Discussion on Writing: What does it mean to be right?

Whenever you experience a story either it be from, movies, books, or video games there will come a point in the story where a truth is declared either it be justice prevail or something more nuanced like the meaning of determination and death. Usually how true it is becomes irrelevant as for the purposes of the story it being true rounds out the story. Doesn't really matter if Justice doesn't always prevail in real life, as its a story meant to inspire hope or be an escape so you can believe it truly does for just a moment more.

This is where my muse comes.

What of the stories where the characters are right but for the wrong reason? What of the stories where the characters don't deserve to be right?

The self-fulfilling prophecy is actually pretty close to this, but it's usually less explicit to what I mean so allow me to expand upon this more deeply. One story that comes to mind that most people should know that actually achieves what I'm talking about perfectly would be Arcane, the Netflix Original based on League of Legends just so we're clear and not mistaking Arcane for anything else, albeit not that many would. One old sage character, Heimer, has an extreme prejudice to magic and simply sees it as calamity waiting to happen. Viktor, however, is a cripple that has found himself at death's door and sees a potential solution to his illness through the recreation of magic.

When Viktor goes seeking help from the more experienced Elder, Heimer goes into a fit of rage and demands it all destroyed. Viktor is now stuck in a corner with unstable magic that he must control, or he dies, and because of Heimer's extreme refusal tragedy strikes. While working he accidentally triggers something within the magic he was working on that starts absorbing everything into it. Instead of Viktor getting killed however, a fellow scientist, Sky, was sacrificed instead and her corpse was able to stabilize the magic saving Viktor's life both short term and long term.

In this situation Heimer was right in his prejudice, but he was also wrong. He had no compassion for Viktor and sought no alternative solutions to try to save his life or provide support to prevent the tragedy, so he was right only because he let himself be right. That's what I mean by it being similar to the self-fulfilling prophecy. They set an expectation and act in a way believing its bound to happen, but their actions were the reason it happened at all.

I would love to see more stories follow this approach. To be right but for the wrong reasons can have so many meta character revelations where a kind person is suddenly found to be horribly unkind like with the case for Heimer. Then there are the possible revelations that the character's themselves could have, such as finding out the person they hated did something far, far worse than what they initially hated them for which would completely re-frame all previous encounters.

This kind of story beat isn't all that common and its not particularly hard to see why. It's easy to have that old switch-a-roo in personality by saying it was all deception, but its a lot harder to have that switch happen with the character not changing at all, since the switch isn't with them, but the audience perception. Chainsaw Man actually does a pretty good job at this