think my villain is more interesting than my hero and I don't know how to fix it without ruining the book
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ok this is keeping me up at night,
I'm about two thirds through my draft and I've realized with growing horror that every time my villain is on the page, the book comes alive
he's complicated, he's got real reasons, he's genuinely scary, his scenes write themselves. and every time I cut back to my protagonist I feel my own energy drain because she's just... fine? she's good? she does the right things for the right reasons and she's so much less interesting than the guy trying to stop her
and I don't know what to do cause I can't just make the villain win, that's not the book. but I also can't keep writing a story where readers are secretly rooting for the bad guy because he's the only one with any spark
I think the problem is I gave the villain all the complexity and left the hero as a sort of default good person. he gets contradictions, doubts, a tragic logic. she gets virtue. and virtue is apparently really boring to write and I didn't realize that until it was 70k words too late
do I go back and complicate her? do I give her flaws and doubts and a darker edge? but then is she still the same character? or is the answer that a good hero just needs to be written better, like the problem isn't that she's good it's that I wrote her goodness lazily?
how do you make a genuinely good protagonist as compelling as a great villain. because right now I've accidentally written a book where the antagonist is the main attraction and I'm scared that's unfixable