bud i absolutely love your mith characters, im intrigued by Clem being supposedly not a good person?? would u elaborate on their moral greyness? do he and Midge vibe or nah??
Hmm I have a tendency to ramble so I’ll try to stay relatively brief! This is going to probably be very vague, I do not have the details of their character/situation worked out. But morally grey is right, and I feel like I don’t give them enough credit because they are the sort of person who’s striving to do good by the world and actively takes steps to make that happen, and I think they do usually have the right reasons for that! Most of the problem boils down to how they treat individual people and their relationships, though on the bigger scale too they do lean into the ‘ends justify the means’ sort of deal, they’ve got a fantasy paladin vibe and see matters in a very decisive way where bad is bad and good is good, and as long as you’re working toward ‘good’ you are ‘good’. I don’t think they’ve done anything heinous, but they definitely have crossed a few moral lines
In personal matters, it gets a bit more complicated? Clemency has a bit of a hero complex, and a tendency to downplay or brush aside others’ feelings. They think they know best in most situations and once they’re set on a result they don’t really pay attention to how other people are affected? Clem doesn’t ever really step back from a problem, regardless of whether or not it’s their business to get into, and will much more commonly fix the problem on their own without consulting anyone actually involved, rather than taking a more supportive role.
All in all, they’re not a terrible person, but what stops them from being a good person is that they’ve made no attempt to recognize the things they’ve done wrong, and they’ve ended up hurting people close to them as a result of various actions. While it possible for them to still learn and grow, I think it would take a lot and they probably are not going to change, they’ve had opportunities to do so that they haven’t taken.
As for Midge, they did vibe in the past as close friends, but as previously mentioned that is Difficult. Midge is one of those people who feels hurt by Clemency’s actions and no longer wants anything to do with them. Clem gave her space for a while, but they seem to think that the time and distance should have been enough to fix the problems between them, and is trying to get right back to how things were.
