Writing heroes who think they're villains

It's trendy now to write morally grey characters in fiction. Hurray!

But if that were true, I'd have no free time left in my day; I'd be reading or gaming or watching that character live their edgy, chaotic little life as much as humanly possible. I'd be eating so good, I'd go radio silent for weeks.

I love morally gray characters more than any other. For the first, oh, 15 hours of my 150-hour P5R playthrough, the "detective prince" Akechi Goro pissed me off every time he was on screen...until one day, I blinked and was part of his rabid fan club at my big age. In my mind, he's the quintessential villain who thinks he's a hero: you understand his stakes, and why he does what he does, but he's so aggressively two-faced and ruthless, you could say he single-handedly divided the fandom.

Presumably an anti-hero, he follows his own sense of justice and his own rules, ostracizing himself in the process. Sometimes these characters look simultaneously noble and evil, brilliant and profoundly stupid. I didn't watch The Boys, but every clip I see of Homelander tells me he's got a legion of "I can fix him" girlies on Reddit frothing at the mouth.

Then you have characters who, unlike Akechi and Homelander, start off despised and vilified. They're similarly unpredictable, and have a painful weak point that likely made them who they are.

What makes a morally gray character in fiction sing is how well you humanize them.

My character Lukas is a hero who thinks he's a villain. Murder is sanctioned in his line of work, but you have no idea how he feels about it — or anything, for that matter. You get to watch him both harm and protect people in the same breath, flirt with girls and slash their throats. You see his comfortable life, but also the smallness of his world. He's idolized by some and a scary urban legend to others. For the first 30 or so chapters you get glimpses into how he thinks, but no insight into his motivations.

God, I hope I pull it off; that feeling that you know where the story is going and think he's one of the good guys. You're just not sure when or how the other shoe falls — or whether he'll survive to enjoy his redemption.

A lot of TikTok talk over morally gray characters ends up boiling down to "bad dudes doing bad things but feeling sad about it." I'll reserve my flowers for the characters who those righteous types who get the job done, by any means necessary.