Dov Shaul, while serving with the Australian Commandos, decided the Rules of Engagement for his third tour in Afghanistan were optional…suggestions at best…Dov was a ‘tad’ upset about the loss of several friends during and after his second tour. About three days after Dov’s return to Australia he binned his orders to recuperate and re-train, swapped his sniper rifle for a machine gun, climbed into a Hercules bound for Afghanistan, and the rest is classified but within two months all grievances and related matters were settled (mulched).
So, both my protagonists had to make hard choices where they had to weigh two bad things against one-another.
Sara chooses to kill a man (she thinks she killed two men, but one of them is, in fact, still alive) so that she can be free (the other man was planning to give her over to the dead person, for reasons Sara did not know but could guess at)
Malika chooses to save Sara’s family from death (i.e. a huge gang) even though it leads to the death of her own family.
No, he rescues someone else and decides to leave the other one because he’s got a personal vendetta against that person lol. Not necessarily for bad reasons, but considering he’s supposed to be the “good guy,” I like the idea of showing that even heroes refuse to be heroic sometimes lol.
So for most of the story, my MC was pretty docile and averse to violence, especially for a demon. But over the course of the story he and his friends are pursued by the relentless and sadistic villain. At one point, Shia is grievously injured and nearly killed by him. He pulls through, but is left permanently maimed with an injured arm. During the climax, Shia and his friends are cornered at the very literal edge of the world and he watches the villain take down each of his friends one by one. At that point, all thoughts of peace go right out the window, he succumbs to his true demonic nature, and, uh… yeah.
I don’t think so right now, but she might when I eventually get around to writing it. She thinks long and hard about it, then decides to steal them to protect the dead patient’s reputation. Her patient was an old lady killed in a mass shooting by another patient, but only her therapist knows her secret. She (the patient) was a hugely popular internet celebrity whom everyone thinks was a gorgeous twenty-year-old because she posted photorealistic paintings of herself on Instagram, claiming they were photographs. If anyone finds those paintings, the truth would come out that they weren’t photos at all and that she was actually an old lady, so her therapist decides to prevent anyone from finding out the truth so the patient can continue to be adored by millions online.
Basically, years’ worth of abuse culminated in the grandmother’s death when Elya (who was a child around eight at the time) and her beloved nursemaid attempted to flee on a boat–a plan the grandmother thwarted. The grandmother was strangling the nursemaid to death when Elya killed her. Not so bad, right? It was self-defense. Well, she, an emotionally disturbed eight-year-old who has lived most of her life not knowing love, about to witness the death of the only person who has ever cared for her, went a little trigger happy and brutally bludgeoned her to death. The death itself was ruled so brutal that officers reporting the scene dubbed it: “The cruelest act humanity is capable of.”
Shite thing is, the nursemaid took the fall for the crime (much to the protest of the eight-year-old who insisted she killed her grandmother) and due to the severity of the crime was horribly tortured and then hung, the latter of which Elya was forced to witness. (The nursemaids public execution/torture also had a lot of political influence due to the fact the grandmother was a well-respected noble woman/business owner. She was also the mother of the king’s favored mistress–Elya’s mother–so the act of murdering her was semi-equated with murdering a member royal family.)
She’s certainly an anti-hero, her main character motivation/story centers around getting revenge for her nursemaid’s death/torture. I wanted to try a different approach to the narrative and chose to make the MC someone who is well on her way to becoming a villain, but due to circumstance, is thrusted along the hero’s path (which becomes her redemption).
In spite of the emotional turmoil it brought, she is not sorry the grandmother died.
Edit to offer further explanation
Edit: Just want to add in case any of this comes off weird, I don’t condone any of her actions, nor am I trying to justify that through her being abused. Her actions are pretty extreme and abnormal, which correlates with her more anti-social behaviors, displayed throughout childhood and into adulthood. It’s more meant to be a tragedy, reflecting the consequence of her decisions, and her entire revenge arc to ‘get revenge’ is basically her wanting to satiate her guilt with more death. Something that clearly does not work. She’s meant to represent how the cycle of abuse, or bad behavior, can continue and how that can be broken (in a hyperbolic way, to be sure) but also to test the waters for what can and cannot be redeemed. Overall, she’s an emotionally disturbed and broken individual whose ability to be self-aware is severely stunted.
If you count my MC disobeying his government rulers, then that might’ve been the worst thing. But beside that, all I can really think of would be things he hasn’t done yet. One of which is killing one of his own soldiers… because while he’s held hostage by a magical queen, she transforms him into a monster (my twist on a vampire who doesn’t necessarily drink blood, but eats flesh instead) as part of her own slaves. It’s not naturally his fault, but deep down, he knows it was the worst… he just didn’t have any control.
Sorta yeah, sorta no, mostly just a big misunderstanding, but she’s either an antihero or a teenager who got too much heaped on her bc her mom couldn’t handle it.
Forgot about one of my ‘good guy’ characters who committed several grievous offences that sets up my current story.
In Israel, 2012, an aged, compassionate, highly intelligent (and cheeky) Dr Lander extracted multiple DNA samples from a recently deceased young girl, Aviva, without her parents’ knowledge (forbidden by medical and Jewish law). Aviva had died in a rocket strike while protecting her friend, Dov (see above). Dr Lander used Aviva’s DNA, and some donations from a comatose (and unaware) Dov, to commence an experimental hybrid clone project (also frowned upon by most of the world). This clone project was used to both grow a new left arm for Dov (the rocket had destroyed his original limb), and to create a teenage girl with cybernetic and genetic ‘enhancements’.
In 2016, Dr Lander asked the still clueless Dov to nurture and mentor the clone girl, who Dov gave the name of Freyja.
One of my characters may or may not have killed a kitten. It won’t be mentioned in the books, and I’m contemplating on whether to make it canon or not. It’s a long story but basically that character did not get along well with that
As for other characters, one of them hasn’t done this yet, but he’s probably going to mass murder a bunch of people too
And I might make my other hero accidentally wipe out half of her loved ones in an incident
