Writing Morality - The Setup is EVERYTHING 

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Merphy, today: How to kill (fictional) people Daniel, today: How to be moral

I love how like some "anti heroes" in fantasy novels just kill horrible people and....are kind of snarky and use swear words....that's it, like my grandma is more morally complex than that.

One thing I think is often overlooked in fiction, particularly by less experienced writers, is that intent does not necessarily correlate with results. It's tempting to have your main character(s) always be well-meaning and never do anything that hurts others. But sometimes that happens, even if what you're doing is a good action from your own perspective. And sometimes you have to square your own morality and your choices with the unintended consequences that result from those decisions.

Having black and white characters is nice, but a morally grey character done well is absolutely wonderful to read

I completely agree! I'm so sick of authors bashing morality on my head in fiction without any subtlety, in all genres. It can be done well, but most authors just need to cool it a bit!

One thing I love about the Dresden Files is that you have a character who really is just hardcore on the "light" side, but lives in a dark and gritty world where almost nobody else is as good as he is, and he is often straddling that line between hero and anti-hero and good and evil in basically every book. He's so often tempted to do bad things or to take the easy way out, and sometimes he is forced into doing bad things but we more often see his goodness triumphing. It's honestly heartwarming, wholesome, and inspirational to read.

I personally love stories of characters who want to do what's right but are put in situations where they don't know how. Kalladin in *Words of Radiance* and Cap in *Winter Soldier* come to mind. They have a tireless drive to do what's right, but need to figure out exactly what that means in complicated situations.

RU-vid always puts Merphy's and Daniel's new videos notifications together for me, so I always have to decide whose video to watch first. I feel like a child whose parents got divorced and who needs to pick where to stay today. Today it's Daniel o.o

The Expanse is really good about having a variety of characters among the morality scale. Case in point: Amos, if he weren't fighting with "the good guys" would be a downright homicidal maniac.

Morality is my absolute FAVORITE theme in books. The nuances in morality are always intriguing to me!!

remember what Jack Sparrow said about honest people, make your characters along those lines.

I'm of the opinion that morality is always subjective and based on the opinion of the individual and their experiences, as well as society as a whole, and that's a theme that tends to run throughout my writing.

I swear that daniel has the best outro music ever

Daniel's eyes freaked me out in the sponsor segment He's holding back his goblin transformation

From the Fantastic Imagination essay by George MacDonald: "In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey-and take their laws with him into his invented world as well." (Also, thanks to Daniel, because I only knew about this essay from his discussion in a previous video.)

Anyone else freak out and think Daniel got possessed during the sponsor section because his eyes were caught by the green screen effect?

1:00 finally the goblin's taking over

I recently got done watching Hunter X Hunter for the first time, and I gotta say it's one of the best morality/philosophical studies I've ever seen in any form of media. I recommend it for anyone looking for complex storytelling and characters 😄

I really appreciate the notion of the exact price tag in the ad. Way to often you just hear "It's 87% off!" but that could still mean it's hundreds of gold pieces.

My favorite morality system in stories is when the individual characters are quite obviously good or bad, but the factions that they can work for are all morally Gray. That way you have obviously good and obviously bad people on both sides working with and against each other You don't see that very much but I like it personally

I like grey villain-ish characters, but I LOVE badass villains.

Attack on titan especially now in season 4 is the best when it comes to morality

Anyone who wants to write morally ambiguous characters just has to look at Legacy of Kain, particularly the protagonist Kain himself For anyone who isn't familiar, Kain is a selfish, bloodthirsty (literally and figuratively) and revenge driven vampire king who cares little for humanity despite being human himseld once. However, despite these flaws you can't really call him a villain. Because ,ultimately , Kain's intentions for the grand scheme of things are good and he spends most of the series trying to beat an artificial fate that was rigged since the day he was born by an invisible puppetmaster. I won't spoil anything else, there are entire videos out there dissecting the series and its godlike storytelling and its really something you have to see for yourself

Yoda (In a very muddled voice) Look, We are all connected *Gibberish* (Smokes cigarettes) Me: Yup that’s accurate

My favorite quote about a morally gray player on the good side is by Alys Karstark in A Song of Ice and Fire: "My father wrote that he would find some southron lord to wed me, but he never did. Your brother Robb cut off his head for killing Lannisters [children]. I thought the whole reason they marched south was to kill some Lannisters."

when it comes to stories about morality, Breaking Bad is my to-go study lol.

I think a good example of this is Wave for the anime Akame ga Kill! He starts on the very clearly "evil" side, the Empire but does so because he is oblivious to its true corruption. He does things because he feels he has a duty to his country, but the more he learns and comes to the realization of this corruption, the less he wants to fight for this corruption and the more he wants to fight against it.

Hey Daniel, just wanted to recommend the show The Promised Neverland bc I think you’d really like it. It has none of that stuff that you normally dislike in anime and the worldbuilding and plot is amazing.

I never tier of having a plot setup with your good guys and bad guy's. It's always just a good fun time after reading a bunch of stories with grey character's. Which is something I do enjoy but having a balance is quite neccessary.

There are also the cases of characters on the same side but with differing views on how should they accomplish something. Example is Ashford from The Expanse tv series (haven't read the book yet), who isn't an antagonist, but is working against the main cast.

4:00 you forget that the entire prequel trilogy was dedicate to Anakins fall and how the Jedi were partially responsible, how they caused most of the problems that occurred, being blind to their manipulation by one hammy boi

What about scenarios where perceptions of 'good' or 'bad' are mostly a product of the society (and there position within it) they live in? You can then confront peoples of different societies, who all think they are right, with eachother and see how they react. I think this also a lot more reflective of real life!

And sometimes, too, you get there by not worrying about it - sometimes deciding "the character is going to be nuanced, but mostly good/bad" will make you think too much about it, while just trying to make a character as realistically human as possible will make that happen naturally (also I apologize to all the non-humans who want to be portrayed realistically, I just wasn't sure how to phrase it)

Another thing to avoid imo is the 'Hard men making hard decisions (whilst hard)' thing. Though I do love when it is called out as "Someone *else* dying for *your* cause is not you making sacrifices."

I think an amazing example of a Morally complex character is Bondrewd from "Made in Abyss" (amazing anime btw, seems light hearted at first but becomes one of the most complex and heart wrenching stories I have ever seen.) Although he does some incredibly inhuman things I wouldn't exactly pin him as just evil. More so just incredibly utilitarian to the point where he would do unspeakable things to his closest over ones to achieve his goals, which are technically good.

I was super confused when, after finishing chemistry HW I saw molality in this title, then I realized it said morality lol

Please do the Lord Asriel video! He's such an amazing character and I'd love to hear your take on him

I feel you can get away with a easy good/bad dichotomy more effectively when you show the banality of people’s complicity in a system. Likewise give your villain one or two neutral to good aspects like daughter they love who could be a thematic anchor for them. Effective drama if you play your cards right.

I'm so glad you included simplified good and evil as an acceptable option. I'm so sick of everyone bashing that as hackneyed and lazy while saying "every villain is the hero of their own story."

Not having any moral complexity can work, if the story is profound in some other way. For example, in LotR, yes there is not a whole lot of moral ambiguity within the characters; however, the struggle between the characters and factions serves to speak metaphorically to the good and bad sides of the human condition - Tolkien said that we all are the Orcs and we are all the Elves. It also fit into his broader Catholic philosophy of a fallen world. And that’s why I think LotR is a far superior story than Star Wars (the main movies at least). Star Wars is also black and white, but lacking a higher philosophical purpose to why it is that way. Lucas tried to make it a general Hero’s Journey, but I think you need a little more than that.

Cheers! This was excellent and I might use it when I teach story and narrative morality next. Thanks!

Loved this video! Strong ideas, and perfectly presented :) amazing job!

Complex morality is something I almost always implement, because I like telling very adult stories. I like catagorizing characters as more selfish or more selfless, then the details seem to fill in themselves.

Love how the green in your eyes screwed with the greenscreen sponsorship. Trippy as balls. Dead set, it was the flickering. I don't usually pay that much attention to youtubers eyes 😂

One of my irritations with morality in fiction is that many authors don't bother to actually lay the groundwork for *why* something is good or bad in the first place. They may make some attempt at depicting another moral framework that differs from ours in uncomfortable ways, but rarely will I see any real engagement with that perspective on its own terms. At least in all of the popular fantasy that I've seen, there's no deep moral examination like what you would see in books like Crime and Punishment. Yes, I know that's an obscenely high bar, but who doesn't want to see Dostoevsky with Dragons?

This video reminded me of a Chinese fantasy (a xianxia) with a main character who had absolutely no morals and only lived for benefits and to attain eternal life, but despite that moral deficiency, the discussions on morality and the references to real-life selfishness and the reasons why he is like that are explained very well, especially in the flashback arc. I'm saying that sometimes a story with a completely morally deficient protagonist is good if it is done right. (btw the book is called Reverend Insanity and it is extremely critical of China's political landscape)

Personally I love writing my characters with good morality. Yes there are levels of that, for both sides, but I want you to look at my characters and say: “I can root for this guy/girl”

What I wish fantasy writers would do is to write up different morality systems for fantasy world as most of the moral code of our cultures is arbitary why not make a new one up. For example in a fantasy world the early stages of human development we already had magic so infant mortality is significantly lower which progressively leads to less emphasis being placed on keeping kids safe and in a 1000 years leads to kid murdering being much more okay than it would be in our world

The end of this video reminded me of the classic Spaghetti Western Film “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” by Sergio Leone. The title and opening sets an expectation in your mind of where the characters will lean. Tuco (or The Ugly) being a somewhat middle ground, whereas Angle Eyes is obviously and appropriately owing by up to his namesake as the Bad. And yet you get to Blondie (The Good) and you see this all sort of fall away. While he isn’t evil his character is overall more in line with Tuco’s as the ugly than a truly good character.

Gundam deals with this morality questions in a way that for me is brilliant. You have two sides on war, both of them see themselves as the good ones and the other as an absolute evil, and in order to defeat this evil they both commit atrocities. One side uses children on the war, and the other sees no problem in commiting genocide or terrorism, both of them dehumanizes their soldiers and uses them as experiments. You have heroes and villains on both sides of the conflict, and almost everyone has a reason to fight for them and hate the other.

Ok so i know i'm like a year late on this... But the greenscreen effect applying to your eyes in the curiosity stream advert is FUCKING TERRIFYING. I love it.

Yeah...the thing is readers will read messages into a book whether it's there or not. During my first series I was accused of pushing a Christian agenda and being anti-Christian. For my part, I was just telling a fun story. There was no underlying message. Just pure entertainment. But people won't let facts get in the way of finding something to get pissed off about.

I wish Daniel had mentioned more specific examples from books during the video. I like conversations about books that have been read more than videos that are more like writing advice, like this one was. That being said I'm sure there are people with the opposite preference than mine; I'm just expressing my personal/subjective opinion for the purpose of audience feedback and conversation :)

It's funny that you talk recisely of that subject these days, because with my daughter I had that same conversation/ discussion starting from fantasy then applying it to real life and political climate, present and past. Especially, since she's passsionate right now about chinese web novel about cultivation (wanxia & xianxia) then moving on to capitalist democraty & dictatorship socialism (as she's also learning more about modern c-drama)... As product of our own propaganda, we do believe that our system is better... whatever side we're on! So I think that fantasy leaning more and more toward the gray zone of morality may actually help us understand better real life various pov, and make us listen better to "the other side" to maybe eventually pick waht seems to work better from each system and improve life for everyone. Which reminds me of what the proctor at my sister's art graduation said, that the role and dury of any and all artists is way beyong the entertainment, it is about elevating humanity. And I have a feeling that is precisely what those authors are doing at a very deep (or high? Lol) level.

Great video Daniel. Thanks my dude.

"You don't always need [morals]... It's just not appropriate all the time." So true, so hard to get ppl to accept.

How did Sansa end up with the good guys? She contests Lord Baelish to be the character most driven by selfishness in the entire ASOIAF series. She may not have evil intentions but she is definitely not "good".

Yes, please do a His Dark Materials video covering Lord Asriel! Or indeed, any aspect!

I wonder, can you have a main character who is similar to the classic hero(heart of gold, lots of determination, never really strays from the path(infact no one really believes they will), slight pacifist who will fight for his ideals) alongside the edgy cool badass rival and somehow make the mc the fav char of the fandom? Like how rare is it to have fiction where the mc is your favourite character

House on the Cerulean Sea is a great example of good guy in the bad system and learning to recognize how best intents is just a first step.

Thank you for saying you don’t always need to question morality in stories. I enjoy it, but not for every book. Sometimes I want to a good vs evil. Other times I want something more complex like the sword of Kaigen.

Well said. I'm down with any kind of morals written into a book, though I adore the books that have multiple ones the most. A typical bad vs good, but also some good bad guys and bad good guys mixed in. Like not everyone falls into the same category. Also, love me characters who truly believe they are good, doing good, leading good, the savior of their people!! But in reality are doing some of the worst damage to their people in ages. (Here's to looking at a certain WoT character I won't spoil for new readers).

This video is making think of the video game Ogre Battle. My husband was just replaying this and talking to me about the affects of having your soliders go on a "bad" path or a "good" path

It's super weird to hear Bob mentioned so often because I've written a book with him as a morally grey character.

It reminds me of Chad with the Necromancer in Legacies. He is himbo who doesn't want to do the Necromancer's bidding, but he has no choice because he has no control over his actions

I agree with you on authors needing to tone it down sometimes, and this is another solid advice video. But I can't help it I must say, it's not as simple as a sudden switch in Star Wars. Anakin had been getting manipulated by Palpatine for a decade though. The prequels and the Clone Wars show pretty well imo that it was a slow corruption. And they say that the dark side is more of a slow overtaking than a switch several times across the franchise. Vader switching back to the light side at the end of Ep 6 happened a lot faster than the opposite, but it too was influenced by an outside manipulation i.e. Luke tugging on the old heartstrings. The sequels are a hot mess and Kylo is not a well-written character by any means, but they did establish with him that it's possible to be stuck in between the two sides.

My day is blessed by another Daniel Greene video

The music this time around made me think you were going to do crafts... which I would still watch.

Stargate as a tv show displays this kind of thing really well when regarding propaganda. In season 10, I believe, it shows a main bad guy officer realising his "truth" for his beliefs has been twisting to justify genocide by the pariahs. Things like that in a show suddenly add so much to a character who would otherwise he very 2D for me.

I enjoy seeing writing advice from you. Do you plan on putting more of it out there?

What I like depends on what I'm reading if it for pleasure/to relax I generally enjoy more black and white morality but if I am trying to get something from the story the more complex morality is preferable

The Scar by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko is a great fantasy tale about morality. It's also one of the best fantasy novels but pretty unknown. Not sure if you've heard of it but I'd love to see more people give it a chance.

I’m writing a fantasy novel where the main character is constantly questioning whether he should kill the people he’s fighting and whether or not his personal quest for vengeance is justified. But so far, he’s mostly dealt with it through introspection. He’s not broached the subject with his companions.

I read a lot of thrillers - perfect territory for grey morality - and one thing that really gets to me is when a character is very morally flexible in their actions, but the book is still demanding that we see them as 'good' or 'the hero'. I don't mind if a character does bad things, I might still root for them because I think they're interesting, and I will just resent it if the author seems to be forcing a good opinion of them; it doesn't work, it doesn't make me like them. I read the military thriller 'Diamondhead' which could have been an excellent character study of the main character being slowly corrupted, but instead he's portrayed as somehow continuously heroic despite accepting an assassination contract, just because the target is a bad person, and the wealthy industrialist paying for all of it that wants his rival dead is also portrayed as 'good' with 'altruistic' reasons that rung hollow. It's... just flat. I didn't like it, it had no nuance (and the book had a lot of other problems, like 200+ pages of not much happening before the action starts) and it was like the author was trying to force me to see Mack as heroic, the industrialist as good, and it was so melodramatic and overblown in how it tried to make the characters 'good'. I'd have appreciated it much more if the characters were intended to be seen as flawed, as making bad choices, as truly succumbing to desperation and vengeance without that being romanticised or having excuses for it rammed down the reader's throat. I don't think I would have liked the book, but at least I wouldn't have felt patronised by it.

I think this kind of discussion can be easily put into manga genre: you write shonen if you want simplified morality, you will touch upon senen if you want some complex morality. Shonen is like Disney, it's good entertainment, but horribly political wrong in the aspect of ethics of making art and have a clear consumerism toxic(toward art as exploration) ideology. Another way to look at this is, imo, morality is just political discourse with less steps. If you want to establish political correctness, you will have to establish what is politically wrong FIRST, in any way, there's no escape from either sides. The good moral of yesterday won't be as good as you see it today, unless you can predict all future days. The real questions is HOW are you going to arrange and design your narrative. I found philosophical conflicts beautiful as mathematicians consider some formula pretty. There IS aesthetics in designing conflicts of morality, and because it is aesthetics, by its nature, not everyone will "get" it.

You covered a lot here. One area I'd like to dig deeper is the contrast between... 1) clear good and bad with a mess in between and 2) just the mess, focusing on individual morality. What do people think about this? When would one be better to use than another? As I edit my first novel, I started out much closer to #1 than I'm at now. The more I learn the characters, the more I realize we're all shaped by our upbringing and personal experiences. Granted, in a society, many people share similar experiences, but it's more nuanced than that. When should an author try to show "good vs. evil" with humanity mixed in, and when should they just show the complexity of human morals? Great content as always! Oh, and... rage rage Star Wars, rage rage Trump.

Lord Asriel is one of my favourite villains ever, Mrs Coulter too. Asriel is the worst though, he would have killed his own daughter if *spoilers* hadn't been there.

Only times I think Star Wars has ever done “morally questionable” kinda well without breaking the universe is kotor 2 and “Darth Bane: Path of Destruction” (the rest of the Bane trilogy goes back to more black and white morality). Both do get kinda stuck on the Star Wars dichotomy at points though.

0:56 Your eyes, oh my god.

Ultimately, it comes down to the reader's specific stance on moral choices. When it comes to me, you can't just throw a good/bad person on the other side and then claim moral ambiguity. A good person who fell for propaganda and does evil things for that reason is not a bad person to me. Purely because they still are acting in accordance to their own morals, it's just that they're focus is misplaced. Same goes for a bad person, it doesn't matter that they have a heart of gold or won't cross a particular line or two, they're still a bad person; just maybe less shady them some. Then there is the variable of the world that it's placed in. A LOT of "heroes" in the fantasy genre do plenty of evil/illegal crap (murdering people, stealing, deceiving, causing billions of dollars in destruction of property, etc.) and yet most of us don't really call attention to it. Yet, if those same people were set in a more contemporary setting without all the fantasy quirks, those same actions would be looked at a lot differently. (at least that's how it works for me). The real discussion that morality has (whether it be ambiguous, complex, or simple) is that it allows the creator to delve into where certain characters draw their lines on a case by case basis. For instances, imagine a person who is perfectly fine with murdering able men and women but won't lay a hair on the elderly or pregnant women or kids and infants. Or even a person who believes that everyone has the capacity to change and yet they're on a mission to kill this other guy because of something they did in their past. And don't get me started on the dynamics you can have when you put a morally concrete person (as in someone who is firmly on one side or the other) and a neutral aligned person (i say neutral because I typically think that most morally complex characters would fall here but any character who is willing to break their code for whatever reason works fine) in the same room together.

I really hope you don't keep the background music for these types of videos, they've always been great with just you talking. Found it annoying and distracting. But otherwise good stuff as always! Would love to see more topic-discussion style videos like this

The good, the bad and the ugly comes to my mind when thinking about morality in stories. Those with good or bad intentions and those with morally grey dispositions who could fall either way depending on who they interact with during their character arch and or a traumatic or good event/internal struggle that led them to make their choice of sides. Just as in real life I feel like characters choices in their moral actions need to be explained so the reader can understand stand why they made the choices throughout the plot, narrative or story and for what reason/s. Morals are conflicting choices and that is why in my opinion all stories need them to keep the story moving along nicely and who doesn’t like a bit of drama or action, otherwise the story would be boring without conflict to propel it along.

The intense music at the beginning of the video is raising my anxiety and Im here for it.

This is why fantasy is a such reflection of the political climate of real world. And if u get it it can get u to see the world in a better light

Ok, but counter argument: From my point of view the Jedi are evil.

That non-copyright music in the background... is something

In Star Wars' defense, Anakin was still considered a "good guy" when he committed a massacre of Tusken Raiders in the Attack of the Clones. It doesn't even matter though because that's by far the worst Star Wars movie and Padme's reaction to him telling her "not just the men, but the women, and the children too! They're animals and I slaughtered them like animals!" was fucking ridiculous. Homegirl was literally like "Ily!!!" right afterwards. Like, that's not real, come on. Sorry, I just really hate Attack of the Poopie

I think a lot of authors and readers don't understand what morally grey means. The popular conception of "grey" is basically a hero who curses, and maybe has relationship issues. Every time they steal it's for an honourable purpose. Every person they hurt is a villain, or at least deserves it. Everything is always justified with them, or so minor it doesn't much matter. I've seen many characters described as morally grey, but very few of them actually are. They're usually just white knights, with a bit of complexity.

You can also take Dark's approach of changing the rules of the game so thoroughly that the audience don't know what good and bad are. 😀

I need that lord asriel video!!!

My current WIP is basically good people struggling to reconcile with other good people under bad leaders, but my main planned story is far more interesting. People with good goals with harmful methods, fighting each other to cause the least harm possible while still accomplishing the goodbad thing that MUST be done.

Joe Abercrombie rocks this grey line. Oh! And later Dresden!

I think this is a great analysis. Morality is just one more thing that your story can be about. If you're a Tolkien and want to tell a story about hardship, and friendship, and courage, and overcoming great odds, and death, you really don't need to add any moral discussion. You can just tell people that there's an evil Sauron who wants to subjugate the world and a good soon-to-be-king and a good angelic being that want to stop him and that's that. If, on the other hand, you are a Tolkien and want to tell great tales of betrayal and utter tragedy, perhaps you might want to create an extolled hero that eventually causes the greatest tragedy known to the folks of elves and dwarves, making morality not the main theme but having it play an important role. And if you want morality to be the focal point of your story, you write a first law and power-hungry old men breaking it (oh and of course you throw some super tragic torturers with great humour in there; they are amazing). Either approach is as valid as the next because your goals are completely different. Of course, as a reader, you might prefer one approach over the other because you like the resulting discussions. If you're interested in examining the effects of war and cruelty and hardship on the human psyche, perhaps you'll want to read a LotR. If you're interested in examining the causes, perhaps you'll want to read a Nauglamir. And if you're interested in realistic characters and morality, you'll want to read an Abercrombie. That doesn't make writing these stories any more or less valid though. Just more or less economically feasible.

You got it kind of right about good people on the bad side, but I think you overlooked the biggest reason real people joined 'bad sides', and that was because they were born into the 'bad kingdom'. The idea of being politically motivated to go to war is new, go to the medievil period so beloved by fantasy, most foot-soldiers couldn't read and were serfs, they fought because the army was the best paying employer and because they didn't want 'scary foreigners' to win the war. Most soldiers were motivated by what could best be described as tribalism. They might even disagree with the 'evil king', but since he pays them and protects the 'good guy's' family he's more than happy to do 'the wrong thing'. As such, the 'bad side' could end up populated mostly by 'good people', but also, 'good people' from both sides may have been what we would think of as incredibly racist, believing things like 'the only good orc is a dead orc' if you want to go with Tolkien.

Ok no one else has said this (that I've seen) but in your ad your green screen in the background was also passing through your eyes.

I don't care much about this, as long as it makes sense. For example, if you have a blunt good vs bad story, don't try to force us to sympathize with the bad guys all of a sudden; the same goes for stories with these morality issues. It sounds misplaced when a character acts crazy just for the sake of advancing the plot when we don't think they're going to do that (hello, Daenarys!). It's all about making sense to the reader. Yes, there may be a foreshadowing that once the good guy stepped on an ant, thus he's capable of bad things.. but no, this is not a strong hint of their bad behavior.

Now I need to re-read Villians by Necessity by Eve Forward. It's all about saving the world by righting the wrongs of the good guys.

The beginning here is key. Your story doesn't *need* a morally grey character. Please dear authors, remember that everything needs to fit your tone. Excellent video Daniel!

Hey, loved the video content-wise - just a subjective formal criticism, I don't think the music playing in the background was necessary. Maybe it's just because my brain's on energy saving mode today, but it kinda distracted me a little.... nothing major tho. Keep up the great work!