I understand that you were aiming for a morally grey protagonist, but in practice what you've ended up with is more of a moral beige.
@ancient-tree-with-deathwish replied:
how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?
Distinguishing features of moral beige:
The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.
The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.
The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.
The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.
The protagonist always ends up doing the right thing (for some fuzzy value of "right"), but, like, they're really grumpy about it.
