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So if you spent anytime in book advertising spaces on something like Instagram or Threads or Blue Sky or Tik Tok, you’re going to see this sort of collection of shared vocabulary. These will tend to self-collect into difference sub-genres, but there’s still a fair amount of crossover.
One of these terms is “morally gray main character.”
And what’s interesting about this term is it’s almost exclusively used when marketing romance, romantasy, or other romantic subgenres. It is exceedingly rare to see it used in any other genre marketing. Science fiction is not typically trying to sell you on a morally gray character as a primary talking point. You don’t see it in horror or thrillers or mysteries or even literary fiction. It really is pretty sequestered to these romantic subgenres.
Beyond the obvious literal defintion describing a moral framework, what is this word meant to mean?
My first reaction to seeing this word in use was, “aren’t you just describing a well-rounded character?” Real life people are “morally gray.” Not a single one of us adheres to a perfect ethical framework all the time.
But then you have to remember that we’re looking at words that describe a fixed narrative framework. These characters don’t change in real time, just over the course of the story. These words are meant to be cursory labels, not deep dives into the reality of existence.
So in that context, what is “morally gray” trying to convey?
When we’re talking about characters in a narrative, two of the most elementary archetypes are the hero and the villain. The “good guy” and the “bad guy. However, there’s not a single objective moral structure assigned intrinsically to being a “hero.”
Gilgamesh began the story as kind of an asshole. The whole inciting incident of that story is the gods saying “yo, you’re a bad king, we’re gonna fix that.” He grows into a better ruler in-part through his relationship with Enkidu. There are a number of mythological hero figures that abide by a morality that looks different under a modern interpretation.
So the actions that define the morality of a hero character are a reflection of the context in which they are written. One of those contexts is genre and medium. In Christian fiction, for example, you’re going to see the heroic characters mirror morality that most closely aligns with more more conservative Christian values.
There are modern genres and mediums that are built on a very strong delineation between hero and villain. And that delineation comes with an generally consistent moral framework for its hero characters. So much so that a protagonist that deviates from that framework gets their own label.
An antihero.
There’s a much more complex history of the word underneath, but this is the way we understand it in modernity.
This raises a bit of a linguistic conundrum. If romance and romantic subgenres are going to claim a strong villain-hero delineation, then the word antihero already exists. We don’t really need the term morally gray. If they’re not going to propose a strong delineation between hero and villain, then potential morality runs a broader spectrum. So in that sense what is the term “morally gray” trying to do? What message is it conveying?
Presumably, it’s trying to say that instead of being a “traditionally” good guy, the character in question has darker, more selfish qualities. But when has “a traditionally good guy” ever been the default expectation of any of these romantic genres? So you have to ask what you’re trying to communicate when you use the phrase “morally gray” in romance book marketing?
And this is the tip of the weird marketing iceberg in this regard.
Because tell me why I’ve seen a number of books recently advertised as having a “reverse age gap?” In the real world, that is not a thing. An age gap is just an age gap. Now I know there’s an implied default of older man/younger woman when it comes to books in these genres, but what if I was looking in from the outside? Even internally, why are we doing it this way?
Obviously we exist in a marketing environment where we need to rely on keywords. But surely we could have come up with a better keyword that actually describes why that age gap is important. Because that’s what I would actually like to know. Just knowing that it exists does not help me. I cannot be the only one who feels that way.
Right now. Romance and romantic genres are the primary scapegoat for the literacy crisis. They used to share this honor with things like comic books and pulp science fiction. But now everybody loves comic books and have seemed to have forgotten that terrible techno-slop still exists. It does not help that the marketing of romance, romantasy, and romantic subgenres looks this way. Too much of it looks abjectly stupid stupid from the outside.
In conversations about smut, I see people defend their romantic book of choice because it only “has one sex scene.” Yet explicit content is a huge focal point of these books from the people talking about them in the reading community. They’re creating spice scales.
It is perfectly fine to read books with explicit content. I write books with explicit content. But the community, as a whole, is not successfully beating the allegations that explicit content is the only thing they care about as readers.
It is not fair and never has been that romance and romantic sub-genres get the flack they do. But we also don’t have to make it easier for those judgments to land square in the center.
