Pink Hazard said:
For example a guy who commits several murders but also loves his son and actually seeks power in the wrong way, only so he can protect his little boy.
Hmm, that's interesting. Personally, I tend to define people as good or evil based on their actions rather than their motivations. Killing someone else, barring some extenuating circumstances, is something I'd consider an evil act, and someone who tends to commit evil acts I'd in turn label "evil." I'd say that the character having someone he wants to protect
humanizes him, maybe makes him more relatable than someone who just goes on a killing spree for the evilulz, but doesn't actually make them any less
evil. If he were good, he would go about getting power in the
right way if he thought he needed it to protect his son.
Not saying your interpretation is wrong; it's just intersting to me how hard it is to define "good" or "evil" and how much people can differ in their interpretations of them.
How do you make your characters? Do you base them off of people you actually know, do you build them around a situation (tragic past, dangerous situations), do you prefer your bad guys to be unambiguously evil, or for everyone to have shades of black and white?
I don't really make characters so much as characters happen to me. I'll be writing a scene where I need a character to appear--a trainer to be fought, a pokémon to capture, some shopkeeper or other NPC to interact with--I just write along with the first characteristics that come to mind. They'll take on some small quirks just as a matter of course, and the more I work with them, the more those quirks will deepen and be refined to create the full character, if they're going to stick around for more than a few lines. Sometimes a character comes to me quite unexpectedly and more or less with a complete personality, which actually happened to me while working on NaNoWriMo this year, but even then I continue to learn more about them as I write. Overall it's a subconscious, intuitive, iterative process, and sometimes my conception of a character can change dramatically from when I first start writing about them to the end of the story.
Once I've got a reasonably-developed character, I have a lot of fun analyzing them, enumerating their strengths and weaknesses, figuring out what Hogwarts house they'd be in, that kind of thing, but I don't work
forward from a set of traits; it's a destructive exercise rather than a constructive one. So I don't really do any "building," as such, and while my characters no doubt have some source of inspiration, whether someone I know in real life or a character in another work, that's only something I can recognize in hindsight.
For the most part this works pretty well for me, but unfortunately it can lead to a lot of characters who have broadly similar traits--there are just some character type I enjoy working with, and so my brain grabs onto them first when trying to fill a blank spot in the narrative. If the characters get enough screentime they'll usually diverge far enough that it's not a big deal, but minorish characters often suffer a bit. This is why I tend to end up with piles and piles of snarky wise-talkers.
Generally I prefer characters who have what I consider to be realistic motives and struggles, but I don't mind labeling some of them unambiguously "good" or "evil." An evil character isn't going to spend every waking moment kicking puppies or something, just as a good character doesn't have to be anything like a perfect saint, but I don't mind working with characters that I would call "unambiguously evil." The stories I've written so far have called for characters that have messy alignments--where it can be difficult to tell who the good guys are, if any, and where characters may change alignments over the course of the narrative--and without clear villains, but I wouldn't mind doing a story with more of a clear-cut "big bad" figure. I just haven't been inspired to write any thus far. I've actually been kind of been toying with writing a story about a more "traditional" hero--much with the goodness, doesn't compromise on their principles, self-sacrificing to a fault--recently, maybe as a reaction to writing so many terrible people in my current fanfic.