(no subject)

There’s this thing that happens a lot in fiction where you’ve got a hero who’s totally law-abiding, and a villain who’s evil and breaks the law, and a henchman who breaks the law but isn’t really evil. The henchman repents, but in-universe coincidences or poor judgment result in him dying, probably to save the hero. And it tends to be eye-rollingly obvious how hard the author is going out of their way to “punish” the henchman. It just seems arbitrary to me that the pure-hearted hero can’t die saving the henchman.