If you were tasked with getting tom and harry to each go against one of their key character traits (like harry's loyalty or self-sacrificing/ tom's self-dehumanization or idolization of himself above all others, ect) what traits would you try to get each of them to break and what do you think it would take to make it happen?
(assume you have like all the powers of an author)
I don't think a core trait in either of them can be broken by direct opposition alone. It must be pushed until it exposes the limits of the character itself. First, Harry... what defines him is his stoicism with agency.
Harry acts, takes a stance, despite the contingency. His resilience is a form of grounded resolve; his agency doesn't hinge on total control because the absence of control doesn't undo him. He always choose to fight, but without distancing himself from his own lived reality. The central point is that, even though Harry is a character who does need control, he does not confuse absolute control with effectiveness. He understands that acting well doesn't require governing everything, only sustaining his choices even when the outcome is not guaranteed. His stoicism is a conscious refusal of the fantasy of omnipotence.
Tom cannot tolerate this margin of uncertainty; this lack of real yet human agency over the future. The demand for total control is not merely a desire for power; it also reflects his inability to exist without positioning himself as the axis of the world, which is a philosophical and psychological issue rather than a moral judgment.
Harry can endure the tension between intention and outcome; Tom tries to eliminate that tension. He needs the world to respond exactly as predicted for his identity to remain intact.
So the real conflict is this: Harry demonstrates that coherence can be sustained without total domination, that agency doesn't require exhaustive control (integrity survives exposure to uncertainty). Tom, by contrast, is committed to the belief that integrity is only preserved when nothing is left unaccounted for, when contingency itself is eliminated (it can only be secured by abolishing it).
If you force Harry to abandon this stoicism โ compelling him to assume total control as the only principled acceptable way to act โ you displace him ethically. He remains strong, but he begins to carry a weight that was never meant to be his; the need to guarantee the world. Responsibility is no longer limited to what he does, and extends to what he allows to happen, which means the prevention of all negative consequence, so a standard that pushes mere decision-making into continuous vigilance.
Tom's breaking point, however, lies elsewhere, when confronted with someone who does not need to subordinate all outcomes to his will in order to be solid, compelled to witness his own logic exposed as exhausting and, at its core, fragile. At that point, Tom loses the fantasy of stability. And that is the deepest fracture possible for someone who built himself as the organizing center of reality, since control stops functioning as affirmation and reveals itself as continuous effort (a system that must be actively maintained to prevent collapse).
