The Repentant Tyrant

An imaginary creature of course, but as a fictional character, he might be worth exploring. We must imagine this man to be most vile, consider that before his conversion he would have found the rape rooms in Iraq to be a little tame, that he would hardly raise an eyebrow at killing people with a wood-chipper, and that he would have called Fidel and Che sissies. He must be quite the terrible character.

And then, when the change comes, he is trapped- he cannot abdicate. All those who could take his place are just as bad as he was; they would be happy to kill him, but they know exposing themselves in a grab for power would mean great peril. So there's an indefinite period where the incentives are to keep the repentant tyrant practically imprisoned as the leader, and keep him alive.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other people who are not politically connected that would like to see the tyrant die for what he did to them and/or their families. Indeed, the tyrant himself admits that his death would be just punishment for what he has done. He doesn't take his own life for moral reasons, but he would offer no resistant to any avenger of blood.

And that's the jumping off point. Ordinary people are trying to get past the politically connected in order to kill him, the politically connected are trying to change the situation so that they can kill him and take power, and he's actually turning into an exemplary leader, which upsets the political class even more because that means less plunder for them.

It sounds like something easily worked into the fantasy genre- make the tyrant a king with a few barons who hate each other deeply. It might be more plausible as Sci-fi, because I could come up with some purely technical reason the power hungry have to keep him alive. Anyway, I probably should be trying to hammer out the story instead of just blogging about it.