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Misdirection is a common method. When dealing with shady characters, people tend to pick one to hate above all others. Snape was mentioned, and people loved hating him. He was a character that was ...
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#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27220 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Misdirection is a common method. When dealing with shady characters, people tend to pick one to hate above all others. Snape was mentioned, and people loved hating him. He was a character that was easy to hate. So you overlook Quirrel in Book 1. This is highly dependent on your genre, though. In a detective story, having only one shady character almost always means there's either an open-and-shut case (not likely) or there's a subtly shady character. So you start questioning every character and their true motives (if you are genre savvy). In the end, it all depends on how you want to handle your story. You, as omnipotent and omniscient author, should be able to weave the story in such a way that only what you want to show is shown, only what you want to hide is hidden. But to give a more in depth answer, I'd need more details of your story.