In front of me, the red stone streets of Madrid flicker with a light not unlike the one in A Good Man Is Hard to Find—not just literal, but moral. I had just reread Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque classic, and something clicked. Something that hadn’t clicked before I wrote Rajah Versus Conquistador.
The Misfit, O’Connor’s iconic villain, isn’t just a murderer. He’s a type. “A different breed of dog,” as he calls himself. The more I read him, the more I saw the shadow of my own protagonist—Rajah Humabon. A man I wrote from the inside out. A man who, by modern psychological categories, skirts the profile of a psychopath.
Writing him was method acting. Each day I entered his mind—lived there. I didn’t expect him to change. But in the middle of the novel, something unexpected happened: the psychopath had a conversion. And once that happened, I couldn’t drag him back to hell, which was the original plan—a grim, European film ending where history wins and nothing redemptive survives.
But I couldn’t do it. I had to leave a crack for hope. Even if the ending—the massacre of Magellan’s men—was fixed by history, the soul of the story wasn’t. So I sought grace.
That grace came through the women.
In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own. There’s a moment of contact. Of kinship. But she fails to save him. O’Connor’s story is a tragedy: a woman sees a lost soul and is too late.
Rajah Versus Conquistador mirrors that structure but flips the outcome. Both central men—Humabon and Magellan—are saved not through ideology, but through the steady pressure of the women around them. Humabon is first molded by Handuraw, a baylan who channels his dangerous gifts toward power and ambition. Later, Paraluman confronts him with love—a love that transforms him.
Magellan, meanwhile, enters the story already formed. A Christian knight, not just a killer but a killer with a code. He had Beatriz, his wife, and Queen Leonor—figures who, in the novel (and perhaps in life), shaped his crusading soul.
Where O’Connor’s grandmother fails, these women succeed.
That’s the difference.
It is apt that I’m writing this review in Madrid. Because medieval Spain—Rome’s Christian heir—knew something we’ve forgotten: that the strongman doesn’t disappear when we deny him. He must be sanctified or he becomes monstrous. That’s true in literature. It’s true in history. It’s true in the Philippines. Duterte may be in The Hague, but the archetype he represents is alive and well.
Perhaps the only salvation for Duterte the monster… is Duterte the saint.
And maybe the only people who can lead him there are the women who recognize what he is—and don’t flinch.
Because the psychopath has a vocation. A twisted calling, yes—but one that demands transfiguration, not mere suppression. And the women around him, too, have a vocation: to see clearly, to love dangerously, to fix—but not domesticate. To convert—not to comfort.
The meme, like all memes, “I can fix him,” stems from a truth. Not a naive fantasy, but an ancient intuition: that some men are born wild, and some women are born to save them.
How I used AI for this:
The video was edited using Descript, which uses AI.
The video was transcribed by Fireflies.ai. I then uploaded the transcripts to ChatGPT and I had it create the text above. I did some minor editing.
Share this post