Morality... Every book ultimately has to decide the morality of their story. In children's books, one might ask, "What's the moral of the story." That can confuse us. Those who grew up in US schools might treat "morals" as "lessons", and then ask themselves what does this story teach me? Most children's books have a lesson. They try to teach you to not bully, or to not swear. Thus, in a lot of minds, "moral" and "lesson" become the same thing. Then you grow up, your books grow up too, and morality becomes way more complex than a single lesson you can take away from a book.

The 6 levels of moral development kind of come into play here too. These are the "reasons" we make good choices, or bad ones. At level 1, a person only makes a choice to avoid punishment. If I talk one more time, mom will send me to my room, so I won't talk. At level 2, a person makes their choices for reward. If I act good, maybe I'll get something. Level 3 is appearance. I want to be seen as a good person, so I act good compared to societies standards. The 4th level is maintaining social order. This is the first level that where you act unselfishly. You act in order for the mutual benefit of society. Most people will never go beyond level 4.

Level 5 gains a better understanding of order. They understand why laws exist, and work towards the betterment of those laws. And level 6 is the development of universal principles. You have desires that don't necessary fit the law or societies standards. You have your own ideas on human rights, justice, and equality, and you're willing to follow your own beliefs. These people form the revolutionaries, the changers of this world. You all probably just thought you're level 6 didn't you? Sorry bub, you're probably not.

So why am I going on about morality? Mostly because I think it's important for you to think about it. A lot of people just write their characters to fit certain archetypes or meet certain goals. Every once in a while, it's a good idea to take a step back and think about why your character is doing what they are doing. That's the difference between a 2 dimensional character and a good one. If anyone said your characters don't have dimensions, chances are it's because you haven't thought about their motives, their goals, and their internal morality structure!

However, morality has its own set of pitfalls. The most popular characters these days turn out to be the most detrimental for new writers to emulate. Characters like Walter White.

Walter White is a badass. There. I said it. You were thinking it; I just put it into words. Game of Thrones is a fantastic series. I love how those characters are just so grey. No one is the good guy. Everyone is complex. Awesome. The current trends is to create characters that are bad, but do good things, or characters that are just neither good nor bad. I'll talk about some of the clichés, such as the anti-hero who is really just an arsehole hero, the nice guy who turns rapey, and the polarization of them versus us. These are the most common moral character types, and how they horribly go wrong.

There is nothing a story needs more than some good character development, and there is no easier way to obtain character development than to have a formally good guy go bad... or a formally bad guy go good. I've already mentioned Walter White's decent into evil. You also have Buffy the Vampire slayers "Spike" redemption story. Let's just say, the moral switcher is a common thing. Sometimes it's a permanent thing, sometimes it just occurs for a single episode, chapter, book, or whatever. You have to team up with the bad guys to fight an even bigger bad guy, and actually get a long a bit (X-men 2 for example).

Besides acknowledging that the moral switcher is sort of cliché, the real reason this can go wrong is the result of failing to find a suitable reason for the character to make their moral switch in the first place. Spike took several seasons slowly turning into a better person as a result of a chip in his brain that prevented him from acting on his impulses. Still, even then, after he had convinced himself he was good, it took a scene where he nearly sexually assaulted the woman he loved before he truly attempted to change himself. However, after all that, there was still some bullcrap about a soul and those with souls = good and those without souls = bad that completely undermined the idea that people with souls can be awful.

Issues aside, this was gradual process that took time to set up all the way until the last episode of the show when he finally gives his life for a righteous reason. That is not the kind of setup I see in most Wattpad books. This instead exists as a means of character development for side characters. You're the bad guy, now you are my friend (Dragon Ball anyone?). If you're going to choose to make a character change sides, you need to come up for a darn good reason. If that reason is "temporary" like "I'm pissed at this other bad guy, so let's team up", then his morality hasn't changed, so you can't just have them stay friends after things were resolved. If it's permanent, chances are you need it to be set up, a lot, over the course of the entire story.

Long story short, don't just play a switcheroo. More of this in The Betrayer section.

Ah...the perfect hero. I don't really think this needs a lot of explanation. I've already touched on it while talking about Mary Sues, who are the equally sexist female version of the Perfect Hero. The Perfect Hero is always right. His moralities are impeccable in the world he's in. Everyone on his side will applaud every choice he makes, not matter how brutal that choice may be. Even if he's a revolutionary going up against the government, no one will oppose him other than the government themselves. Even then, after defeating his rivals, many of them will thank him, because they were probably being coerced against their will.

Now remember, no matter how many peons he kills, he's still the good guy. Even if he takes actions that result in more deaths than necessary (attacking a place rather than sneaking in, ect...), he is ultimately still the good guy, and no one will every question the mountains of people that his cause left murdered. Even when this guy destroys a government, something that is universally considered a bad thing which will disrupt the very economics and structure of an entire region, the people, who will likely spend the next 10 years desperately clinging to life as their protection against foreign nations, trade routes, and mercantile activities crumble around them, will still applaud and love this guy.

Although that's starting to sound kind of bad when we put it that way... Wait, we still haven't gotten there yet...

There we go. Now, your first question might be "Bad Guy Hero? Don't you mean Anti-hero?" To which I would answer, not exactly. An anti-hero is the guy whose morals aren't necessarily righteous, but ultimately does good through the act of obtaining their goals. Deadpool, obviously, is an anti-hero. He doesn't make the right choice, he makes the convenient choice. However, he's also not one to make evil choices. So he's not really a bad guy.

The Bad Guy hero, on the other hand... is just a guy whose an arsehole. The Bad Guy Hero is the kind of guy who murders people who disagree with him, often savagely, often brutally, just for the sake of his own cause. Sometimes, the bad guy hero goes through a traumatic event. Extreme bullying maybe. Or Torture. Or Betrayal. Whatever the reason, this guy has an axe to pick with the world, and he won't be afraid to do it.

The mind numbing part about the bad guy hero is the lengths authors will go to justify their actions. They'll slaughter completely innocent people, or retaliate against mild transgressions with EXTREME prejudice. Then, everyone in their circle will tell them how great they are and how right they are for being a savage monster.

The Bad Guy Hero will usually be placed in opposition of the perfect hero. The author will then go to great lengths to prove that the "perfect hero" and his tactics would lead to devastation, while the bad guy hero's antics are necessary to survive.

"Other world" fantasies are ripe full of these. Arifureta, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Against the Gods, Depriving the Depriver, heck even the Sword of Truth Series: all these depend on a previously bullied or "wronged" individual gaining power, and then using that power to exact vengeance on other bullies, often with extreme prejudice.

Although, even with the continued narration insuring the reader that this guy is in the right, and no matter how often all of his friends tell him how perfect he is, there is only so much savagery we can relate with, so how do they get around it? By making bad guys who are even more ridiculous.

So you have a character who won't hesitate to murder a hundred people just because they looked at him crosswise. How do you get the reader to root for a guy who'd be the bad guy in any realistic story? Well, you make everyone else worse.

Every person the hero comes across is a barrel of brutality. Other groups will stab him in the back, try to murder him, and then steal his supplies. That's not when they're trying to rape women. Oh, lord, the amount of rape these books possess. The US has a strange relationship with sex. We won't hesitate to watch our "hero" murder dozens of people maliciously (Dexter), but you have one rape scene and they turn into an unredeemable monster. Remember Spike from Buffy I mentioned before? There are still people who think that Spike's character was "ruined" by that sexual assault, because in their eyes, he was unredeemable.

So, exactly... you want a character that you want us to hate more than our mass murderer protagonist? Make them rape people. It works every time. You may be asking if I made that comment as sarcasm, but I honestly can't tell you. As much as I want to call this a crappy cliché, making a villain a villain by having him sexually assault people works a little too well... but do read my chapter on subjects to avoid before you jump on that bandwagon.

The problem with the ridiculous bad guy, rape aside, is that he doesn't make any sense. His actions are rarely in his own best interests. He'll be oblivious to people more powerful than him, as when he attempts to bully the often OP'd MC. When the MC shows his power, the bad guy will STILL throw everything he has. How many people have to die before you say "Hmm... maybe this isn't someone I should mess with?" They Ridiculously Bad Guy has virtual no sense of self preservation, no doubts in their overwhelming superiority, no qualms about going against the law, and... virtually no gain in their actions. That's a ridiculously bad guy.

So, we have a good guy who does bad things, but he does bad things almost uniquely to bad people. If this story also has harem aspects to it, that'll also be what attracts the girls to him. In these worlds, "not raping people" is an unusual but desirable character trait. How screwed up is that?

So our bad good guy is screwed up in a screwed up world. But how he'd get that way? Chances are... he was betrayed.

The Betrayer is used a little too often in stories. People want there to be a twist, so they put in a character for the sack of that character ultimately betraying to main character. Sometimes, that betrayer will be the hero's lover, and the betrayal will be coerced or otherwise not her fault. Other times it will be a blatant swap, the result of a moral switch that no one saw coming. Maybe the betrayer is actually the antagonist's girlfriend?

In Wattpad, the betrayer is almost always a female friend. You know the scene. Once our protagonist hits rock bottom, she glances over at her best friend, gives her a little "Et tu, brute?" Only to get herself stabbed again. The person's face will twist. They'll get all angsty. Suddenly they go from your best friend, always backing you up, to the most evil bastard you ever did see.

Your MC never saw it coming. However, in a bit too many of these scenarios, neither did your reader. I've seen people add these twists literally a chapter in advance. When I question them on it, and this is literally the response I get "They wanted a twist to keep their readers guessing."

Look, if your story is a mystery. I want twists. If your story is an adventure, I want adventure, and if your story is a romance, I want romance. People read a romance because they want romance, not because they want a twist.

I could write another chapter entirely on this phenomenon, this lack of confidence that results in people feeling they need to take their readers on a roller coaster ride or they'll lose interest. But here, I'll break it down for you. People don't want to read your story to be put on a roller coaster ride. They typically start reading your story to meet a genre they like. Chances are they are reading your story because they like reading stories where two hot guys fight over a girl, or stories with an interesting world built, or stories where the bad guy gets his comeuppance, or a story with NTR, or whatever their goal is. When they go into your story, ultimately, they're expecting another story along those lines. If it's too predictable, yeah, they'll get bored... but ultimately they started reading for the feelings they get when they come across the romance scenes, or those mystery scenes, or those aha! Moment scenes.

So, to end my rant, if you want to put a betrayer in your story, don't do it just to shake things up. Plan it out first, and try to avoid doing it just to force your MC to have character development. That's just another form of weak writing. If you aren't planning to have a character betray another, and the scene isn't set up and lethargically developed over the course of the story, then omit it. It's better to have the story be mildly predictable, than to have to story make the readers say "WTF?"

One moment, they're killing people, the next moment, they're saving someone. There words and their actions rarely match up. They'll be saying they won't help and they hate people and blah blah blah, but more often than not, they fill the need of the hero whenever that is needed. Oh sure, they'll whine about it, but ultimately, they'll make all the right choices, just for all the wrong reasons, or vice versa.

The point of the Neutral guy is create complexity, but at its core, that complexity doesn't exist. Why doesn't that complexity exist? The answer is simple... because the author never bothered to ask themselves about the morals of their character.

They wanted to create a character that seemed full of depth, but at the same time, they wanted a character that filled the roles they wanted to happen. They thought up a scene, they needed this character to fill that scene, and thus the character acted however they needed him to act to finish what they started.

Regrettably, that isn't how characterization works. When writing a character, we all need to think a bit about why that character is doing what they do. Unless they're mentally ill, even bad guys have reasons for acting bad. If you can't understand that reason, even on a fundamental level, then you're going to have trouble writing that character.

You need to think about a character's past, their point of view, and then you need to fit that into your narrative. Yes, your character can act uncharacteristically, but even that should have a logical follow through, from an emotional impact on the character or perhaps the consequences of acting against their nature. Furthermore, that nature won't necessarily go where you want it to go. If you're playing chess, your bishop can move diagonal, your castle can only move straight. Just because your castle is in the perfect position to checkmate if he suddenly moved diagonally, if you make that move, the person on the other side, in this case the reader, will be pretty unhappy with that conclusion. It won't make sense to them.

And in the end, that's what good characterization is like... a game of chess. You have a list of characters, you know the ultimate conclusion you want those characters to reach (check mate), but every piece can only move in a certain, different, logical way, and once you've gotten them moving, you can't just suddenly switch pieces or make moves that make no sense without completely destroying the characterization you set up, or I should say the moves you've already taken.

So morals. Think about it a bit.