Kelly asked Michelle Hodkin:

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This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[If you want to get technical, I consider Mara an antiheroine, Type IV (Vicious/Unscrupulous) specifically.*

There are indeed a lot of grey areas here, because real people don't fall neatly into the categories of good and evil. It always frustrated me to read about shiny heroes and mustache-twirling villains in literature because it doesn't reflect reality--good people do bad things and bad people do good things, the best of us are still flawed and the worst people still have something going for them. This is what made me write Mara Dyer--she wouldn't have existed if her story had ended any other way, because the end of her story (as antiheroine) was literally her beginning (what I started with, as a writer). And that's reflected in the narrative structure of the books--the trilogy begins with the ending.

I also wanted to write a story where there was no Voldemort or Sauron for the characters to unite against--in the first book, there really is no antagonist at all. And even later on, David Shaw and Dr. Kells have good reasons (saving the world, protecting Noah) for doing horrible things (torturing Mara and some other kids), and Mara does horrible things (murder/mayhem) for good reasons (protecting her family and the people she loves). I wanted to take her best character trait--loyalty--to its most extreme conclusion, which is why the phrase, "the people we care about are always more important to us than the people we don't," is first spoken by Noah, in terms of forgiveness, and then parroted by Mara, who uses it as justification for her decision that the lives of nine strangers were worth sacrificing to bring one person she loved back to life.

Is that selfish of her? Oh yes. But what if we were forced to make a similar choice? To press a button that would kill a stranger in another country, or watch our own child be dismembered in front of our eyes? What if the stranger was 93 years old stranger? What if there were five of them? Five million? When is it justifiable to kill a person in order to save the life of someone else, or several someone elses? What if Katniss could have chosen to kill the entire Captiol to save Prim?

I've always been interested in those kinds of ethical questions (i.e. utilitarianism, the trolley problem), and when I was a teenager, I never read about characters being forced to make these kinds of brutal, life-altering choices--plots were neatly tied up, good triumphed over evil. But that story has been told a million times which is one reason it didn't interest me as much as a different kind of story did--a story about a bunch of kids saddled with a ton of power, and no Gandalf or Dumbledore to help teach them how to use it. A bunch of kids fighting themselves instead of a Big Bad, because the identity of the Big Bad depends almost entirely on your perspective. If David/Kells's experiments saved the lives of one hundred million children, the parents of those children might consider them heroes and Mara a villain. She's a murderer after all--what would her life be worth when measured against an innocent little baby? Ten innocent little babies? You see where I'm going with this?

This is why the trilogy began, and ended, with Mara's letter. She tells you what she's done right at the beginning, and explains, through the course of the books, why she did it. But my hope was that readers would root for her despite knowing, on page 1, that she was a murderer, because her motives in most cases were good--saving a dying dog, saving her brother's life--so that by the time Noah's life was at stake in Retribution, readers would find themselves in Mara's position--being so upset at the death of a character they loved that they were willing to overlook what Mara was willing to do to get him back. Because the point is, we're all capable of good and evil, and we're all a bit selfish, too--we make choices to enhance our own comfort at the expense of others all the time. We support companies that treat workers inhumanely because we like the products they manufacture. We eat bacon even though the pigs it came from were tortured before their death.

So yes, I consider Mara an antiheroine. She's loyal and selfish. Kind and brutal. Sometimes she's Batman, and sometimes she's the Joker. She does good things and bad things and you can love her or hate her or love her and hate her at the same time.

*http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php... (hide spoiler)]

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