Valid Motivation or an Overreaction?

I don't think so at all. You'll have to spend some time working through his thought process in order to establish that he is not just another seeker of power, but that should be pretty easy as he struggles with coming to his decision.

I like to read about characters who are forced into situations where they have to grapple with conflict regarding their own loyalties verses their responsibility to a larger cause (country, whatever.)

Seems like an emotional decision by a man who has been pushed hard and far - and, while emotional decisions can (and often do) seem like overreactions from a distance, at the time it certainly makes perfect sense to them.

Show the audience his pain and his sacrifice, how he's more than just a cold, logical tactician but a general who truly feels for, and with, his people. Show how the people of the kingdom regard the barbarians as The Enemy, brutal heathen savages incapable of peace or civilization. Show how he's suffered, how hard he's worked to make the lives of his soldiers, the lives of his families, count for something... and show how betrayed and gutted he feels when his liege throws away all they've gained (in his eyes, at least.)

Plausibility of motivation is all in the execution. As Brightdreamer said, if you show how far he has been pushed and how betrayed he feels, make us feel those emotions with him, it won't seem an overreaction.

I have something similar in my WIP - my army general plots to assassinate the pharaoh so that he can take the throne and invade Canaan. His personal and political motives both have the same end: to destroy the Hebrew exiles responsible for the plagues that killed his son and almost destroyed Egypt. Is taking revenge after 15 years an overreaction? Some would say so, but it's all a case of setting your story up so that it makes perfect logical and emotional sense for the character to do it.

This is straight out of history. People have fought and killed and turned against everything for far less motivation.

Absolutely. Especially if he's watched people die he cares about and has what we now call PTSD.

Make it personal. What does he or his loved ones stand to lose if the barbarians invade? Make it something the king does not stand to lose. Then the father can regard the king as out of touch with the dangers the common people are exposed to. It's not simply a matter of the king making a different decision, it's a matter of him having the wrong perspective, and callously neglecting other perspectives.

He might be able to abstractly rationalize why the king is making the right choice, but emotionally, everyone he's lost, all the sacrifices, all of it for _nothing_ and worse than that, it might buy a few years of peace, but then the barbarians will regain their strength and attack again.

Seems like very good internal motivation for even a stalwart man to turn.

It's extremely plausible, and not all that difficult to spin sympathetically -- forex. the king has already made a series of bad decisions with bad consequences and rejects all advice to the contrary, so the general has reason to consider assassination the only way to stop worse things happening.

Gammer said:

....... So he joins in the plot to assassinate the King.

Is that a strong enough reason to kill a man he swore loyalty to and as a consequence put the king's family in danger as well? Or is it just an overreaction on the father's part?

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Here's the crux of your problem:

You gave us some reasons, and to soft-punt, I'll go ahead and say "yeah, they are fair reasons," but that's also immaterial--what matters (within some level of reason) is what's reasonable to HIM. so he could do all of the above because he was a misanthrope or sociopath, who could care less for these consequences or even welcome them, he could do it for a thousand reasons, or he could NOT do it, for another thousand.

These things come down to the individual, who he is and what he's like, what he's been through, how he thinks.

You can make him do worse with less motivation, and still make him sympathetic. Conversely, you could give him even better reasons and still fuck things up many, many different ways.

Make what he's doing make sense for him, and make the MC believable, instead of trying to focus-group the events themselves......


just my thoughts

Edit: It may be well before your time, but in Escape from New York the MC likely sets off a third world war, just because he was pissed off and nobody fucks with Snake Plissken. That was it. It is an extreme example, but you could root for him as an antihero, so you could accept what he did. In Misery Annie Wilkes hobbles a dude who's already in a fucking wheelchair, but she's crazy, and you understand both her line of logic and how far gone she is. General societal concensus is not always, or even often, the rationale for character behavior.

It sounds very believable and even sympathetic to me. He's already sacrificed so much in the service of the King, only to have the King make a decision that jeopardizes everything he is trying to protect. Even if he's wrong, it's hard to say his feelings aren't justified.

ETA: Of course, I'm assuming he loved his wife and his son, and that he genuinely believes the barbarians will eventually overrun the border.

Okay, my opinion. You would really need to sell this somehow. You would have to really dig down and bring out the emotions because from the outside, I really can't feel for the father and his decision. Maybe it's because I can be very logical and rational (almost to a point of it causing issues), but his reasoning is very much about the emotion and it's not a logical decision that is being made.

Whole series have been written about an individual who has stayed 'true' to his king, and cause, no matter what. His or her struggles as he watches loved ones falter, die, go to war, etc. etc.

On the other hand, whole series have been written about an individual who must turn against the man (or woman) to whom they've plead life and loyalty. Then they watch as loved ones falter, die, go to war, etc. etc.

It can go either way, and be a complex and compelling read. And yes, you've certainly given plenty of justification for your character to do what he feels he must. Making a difficult, heartfelt, earnest (enough adjectives!) decision, and then having to carry it through, often makes for the most interesting stories.

That scenario seems beyond reasonable. That said I don't see overreactions as a problem. People overreact. It's part of our nature. Some people are more prone to it than others. Even if someone sees it as an overreaction, which I don't think it is, it's far from being implausible. The father believes something and he's willing to turn against something else he believes in exchange. Sounds like there could be some interesting personal trauma that goes along with that decision.