Heroes with capes versus antagonists with twisty mustaches is one way to tell a story, but almost as old as time is the morally grey, conflicted character.
From Hamlet, to Frankenstein, to Morgan la Fey, to Mr. Rochester, morally ambiguous characters have caught the imagination of audiences and become some of the most beloved and remembered.
What Is a Morally Grey Character?
A morally grey character grapples with the idea of what is right and wrong. They equally choose right as often as they choose to do wrong. They may be the protagonist, antagonist, or a side character who influences others.
These realistic characters are more interesting to modern readers. These morally grey characters are people who have been shaped by their history, experiences, and the people around them, not some cookie cutter who always does what is right or is inherently evil for no discernable reason.
Modern audiences want to watch a character fight for understanding of their world and themselves as they change over the course of the story. Readers can question their own ethics and values as they agree or disagree with the decisions these morally ambiguous characters make.
Morally Grey Men Examples
The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
Severus Snape is initially set up as an antagonist to Harry’s protagonist in the first book. However, as the series progresses and the reader learns how much Dumbledore trusts Snape, the various times Snape saves Harry, and more about Severus’ backstory, the greyer this character grows. Because of this, he has become one of the most beloved characters of the series.
The Artemis Fowl Series
Young Artemis starts out as morally grey and stays firmly in place, possibly popping over a bit to the darker side of things in some of the entries to this series. Artemis is a criminal genius who cares about his family and friends and will do anything to protect them, including starting a war.
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Boromir is caught between a rock and a hard place as his father’s upbringing gives him the belief that he has the right to rule and lead Gondor and the ring easily sways him into thinking taking it is right for his people and all mankind.
However, he has sworn an oath to help Frodo deliver the ring to Mount Doom in order to destroy it. Boromir behaves heroically at moments and monstrously at others.
Morally Grey Women Examples
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin
Half hero and half tyrant, Daenerys Targaryen protects those she loves and frees slaves while ruling with an iron fist. Daenerys’ morality is forged in the fires of the lowest levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Once she has survived by making impossible choices, Daenerys uses all of her power—and dragons—to stay on top.
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
An academically and magically gifted character, Rin finds herself the subject of discrimination for everything from her gender, to her skin color, and her social standing.
Rin is refined through her trials into a weapon that could help her save her people, but at the cost of everything that makes her human. These difficult choices keep her firmly in the grey area.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
Becca Bell is the sister of the missing presumed dead murder victim that Pip is trying to solve in this YA murder mystery. Like Andie, both sisters are ambiguous characters that have been pushed into ethically grey behaviors by their circumstances and the people in their lives.
Even the protagonist, Pip, makes some interesting choices. The story leaves one wondering, who is right, who is wrong, and what the consequences should be.
How to Write Morally Grey Characters
Balance
Like a see-saw, your character needs to struggle, sometimes making a better choice, and sometimes making a choice for the worse. This helps them to stay in that grey area, never being truly good or bad. This means that they will have heroic traits and anti-heroic traits.
Peel back the layers of your complicated onion and slowly reveal to your readers who this character is. What are their values? What are their greatest desires? What are their fears? What are their greatest flaws? And what are they willing to do to achieve their goals? Disclosing their attributes one piece at a time, leaves the reader wanting to know more as they delve deeper into what makes your morally grey character tick
Values
Give them their very own value system to follow that may not make sense to some people but makes perfect sense to your character. They may save the cat in one scene, then kill someone in the next scene. This keeps your reader on their toes, never knowing what to expect from this morally ambiguous character.
Consider whether their ethical structure is rigid or flexible and how this can add to your story. Establishing this moral framework can lead the reader on a merry dance of challenging all they know about good and evil.
And as your character learns and grows, this structure may evolve. This can be referred to as a positive or negative character arc. Morally grey characters can change completely, have only a small arc which pushes them only slightly towards being better or worse, or find that their worldview is working perfectly well for them, thank you very much.
Motivation
Let’s be real for a moment. We are all authors which means we are making up our stories, characters, and worlds. So the idea is not so much to make the story seem realistic—hard to achieve in a fantasy with magic floating around—but to make it believable to that character in that situation. Characters should always be true to who they are.
Ways to show motivation are through backstory, flashbacks, characterization, and the decisions/consequences throughout your story.
As your character makes decisions, talks to other characters, and goes to different places, they learn things about the story and themselves. This pov knowledge gained, informs future decisions the character makes in the story, creating their motivations.
Conflict
One thing readers love is conflict. And I don’t mean a knock down drag out fight—though it could be that. External conflict comes from another character, nature, or society.
Internal conflict comes when a character’s internal goal or very nature is in conflict with another internal goal or an external goal. Then the character must make a decision that means they will have to give something up in order to get what they want. Think, ethical dilemmas.
So consider giving your morally grey character two internal goals that clash, just like the traits we spoke of earlier.
For example, they care about another character, and it is imperative they keep their promises. A way you can make these two seemingly positive goals clash is to force the morally grey character to keep a promise they’ve made to get the McGuffin—an important object to the story—even at the expense of the person they care about.
Personal Stakes
What if their goal fails? This is related to the conflict. To make scenes and situations compelling, you want to put your character in a lose-lose situation and see what they choose or if they take door number three and make the best of it.
For example, Your character must choose whether to save their beloved pet or a friend. Perhaps both are hanging off the same cliff and your character must triage the moment, making a split decision on who to save first, putting the other in peril. Or maybe dastardly kidnappers have taken both and put them in separate locations forcing the character into a choice to create pain and guilt.
The Saw movies, The Hunger Games, and more, up these stakes by pitting the character’s survival instinct against the lives of others.
Sliding Scale
Good and evil coexist within the world and within each person. What is good for someone may be bad for someone else. And with a character’s need to survive, you can push them past their sophisticated moral level.
Morally ambiguous characters tend to seem like they are in the grey area, due to a certain selfishness that all readers can relate to. When life is going well, it is much easier for a character to make “good” decisions that benefit others.
Consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People need to fulfill their physiological needs before they begin to think about anything higher.
Then they worry about their physical and mental safety. Next comes love and belonging. Followed by their esteem for themselves and others. Until finally, they can consider their personal potential and fulfillment.
Combine this idea with Kohlberg’s stages of morality. Stage 1 is avoiding punishment. Stage 2 is self-interest. Stage 3 is about meeting social expectations. Stage 4 is obeying authority and keeping social order. Stage 5 is creating social contracts and prioritizing human life, even over law. Stage 6 is keeping universal ethical principles because the greater good outweighs any personal risks.
You can see how Maslow’s hierarchy would affect a person’s morality. As characters slide back and forth along one, they would also slide along the other.
In addition, characters may actively choose to do good or bad things, but they are also more likely to passively allow good or bad things to happen, such as looking the other way as someone dies from their own choices rather than helping them.
Things to Avoid
Try to avoid cliches when creating a morally grey character. Readers get tired of the brooding lone wolf with a mysterious backstory. Challenge your readers’ expectations.
Giving your morally ambiguous character people to love can be used both for and against them. Creating an unexpected twist in their life’s history can challenge your reader’s assumptions.
A trap in all stories is to rely too heavily on telling without enough showing. Readers don’t like to be told what to think. Instead, they want to figure it out for themselves by experiencing your world along with your characters.
So show them how your character is morally ambiguous through their thoughts, words, and actions.
Being morally grey does not automatically make a character interesting. Heroes can be interesting and antagonists can be interesting. It is more about the journey you are taking the reader on through your writing.
Put your characters into difficult situations and watch them struggle. Sometimes they will overcome, sometimes they will fail, and sometimes they will surprise you—and the reader.