So What Color is the Morality?

Gray. Or black-and-white. It’s all so simple, right?

Well, of course not.

It turns out that discussing the complexities of how morality is depicted in fantasy is itself a very complex endeavor! The subject is wildly muddled and I’m going to tell you how I accidentally confirmed this somewhat obvious fact. Confirmed it to the hilt, friends.

Here I was, relatively innocent (for one purpose of this story is to say that none are innocent) thinking I would be clever and write a blog post about the various ways we understand morality in stories–all the way from the over-manufactured, heavy-handed black-and-white of some children’s stories to the lifeless gray ooze of no morality at all, even to those the would say that dark is light and light is dark, reversing all.

I had so many thoughts. I was going to tell you all about them! I think they were at least moderately interesting!

I got about halfway through writing this blog post when I did a thing that people sometimes do. I wandered onto reddit. R/fantasy, to be precise. In that vast land of heroic opinionators, philosophical sages, and jumpity trolls, one noble fellow (or lass, who can know which) posited a question: must a character be morally gray to be complex? Always, this particular denizen of reddit had supposed they must be, but now they were no longer so sure.

On a dangerous whim, I commented. Being a rather infrequent visitor to this realm (I reside more regularly in the martial land of r/bjj) I thought nothing of it. I simply offered my thoughts to the masses, as one does these days, with no particular expectation whatsoever, and no thought to the consequences.

You don’t have to read the whole thread to understand what I’m about to say, but you may if you like. Here it is. Yes, mine is the first comment at the top so you don’t have to search for it. I say this not to brag–reddit coin doesn’t convert, friends, it’s mostly a dopamine drip–but because I was flabbergasted by the response. The passionate agreement, for the most part, and the very specific and fascinating strain of dissent.

So DOES a Character Have to be Morally Gray to be Complex?

NO! Was the short version of my answer. And I shall say it again here: NO!

The medium-length version is that complexity does not equal ambiguity. A person can have a strong moral framework and high ideals and…fail. Not just be tempted to fail, but simply fail.

Far from the exception, I daresay that’s the rule in life.

Based on the arbitrary measure of upvotes, it seems that a LOT of people agreed with this and indeed find themselves frustrated with the contemporary notion that gray=complex and there is no other way for a character to be complex. Why should a character have to be morally gray in order to fascinate us? Why is a fogging of morality the only way to prove the depths and nuances of a soul? Is reality actually as bitter and hopeless as that?

Well, yes and no. It certainly shouldn’t be, one would think. But at such a rate of comments, I think I understand where the confusion comes in. It’s half to do with the soul and half to do with semantics.

And contrary to popular opinion, semantics are actually a pretty big deal.

Let us Define our Terms: The Semantics Bit

To explain how a character could be both moral and complex, I gave some examples of moral failure, doubt, and struggle. To this, a good handful of people responded by asking “but isn’t that just what morally gray means?” Which is to say that a lot of people felt that depicting failures in morality is the same as depicting gray morality. This was shown all throughout the conversation.

Some felt that morally gray=imperfect.

Some felt that morally gray=garden variety jerk.

Some felt that morally gray=bad guy with occasional instances of empathy or kindness

And of course if you don’t even believe in a concrete morality, then everything is gray all the time forever. No flashes of light. Just endless gray muck playing at “depth.”

I think, however, that the most typical and useful definition of “morally gray” is a character who, while not necessarily a villain, doesn’t hold to any strong moral standards except that which society, desires, necessity, and convenience provide.

Or, to phrase it differently, a morally gray character is someone whose morality is very pliable. Either by themselves, or by outside forces. We do not say they are a villain, because that is not their objective. But they are usually not interested in upholding a moral standard, and often they will scoff at the very idea. Not all morally gray characters are cynics, but there’s a pretty strong correlation. They always have an excuse to evade the standards which those around them are trying to uphold.

Let us Define our Terms: The Soul Bit

Good so far? So why have so many people drifted towards the idea that a flawed and complex character is the same as a gray character?

Probably the most interesting comment I got was someone who said: “but isn’t that [the moral person struggling to be moral] just, like, a regular average person?”

To which I answered a resounding YES!!!!! For here is the fundamental truth. The average person is bewilderingly complex. Even when they do not seem it, they are. We do what we don’t want to do and what we want to do, we don’t do! Or, as Solzhenitsyn would have it, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart…”

That’s the soul bit.

You’ve probably seen/heard/been lambasted with articles about how strangely un-nuanced people become on social media, how quick to blame, how quick to judge, how harsh and unforgiving towards moral or social infractions. How intensely everyone upholds the causes they perceive as righteous, how easily disgusted they are with those who wish to provide caveats or complexity or who simply don’t understand.

My personal opinion on this is quite simple (and you are free to disagree): where a moral framework is lacking, one shall be built, however haphazardly. Nature abhors a vacuum. So even if you say you are not religious you will make a religion out of SOMETHING. Who knows what. And a secular religion centering around politics or some such often ends up being far less forgiving than an actual religion, despite being convinced it is otherwise.

These new moral constructions are rarely up to code, the joints don’t meet flush like they should, and a little prodding causes them to tremble or even collapse. So it takes a stunning amount of effort and ruthlessness to keep them up.

Hence the strange ferocity over virtue and perceived goodness in social media conflicts. Everyone is trying to make things that aren’t gods into gods. These social/political gods require so much maintenance. And considerable sacrifice. One of the first things to go is complexity. Then common sense.

And because these shoddy constructions make us ironically more rigid, more prone to black-and-white thinking than the all-consuming yet far more forgiving beliefs they claim to overcome, we begin to think that moral failings of any kind are anathema. Only a villain or morally gray person should have them.

But we all have them, whether we want to admit it or not. The average person is either an immortal glory an immortal horror, and how we treat them helps them in their war between the two directions (That’s Lewis, paraphrased).

Gray is not following the compass poorly. Gray is a broken compass, or a lack of one.

Gray is not the same as wanting to do right, but simply failing.

Gray is not recognizing that you have mixed motives, that you were a jerk and you know you’ll be tempted to be a jerk again next time. Only someone who has a clear moral framework can even see that.

Gray, I believe, is indifference. And, eventually, blindness.

And even the most grievous moral failures do not equal “grayness” if either the character or the narrative acknowledge that there was something more and better to be pursued. Still less is a character gray if they get up, try again, fail again, and get up again. The getting back up? That’s actually as black-and-white as it gets.

BONUS THOUGHTS

I’ll conclude with this. A long time ago, in an early version of my book, I tried to contrive the narrative so that my main character didn’t have to do anything too ruthless, too bad, to complicated. He’s a character with strong morals, high standards, serious convictions. I was protecting him from having to make hard choices–from failure. I didn’t want to make the reader wince at any of his choices.

He was dead on the page.

Only when I stopped protecting him from complicated situations, let him face his own flaws and hypocrisy–let him fail his own standards–did he finally come alive.

He is not a morally gray character. I did not write him to be. But he is complex. It has been one of the most common things pointed out in reviews…