I've come across a problem with one of the main characters in my book. The "heroine" of my story starts out as an apathetic self-absorbed hacker, who seeks adrenaline thrills to find meaning in her life. With that in mind, I tried to show this kind of outlook is not evil, but neutral instead (the theory that all humans are self-interested). To make a point that she's not evil, I've shown that she refuses to cause physical harm to anyone, and won't work with a hacker organization that kills people. At the same time though, she didn't care about their agenda to expose a company that exploited child workers, because it doesn't affect her at all.

Here's a little exchange she has with another hacker, whom she helped to expose a corrupt organization (The MC is Joyce, aka Banshee_Harvest)

Banshee_Harvest: The infiltration went without a hitch, I managed to copy their entire database onto my hard drive. I’ve sifted through the code too, you were right. They were exploiting children for labor.

G00fy: That’s what I thought. I’m impressed Banshee, the TLF were ready to sift through that code with you. I’m glad that it ended up being so easy. It’s just another domino in the effort to free the people of these corrupt corporate executives.

Banshee_Harvest: Save your preaching for someone who actually cares. I was in this solely for the thrills. I’m uploading the files now #2_files_attached (New_labor_contract.pdf, Redacted_labor_contract_CONFIDENTIAL.pdf)

Banshee_Harvest: I’ll send the rest of the content if you’d like that, but I think that’ll be enough.

G00fy: Aren’t you the one who is always complaining that they need a cause to join? What’s so bad about the TLF?


Joyce swiveled in her chair, tucking her legs in, remembering the uneasiness she felt earlier.


Banshee_Harvest: I don’t like the rumors about you guys. You’re not afraid to hurt people to get what you want. And I don’t want to end up on that side of the fence. The ends don’t always justify the means.

G00fy: Lol, yet here you are, working as one of the most profitable hackers in the country, if not the world.

Banshee_Harvest: I don’t throw people under the bus to get what I need. You do.

G00fy: Listen, we do what we have to, no more, no less. The sacrifice of the few, or the one is for the good of the many, am I right?

Banshee_Harvest: Don’t try to push your fascist beliefs on me, I’ve heard about what you’ve guys done.

G00fy: We’re only trying to help. And I do mean that.


Joyce sighed in frustration. G00fy could be annoying at times. She didn’t want to join them. This was a one-time thing, and she meant it.


Banshee_Harvest: As I’ve told you many times before, NOT INTERESTED!

G00fy: Okay, you don’t have to shout. Thanks for your help, btw.

Banshee_Harvest: Np. However, there is the matter of paying me still. I think I should negotiate my price considering all that I was able to do, don’t you agree?

G00fy: I’ll have to talk with the other members about that, but you did agree to a 25 bitcoin price, which is a fair sum of money.

Banshee_Harvest: But I think, with all that I’ve done here, I do deserve a 5 bitcoin bonus, don’t you agree?

G00fy: That’s pretty hefty, like more than I can vouch for at least. Like I said, I’ll have to talk to the others about this. Thanks for your help though. The 25 should have already been sent to your account.

One of my reader's described Joyce (Banshee_Harvest) like this, "I'm hating Joyce right now. Her character is contradictory. She's selfish and a criminal. And she deserves to be in jail. Plus she's apathetic and arrogant and I don't see any redeeming qualities to her. So if I'm supposed to feel this way, you've succeeded. But I don't think I want to live with her as the protagonist of this book. I'll just want to keep shooting her in the head."

The purpose of this novel is to show her transformation from someone who is chaotic neutral to lawful good. However, I can't begin that transformation if my readers hate my character. How can I portray a chaotic neutral character as sympathetic and avoid making them seem evil? Or how can I make a selfish character relatable?

_{I understand that morals can be ambiguous, but it's important that my readers can at least relate to this character so they give her a chance. However, my character is really self-absorbed (she really doesn't have anything driving her other than thrill and money: at least at first.)}

I found a very elegant reduction of alignments in a Tumblr post:

I figured out a simple guide to the alignment chart last night:


Lawful: Rules matter more to me than individuals.


Chaotic: Individuals matter more to me than rules.


Good: Other people’s well-being is more important than my own.


Evil: My own well-being is more important than other people’s.


Neutrals: My opinion of what is more important is determined on a case-by-case basis.


So a Lawful Good character’s guiding moral philosophy might be “I follow the rules because the rules keep people safe, even if they are sometimes inconvenient or harmful to me or other individuals.” A Chaotic Evil character’s guiding moral philosophy would be like “Screw the rules and screw you.”

If Joyce is Chaotic, she's concerned with individuals more than corporations (so she won't kill, because that would harm an individual). If she's Neutral, then sometimes she will decide that people are worth helping, and sometimes she won't.

If you want to show her as Neutral rather than Evil, then you need a Pet the Dog moment. (TV Tropes warning!) You need to show that she is in the middle of the Good-Evil spectrum, and that she is capable of doing good things if it interests her. Ignoring child labor shoves her towards Evil, so I see your beta's point. There's a difference between self-interest and self-absorption. "I don't have to do anything about child labor because I don't know the kids" is not Neutral, it's Asshole.

The journey from Neutral to Good is not a long one. But going from Chaotic Good (I will help other people, regardless of the rules) to Lawful Good (I will help other people as long as I can follow the rules to do so, and I won't break the rules to help people) is honestly the bigger challenge here. How do you get Joyce from "screw you, I do what I want" to "I can't stop GlobalMegaCorp from using child labor because it operates in Backwardsia, where there are no laws against it"?

If you want your Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins! protagonist to be appealing, you have to make her appealing. She has to do things we like, or find fun, or could sympathize with. A selfish character can still be "not a jerk" if the character is capable of not being selfish all the time.

Loki is a Chaotic Neutral who repeatedly swings from Evil to Good. Captain Jack Sparrow is a Chaotic Neutral who isn't as Evil as he pretends to be. Petyr Baelish is a Chaotic Evil who pretends to be Good. None of them could suffer to be Lawful.

I think the problem is that for somebody that doesn't care, Banshee gets awfully worked up about not caring, and this emphasizes an evil side, not a neutral side. I think you are trying too hard to TELL us she is neutral, instead of just showing her being neutral.

I'd edit the following exchanges:

After " to free the people of these corrupt corporate executives" you have:

Banshee_Harvest: Save your preaching for someone who actually cares. I was in this solely for the thrills. I’m uploading the files now #2_files_attached

I think that is too much TELL. I'd show she doesn't care:

Banshee_Harvest: Whatever. I'm uploading the files now ...

After, "What’s so bad about the TLF?" you have

Banshee_Harvest: I don’t like the rumors about you guys. You’re not afraid to hurt people to get what you want. And I don’t want to end up on that side of the fence. The ends don’t always justify the means.

Too much exposition, you've said the same thing four times. I'd change it:

Banshee_Harvest: You hurt people. I don't hurt people. See the difference?

After "we do what we have to do ... for the good of the many, am I right?" You have:

Banshee_Harvest: Don’t try to push your fascist beliefs on me, I’ve heard about what you’ve guys done.

"Fascist beliefs" is too much, and after G00fy expresses a philosophy, she can summarize her own philosophy:

Banshee_Harvest: No, you're wrong, because you don't HAVE to do anything. The many are way more powerful than me! They can take care of themselves, and I will take care of myself.

I think for a neutral, this is a fine position. It is a fact that the 99% far outnumber the 1% of oppressors ruling the world, and they usually far outnumber the armies and police of the oppressors. It is only their own refusal to take up the risk of revolt and casualties that keeps them oppressed. In other words, they are not going to risk their lives to help themselves and their fellow oppressed, and if they are not willing, why should she take any risk on their behalf?

She can still be interested in a cause (like helping journalists with information). She can still feel sympathy for the oppressed, the trafficked girls, the people robbed of their pensions. She may still decide to do something about it when she's bored and the risk isn't great.

I also think its fine if her public or professional face is set to only care if there is money in it for her. But privately, I would write such a character as occasionally seeing something on the news or the Internet, and casually engaging in a bit of easy hacking to deliver a little Karma to a jerk, just because she likes hacking, and likes the satisfaction of balancing the equation now and then. She may think its funny.

A crack in her shield will make it easier for you to break the wall of feigned indifference (which you have already suggested exists if she has in fact said on several occasions that she is looking for a cause.)

First, love your character. If you don’t, why should the readers care? Make her more than just this skill she has - make her who she is rather than what she does.

I have a hacker character who is a charming neutral, but assists assassins in a professional capacity. Most of what he does is what one might expect, but he takes joy in the challenge of checking a company’s security. He does other things, but has become the go-to if you need information that cannot be obtained otherwise.

I started with him as just some semi-anonymous person on the dark-net. That lasted about five minutes as he developed into an interesting charismatic person.

Joyce has a line she won’t cross, but acts as she does - why? Is she, like my hacker, intensely curious and striving to always improve his skills? Apathy is dangerous, self-absorbtion can be irksome.

Give her a reason why she became Banshee. Who was she when she was just Joyce? She is trying to do some good by exposing this corporation, but why? The bitcoin? Or does she care, even if she doesn’t really know it herself?

Does she perform this service because she believes, even subconsciously, in something? Is she a pure mercenary? Or does she charge what she does as a way of both justifying it to herself and fining those who have gone too far, who have no boundaries that she can see?

Why she's not saving the world... (easy)

I think you're already on track to answer this. You said at one point in your comments that your character wasn't interested in saving everyone because she was self-interested and not worried about some awful thing that someone else caused.

Well, what would lead someone to not be worried about other people's problems? Having too many problems yourself. Which, if you pull it off right is fine. Being too busy to care is a real thing and seems already in line with your character. It doesn't have to be busy, but all we're really talking about is crowding out her ability to be too concerned about any one thing that's not directly affecting her. Give her enough emotional and local baggage and it'll be pretty easy to have her shrug off a request to do more.

"I don't have time to take down a drug ring, I need to eat before my big meeting and I haven't even prepared!"

Or the classic...

"I can't take down that drug ring, I have children to raise."

Or...

"Sure, I'll save the world; after my homework is finished."

There are lot of reasons to not do things that aren't going to help yourself and most of us organize our days regularly around such reasons. You're going to have bigger problems justifying why she's willing to take some actions that harm people than justifying why she's not taking actions. So...

Why she's making the world worse...

On balance anything she's doing to make the world worse for others you're going to have to demonstrate as not being that bad. Classic tropes are "they're ensured," "stormtroopers aren't people/robots don't have feelings," and "they deserved it." The point is you've got to keep your character from crossing a line and really hurting someone, or if they are going to do that maybe they own up to it later or do enough to really offset this in your readers mind or it was the least bad thing they could do given the circumstances.

The less of a sympathetic connection your reader feels to the person being harmed, the more likely you are to pull this off. If you can create space for justification, then your character has space to remain "not evil".

If you balance these two methods you should be able to create a character who is too troubled to be a big-time hero, but capable enough to get by in an unfair world by taking from those who won't be harmed or deserve it.

You need to figure out what your story's theme is. And then you need to take Joyce on a journey that forces her to make decisions about that theme. That will define whether she's good or evil within the context of your story.

I'm going to go on a bit of an aside here. Whether your character is chaotic neutral or lawful good or whatever doesn't matter for crafting a good story. RPG alignments aren't really about good and evil, but are more like a knock-off personality test that works well for a specific type of setting. In the end, as in real life, characters' moralities are defined by what they do. If an ostensibly chaotic evil character ends up stopping a cultic ritual to summon a powerful demon, isn't that a heroic action? And if an ostensibly lawful good character throws people who were looting to survive desperate times in jail, isn't that discompassionate? To be clear, I'm not saying not to give Joyce an alignment - it can still be helpful for understanding her personality. Just don't be married to it.

Instead of worrying a great deal about your character's alignment, you would be wise to focus on your story's theme. A good story is more than just a series of interesting events that happen to somebody. This is why you'll hear about ideas like The Hero's Journey, the 3-act structure, and the flow of rising action into a climax mentioned so often and treated as though they apply to every story. It's because they do.

And at the heart of all of those ideas is a story's theme. When a story begins, the MC is naive, immature, or broken in some way that's important to the world. Then, when the inciting incident occurs, they're forced to deal with piece of their world very directly. The question is, will they be able to learn how to deal with this new reality? If they do, then they're a hero, regardless of what form that takes. If they can't, they've either become a villain or a tragic hero.

A lot of these themes are straightforward. In Harry Potter, Harry grows up in a family defined by selfishness, then is thrown into a world of magic with some people who are generous and altruistic and others who are even more selfish then his aunt and uncle. The question is, can he become a hero be fully embracing the selflessness the good guys stand by?

But in some stories, the moral logic can become quite convoluted! In the movie Inception, the main character, Dom, is a man who accidentally led his wife into committing suicide by messing with her dreams. He's been broken in two ways ever since: He can't get over his wife's death, and he's unwilling to go as deep into dreams as he did so comfortably at one point in his life. When he's tasked with not just stealing information from a victim's mind but planting an idea in his head, the question is twofold: Can he successfully pull off the reverse heist, and can he overcome his hangups with his wife?

The ending of Inception is a little backwards. Dom succeeds in manipulating his target's mind. Outside of the framework of the story, this would seem to be a very selfish, evil thing to do - taking away someone else's free will! But in Inception, the main character is treated as a successful hero. This is because the action he takes - pulling off the reverse heist - answers the question of the theme - can he return to the world of dreams? His decisions would probably be classified as chaotic evil in an RPG alignment system, but the bravery he showed was core to his specific story. Furthermore, the story doesn't end until Dom goes too deep and gets lost in a dream abyss with his memories of his wife. In order to escape, he has to overcome this manifestation of his grief. The story could not have possibly ended satisfyingly before that point, even though he succeeded in his primary goal, because the question of his unresolved guilt was tied to one of the story's central themes.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying: Don't worry about whether Joyce is "good" or "evil" in the abstract. Instead, figure out what the central question of your story is, then decide how Joyce is challenged by and ultimately overcomes or falls to that question. Your readers can and will debate the merits of Joyce's decisions in the broad sense forever. But they will root for her if she's dealing with the core issues in your story regardless.

From the snippet in your question, I already see several possible core themes for your story:

G00fy: That’s what I thought. I’m impressed Banshee, the TLF were ready to sift through that code with you. I’m glad that it ended up being so easy. It’s just another domino in the effort to free the people of these corrupt corporate executives.

Banshee_Harvest: Save your preaching for someone who actually cares. I was in this solely for the thrills.

Will Joyce start caring about corporate corruption? And if so, will she be successful in bringing that corruption to heel?

G00fy: Aren’t you the one who is always complaining that they need a cause to join? What’s so bad about the TLF?

Joyce starts out not wanting to care about how her actions affect anyone but herself. But when she gets caught in webs that tie her to other people whether she likes it or not, will she be willing to commit to something bigger than herself?

Banshee_Harvest: I don’t like the rumors about you guys. You’re not afraid to hurt people to get what you want. And I don’t want to end up on that side of the fence. The ends don’t always justify the means.

G00fy: Lol, yet here you are, working as one of the most profitable hackers in the country, if not the world.

Banshee_Harvest: I don’t throw people under the bus to get what I need. You do.

G00fy: Listen, we do what we have to, no more, no less. The sacrifice of the few, or the one is for the good of the many, am I right?

Despite pretending like she doesn't care what happens to others, Joyce can't stand the thought of hurting others. But she has abilities that can bring about a happier future for many if she's willing to pull the proverbial trolley's lever. Once she inevitably makes that decision once, how will she respond when she is put in increasingly twisted zero-sum games and forced to choose who lives?

Any of these would be a strong direction for your story to go in. You've asked the questions yourself pretty directly in the conversation you posted, I'm just making them explicit! And if you have a different central theme in mind, that works too. Regardless of what you choose, make sure Joyce's journey revolves around that theme. At that point, it won't matter whether her decisions would be classified as good or evil, lawful or chaotic - your readers will root for her regardless.

Banshee_Harvest: Save your preaching for someone who actually cares. I was in this solely for the thrills.

That response is quite extreme. Neutral would be more like:

Banshee_Harvest: No worries. It was fun.

The focus is still on the wrong thing, i.e. The fun.