Writing Tips and Reviews

Pure Good and Pure Evil

How old are you? I'd love to know. Because it'd make sense to why you'd think this way. Human hearts aren't pure anything, from what Kingdom Hearts has taught me, both light and darkness exist in all hearts. Yes Ventus' heart was stripped of darkness, that was under unnatural circumstances. He wasn't born that way.

I don't like this idea that people are only pure good or pure evil. The best of people have done terrible things, and the worst of people have tried to do good things. A character who is pure good or evil is boring. Why do people make characters unrealistic? First copied and pasted clones, now pure good or evil. There's something wrong here. I know those do have exceptions, robots can be made to be the same, I did say one they start their own life they become a different person. And I know that under circumstances, there can be those with pure light or darkness in their hearts. But they are not natural.

A pure good person does good things for good reasons. They usually don't want to fight or fight for a just reason. They never are mean and never have mean thoughts. They love everyone and are loved by everyone. Sound familiar Mary Sue? Pure evil is just the same with "evil" in the place of all the good. It's honestly boring. Instead of trying to make similarities between the hero and villain if it starts to happen, the writer will just make the villain even more evil. There's no deeper meaning, there's no relating the two and there's no making the story interesting. In a situation like that, making the villain worse to make the hero look better is just lazy writing.

It's harder for new writers to make characters with more than one trait. If they're good or bad, that's all I see new writers make. I, along with many of my friends, would rather see a story where the characters are good with some bad traits or bad with some good traits. It's much more exciting to read about a character who does bad for good reasons. You sympathize more with that than just a character who has never done anything bad or only does bad.

While there are characters like that who are pure good or evil, how popular are they? In some ways they can be popular, in others, they're boring. A serial killer who just goes around killing has been popular in America. For me personally, all the characters I know and love have always been set in the middle. They're not to the point of anti heroes or anti villains, but they are more interesting than "I'm an insane psychopath who kills for fun", which, don't make me bring up the quote again.

That's boring. I role played with a person who did that with their character, who also thought they were better than everyone else. A Mary Sue basically. And it was so boring. The same song and dance over and over again. "I'm going to kill you" doesn't kill. "I'm better than you because I have five years of training" can't even fight. "I'm insane" don't even get me started. Do you see what I mean? It got more and more pathetic because there was nothing more to the character.

If a character is evil and does something, say, is trying to destroy the world. Then sees a crying child. What is more interesting? To see them ignore the child or even kill the child? Or to see them try to help the child? The first would just back up that they're a terrible person, while the second shows that they have a good side and maybe isn't as bad as they seem to be. The second makes the reader want to know more while the first engraves what the reader already knows about the character and make the reader hate the character even more.

If a character is good and is trying to save the world then is faced to kill their best friend because of many possibilities: already dying, being controlled by the villain, betrayed the hero or anything else works. What is the interesting turn? If the hero lets the character live, then what is the consequence? Do they die later on? Do they kill the hero? Do they stand down after seeing the hero's unwillingness to harm a friend? If the hero does kill the character, what is that consequence? Do the others blame the hero? Does the hero feel guilt (a negative emotion)? Does the hero blame the villain (a negative thought or doing)? Both ways work and many games will do this. Despite what the hero does, there's a consequence and emotion that happens after it.

Emotions are a huge part of this. Pure good means only positive emotions while pure evil means negative ones. Which is impossible. Let's go down a short list of both. Positive: happy, sympathy, love, innocence. Negative: sorrow, indifference, hatred, guilt. I chose these specific examples, can you see what I see? The emotions are opposites. As Tales of Berseria says "a world without hatred, but also, a world without love". A villain that shows compassion and love isn't pure evil, and a hero who shows hatred and sorrow isn't pure good. Regret is another emotion, if the hero or villain feels regret for what they're doing, then they're not pure good or evil.

I really don't understand why there are people who think that people can only be one or the other when that's not true. There's a middle ground. Something as simple as feelings can show what type of person someone is. Doing bad and regretting it and doing good and regretting it happens all the time. We as humans make decisions that we don't always like. To think that characters are pure anything is stupid and lazy.

Making the villain worse and worse to make the hero look better shouldn't be happening. The hero, if pure good, should be good on their own. If you need the villain to be worse than they already are, then try making similarities between to two instead of trying to differentiate them. If they're looking too similar, then try to work with that instead of against it.

I've seen many heroes and villains work together at times because their motives match up. I've seen characters switch sides as their beliefs are changed. I've even seen the hero become the villain. That popular saying "if you don't die a hero you live to watch yourself become a villain". It's human nature to have both good and evil. To strip one away is to strip the other as well.

Here's this, the backstory here, is that when I used to role play, I used characters from my series. This person thought that gave them permission to use my character in their story. Which, they stole all the assets for their story, this character included. I had to tell them no four times and finally when I got fed up, deleted her off the character list along with every other character they tried to steal from me.

But that backstory aside, out of everything Lazarus is, that was how this person described Lazarus. "Pure evil". What is wrong with this picture? Well, like I said when I described Yuri Lowell to that one person, this one did the same. They took the entire description I gave them, took out everything that didn't concern what they wanted, and kept one singular little piece of the character for who they are as a whole. This goes into defining a character by one trait as well.

This person didn't understand anything I told them about Lazarus and they made her this one liner, striped down, "pure evil" character because that was what they wanted her to be. They were someone who thought people were pure good or pure evil and made all their characters that way. Who Lazarus was as person didn't even matter to them, they just cared that she was "pure evil". Like the other one only caring about Yuri being "a psychopath" both which are wrong. When I corrected the person again, they changed the description to "pure good", like there was no middle ground.

(And her title is "Immortal Witch", a title, not what she is. She's a sub species of angel, but that was too complicated for them.)

You can't strip a well developed character to a one liner. Making a character like pure god or evil because you can't understand why characters are a mix of good and evil shows how little you know about writing characters.

I'll also only mention the one person who knew Lazarus was cursed with immortality (see, not born with) and kept saying "I'll break the curse and kill you". That was just annoying, I hate hearing "I'm better than you" every other second when I spoke to that person.