The Rebel Witch

What is the best version of an underdog you have ever seen?  There are many examples from all different eras: Malcolm Reynolds in Serenity, Paul Blart in Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Scott Pilgrim, Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter, Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon.  None of these individuals were necessarily heroes to begin with, nor were they the most popular kid in school.  They did have one thing in common however.  An ideal.  Possibly given to them by a friend, relative, or mentor.  The exhuming of something that was buried deep within them by a hurt or a mistake.  In some cases, it wasn't just one thing but a lifetime of emotional, mental, social, or even physical torture that caused something to snap.  Some inhibited part of their psyche finally had enough and forced its way out of the prison we build around it with other peoples words and thoughts.  There is however a counter-agent to each of these individuals who also may have had the same sort of ascent or rather, descent.   This individual, often comes from the same background whether harder or easier than others.  They many times have the same gifts or talents.  Usually they encounter hardships, happiness, tragedy, fame all in the same ways that the protagonist would, but inside of them an ideal begins to form in the same way as the underdog.  It starts out small and silent but eventually, grows beyond the size of its prison within them.  The difference is its origin.  The underdog's ideals or code of conduct come from within themselves and are conceived by their choice to rebel against what is readily accepted as the status quo.  Now they may have received guidance in their youth or picked up things along the way but they have made this one thing their own and it is a part of them.  In the same way the twisted antagonist was not always this way.  They were respected, possibly even revered before something happened to them not of their own will.  They know it was wrong and they couldn't control it.  They try to move on as though it never happened...but it did.  Nothing can ever change the fact that it did happen and it is then that the abnormality spawns.  It is then that something I call The Rebel Witch Principal takes hold.  It is the rebellion against the overwhelming amount of functionality around the idealist.  They see those that carry on with their lives as a slap in the face and ignorance of how life really is.  They slowly become self absorbed and consumed with what life has done to them and not for them.  They believe that functionality and principal are legalistic and hypocritical.  When they have finally seen enough "perfection" in the lives of others and can no longer bare the company of those who have not been defeated by their environment, it happens.  They give up trying to hold back what has grown inside of them and the worst part is that the ideal was never theirs.  Whatever happened to them that could have been the turning point in their life instead, impregnated them involuntarily with something not of their own body, mind, or spirit.  They allowed it to live and grow little by little in the fertile soil of other people's dysfunction around them until eventually, they couldn't even distinguish themselves from the twisted root of this dysfunction.  To describe it in short, it is the rape of our conscience.  Truly, there is a rebel within all of us that desires to break the mould and reshape what has become a world in our image, not His.  The norm has become that we must be like the world in order to change the world.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We are to be light in a dark place and to be more specific, a light leading the way out of the dark, not the way back into it.  You see, in life there are no double-negatives where enough wrong decisions turn us into a person who can "really reach people".  Bologna...(Ba-Lo-Nee) Poor decisions can (not to be confused with will) end up teaching us lessons but there is only one person who has ever claimed to be able to turn an insanely idiotic circumstance into a good one for His glory and that would be God.  The Rebel Witch believes that if they just do enough questionable things to get to peace, everything will be the way they want.  What the Rebel Witch doesn't understand is that no amount of relativistic behavior will ever lead them out of the path of chaos.  The sad part is that they will never see it for themselves until they hit rock bottom and lose it all.  By that point, it is usually too late because they have alienated or destroyed all of the relationships that could have helped them.  Including a relationship with God.
Lord of the Rings summed up this principal quite well in its lengthy tale about a Hobbit who set out to destroy a small ring that had the power to destroy an entire world.  It was long forgotten by those who experienced it's terror until a lack of respect for what it could do caused an immense power to rise and threaten to wipe out all who lived in Middle Earth.  Even the smallest ideal can grow into an unruly monster.  Even the smallest ideal can change the world for the better.  Who are you?  The Rebel Witch or the Underdog?