Hello, darklings.
I’ve been under the weather some, but promise that I’m mending!
Now then. I love characters with mixed morality. I love plot that makes them question morality vs mortality.
One, it’s realistic. Two, it leaves room for growth. Three, it creates great conflict.
Now, when done right, I love my evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villains and the white knight heroes, but I really, really love gray characters. I especially love characters who slide all around that gray scale.
Now, either way you go on the morality scale with a character, it can be done wrong. You can’t have a character start off too evil. I put a book down once because I didn’t like any of the characters (except for the horse—horse was great), and the one-eighty that the main character did due to one incident came too late. I already hated the character, and, worse, the sudden change of heart wasn’t believable at that point.
So, don’t go too dark gray with your character. There has to be something redeemable there. It’s where the term “Save the Cat” comes from. If you have an anti-hero but need to show there is something good lurking in there, have them save the cat. The audience then knows there are some things this character will lift a finger for in the world.
Also, if they are pretty dark gray and you’re going to redeem them later, make that journey believable.
One of the best examples I can think of is Zuko in Avatar: The Last Air Bender. The journey of this angry, violent teenager to a collected fire master is storytelling at its finest. The three seasons show him make his mistakes, learn humility, and accept that his family is abusive before turning to the good side. The journey is believable, but certainly not a straight line, which just lent to its realism.
I also really adore characters who are on the right side, but are really hard to get along with. Anti-heroes, of which I have a very long, beloved list, or, another favorite, good characters who do horrible things because 1) they know it will save others, and 2) they can’t bear the thought of anyone else bloodying their hands with such atrocities.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima lately, and this is a great example of a character weighing honor against people’s lives. At first the character struggles with what’s necessary to win, but then embraces this more murderous, cutthroat way of fighting a war. The whole game is a character journey or treading good and bad, honor and dishonor. It’s an excellent story example that shows the monsters war makes of mankind.
That conflict of good versus evil, of when a character doesn’t realize they’re slipping too far down a dark path, is told in so many works, but it never fails to intrigue me. Moral ambiguity plus our ability to understand the reasoning when characters are put in extraordinary situations, whether we agree with their actions or not.
These shades of gray, shifts of thinking, crossing lines they never thought they would, can add so much dimension to your writing and character, and I know, personally, I eat them up.
Remember to rest if you’re not feeling well, little corvids, and looks for gray shades to add dimension.
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