How to Write Morally Gray Characters

Morally gray characters can be very useful in crafting complex stories. Humans are not purely good or evil, therefore, stories trying to capture the complexity of human nature greatly benefit from having morally gray characters. However, creating morally gray characters that are well-written can be difficult. Furthermore, even once you have succeeded in creating a well-written morally gray character it can be difficult to make sure that the audience sees them the way they’re intended to be seen. Sometimes characters that are meant to be ambiguous or even negative can be seen as wholly positive. The opposite can also be true, and sometimes characters that are meant to be overall sympathetic can wind up being hated by the audience because of their negative actions. To address all this, this article will address, first, how to create morally gray characters, and then how to frame them and their actions so that the audience sees them the way you intend.

What are Morally Gray Characters?

Before being able to create morally gray characters, we first must understand just what a morally gray character is. Morally gray characters are meant to represent the more complicated nature of humanity, so we have to consider what aspects of that humanity they are reflecting. All humans have good and bad impulses, good and bad motivations, and thus take actions that can be good or bad. Of course, this does not mean that everyone is in a middle point, and no one can truly be considered good or evil. From a pragmatic point of view, people, and characters, can generally be considered good if they take more good actions than bad ones, with the opposite also being true. Pure good heroes might have dark desires that they do not act on, or that they act on briefly before stopping as some kind of lesson. Pure evil villains, likewise, can occasionally have good motivations or take good actions that will not come anywhere near outweighing the evil that they have done. Morally gray characters, then, take actions that are both good and evil, but that are balanced more closely.

Despite all this, morally gray characters can often still be categorized into either hero or villain roles, or, in more complex stories, they can still be counted as protagonists or antagonists. Even when these characters initially defy categorization, depending on their effect on the story, they can often be categorized by the end. Either way, readers will usually decide that they see these characters as one or the other.

Building Morally Gray Characters

All this makes it clear that to create a morally gray character, then, all we need to do is to make sure that our character both has and acts on good and evil motivations enough that they cannot be seen as purely good or purely evil. But you can’t just make a character developing a cure for cancer for free also love kicking dogs and call it a day. Morally gray characters, like any other characters, still need to have cohesive motivations. Besides this, if a morally gray character is meant to be seen as a hero despite having taken bad actions it can help for the character in question to feel some regret regarding their eviler actions. Then the question is; if the character regrets having taken evil actions, why did they do it? In some cases, the character is simply more pragmatic than their more idealistic counterparts. Pure good heroes will take actions based on their ideals while more morally gray heroes may believe that the end will justify the means. These kinds of pure heroes and morally gray vigilantes can often be found in superhero stories, Batman and Red Hood being some of the first examples to come to mind. Batman believes that heroes should not kill their villains because it would make them no better than the villains they are fighting and thus ends up being more responsive to criminals. Red Hood, on the other hand believes that being more active by controlling the underworld and killing certain villains is the best way to reduce harm. In addition, Red Hood came to think this way largely because Batman refused to kill the Joker even after he killed Red Hood himself. Red Hood became morally gray as a response to Batman’s own actions and morals, and it is a great showcase of how morally gray characters can be used to contrast more upright heroes.

Of course, despite the ideological split between Batman and Red Hood being partially created by their logical reasoning it cannot be denied that emotions also play a role in this. Even if the reasons behind a morally gray character taking negative actions are purely logical, there can be emotional effects on the character themselves. As an example, the desire to seek revenge can often lead to a character becoming more morally gray than they might be if they were just acting on their principles. If a character believes that killing is wrong but is so overcome by their desire for revenge against a parent that they end up killing them then it is going to affect their mental state. In some cases, they might be overcome by guilt, and this shows that their morals are not entirely compromised, if they decide not to kill anyone ever again. However, it is also possible they might change their minds on killing because of this. In order to justify their own actions, they might start to believe that maybe people who are truly reprehensible might be alright to kill, where they once believed that any purposeful killing was reprehensible and unforgivable. Humans will often resolve their cognitive dissonance by changing their values, after all. That is one way to create a character with differing values believably. However, what values characters are meant to hold are all going to be dependent on the story itself, and this is going to affect the way that the audience views your characters.

Framing Morally Gray Characters

Red Hood is considered morally gray because despite taking actions to reduce crime and make his city safer, he does this by killing people. However, this complicating his morality is a matter of perspective. While in the world of comic books, and indeed our own world, killing is almost always seen as something that complicates a person’s morality. In a story that focuses primarily on soldiers on a battlefield their own killing might not immediately paint them as morally gray. Of course, there are plenty of war stories that grapple with the horrors of war where all the characters are painted in shades of gray, but this does not include every story on this topic. That is not to say that there are a lot of stories where killing would not be considered as something that makes a character morally gray, but instead to suggest that which actions are considered morally questionable in a story are often determined by the way that the story itself views them. For instance, while Batman was previously used as an example of an upright hero when contrasted to Red Hood, who kills people, there are plenty of stories where Batman is considered more morally gray. This is because in those stories he is contrasted to Superman or, in The Dark Knight (2008), to Harvey Dent. When compared to them, Batman is considered more morally gray because he is willing to torture criminals to force them to talk, or because he hides his identity and is not accountable to the law. Likewise, there are some stories where someone might be considered morally gray because they steal or because they lie. Characters are always going to be contrasted against each other, so while diversity in values between different stories is good, there needs to be a consistent ruling between actions and values in the same story or the audience may not view characters the way the author intends.

There are stories where all the characters are meant to be morally gray and that is the point. Meanwhile, in other stories the majority of characters find themselves being on the end of good or on the end of bad with only a few significant characters being in the middle. In either case though the gray characters will often be perceived as good or bad by the audience occasionally even disregarding the fact that they are supposed to be gray at all. This is often a problem with both Batman and Red Hood. Because Batman is almost always framed as a hero the audience will often disregard the idea that he is meant to be morally gray. Red Hood on the other hand, still seen as being gray, because killing is more severe, especially in those kinds of stories. However, because the audience often believes that Batman should be killing at least some of his villains, they will often believe that Red Hood is more good than gray. Both examples can frequently undermine the intentions of their writers, but how can the writer avoid this?

The former example is not entirely applicable to us; After all, the majority of us are not writing about Batman or any characters that are as widely known as he is. However, despite not writing those characters directly, audiences can see that your characters are similar to Batman or other characters and view them similarly to the way that those characters are viewed so it can still be a problem. The second example can be far more applicable. If a character is pragmatically going against values that the story promotes but the reader feels that this is something that more characters should be doing, then they will think that this character is a good character instead of being morally gray. In these cases, it can be helpful to show the character feeling badly about going against these principles that make them gray, but it will not often work. The best solution to this is to show why going against these principles is bad in the first place. If the character is morally gray because they steal then show their stealing hurting someone they know and care about, or at least someone the audience knows and cares about. The character’s negative actions need to have negative consequences that the audience can really see. Red Hood’s killing might result in innocent children becoming orphans. Batman’s torturing of criminals might leave them disabled for life even after they decide to turn over a new leaf. These are both hypotheticals that an audience might be able to think of if they consider the consequences of the character’s actions, but without placing these scenarios in the story we cannot expect this to sway their opinions about the characters.

Conclusion

Morally gray characters can be tremendously useful in complicating simple stories and in adding depth to other characters through contrast, however, in order to make sure they are well-written, there are many things you need to keep in mind. You need to consider what could push characters to take both good and bad actions and how they feel about them, as well as how the audience will see them. In many ways creating a well-written morally gray characters is a feat of both good character writing and good story structure, but if you take the time to put the work of considering all these things in you’ll find it was all worth it.