, they still fight like good guys, continuing the battle long past the point of no return, when what they should have done was choose an objective, strike, continue the fight until it was clear that the objective was either done or too difficult with that approach, and withdraw. Recurring villains have special techniques; learn them. Second, they choose battlegrounds the way the good guys do, which is to say by letting the opponent do it for them. You’re a villain now—you can make them come to you! Think tactically!

Then there’s what happens when you come in contact. Often, your former teammates or whiny rival will hit you with the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. And I don’t just mean the Gooshy Generalized Healing Technique or the Clearly Cheating Special Move Pulled From Their Nether Regions, though they’ll probably try those too. I mean that unnervingly effective and utterly dirty technique that sweetness-and-light heroes seem to naturally grasp. They call it the Power of the Love and Friendship. We call it emotional blackmail. (So much for heroic honesty!) The important thing, when that technique is being turned on you, is to see it for what it is. To know that it’s just their attempt to sugarcoat a vicious social pressure strategy. And then, once your superior understanding frees you, turn around and do the same thing to them. At best, you’ll make heavy inroads towards converting them. At worst, you can give them moral crises with an “Are we really so different?” moment. Either way, you can probably get them out of your hair long enough to make a clean getaway.

They say evil will always win because good is dumb. Embrace the intelligence. Use it. It’ll make the former teammate issue a lot less dangerous to you.