: Re: Pitfalls of morally grey protagonists? We're all familiar with stories about good and evil, where characters are unambiguous. The benefit of this sort of a story is that we can enjoy the conclusion

@Kevin153

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In my opinion, when we read --or watch--, we are looking to learn something of value to our lives. We don't want a didactic lesson, but a visceral one, an emotional one. So we need a character and/or a situation we can identify with, that character needs to make choices, and those choices, for us, need to be either aspirational, the kinds of choices we can aspire to, or cautionary, the kinds of choices we should avoid.

The advantage to morally unambiguous characters is that they spell out for us which lesson we are learning. But the advantage to morally ambiguous characters is (when done well) that they are more relatable, because we all know ourselves to be not wholly good or evil, but a mixture of both. But we still want to learn something. For example, consider Woody Allen's Match Point, which features an sociopathic antihero, whose remorseless actions appear to be rewarded rather than punished. The deeper lesson, however, is that he's destroyed everything truly real and good in his life, in pursuit of rewards that are ultimately empty and meaningless. It's a fine line to walk, you can easily confuse the audience, and turn them away, especially if your work feels too nihilistic or absurdist at its roots.

It's also a question of audience. Something like Match Point isn't to everyone's tastes, it requires a certain amount of sophistication and discernment to appreciate. But on the other hand, people tend to get tired of big cartoonish morality tales --witness how even super-hero movies, the ultimate in brightly colored fables --have trended towards shades of grey.

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