When - And When Not - To Make Your Characters 'Morally Gray'

A few days ago, I came across this dramatic plea from a fellow writer, and I find myself agreeing.

This is absolutely true, but I think some caveats are needed.

Morally gray characterisations are fine for dramas where there is intrigue, mystery and no clear winner or loser. Morally gray characters work in stories, like George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire', which exist to explore the highs and lows of human nature. The trouble is, audiences have become confused and weary of morally gray characters because of the incessant and needless reexamination of fairy tales that has become fashionable in recent years.

There is no greater culprit in this regard than the Disney corporation.

Fairy tales are meant to be a dose of escapism, of unrealistic, heartwarming comfort. That is their purpose. These days, stories where good triumphs over evil, where heroes slay monsters, are rarely being told and when they are, they are being told badly. If your story is a fairy tale, which is meant to be a story about good triumphing over evil, making the hero or villain morally gray weakens the entire conceit.

Disney began this process of deconstruction with the excellent ‘Maleficent’ which fleshed out the villain of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ into a gritty rape allegory. This movie worked well, but only because it was an entirely different story to that of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. It was not a true fairy tale.

Once Disney began to do this for all their villains, however, they began to unravel the appeal of their main characters in all the Disney Renaissance movies, and began a trend towards deconstructing their own strength as master fairy tale storytellers.

Disney’s insistence on giving tragic backstories to characters like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is laughable. He is meant to be a crude caricature of an arrogant, narcissistic young man who only wants Belle because she is beautiful and because he can’t have her. Do we all know guys like that in real life? Absolutely. Is what we want from every villain now, a full backstory about why they are the way they are? Nope.

Did we need a whole movie dedicated to the youth of a woman who wants to skin puppies for a coat? No. The whole point is that Cruella is vain, callous and shallow. Her name literally has ‘cruel’ in it. That is the point of her. Villains in fairy tales are meant to be caricatures of evil. If a villain is just a misunderstood, tender soul and not, in fact, deeply evil, any victory over him or her is nowhere near as potent. Morally gray villains make heroes less, well… heroic.

This is why modern storytelling is so weak. Filmmakers and writers don’t know what story they’re trying to tell. They don't know what's meant to be a caricature and what's not. If you want to examine moral grayness, don’t tell a fairy story, that is the wrong story for you. People need fairy stories where good triumphs over evil because in the real world that doesn’t necessarily happen. That is where the comfort is.

When you begin to write a novel or script, you, as a storyteller, need to think about what experience you want your audience to have. Are you offering your audience comfort and escapism from a cruel, harsh world? Or are you offering them a treatise on the human condition? Hollywood has been trying to convince audiences that a story can be both, but I have yet to see evidence that this proposition is true.

The result is a corporation like Disney undermining their own winning formula, their own IP, and tainting the fond memories their own audience have of their stories. This is exactly one of the reasons storytelling is in decline.

Before you pick up your pen, you must first pick a side.