Why writers should create more morally gray characters
- Nov 18, 2017
- 2 min read
Stories these days tend to be about heroes and villains. The hero is (more often than not) a character with an incredibly perfect moral compass, who selflessly does good deeds for those around them, and rarely acts out of anger or hatred. I understand why people create characters like this, and I'm not saying that they are bad characters to have, especially in children's media. The hero is something everyone sees as the ideal person to be, but this ideal hardly represents the average human being, and is ultimately an unrelatable character.
The villain is the character that you're supposed to hate, with the writer often making them commit such heinous acts that they can end up being unrealistically evil. The extremes to which a villain can go, without much of a backstory that gives them proper reason to do what they do, can actually get to the point of looking silly to an audience member. Now, I know that not every villain is a badly written, one note caricature, but it does unfortunately happen quite often. This extreme of bad morality purposefully creates distance between the viewer and the villain, making them an unrelatable character.
So, if these two character types keep producing unrelatable, and even downright unlikable characters, then what should be done to stop this trend?
This brings me to the morally gray character, otherwise called the morally ambiguous character. These characters would often do things for their own gain or self preservation, which can occasionally put them in the position of a temporary villain or hero of the story. Morally gray characters have the capacity, and sometimes the desire, to do good, but this isn't always an option for them due to the circumstances in their life or backstory. They aren't afraid to do favors for the villains or heroes, but they don't usually stick around permanently, because first and foremost, they do what they deem is best for themselves.
They may not always be the characters we like, due to their unaligned nature, but they are the closest representation of human nature, and are ultimately the most relatable characters out there.
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