Heroes Are Rarely Innocent

Why Morally Grey Characters Matter in Dark Fantasy

A question came up recently in a writing group that made me stop and think.

If most of the characters in a story are varying degrees of morally grey, how does the reader connect with them?

How do readers grow to care about protagonists who are not always heroic, not always noble, and not always easy to forgive? And of course, let’s not forget the antagonist. Are they simply evil, or does the reader need to understand them too?

It’s a fair question.

And while yes, the genre plays its part, readers of epic fantasy, dark fantasy, and grimdark tend to expect complicated characters, it still made me stop and think.

We are often taught to think of stories in terms of heroes and villains. The hero does the right thing. The villain does the wrong thing. One stands in the light, the other in the darkness. It is clean, simple, and satisfying.

But I have never found people to be that simple.

Most of us like to believe we know where our moral line is. We know what we would never do. We know what we would never accept. We know the kind of person we are. We know which step is a step too far.

Or do we, really?

What if fear moves the line?

Or grief?

Even anger?

We all think we know until something changes that we perhaps didn’t foresee. Loyalty, love, desperation, survival, faith, revenge, or duty forces us to look at that line and ask whether crossing it might be the only way forward.

That, to me, is where morally grey characters become interesting.

A morally grey character is not simply a villain wearing a hero’s cloak. They are not “bad” for the sake of being bad. They are, just like us in the real world, complicated. They make choices under pressure. Sometimes they do the wrong thing for reasons we understand. Sometimes they do the right thing for reasons that are deeply selfish, believing it is right. Sometimes they save one person and doom another. Sometimes they believe they are protecting the world while quietly becoming the thing they once feared.

That does not mean the reader has to like them.

But understanding them is not the same as forgiving them.

Understanding is not forgiveness

In dark fantasy, and certainly in Relic Reborn, that distinction matters.

A reader doesn’t need a protagonist to be perfect in order to care about them. What readers need is truth. They need to understand why a character makes a choice. They need to feel the cost of that choice. They need to see the suffering behind the action, the belief behind the mistake, the desperation behind the betrayal. If a character crosses a line, I hope I’ve been able to show why.

Consequences give darkness weight

And just as importantly, I need to ensure that the story asks what happens next.

Consequences are what separate morally grey characters from hollow shock value. If someone makes a terrible decision and the story simply moves on, then the darkness of the decision has no weight. But if that decision changes them, haunts them, costs them friendships, breaks trust, or forces others to look at them differently, then I believe the reader has something to hold on to.

They may not agree with the character, and they may not forgive them.

But, and it is an important but, they may still understand them.

That is where I believe the emotional connection between the character and the reader begins to form.

Heroes, villains, and the grey between

And likewise, even the antagonist. The baddie, the monster, the person standing in opposition to my hero, needs to be more than just a label. The reader certainly knows they are cruel, terrible, nasty, even evil. However, if we can delve under the surface a little, then the reader can see the why. That doesn’t mean they like the character but again for a moment, they can understand. And possibly even sympathise.

In Relic Reborn, and in the wider world of Azangrail, I have never been interested in writing a world where every answer is clean, every hero wins the day, with no consequences. Because there are always consequences, no matter how small.

In Azangrail, the characters I try to write, are shaped by faith, ambition, trauma, duty, loyalty, survival, love, fear, and old wounds that refuse to heal, even a code by which they try to live by. Some try to do the right thing and still cause harm. Some make selfish choices and still protect people. Some are heroic in one moment and unforgivable in the next.

That feels more honest to me.

Not because everyone is secretly evil, but because people are rarely one thing or another.

A knight can be noble and broken.

A ruler can be wise and ruthless.

A survivor can be loyal and dangerous.

A friend can be loving and manipulative.

A believer can be faithful and terribly wrong.

An assassin can still refuse a contract on someone they deem innocent.

It’s morals and it can be a very grey area.

That is the kind of tension I enjoy writing. Not good versus evil in its simplest form, but belief versus truth. Loyalty versus conscience. Survival versus morality. The person someone wants to be versus the person the world forces them to become.

I believe dark fantasy gives space for those questions.

It allows a story to ask what happens when the heroic choice is not available. What happens when every path has a cost. What happens when saving one life means abandoning another. What do you do when the only two choices available are lose-lose. What happens when someone does something terrible for a reason that almost makes sense.

Almost.

That word matters too.

Because morally grey does not mean consequence-free. It does not mean every action can be excused because the character had a tragic past or a difficult choice. Some things can be understood and still not forgiven. Some wounds can be explained but still not healed. Some choices can save the day and still leave the stain on the essence (soul) of my characters.

That, for me, is the heart of it.

Readers do not love morally grey characters because they are morally grey. They love them because they are human enough to struggle, flawed enough to fail, and real enough to make us wonder what we would have done in their place.

Would we have held the line?

Would we have crossed it?

These are the questions I hope pop up now and again with my readers.

Would we have sacrificed the army to save one city? What if it was a town? A village? What if it was one person?

Would we even recognise the moment when the line moved and now, we are in that grey area?

Those are the questions that stay with me.

And those are the questions I wanted sitting beneath Relic Reborn.

Azangrail is not a world of clean heroes and simple villains. It is a world where faith can betray you, loyalty can become a burden, and the cost of doing what feels necessary may be far greater than anyone expected. Friendships can be tested. Family can be strengthened. The villains can be understood and the heroes wrong.

In that kind of world, heroes are rarely innocent, and villains are rarely purely evil.

But that does not mean they are beyond understanding or redemption.

And perhaps that is why dark fantasy matters to me. It allows us to step away from our own world into a realm, where we can imagine the impossible, face the terrible questions, and answer them without fear of retribution or guilt.

It was a question that stayed with me long after the writing group ended, because it made me look more closely at why I naturally veer towards writing morally grey characters in the first

place.

The questions Relic Reborn asks

And perhaps these will be the questions I hope Relic Reborn will leave readers asking:

What would I do in a situation I never saw coming?

Where would I draw that moral line?

And would I recognise the moment that line moved?