⁀➷ Building a Story (i)

After a bit of thinking, I came up with a genre I wanted to incorporate to the story: Psychological. I think I might end up going for a Psychological Drama (subgenre of Drama) based on a vague story idea I have (will be discussed in the next post).

But first, I want to gather and evaluate the research I have done so far:

Psychological Dramas focus on the emotional, mental, and psychological development of their main character/subject. I want to portray a dysfunctional relationship between, with the main character being the initiator.

My goal here is to build a story in which the audience would have trouble deciding whether the main character's actions are valid. I want to make the main character morally gray, where they have motivations of their own, carrying out actions that are morally complex (Source). I feel like morally gray characters are a bit more relatable generally because not a lot of people are morally black or white, evil or good. Collectively, as humanity, we are known to possess complex minds, thoughts, and feelings. Though certain fictional figures of morally white or good characters are generally looked up to, our complex nature refrains us from achieving such goodness, typically out of selfishness or yearning for something such as love.

Batman, or Bruce Wane, is an example of a morally gray character. Batman does things on his own volition, working as a vigilante. He does not care for social norms or whether his acts are of legality, but he does have the motive to combat to organized crimes. Though he carries out nearly criminal acts, he still abides to his moral code of not killing anyone, even malicious criminals such as the Joker. (Source)

Another morally gray character would be Tartaglia from the game Genshin Impact. Tartaglia is one of the executive heads of a powerful military force in which are widely feared and despised by the people of his world. His goals are to serve the Tsaritsa, the ruler of his nation, to make a living for his family. He treasures his family and would sabotage or kill anyone who gets in the way of his family's happiness.

Shown below is my brainstorming/planning paper. I found that writing things down makes me think a bit more than typing.

Generally, this is just questions that I felt I should answer as I developed the story and characters especially going the route of a morally gray character/psychodrama genre.

So far, the pattern for morally gray characters to do "bad" for a "good" cause seems to be prevalent. I think that it would also go the other way around, where characters may do "good" for an extremely selfish or "bad" cause.

I want to be able to incorporate this in my story allow for the audience to be more immersed in the story, trying to decide whether or not they would root for the main character or not based on their actions and cause(s).