Victim, Aggressor, Savior

In the last (main) issue, we established that stories shape culture. The narrative structures we absorb become the lenses through which we interpret the world. Today, I want to get specific about one of the most powerful of those structures: the drama triangle.

You’ve seen this dynamic everywhere, although you’ve never had a label you can stick on it. It sneaks into every novel you’ve ever loved, into the news stories you watch, and into the vast majority of interactions you have with others IRL. It’s one of the oldest shapes in storytelling (and the foundation of the Hero’s Journey), and it maps onto our pyramidal social structure with uncomfortable precision.

Let me introduce you to its three roles.

The drama triangle (adapted here from psychologist Stephen Karpman’s original model and filtered through Rhonda Mccrimon’s shamanistic lens — because that’s who introduced me to the model) requires exactly three roles to function. First, there is the aggressor: the one who perpetrates harm, who threatens the established order, who wants something badly enough to take it by force. Second, there is the victim: the one who suffers at the aggressor’s hands, who is acted upon rather than acting, whose helplessness is what makes the whole situation feel urgent. And third, there is the savior: the one who intervenes, who takes on the aggressor in order to protect the victim, who shoulders the moral weight of the story.

In a pyramid, these roles have a natural home. The aggressor sits at the top, or is fighting to get there at the expense of others. The victim is at the base, being crushed. The savior is somewhere in the middle, climbing toward the top so they can depose the aggressor and save the victim (notice, both the aggressor and savior are headed to the same place, but are fueled by different motivations). Often, the savior’s reward for fixing things is a more permanent place at the top of the pyramid. In this way, the triangle serves as a sort of convection current that allows the aggressor and savior to exchange places while reinforcing the overall structure of society. The triangle doesn’t challenge the shape of the pyramid. It asks who gets to stand where inside it.

“The triangle doesn’t challenge the shape of the pyramid. It asks who gets to stand where inside it.”

This is the trap. The triangle feels like a story about justice. It’s a story about the redistribution of pyramid-shaped power.

In Issue 1, I mentioned billionaires who announce they’ll fix world hunger and then break their promise so they can spend twice that sum on a vanity space launch. I deliberately left something unsaid there, so let me say it now.

When a billionaire positions themselves as the person who will solve a global crisis, they are stepping into the savior role. The world — or some portion of it — is cast as victim. Some force (poverty, inequality, institutional failure) is cast as aggressor. And the billionaire, with their resources and their vision, is going to fix it.

This is a drama triangle, and it has the same pyramidal structure that has created such systemic oppression. A savior, by definition, holds power over the victim they’re saving. The act of saving someone only entrenches the power differential. Instead of flattening the hierarchy, it reinforces the structure while claiming to be good. A savior does not empower those at the bottom of the pyramid. Even the most well-meaning, moral, conscientious savior still communicates that the victim had no hope of dislodging themselves from the situation. They still say, whether they mean to or not: you needed me. I didn’t have to help you, but I chose the higher road and now deserve thanks for my trouble. It lends moral authority to the very structure that created the imbalance of power in the first place.

“Even the most well-meaning savior still communicates that the victim had no hope of dislodging themselves from the situation… It lends moral authority to the very structure that created the imbalance of power in the first place.”

This is also why communities — not individuals — ought to bear the responsibility for systemic problems. Not because any individual is villainous for trying to help, but because the savior role is a pyramid role. It requires a victim below and an aggressor to oppose. The moment you step into that shape, you’ve accepted the pyramid’s power dynamic as natural and necessary.

Fantasy loves an aggressor. And not just any aggressor — fantasy loves an Evil Overlord: an aggressor so thoroughly stripped of redeeming qualities that opposing them becomes mandatory. Chancellor Palpatine. Voldemort. Jadis, the White Witch. Sauron, whose physical form has dissolved entirely into the symbol of his will to dominate.

These characters work because they make the savior’s job simple. When the aggressor is pure evil — when they want eternal slavery, the destruction of all free peoples, or the death of everyone who isn’t like them — there is no moral complexity in opposing them. Violence applied to a bad guy prevents more violence. The savior is justified. The pyramid is defended.

But notice what’s been done to make this work: the aggressor has been stripped of their humanity. As far as we know, Jadis spends all her time turning people to stone in her ice castle. She doesn’t go out for drinks with friends, she doesn’t volunteer on college campuses, she doesn’t bake cakes for her mum on Sundays. She is the evil queen, and she spends her whole life doing evil queen things. She has become nothing but the role she plays in reinforcing society’s structure. In stories, bad guys aren’t really people. They’re characters.

In real life, all bad guys are human. That distinction matters. Every aggressor is a person. They have people who love them. They have histories that shaped them. They have fears and hungers that make their actions legible, even when those actions are indefensible. Dehumanizing anyone — even someone who has done real harm — is the slipperiest of slippery slopes. And dehumanizing someone because they disagree with you is a slope that leads directly to a fractured society.

“In stories, bad guys aren’t really people. They’re characters. In real life, all bad guys are human. That distinction matters.”

What happens, then, when political narratives frame real human beings as Evil Overlords? Some people decide to step into the story. After all, if you’ve correctly identified the aggressor, and if violence applied to an aggressor prevents further harm, then the logic of the triangle compels you toward action. It’s as natural and binding as the gravity that maintains the pyramidal playing field.

Remember that gravity is not constant everywhere. People may leap higher on the moon than here on Earth, but place a human being in Jupiter’s grasp and they’ll be crushed into jelly before they recognize their predicament. Likewise, some of the tropes we hold dear create stronger gravitational fields than others. One of the strongest — and most common — is the Chosen One trope.

We see it everywhere. Sometimes a character is special because of their bloodline — their parents were powerful witches or wizards, they’re royalty, they were the subject of a prophecy. Sometimes they fill a special religious role or belong to a particular race that carries latent power. The specifics vary endlessly, but the structure is always the same: this person is destined. Only they can overcome the approaching trials. Their specialness is both their burden and their justification.

The Chosen One trope works, in part, because everyone has something particular about them — some gift, some perspective, some stubborn capacity that is uniquely theirs. But now hold that trope up against the backdrop of white supremacy, nationalism, and identity-based politics. Each person raised to believe that their identity confers special status — that their group is chosen, their culture is the pinnacle, their way of life is worth protecting at any cost — has already been living inside a Chosen One narrative. Worse, in a world where systems have been designed to reinforce that privilege, the story keeps confirming itself.

And then comes the Dark Night of the Soul.

In story theory, the Dark Night of the Soul is the moment before victory when everything seems lost — when the mentor dies, when the bad guy wins, when the protagonist has nothing left but their will to continue. Aslan is killed on the Stone Table. Dumbledore falls from the tower. Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. Luke Skywalker is electrocuted by Palpatine. In this tradition — especially in stories rooted in Christian narrative structure — suffering at the hands of evil is a signal of virtue. You endure it, you sacrifice through it, you allow the suffering to purify whatever remained of the un-special, and you transform into the most powerful version of the qualities that lent you disproportionate power to begin with. Through suffering, you achieve victory.

“You endure it, you sacrifice through it, you allow the suffering to purify whatever remained of the un-special, and you transform into the most powerful version of the qualities that lent you disproportionate power to begin with. Through suffering, you achieve victory.”

In real life, this looks like someone treating a prison sentence as martyrdom. It looks like capitalizing on being the target of criticism or cancellation. It looks like spinning every obstacle into evidence of persecution — and therefore into evidence that the cause is righteous, that the fight must continue, that the ends justify the means.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been wondering how you fit into the savior role. You’ve examined the times where you’ve advocated for change, where you’ve helped those less fortunate than you, where you’ve sacrificed for the greater good. And that self-reflection is essential. But here’s the hard truth: a savior is also an aggressor and an aggressor is also a savior. The same can be said of victims. The difference is spin.

We want to see ourselves as saviors. That seems to be the least-bad of the roles.

It’s not.

A person who commits an act of political violence and goes to prison can paint themselves as the savior who struck a blow against an aggressor — suffering now as the price of protecting the victim. They may appeal to others, saying I saved you only to be victimized by the same system I saved you from. It’s your turn to become the savior. The party on the receiving end of that violence can point to their suffering as evidence that a larger, amorphous aggressor is making victims of them — and use that victimhood to justify a forceful response in turn. Both sides are inside the same triangle. Both sides feel entirely justified. And as these cycles continue, the pyramid strengthens alongside deepening polarization.

This is why politicians can deploy these tropes so effectively. They’re not inventing anything. They’re reaching for patterns that stories have already installed in us — patterns we recognize at a gut level, patterns that feel like truth, patterns we enact every day on a minor scale. Scientists have observed that human beings think in narrative structures. We experience our lives as stories in which we are the protagonist. So when a political narrative hands us a clean drama triangle — here is your aggressor, here is who they’re victimizing, here is what a savior would do — it feels like righteousness instead of propaganda.

“Both sides are inside the same triangle. Both sides feel entirely justified. And as these cycles continue, the pyramid gets harder.”

I don’t have clean answers to political violence. I don’t think anyone does. But the drama triangle is not a trap without exits. In fact, it has many similarities with an invisible labyrinth. While the walls remain invisible, attempts to solve it will drag you deeper. But render the limits visible and you can begin to solve the labyrinth.

The first exit is naming. When you feel yourself being pulled into a role — when a narrative is casting you as victim, or when outrage is inviting you to become a savior, or when you find yourself becoming an aggressor — name it, even if only to yourself. The triangle operates best in the dark. Recognizing the structure doesn’t make you cynical or passive, it illuminates the labyrinth’s walls so you can stop being drawn toward the center — and, crucially, it frees you to step into a different shape entirely. By recognizing the pattern, you enable yourself to make room for something else.

The second exit is boundaries — and I mean this in the specific, unglamorous sense of knowing what you are and aren’t willing to take responsibility for. Boundaries clarify where you end and another begins.

The savior role is seductive because it feels virtuous. But there is a meaningful difference between helping someone and saving them. Helping is lateral — it happens between people who each retain their own agency. Saving is vertical — it requires one person to be lifted by another, which means one person must remain below. A boundary isn’t a wall that keeps people out. You cannot give and take as equals while one of you is being held up by the other.

The third exit is the kind of communication that refuses to treat the person across from you as a character. It’s easy to engage with someone’s role. It’s harder, and more necessary, to engage with the person filling it. This doesn’t mean excusing harm. Instead, try asking questions. What does this person need? What do I need? What is being asked of me here? What is the triangle telling me I should do? These questions are inherently lateral questions — they assume that the person across from you has needs as real as yours, a perspective as valid as yours, and humanity that the triangle would prefer you forget. Asking them is an act of resistance to the triangle’s geometry.

These three moves — naming, boundaries, communication — are also, it turns out, what it looks like to step out of the pyramid’s gravitational field. Not to float free of it, which isn’t available to any of us, but to act from a different logic: one where power isn’t a position you hold over others, but something intrinsic to being human that you bring into contact with other people’s equally intrinsic power. The triangle has a shape. So does its alternative. And that alternative — its geometry, its logic, what it asks of us and what it offers in return — is worth understanding.

The process of exiting the drama triangle is, admittedly, easier said than done. The triangle is embedded into the way we think — which is exactly why fiction is such a useful place to practice noticing it.

One of the things I try to do in my own writing is show what it looks like to step out of the triangle in real time. My Sanctuary Witch stories follow Annette, a witch whose work brings her into contact with exactly the kinds of situations the triangle loves: people in crisis, people causing harm, people convinced they need to be rescued. What Annette tries to do — imperfectly, because she’s a person and not a plot device — is refuse the role the situation is offering her. Not because she doesn’t care. Not because she won’t help. But because she’s learned that accepting the triangle’s terms, even as the savior, keeps everyone stuck inside a shape that doesn’t serve them.

She reframes. She asks different questions. She looks for what the situation needs rather than what the drama of the moment is demanding. And sometimes she gets it wrong, because reframing is a skill and skills take practice.

“She refuses the role the situation is offering her. Not because she doesn’t care — but because she’s learned that accepting the triangle’s terms keeps everyone stuck inside a shape that doesn’t serve them.”

That’s intentional. I want readers to watch that process — the noticing, the hesitation, the choice — because watching it repeatedly in a low-stakes fictional space is one of the ways we build the mental muscle for it in higher-stakes real ones. Stories installed the triangle in us through repetition. Stories can help us find the exits the same way.

If you’re a Hearthside Friend on my mailing list, you already have a copy of the first Sanctuary Witch story, Brownie Removal Service — and if you’ve read it, you’ve already seen Annette navigate exactly this kind of moment. I’ll do a closer reading of that story in the future, for those who want to see the theory and the practice side by side.

Any of you who have read my Mother’s Day story (released today to my mailing list or available on my store) will notice elements of the drama triangle in the Battle Witch dynamic Annette’s Mother struggles with. Stay tuned for a closer reading of that story sometime this month.

For now: next time you pick up a fantasy novel, I’d invite you to ask which corner of the triangle each character is standing in. Ask what the story would look like if the triangle weren’t the frame at all.

Are there any specific stories you’d like me to analyze for drama triangle content? (I’ve thought about doing the Devil Wears Prada… But only if someone is interested.) Let me know in the comments!

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