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Perhaps I'm just not fed up on Western works enough, then. When I see an amoral protagonist, they bore me. There is no wondering what they'd choose to do, just pick the most effective option and author willing they'll do it, or fail and come back 100 chapters later. If everyone can only be evil or stupid (or stupidly evil), they all blend together and can only be indeed differentiated by cultivation ranks and sect hierarchy position.
On the other side in Pale which I shilled a few times, there are various evil characters - some more successful than protagonists, some less, some get their comeuppance and others don't, but the facets of evil make them interesting. Although I concur that the protagonists of Pale are probably way too saccharinely self-righteous by the standards of the average ruthless MC enjoyer. But then again, they're regular teens, not ones isekaied into by their 500 year old variants (another Reverend Insanity cheat that already begins to grate on me in the first chapters).
Right right, but that's the thing with the Chinese protagonists, they are moral and have their own moral system, they're just not Western morals.
Yes. Sometimes also there are Western works where protagonists have a moral system that's not the modern Western morals. I'm specifically dissing the explicitly amoral sociopath protagonists like the one Reverend Insanity is advertized for.
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