A Lighter Shade Of Black / Literature

• "Big Claus and Little Claus," by Hans Christian Andersen: Little Claus is the protagonist, Big Claus the antagonist. Both are greedy and unscrupulous, and cause other people's deaths, but Big Claus is more actively murderous, and also extremely stupid. As an example, Little Claus mourns when his grandmother dies — then uses her corpse to scam money out of a stranger. Then he tells Big Claus that he made the money by selling his grandmother's corpse. In response, Big Claus murders his own grandmother and tries to sell the body, while openly admitting this to the apothecary.
• The Beginning After the End: In the Divine Conflict that drives the story, both sides are a major case of God and Satan Are Both Jerks. The Vritra, the main antagonists, are a faction of corruptive Evilutionary Biologists who seek to wage war on the rest of the Asuras for exiling them. The Indrath, the rulers of the Asuras, are revealed to be just as bad as they are a faction of draconic Knight Templars who are willing to commit genocide for what they perceive as the greater good, and caused the Vritra's Start of Darkness when they exiled them for discovering the atrocities they committed. Even after the reveal, the Indrath are still the lighter shade when compared to the Vritra as they desire to protect the world while the Vritra are willing to burn it all down in pursuit of their vengeance, to the point that Arthur is willing to pull an Enemy Mine with the Indrath against the Vritra in spite of knowing the truth. However, that distinction means very little to Arthur, as he resolves to give his allies the strength to stand up against the tyranny of the Asuras, regardless of which side they view as the lesser evil.
• In Blood Meridian, all members of Glanton's gang are brutal killers. However, the kid, Tobin the ex-priest, and Toadvine are bounty hunters by vocation, they're willing to kill and they're good at it, but they take no particular pleasure in doing so and usually only kill in self-defense or legitimate bounty targets. This is in sharp contrast to Glanton himself, Brown, and especially the Judge, who love killing for killing's sake and are just as happy killing non-combatants (including Indians, Mexicans, and even Americans who show them hospitality).
• In the BattleTech novel Bred for War, the assassin responsible for the death of Melissa Steiner-Davion in an earlier book gets this treatment. When a new "revolutionary" government takes over the planet he'd been thinking about going into retirement on, it turns out to be sufficiently nasty that even his disregard for collateral damage in leading La Résistance and his leaving his local girlfriend to be captured and killed as a distraction can't quite quench the admiration for his magnificent bastardry. (It helps that he only reveals his real identity at the end of the subplot — even to the reader.)
• The Imperial States of America in Caliphate are an brutal Christian empire that has abolished its Constitution, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms don't exist and it has expanded its influence over other foreign territories. Yet for all its faults, women have rights, are taught how to read and are allowed to join the military in a stark contrast the Caliphate where women are forbidden from reading, going out in public without veil or a male companion, their testimony are only count for half a male one and if they are raped they are regarded Defiled Forever.
• Ezra's Gamble is about Bounty Hunter Bossk and Street Urchin Ezra Bridger fighting a criminal and a corrupt and murderous Imperial officer in cahoots with him. Bossk himself only comes across as evil in other Star Wars stories, not in this one. Until the reward he promised Ezra turns out to be significantly smaller than implied.
• Played With in The First Law. The wizard Bayaz is a grumpy Jerkass who assembles a team of hardened killers (and Jezal, who is still a soldier and The Fighting Narcissist, just a bit green) to find a secret weapon to help him defeat the cannibalistic slaver armies of the Evil Sorcerer Khalul, and near the end they thwart a separate plot by another renegade wizard to bring The Legions of Hell into the world as well. It turns out that Bayaz might be the greater evil of the three, as he turns out to be a massive Manipulative Bastard who played every character in the book like a fiddle, and the other evil wizards are driven in part to avenge crimes he commit in the past against them and their mutual master, whom it's implied Bayaz murdered for power. He is a megalomaniac bent on taking over the world, and the armies of Khalul even offer to spare the capital city the protagonists are defending if they just hand over Bayaz to them. His vision might be a bit less dystopian than the other two evil wizards, but Bayaz is the most unprincipled of the three and is largely responsible for the other twos' descent into villainy in the first place, and is actively exploiting their greater threat to further his own ends anyway.
• Forest Kingdom: In book 2 (Blood and Honor), all of the three princes fighting for Redheart's throne are evil and murderous in their own way. Yet Prince Viktor, the middle of the trio, is regarded as the best option to take the throne due to supposedly being the least evil, despite being just as bad as his brothers.
  • Prince Lewis has a violent temper and makes a habit of forcing himself on young ladies from the lesser nobility, or any others who catch his interest (and he also has the habit of murdering them afterward if he feels like it).
  • Prince Viktor, who is also a headstrong and hotblooded lady's man who attempted to murder his own younger brother (which got him exiled from the castle) when the woman they were competing over chose Dominic, and doesn't care if everyone else in the kingdom dies if that's what it takes to achieve his own goals.
  • Prince Dominic is regarded as "barking mad" and having an unhealthy interest in sorcery.
• The Hunger Games: While both Coin and Snow are power-hungry villains, what makes Snow a slightly better person than Coin is that if he makes a threat or promises to do something, he keeps his word on it. Coin, on the other hand, is willing to manipulate others and lie to order gain power. This led Katniss to realize that it was Coin, rather than Snow who was responsible for the bombing of the Capitol's children and the death of her sister, Prim.
• Given that The Man in the High Castle takes place in an Alternate History in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won World War II, the novel is rife with this. To name one example, Reinhard Heydrich is the ruthless leader of the SS and it's pretty heavily implied that he's been responsible for several genocidal actions. And yet he's still a lesser evil compared to other factions jockeying for power in the Reich... who want to nuke Japan.
• In Old Scores, Simon and Salem are vampires who willingly prey on humans with indifference (Simon) and not-infrequent sadism (Salem), but they do not prey on children, and their slim code of honor separates them from Shafax, the borderline-omnicidal King of Vampires.
• The Parker novels by Richard Stark sometimes uses this. Parker, a Villain Protagonist, is an amoral thief. However, he is pragmatic. He would kill to get what he wants, but he would not do it if it was unnecessary because he knows that the police put more effort in hunting murderers than thieves. Some books like The Sour Lemon Score or Deadly Edge, put him against complete psychos who rape and kill on a whim.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has plenty of it, given it's set in a Crapsack World where good people suffer, seemingly good people are questionable, and bad people are total bastards.
  • Cersei Lannister is cruel, manipulative, and self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, her brother/lover Jaime starts out equally ruthless, but after suffering a lot turns out to be a better person than he seemed, and younger brother Tyrion is a Lovable Rogue who serves as the Token Good Teammate among the siblings.
  • The Clegane brothers are both brutal Blood Knights, but while Gregor ("The Mountain") is an Ax-Crazy Sociopath who rapes and slaughters for pleasure, Sandor ("The Hound") is a Professional Killer with some standards and a tragic backstory.
  • None of the Greyjoy brothers can be described as good people: Balon is bitter, vindictive, and an Abusive Parent; Victarion is a dumb brute who cares little about politics as long as he gets to Rape, Pillage, and Burn; and Aeron is a religious zealot serving a cruel, unforgiving god. However, all three look like saints compared to their brother Euron, a psychopath with a god complex who commits acts that are considered cruel even by Ironborn standards, practices Black Magic, and raped and murdered several of his younger brothers in his youth.
• Effectively the premise of The Supervillainy Saga as Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillainy without MercyTM is a Card-Carrying Villain who engages in all manner of theft as well as mayhem is always paired against much-much worse villains. Gary himself could be considered an Antihero but for the sheer number of bodies he's dropped and willingness to overlook his group's evils.
• In-Universe in Vampire Academy, the Alchemists consider Strigoi, Moroi, and Dhampirs to be all "evil creatures of the night". But they are willing to concede that the latter two are a lighter shade of black. Allowing them to covertly co-operate.

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