Morally gray heros?

One of my readers told me he thought the villain of Tendrils to the Moon was the good guy until he was almost through with the book. That confusion was not my intention, but I can see why it happened:

• Tendrils has two lead characters, and neither consistently exhibits villainous or heroic behavior. (Tropes would have served me well here, to communicate to the reader how to feel about the characters.)
• During the drafting phase, I understood who the villain was long before I settled on a character for the hero. The tortured choices the villain makes drive the conflict. This resulted in the villain having a stronger presence until well into the second act.

Theoretically the story is a corruption arc for the villian and a redemption arc for the hero, and they're pushed into conflict by the villain's choices. I could have executed the latter a lot better, because it's not clear what Col. Montgomery Ames (U.S. Air Force–retired) needs redemption from, if anything. Writing that book was a learning experience, but I'm glad people who've read it enjoyed it, even if I do rank my second book higher.

The occasion for this is Yakov Merkin's post about the disconcerting trend of morally gray heros in fiction. Here's a highlight:

What’s important is seeing the hero we like face down these challenges, come to the edge of falling to them, but then finding a way to get through. The hero refuses to betray his friends even under intense pressure. The hero refuses to let himself return to being a merciless conqueror when the opportunity presents itself. Consciously deciding to stay a hero. Physical threats don’t give you that sort of opportunity, most of the time.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m not saying a hero needs to be a literal boy scout. Batman’s policy of never killing his many murderous foes is idiotic and not heroic. There are times when a truly good hero must take harsh action against evil in order to protect the innocent. Don’t mistake that for a falling into darkness.

The moral-graying of heros is a symptom of naturalist and deconstructionist movements to eschew artistic representations of the ideal. In the real world people are complex and do good or bad for a million different reasons. You're drawn to the villain because he's not simply evil; he got to be this way. You often hear how interesting a villain is, like Killmonger in Black Panther. The audience expects there's a reason this person turned bad. (This is so prevalent, it's now considered subversive to have the villain just be the villain.)

The flip side of that is the audience's assumption that all people start out good, or at least okay. Thus the hero's backstory doesn't have as much juice as the villain's. To give the hero's role weight to at least counter the villain's presence in the story, the writer morally shades the hero.

The problem with that? Moral shading diminishes the most powerful emotion an audience can feel: catharsis; the triumph of good over evil. Look at what Zack Snyder tried to do with Superman, perhaps the most idealized hero in American culture. Snyder transplanted him into a darkly shaded setting and narrative. The result? Superman doesn't feel like a hero.

What we can learn from Snyder's failure is you can't have your cake and eat it too. Some characters, like classic heros and villains, can't be moral-grayed without creating dissonance in the audience. If we want better heros, we're going to have to cut down on the moral-graying.

Side bar: I'm no Batman aficionado, but the no-kill principle is indeed idiotic. And I thought the tongue-in-cheek "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you" line in Batman Begins acknowledged it as such, until the sequel showed Batman refusing to kill the Joker while the Joker was on a murder spree. Why are we even fighting if we're morally opposed to killing the bad guy in defense of innocents?

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.