Damn, it's almost like the character would have to be truly disgusted, to the point losing faith in the institution, to be willing to throw away all of that time and effort. It sounds like it would not be an easy decision for him, and as such, would have a crisis of conscience moment that explores his morals, idealation of the military, and disillusionment there in. Sounds like a moment that would cause a visit to earlier point in the story to read them in a new light. Unfortunately it's completely unrealistic to have a moment like that in a story. Truly mental dissonance has never been done in fiction because no one would believe such a thing could happen.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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One of the most important facets of my setting was that there WERE more fictional races in the world, but the human kingdom had expanded and intentionally wiped out other races and all traces of them; most of the humans at this point were hundreds of years past those atrocities; most humans at this point have never even met non-humans (not that there were zero fictional races), let alone engage in a current genocide against them; humanity's supremacist/nationalist nature meant they didn't see non-humans as people (even the captain STARTS OUT not considering the child a true person), but a few were genuinely shook with what they were told to do, while others engaged in it gleefully, taking trophies as well. The nature of the human kingdom is the driving force behind both the antagonist and the protagonist.
The captain towards the end of the story begins to realize humanity's stance on non-humans can't possibly be right (but he's not the protagonist; he gets killed off by the antagonist instead). The child he raised starts out violently racist against the non-humans they meet, but slowly begins to realize they're just traumatized by the ill treatment they got at the hands of the captain (he wasn't precisely good to her; he still hadn't thought of her as a person at that point yet) and brainwashed against other races.
What a bunch of fascist freaks, the soldier who's disgusted by their orders and becomes a rebel is a common trope throughout fiction that touches on war
"it takes a long time and a lot of effort" yeah almost like there are consequences for disobeying immoral orders, as if there should be stakes for characters and the choices they make, god forbid we have a plot
What a bunch of fascist freaks
This is the part that got me the most! Like the guy was ordered to commit a genocide and he was genuinely shocked and disgusted as any ordinary human should be; him leaving the military is supposed to reflect well on his character! Like, was I talking to military brats or something?
"it takes a long time and a lot of effort" yeah almost like there are consequences for disobeying immoral orders
Doing the right thing and paying a high price for it is something we see in real life, with people who know they'll pay a high price choosing to do it anyway, like Aaron Bushnell who literally killed himself in the most painful way possible, or the (two?) people who sabotaged an arms plant that was making weapons for Israel KNOWING there would be high legal consequences (although obviously this being years later, I'm not saying these people should've influenced their thinking, just that it IS a thing that happens).
remind me not to solicit a writing forum for feedback on characterization of people who aren't sniveling cowards.
your original concept was literally a foundational piece of
Andor Spoiler
Luthen's backstory arc.
anyway, even outside of fiction and heroic principles, people legit leave the military officer corps all the damn time. it's very "up or out" and the higher you are, the less slots are availble for ascent, so the overwhelming majority at each rank are pushed to mandatory separation after a set amount of time at that rank if they aren't promoted.
so not only is that wroters forum full of absolute cowards, they are also just plain incorrect about hierarchical organizations.
Ironically if you wrote a character who's only mildly upset at genocide and has zero intention of quitting the military over it because they openly don't consider it worth it, they'd STILL get upset (because they want war criminals portrayed heroically)
These were people who had SOME members who wrote stories critical of colonialism and yet they're most likely the 'they were just following orders' type people
I've definitely written stuff that's very against imperialism and a lot of Western power structures, but I tend to portray the people involved in those systems as the jackbooted thugs they are, rather than have them realise the harm they're doing and heel-face turn. They're usually the villains, not the protagonists or good people in any way. They're eitherr a powerful antagonist, or a nameless mob of evil. I suspect these people would be just as upset if not more so by that.
I tend to portray the people involved in those systems as the jackbooted thugs they are, rather than have them realise the harm they're doing and heel-face turn
For myself I needed a way for the badly injured MC to be saved by someone who had a good reason to be in the area, and someone who had the skills to teach them how to fight; in light of the bootlickers jumping down my throat on the matter, I instead made the captain a woman from an aristocratic lineage (the captain was himself of aristocratic background) who was in the area hunting and decided to follow the troops into this valley. She still starts out a 'Bill Maher classic liberal' and eventually towards the end the protagonist fights them off and leaves; the woman after having much hardship trying to raise the MC in a racist fashion and then being shown mercy by MC and allowed to live much later on (at that point she was trying to kill the MC) gets major cracks in her world view.
For myself I struggle to imagine large groups of people as cruel; I know it happens, I understand it intellectually but I can't understand it....emotionally? Israelis for example, for whom the majority are of the mindset that it's okay to kill Gazan babies because 'they'll grow up to become terrorists' is genuinely beyond my ability to comprehend; I cannot empathize with people like that, it's genuinely hard for me to think of any large group of people being like....well, Israelis. Ironically the human kingdom in my setting is absolutely Nazi fascist, but I don't understand Nazism emotionally nearly well enough to write them that closely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Haitians#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valery_Sablin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
And of course, the October revolution was carried on the back of soldiers.
It is worth pointing out that a captain quitting in disgust is rare. To become an officer with any rank you have to at least be comfortable with being part of the machinery of your country's military and the many crimes in which it is likely involved. But it does happen.
A real lack of imagination (and also knowledge of the real world) from that writing forum
When I mentioned this on a writing forum I was on, people got upset and everyone rebuked the idea that the captain would quit his position and defy orders because......it takes a long time and a lot of effort to become a captain.
I don't know if the rise of ultra-cynical "realist" prestige TV is to blame here, but I'm going to blame it nonetheless
These people hafe clearly never been exposed to sci fi. That shit happens all the fucking time in sci fi. Its a huge part of Babylon 5
Honestly the part that got me the most was how they couldn't imagine someone would be utterly disgusted and aghast at committing genocide that they'd just up and quit; is this how they imagine heroic troops to be?
In addition to the other examples, this is also Fred Johnson's exact backstory in The Expanse, except he was a Colonel, not a Captain.
Ignore them and write your story, a well written portrayal of a fictional captain disobeying orders and sacrificing their career for the sake of doing the right thing just might inspire someone real to take similar action
It takes a long time and effort to become a captain.
That's not true. These people live in an alternative dimension.
In imperial societies, you become a captain based on your imperial lineages and how much ties you have with it. It's possible for a high ranking member of such a lineage to become a traitor to the cause, as well, we have a famous example of such a case: Mao Tse-tung
you become a captain based on your imperial lineages and how much ties you have with it.
That actually correlates exactly with this captain; he was from an aristocratic line close to the royal family
Yep it happens a lot! And a lot of these dynasties are non-aligned to anyone, other than themselves and whoever lets them dominate over others.
Like here in the Baltiks a lot of the far-right have ties tracing back to Russian/Germanic empires. Something not mentioned often, look how they will also destroy monuments dedicated to USSR, they will erase history, even when the worker being honored is someone who is of local ethnicity and spoke their local language, but won't touch the foreign Kaiser/Tsar buildings. They won't rename the streets named after pro-imperial Russians, they are okay with using the names of Aristocratic German families.
These actions make no sense and I think it's why people get so emotional, over being exposed to these contradictions. I myself am kind of a contradiction and I'm already getting off track so to cut it short, my parents were arguing about me from the moment I was born, because I was going to have a rather common Russian sounding name, until paternal grandparents found out and they lost their shit, threatened to take away all property if they don't change it. Yes, they also had ties to Aristocrats...
Anyways learning about Marxism made a lot of things click into places.
Crying and pissing my pants because I watched FFIV's opening
Me too, but it was because I was babby when that game came out.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
lol that was literally a plot point in a recent One Piece chapter
Can I talk my shit again?
I have no doubt that the forum dwellers were a bunch of dorks. I just want to talk about narrative structure because it's all the rage in my writing group and I want to synthesize something out of it.
Whenever a character needs a dramatic change of heart we go on and on and on about how we have to understand their internal state when they're making the decision - it can never be a play by play until after the decision is made. It doesn't need to be the amount of time passing, but we need to know why they're personally so disgusted. But then I also get a lot of flak when it's someone in only in their mind because a character is almost always more interesting when they are in relation to other people. 
isn't just sadly smoking because he feels lonely; he's sadly smoking after hearing someone talk about him. So, in your story, if a superior is there talking shit or an underling gets emotionally overwhelmed and/or asks a resonating question before the change of heart it hits a little harder. It's at its best when it's combination thoughts and relationships, especially if you can show the emotions/thoughts through something like what Sanji's doing.
I think you made a good decision doing some tooling of the character. At the very least, show him to be sympathetic to the plight of the targets of military might earlier in the narrative (or later on through flashbacks if you're fancy like that). It's technically possible that this is his first awakening of empathy, but it doesn't serve narrative structure well to not lead up to a big outburst. Part of being a fantasy novel isn't just being called to adventure, but also being thrust into it with little recourse because part of the authorship is letting the audience imagine what it's like being forced into adventure instead of having to choose it for oneself. In the same way, if your audience really expects this captain to have emotional attachment to his years of military service, you should spend some detail having him acknowledge the time he spent. Maybe he can tell his superior where they can shove their commendations. The final thing is that such a decision demands some kind of sacrifice. It gives the moment a little more oomph to have to sacrifice or lose something at that moment. Maybe he vows to atone for all the horror he caused for so long. Maybe he brings a lower rank soldier with him. Maybe he kidnaps one and doesn't know what to do with them. Maybe he has to kill a soldier on the way out so there's no going back.
The issue here is that the novel starts off at the genocide; the lady (at this point the captain has been changed to a woman from an aristocratic lineage who was out hunting and followed the troops into the valley; she's known to the person who ordered the attack so he doesn't care that she's tagging along) voices her displeasure at the attack and even says it's ridiculous that all these troops, both foot soldiers and highly trained and well armored hussars are being used to kill a small village of creatures; she finds the child, feels sorry for it, and smuggles the MC out.
Most of the novel the lady is living with the MC and it follows the MC's growth and their toxic relationship; the lady starts out seeing the MC as basically something above a pet but leagues below human, but the MC's reactions akin to a human (because the MC is obviously a person) confounds the lady because despite the MC understanding words, she's not becoming blindly obedient like her dogs. Getting over that hurdle of seeing the MC as a person takes basically almost the entirety of the story and only happens after the MC defies her by leaving, and then later when the lady comes back to try and murder the MC and gets beaten and left to live because the MC still loves her despite their toxic relationship and that's when the the lady's world view is finally fully changed.
One of the things I want to show about my setting is just how inhumane the people of the setting's views are of non-humans; the lady here is herself cruel to any non-humans she encounters, even if not murderously so, because she is at her core a supremacist, but she's also a huge pet lover and initially intended for the MC to be a new pet, something different to what she's raised up to this point (although THIS aspect came with the rewrite of the character; the former character, the captain, was simply disgusted with the genocide and this is why he rescued the MC).
it doesn't serve narrative structure well to not lead up to a big outburst
I think the rewrite of the character away from being military made this easier; her rescuing the MC isn't a major act as even if she'd been discovered to be smuggling the child out it wouldn't have been treated heavy-handedly by the military given she's of noble lineage.
The lady, while beloved by the MC, is decidedly NOT someone the reader is intended to empathize with; she IS cruel, unintentionally abusive, and a fascist (she believes in the human cause and sees the exterminations in the past in a heroic light). Her change of heart on non-humans comes solely from her relationship to the MC.
Writing forums can be extremely hit or miss for advice unfortunately. Sometimes you get some really helpful stuff, sometimes you get "This isn't exactly the way I would do it, which means it's terrible writing and you should rewrite the whole thing to cater to my personal tastes."
The biggest thing I would look at with this example you gave: Has the captain shown that they are a person who puts their personal morality above "duty" at any point in the story before this? If this is someone who respects the chain of command above all else, them having a crisis of conscience could feel a little out of nowhere. But if it is foreshadowed effectively and fits how the character would act, I don't see the problem.
That response seems a little strange tbh, like someone too focused on TVTropes and not how actual humans engage with media, and they hate the "cliche" of the good guy protagonist doing the right thing despite personal sacrifice. I've known a few "writers" like that, anything they produce is pure self-congratulatory drek, just full of uninteresting bland characters who serve more as a vessel for the author to vent about things they hate in storytelling rather than actually trying to tell a compelling story. I'm probably reading a lot into your anecdote though.