/lit/ - Literature

I need some advice, Anons. I'm currently working on a story about a group of mercenaries who specialise in something called VIP Retrievals. Basically, they kidnap people on behalf of millionaires. Runaway daughters, unfaithful wives, estranged business partners, etc... They also do assassinations now and then. Obviously they run into a few unsavoury people in their line of work, so how do I keep them likeable and generally "good" despite the fact they murder people fairly often and not always in the cleanest way?

In the near future, a private security company operating from a satellite in Earth's orbit offer on-the-ground personnel anywhere on Earth at a moment's notice, ready to extract their ultra-wealthy clientele from even the most hostile of environments. What starts as a series of unrelated missions across the globe, becomes the prelude to one of the largest and most ambitious crimes in history.

On an unrelated note, I'm reading Snow Crash right now and I'm having mixed feelings about it. I like a lot of the ideas (The whole concept of the Snow Crash virus, Hiro's long chats with the librarian) but there's just so much 90s cheese I can hardly stand it. A blasian hacker MC running around with duel katanas and spouting off future-80s slang is so "nothin' personnel kid" I just can't take it seriously. The metaverse idea, while certainly forward-thinking and prophetic, is basically just VRChat if internet culture had gone down a very different path. I can't help but laugh at so much of the stuff that was probably once considered to be, like, totally rad, bro...