Here's an interesting panel discussion from Capricon. Heroes and villains are easy to write, but morally gray characters offer us more complexity
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Good characters may seem easy to write if by "good" you mean adhering to a formulaic moral code without struggle and without costs. But convincingly good characters or even actions are hard to write, perhaps harder than compromised characters.
True, but that often leads to a different kind of character dynamic.
For instance, Molly Blaine in Lunar Surface Blues probably would qualify as a good character (not perfect, not a goody-two-shoes, but overall a decent person). But she's dealing with immaturity rather than actual villainy, in an environment where youthful foolishness or dumb mistakes can kill.
Reggie Waite gets a cameo at the very end, so we know the story is taking place during the era of the Sharp Wars - but his stories are about how he as an astronaut and an officer of the US Navy responds to the Expulsions, and particularly the horror of the Kitty Hawk Massacre, which we see from Vitali Grigorenko's POV in A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever.
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Good characters may seem easy to write if by "good" you mean adhering to a formulaic moral code without struggle and without costs. But convincingly good characters or even actions are hard to write, perhaps harder than compromised characters.
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True, but that often leads to a different kind of character dynamic.
For instance, Molly Blaine in Lunar Surface Blues probably would qualify as a good character (not perfect, not a goody-two-shoes, but overall a decent person). But she's dealing with immaturity rather than actual villainy, in an environment where youthful foolishness or dumb mistakes can kill.
Reggie Waite gets a cameo at the very end, so we know the story is taking place during the era of the Sharp Wars - but his stories are about how he as an astronaut and an officer of the US Navy responds to the Expulsions, and particularly the horror of the Kitty Hawk Massacre, which we see from Vitali Grigorenko's POV in A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever.
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