Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

OdiousOutlaw wrote

Yeah, I've read that one; but the protagonist in it is more amoral than anything else. The protagonist in my story would have a moral compass, it would just be really fucking weird; it also doesn't really work for it to be told in first person and the setting would more along the lines of "modern science-fantasy".

There would definitely be some sort of absurdist angle to work with, though.

4

HelpOthers wrote

Can you elaborate on the moral compass you have envisioned for your protagonist?

2

OdiousOutlaw wrote

Sure, why not.

Rather than go through the trouble of making new moral concepts outside of the binary of "good" and "evil", I've decided to keep the overall structure of a "normal" sense of morality so that there is a sense of "right" and "wrong"; this has the added benefit of making the protagonist seem human enough (which works well with both the setting and what the character is)and makes her significantly easier to write. With that structure in mind; rather than randomly pick what the protag considers "right" and "wrong", I decided to give her two "virtues" (pride and courage) and two "vices" (mercy and humility) to act as counterparts of "good" and "evil" respectively. Here's where it gets fun; she applies both her "virtues" and "vices" to both herself and everyone else, she would see both arrogance and recklessness as moral pinnacles while seeing modesty and leniency as depraved.

With that being said, I want to write her in a way that makes it so that she doesn't come across as "weird, but still kind of evil"; so her personality would have to be as far from malevolent as possible, which is means her personality also has some bearing on how she "operates": after all, "values" are not the be-all and end-all of whether or not someone is "good" or "evil"; so I envision her as pretty laid-back. But I wanted to add some friction between her and the other characters, so I also envision her as being completely incapable of hatred; which conflicts with the hatred that her allies feel towards their enemies.

1