Quick pop quiz: what do all the following Marvel characters have in common- Black Widow, Hawkeye, Vision, Wonder Man, Prowler,Black Mamba, Diamondback, Asp, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver,Quicksand Thunderbolts, Airstrike and Seraph?
Answer: they all first appeared in the role of villains before becoming heroes(full disclosure: I'm writing a novel about the last two characters)? I am curious as to the reason they had a change of heart( or repentance/redemption if you wish to use religious language). What do you think?
Terry
Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were taken in by Magneto as teenagers while fleeing a mob and were easily manipulated into joining his terrorist group. None of them supposedly knew they were all related at the time. After a while, though, both left Magneto due to wanting to escape his abusive, dominating nature. Both have had spats of mental instability as well as longer tenures as Avengers.
Simon Williams was really nothing more than a white collar criminal, who embezzled funds from his own company. He was petty and jealous of others, such as Tony Stark, and conned into becoming Wonder Man by Baron Zemo and his "Masters of Evil" to do them in. As Wonder Man, however, he gained power to become a real hero and saw his "masters" as true villains who sought to kill the Avengers, not hold them for a ransom. He sacrificed his life to aid the Avengers and betrayed the Masters; he later got better, a few times.
Black Widow was a communist spy, manipulated and outright brain-washed into serving the Soviets in all sorts of nasty stuff; this partly why she is attracted to Bucky Barnes, formerly the equally brainwashed Soviet killer, Winter Soldier. In the 1960's, communism was bad and America was good, so eventually she defected.
Hawkeye was more a thief trying to impress Black Widow then a genuine Iron Man villain, so the shift to hero was more about realizing he was just not into her. That, and his old mentor the Swordsman was a criminal (so was Trick-Shot), so it was really about escaping bad environments.
Sandman I believe was eventually stated to be outright mentally ill, who had different aspects of his personality. One personality was a thug, burglar, and common criminal; the other was capable of attaching to others or even wanting to reform. Since exposure to Wizard's Id machine, however, Sandman's been in "villain" mode for years.
Diamondback basically fell in love with Steve Rogers/Captain America, fueling her siding with angels.
Vision was programmed with Wonder Man's brain patterns and thus absorbed his personality traits, which included the fact that he wasn't genuinely evil. This allowed the Avengers to appeal to him, and for him to turn on Ultron (and famously weep over the Avengers' generosity towards him). There was a time when Vision sought to take over all of the technology of the world via being corrupted by the ISAAC program and had his memory wiped, but he still chose to be a hero after that (albeit one who was distant towards Wanda after).
The Thunderbolts, or at least most of them, were led by Baron Zemo to pretend to be superheroes to fool the world before taking it over, but most of them genuinely enjoyed being heroes and later turned on Zemo (and I believe Fixer/Techno). Later on Zemo would have some anti-hero moments, although lord knows why.
Many of Osborn's 50 State Initiative recruits are just villains who are pretending to be heroes in order to better enrich themselves, either hoping the public forgives their past crimes (U-Foes) or going with new identities (Boomerang, who changed his guise to Outback).
