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@chalice

Everyone else has said their piece and they’re really good, with excellent, solid, detailed advice – I’m not sure how much I can add, but after reading your question I felt compelled to draw up an answer, as I have an MC who is pretty much in the same position. Since everyone else has already supplied high quality general advice, mayhap a concrete, detailed(ish) example will help.

Myrrha (my MC example) is a misanthrope to a T. Like your character, in the beginning she pretty much hates everyone around her, hates her world, hates her life, hates herself, etc. As the others have said, the key is in the “why” and the “but” – she’s angry, but why? She’s a horrible person, but –

Myrrha hates people in general because she can see their thoughts, whether she wants to or not. She has come to hate people because she can see all of their venial thoughts and feelings, their best and mostly their worst, and she can’t get away from it. She was also born looking like a monster, so she can never be her true self around others (she has to disguise herself with magic), while she’s forced to see everyone else exactly as they are – and whenever her true appearance has been revealed, it has always ended in disaster, both for her and for the pitchfork and torch crowd chasing her out of town.

Being privy to everyone else’s private, inner thoughts, she’s become disdainful of ‘mere humanity’ because she sees just how false, fallible, and petty humans really are. However, (here’s the but) she is also very much self-aware of her own failings. She knows that what she’s doing is wrong – she knows that she is evil and wicked, and she utterly despises the lows that she has stooped to, not merely to survive, but to take pleasure at the expense of others. She chases pleasures both mundane and supernatural as a distraction from her guilt, until that pleasure fades too, leaving her with more guilt.

Her guilt makes her relatable – she knows she’s awful and she wishes beyond belief she could change, but she feels trapped, like she just can’t ever do things right – something we’ve all experienced.

However, guilt alone would make her sympathetic, but would not redeem her for a protagonist role unless she experienced some change. For Myrrha, this comes as a rediscovery of innocence – a little child who is too young to see her as a monster, and instead he thinks she’s a mermaid sent to keep him company.

For me, a huge part of my motivation for writing her story was catharsis. Partly I was swept up by the winds of inspiration and spectacle, but I was compelled to write her dark (yet ultimately heroic) story because much of it was drawn from my own experience – struggles with sin and guilt and eventually the light of the gospel entering my life. The light part is still yet to come in her story – there’s a little light, but the true hope and salvation is still a book or two off. 😛

I don’t know if that last bit was helpful, and my brain train just ran out of coal, so I think I might have to cut this response off here before it rambles much farther off track. I hope this was helpful – tag me if you want to talk about it! Writing about horrible-bad-awful-no-good-protagonists is my specialty! (as an amateur. 😛 )