Actions and Attitudes, Motives and Methods

I just watched a video about antiheroes, and the video essayist looked for ways to categorize heroes, villains, and anti-heroes on a pair of graphs, with heroic and non-heroic Actions and Attitudes and Motives and Methods. As I watched this video, I couldn't help wondering where I would fall on these graphs.

My actions aren't exactly heroic, but they are generally good. I usually try to do the right thing, when I bother to do anything at all. Yet, I know my attitude could use some work. I usually do good, but I also usually do so reluctantly and/or resentfully.

My motives and methods are a little harder to pin down. My motives are a mix of good and bad ones. I generally like helping people, and I enjoy making people happy, but I also derive some motivation from just doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm motivated as much by an obligation to do good as by a genuine desire to. My methods are functionally irrelevant. A fictional character may have options in their choice of method. For example, when a fantasy character has to get into a city despite guards trying to keep them out, the fantasy character may try to trick the guards, sneak past them, bribe them, intimidate them, persuade them, kill them, or merely knock them out. There are plenty of ways to get into a guarded city, but there aren't that many different, meaningfully-significant ways to clean the house or church building or help my sister with food.

So, my methods are irrelevant, my motives are a mix, my actions are generally pretty good, but my attitudes are generally pretty bad. Of those four, I think it makes the most sense to work on my attitude, to stop complaining and grumbling so much, and to focus on the better motivations for doing good. If I'm doing good only because I "should" or because I "have to," it's easy to have a bad attitude about that. But if I focus on better motivations and do a better job of maintaining a good attitude, I can establish myself more firmly in a heroic quadrant than an anti-heroic quadrant.

I want to be a good person. I want to do good things in good ways for good reasons, and I want to maintain a good attitude while I do it. I know that's asking a lot, but I'm already about halfway there. Now I just need to work on my Motives and Attitude, and I should be almost entirely Good.