50 Shades of Morally Grey: An Exploration into the World of Fan-Fiction

Grey is My Favourite Colour

My attraction to words was instant. A chemical reaction. An innate relationship. I started writing around the age of twelve, trying to mirror whatever young adult book that had captured my attention that month. The problem was, most of the characters in books presented to me felt too binary. The good guys had hearts of gold and the villains were crafted from pure evil, with no middle ground. It felt like I was being presented with a false dichotomy. While I understood the appeal for some, I could not relate.

I am a biracial woman, a stereotypical middle child born in one of the most diverse places on earth, South London. Consequently, my entire life has consisted of trying to understand people from different places, trying to get conflicting lifestyles and views to coexist around me and within myself. All while dealing with the inevitable cognitive dissonance from being a half-black woman; always too white to be black and too black to be white. I have become comfortable living in the blurred lines. I have learnt that even when the world tries to insist things are black and white, it is OK if grey is my favourite colour.

As my philosophical standing on morality became clearer, so did my taste in books. When faced with characters without much inner conflict, who are reductionist, who are firmly on one side of the good or evil coin, I find them flat, unrealistic. I became the kind of writer and reader who seeks out characters that are complex; that you can't figure out in the first couple of chapters. Characters that are unpredictable, hard to summarise, more reflective of the intrinsic convolution of human nature. I became enthralled with morally grey characters.

A morally grey character can be defined as a character whose morals are unclear or ambiguous. They deviate from the socially accepted meta ideas of good and bad, falling somewhere in between these lines, with a potentially rapidly changing vague moral code that is explored throughout a piece. They are nuanced characters that allow room for growth.

There are many ways to depict a morally grey character's arc. They could have a fall from grace, in which a 'good' character struggles to maintain their positive characteristics, leading them to closer resemble a villain. This is portrayed in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890). Dorian Grey starts off highly regarded and beautiful. To remain beautiful, a painting is cursed to bear the burden of his ageing and sins. We follow Dorian as he spirals into a world of chaos, murder and transgressions but remains beautiful and young, while the painting gradually depicts him as hideous: "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic" (Wilde, 1890, p.27). His moral corruption proves disastrous, leading to his death.

A MGC can also have a redemption arc; where a character who is initially perceived as 'bad' has a moral shift that ends in their redemption. A classic example of this is in Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol (1843). This story centres around businessman Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas. He starts the story cold-hearted and miserable but this changes as he's visited by ghosts that show him the error of his ways. By the end of the book, he's had a change of heart: "He became as good a man as the good old City knew" (Dickens, 1843, p.67).

Some of these characters are not written to be changed. The exploration of their character may pull them to one side of the dichotomy or the next, but never fully. Batman, from the world of DC comics, serves as a model for this type of MGC, as he's widely accepted as an 'antihero'. He fights against crime in the fictional city of Gotham, however, he frequently disturbs police investigations and uses extreme forces of violence to do so. In spite of this, his moral code of never killing stays intact. He never ventures too far into the realm of 'good' or 'bad'.

There are no hard and fast rules to writing morally ambiguous characters. The main element of these characters is that they are ambiguous. There are arguments for both sides of their morality.

Nonetheless, there has been a shift in what is accepted as morally grey in a literary culture that has been gaining popularity since the 2000s. This culture is the lovesick world of fan-fiction.