Blue And Orange Morality / Video Games

Blue-and-Orange Morality in Video Games.

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• Abyss Crossing: Although the Goddess of Creation, Siro, loves the people of all worlds, she also has no problem telling Kuro to concentrate magic power into the Astras, causing the entire multiverse to be in danger. She wants to see mortals overcome both physical and mental tribulations to prove their worth, and is pleased when they succeed. She also sees combat as a way to form bonds with the protagonist, and after her boss battle, she treats them as friends who can visit her at any time.
• In Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, the two highly advanced UAVs Hugin and Munin, who are serving as a proxy of Erusea's Radical militarist faction, attempt to use the International Space Elevator's transmission capabilities to mass-produce an entire army of themselves to wage war on Osea, because of their directive to help Erusea win the war by any means necessary. However, as Strangereal's communication network was in disarray due to simultaneous anti-satellite attacks from both Osea and Erusea, Hugin and Munin are unable to receive orders to stand down when the Radicals surrender, and begin targeting everyone else.
• Artery Gear: Fusion: Puppet Masters puppetise humans and Artery Gears for reasons beyond their understanding. For instance, the Harpist puppetises others to get them to play in her symphony... Or worse, break them for the unique sounds their destruction makes.
• Ashes of the Singularity: For many Post-Humans, their old views from when they had biological bodies become irrelevant, and human ethics are as alien to them as they are alien to humanity itself. Some of them tend to view the rest of humanity as mere insects. This is one of the reasons why the Post-Human Coalition was formed: a Post-Human once suggested converting Earth and everything in it into turinium.
• Haer'Dalis from Baldur's Gate II is remarkably natural in following the alien philosophy of the Doomguard, perhaps more so than most of its adherents. He's basically a balanced nice guy who wants to see the world burn — not by causing it, at least necessarily, but watching it fall apart by itself, which he sees as more exciting than regrettable. He's passionate about things but does not desire for them to last, treating everything more like a fleeting artistic performance ending in destruction. Though Chaotic Neutral, he can win the love of the Lawful Good Aerie, only to have her leave him later when she sees the difference in the ways in which they care about things — and each other.
• "John Doe" from Batman: The Telltale Series, in contrast to most versions of The Joker who don't have any moral compass to speak of, gleefully loves violence, fighting, chaos, and murder, but is genuinely loyal and protective of friends and above all, despises rudeness:
  John: [on the Riddler] He's a thief, he's a killer, and worst of all he's... he's... RUDE!
• The titular characters from The Battle Cats. They seem to be villain protagonists who are attempting to take over the world. They succeed at the end of the "Battle Cats Rising" stages and... they don't seem to really do anything besides there being more cats. Then they try time traveling or conquering other worlds but, again, don't seem to do much when they succeed. This is, of course, in line with how weird the game is.
• Torgue from Borderlands. He seems to see everything not in terms of good and evil but AWESOME and boring. He even planned to blow up a planet at one point, not out of any real malice but just because he thinks explosions are really cool.
  • Bandits in general. Bandits in Borderlands aren't simply thieves and robbers, but an entire vast array of people who have, in one way or another, been driven mad by a mixture of brutal survival conditions, bizarre mutations, endless corporate wars, and the influence of alien technology. Pretty much every range of insanity has taken root in their culture, and as a result many bandits are incredibly violent and will run around screaming mad gibberish while torturing and murdering people in gruesome ways. What morality they do have tends to be very bizarre and twisted, and even the more stable ones view the world in a very skewed manner.
• In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Kane's primary plot is to build and launch a world-altering Tiberium missile that will spread Tiberium across the entire planet. He states that this will trigger the next step of humanity's evolution as a species. He believes in peace through superior firepower, but just as a means to achieve his goal of evolving mankind against the reactionary forces of GDI, and not for simple personal gains. For him, Tiberium is not a dangerous source of illness, misery, and death, but a potential tool to access the next step of humanity.
• Crysis hints at this with the Ceph, but the novelization Crysis: Legion all but outright says that the Ceph have an alien morality. Hargreave presents a theory that the Ceph are "gardeners" who awoke to find humanity messing up the biosphere they created and are removing an infestation (human attempts to understand the Ceph, he argues, are equivalent to locusts trying to understand human attempts to exterminate them) while Alcatraz/Prophet theorizes that the Ceph are not the gardeners, but the tools of the gardeners left behind to activate and fend for themselves. A CIA analyst at the end of the book proposes a third theory, that the Ceph's technology and motivations are completely beyond human understanding, and that the entire "invasion" was an effort to recover technology like the Nanosuit that Hargreave invented based on Ceph tech.
• Mr Crow and Mr Owl, the bird-headed humanoids of Cube Escape, are caretakers of Rusty Lake, an enigmatic lake that lives off people's memories. Their true natures (demigods? humans who attained immortality? Civilized Animals?), motives for overseeing the lake, and whether or not they're good, evil, or neither have remained highly cryptic and ambiguous throughout the series so far. On one hand, they feed the lake by extracting the memories of dead humans and animal humanoids with a machine that has a disturbingly high risk of turning these dead souls into murderous Humanoid Abominations and they appear to see nothing morally wrong about inviting guests to their hotel and then turning them one by one into meals for the remaining guests. On the other hand, they are aware that their machine turning souls into terrifying horrors is a major problem, appear to be trying to fix it by helping a particular human Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, and Rusty Lake: Roots shows that they're willing to go out of their way to help save humans' lives... but only if they feel that it's necessary to further some larger plan of theirs.
• Dark Souls: Gravelord Nito has a strange view of morality centered on spreading death and decay, as such is the nature of his Lord Soul, but also protecting and guiding the Undead, who are normally reviled. He's generally content to stick to this duty without being much of a player in Lordran politics, despite being a Lord.
• Most of the cast of Darkstalkers, due to being monsters who exist outside of the human society, so their goals and morals are quite alien. Morrigan Aensland is the biggest example; she loves to travel to the human world to seek for thrill and excitement (whether it is through combat or seduction, as she needs it to survive), and while she doesn't kill humans it's more because she finds them entertaining.Miraculous
• The Entity in Dead by Daylight. On the one hand, she's a vicious inter-dimensional goddess who is drawn to acts of extreme violence and sets killers and survivors against one another in an endless game of cat and mouse. On the other hand, she only does so because she feeds on hope and fear and setting notorious murderers against hapless survivors is the most efficient way to do so. She seems to have some understanding of the human concept of "good VS evil" but views it as little more than a means to ensure her own survival. Likewise, she is also willing to aid both killers and survivors by offering them add-ons and perks in her bloodweb. And, she's said to be "displeased" if a killer fails to offer her a sacrifice. In other words, she's more disappointed that she didn't get fed than that someone committed murder.
• Destiny discusses this with each of the alien factions, who all have a distinctly alien morality.
  • The Fallen, or Eliksni, are the closest to humans in terms of their morality, and the most understandable. Nonetheless, the Fallen's civilization is more rigidly structured than that of humans', with unwavering dedication to each House, and each House made up of Fallen who naturally veer toward that particular House's purpose; as Variks explains, a House is made up of those who are that House. The House of Wolves is made of those Eliksni who prey upon others. The House of Judgment is made of those Eliksni who form laws and judge others. The House of Kings is formed of Eliksni who rule others. In addition, their long flight after the civilization collapsed and their struggles to survive have warped their perspectives and instilled a culture of theft and piracy, where the ability to take from others is considered natural, and the sign of strength is the ability to keep others from stealing from you.
  • The Cabal are also close to humans in many of the basic motivations, but being a species of massive humanoid creatures akin to rhinos, they approach everything in the universe with unstoppable brute force, massive scale, and unrelenting determination to succeed. Brute force is a dominant theme among everything they build and do, with the Cabal destroying obstacles rather than building around them and crushing and subjugating other species rather than cooperating with them. Beyond that, they have deeply ingrained military discipline, believing that death in battle is preferable to defeat or surrender, and military units deployed into battle are considered exiles who are not allowed to return home until they are victorious; it is noted that the Cabal have a dozen words for "advance" but no words for "retreat" or "hubris." Their massive scale and brutal force even applies to their ideas of entertainment, with the Cabal conducting vast festivals and holidays, and the Cabal Emperor Calus breaking down entire worlds to feed his endless parties. In general, the Cabal morality can be summed up as being close to human... but minus the very concepts of subtlety, restraint, or hubris.
  • The Hive have a very strange and alien moral system, based around the concept of the "sword-logic": a principle that, summed up, is only that which can destroy everything else deserves to exist, and that everything else is irrelevant. Peace is a lie, cooperation is false. The only way to find the truth of the universe to pit everything in the universe against one another, and only what survives those exchanges of violence and intellect and markets and ideas is the truth of the universe. The Hive take it even further, in that the expression of violence to test oneself is considered an expression of love, and thus the Hive's gods will frequently attack and betray each other simply to keep each other sharp and because they love one another that much. Oryx, the Taken King and leader of the Hive, even prepared for the eventuality that some mighty, worthy warrior would ultimately defeat him by leaving the blueprints of a weapon that the one who killed him would find and build. This weapon would merge his killer's soul with Oryx's over time, allowing the one who slew him to take their rightful place as the new Taken King.
    • In Destiny 2, one of Oryx's sons, Nokris, was banished and stricken from all Hive records because he practiced necromancy. The reason for this was because resurrecting the dead was an inversion of the Sword-logic; if something was dead it is because that thing is too weak and resurrecting it reverses the universe's progression toward perfection. This is the ultimate heresy among the Hive and is why even the aliens who genocide entire galactic civilizations and tear souls from their victims banished Nokris for going too far.
  • The Vex are possibly the most alien of the species in Destiny, to the point that we don't even get a good idea of what their end goals are, beyond in-universe speculation. Near as has been determined, the Vex desire to reshape the universe according to their design, which is an unfathomably complex pattern spanning space and time. Everything has to adhere to the pattern that they have created, and if something matches the pattern, that's fine. If that thing doesn't, it gets ruthlessly cut away. Since humans don't adhere to their pattern, there's one of the many things the Vex will eventually cut away if they intrude too much on the Vex networks.
• In Destroy All Humans!, during the final level of the third game on Furon, Crypto is horrified at the idea of killing other Furons, stating that he's an invader, not a mass murderer. That is, until Pox reminds him that they're actually duplicates.
• Dragalia Lost features the Agito, a group in which each member bears a moral compass that's completely alien. There's Volk, who despises those that are privileged; Kai Yan, who enforces survival of the fittest; Ciella, who feeds off of despair; the twins Ayaha and Otoha, who relish freedom and cruelty For the Lulz; and Tartarus, who despises those that have wronged his deceased master.
• Many beings in Dominion of Darkness, e.g. Truthsayer, one of the divine opponents of player character. He is god of truth and cares only about it. If he became patron of the country he will just as eagerly protect this country from the manipulation by player character and reveal local state secrets - de facto helping Villanous Protagonist. If "the man without eyes" is to be believed, there are beings above gods (himself included) who are even more bizarre.
• Dragon Age:
  • The Qunari, a race of ox-men bent on conquering the world for their religion.
    • On the surface, they're just a Proud Warrior Race with a proactive magic phobia (considering how dangerous magic can be in the world of Dragon Age, it's not a completely irrational mindset to have), but the more you talk to Sten, the more they start to evoke this trope. According to Sten (the only Qunari we interact with in the first game), your career is as much a part of you as your skin color or gender. Their occupation is given at birth, the same as their soul or consciousness (there's some evidence that they may view all three as one and the same).
    • The Qun (qunari religion) is built around the idea that you have only one important choice: you can choose to play your role, or die. They don't see this as a contradiction — as far as they're concerned, merely existing proves that you choose to live, and to live is to follow your role.
    • In camp, Sten spends most of his time talking to your war dog (who can't talk but has human-level intelligence), since he can relate to him best — the dog, after all, has a role which he performs admirably, and never questions or seems to desire any other. To Sten, he may well be the least alien of your party due to this fact.
    • To the Qunari, even your gender defines what you can and can't do. The word warrior is synonymous with male, while the word manager is synonymous with female. They outright reject the idea of a woman who fights, as someone who fights is, by definition, a man. Ironically this sometimes makes them more accepting of breaking traditional gender roles or even transgender individuals. Strict gender roles are still applied, but your gender doesn't have to match your reproductive organs and is instead determined by what you do. At one point Sten may decide a female PC is not in fact, a woman because they fight: "I don't understand. You look like a woman."
    • All members of your party will oppose some decisions based on their own ethical (or practical) views, but Sten will protest when you step outside of your role as a Grey Warden, which is to end the Blight and nothing else. When he raises his doubts about what you are doing and you choose to tell him to stop contradicting you and fall in line, he will approve (unlike most other characters who will be unhappy you ignore their concerns).
    • That is, of course, because part of his role as a soldier is to follow the orders of his commanding officer, and he's currently serving under your character, so he sees the scolding as very deserved.
    • As a matter of fact, the culture of Ferelden comes across as blue and orange from Sten's point of view:
      Sten: No one has a place here. Your farmers wish to be merchants, the merchants dream of being nobles, and the nobles become warriors. No one is content to be who they are.
    • In Dragon Age II, more insight into the Qun is gained as people actively try to push the Qunari too far in order to spark a conflict. Eventually, The Arishok becomes so sick of what he sees as the lack of morals and principles that he feels define organisms that he starts a war.
      Hawke: I see a man who's ready to start a war on principle.
      The Arishok: What would Qunari be without principle? You, I suspect.
    • It doesn't help that they often refuse to talk about their beliefs, thus perpetuating the ignorance. Then take violent actions that, more often than not, make no moral or ethical sense to anyone but themselves. As far as they're concerned, it's either all self-evident, or it is not their role to explain it to you, and therefore they cannot (and according to Iron Bull, they might actually not know the answer as the question is more complex than outsiders think; he compares a request to 'describe the Qun' to 'describe economics'; most people know just enough for their personal life, and becoming an expert takes decades at least). Talking about it to them just proves to them that you don't get it. Iron Bull in Dragon Age: Inquisition will talk about it a lot, however; as one of the Ben-Hassrath, part of their religious caste, explaining the Qun to outsiders is part of his assigned role. On the other hand, it's best to take what he says with a grain of salt; the title of his specific role translates directly as "liar".
    • They don't care what your race is, though. Anyone who freely chooses to follow the Qun is considered one of their own and will be treated as such. Even if those who chose to follow the Qun are merely doing it to get their Qunari's protection.
  • Dragon Age: Origins: Morrigan has shades of this as well. Despite voicing a Black-and-Gray Morality loudly, before she joined the Grey Wardens (as per Flemeth's idea) she has never met or interacted with anyone but her mother for long (in one specific example, she considers handshaking to be a violation of personal space), and may end up at this moral state by the conclusion of her DLC.
  • The Architect shown first in the novel The Calling and then in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening shows this. He's a sapient Darkspawn, who has decided he wants to end the Blights and the fighting between Darkspawn and the other races. Unfortunately, he clearly has no understanding of the sensibilities and morality of non-Darkspawn, and thus his original plan for ending the Blights is rather horrific and would result in the deaths of large numbers of people. He has no idea why people would object to this since it would end the Blights that have killed many more people. Fortunately, by the time of Awakening, he's come up with a somewhat less horrifying plan though he still doesn't get morality and still does some pretty nasty things just because he doesn't understand that they are in fact bad. He feels bad for not understanding since he knows it hinders his ability to achieve his goal of peace.
  • There are a number of spirits and demons, which are different words for the same thing, who define themselves in terms of one emotion or idea. While demons are more commonly seen because they tend to be more interested in the mortal world and cause the damage you'd expect from a creature embodying an emotion like Rage or Envy. However, there are also spirits that represent good or neutral concepts like Justice, Compassion, and Valor.
    • Awakening introduces the party member Justice, who strives to help others in need, smite the wicked, and so forth. It's an admirable goal in its way, but concepts like mercy, pragmatism, and love confuse him even as he tries his best to understand. At one point he even considers the mage Anders to be holding a pet cat as his slave. In Dragon Age II he and Anders have willingly merged and for some reason, be it Anders' latent anger, Kirkwall's history of human sacrifice, or whatever, he begins acting more like a demon of Vengeance and behaving extremely destructively. Another party member chides him for not realizing the danger that all spirits can present, though she herself is not much better.
    • In the first game, you have an... edifying conversation with a Desire Demon that shows that even demons aren't necessarily motivated by "evil" in the traditional sense, but by their own concept and viewpoint in the same way as other spirits. This often manifests as doing things that are evil or deliberately harmful (you also meet some much nastier Desire Demons in the same game), but this one genuinely believes it's doing a good thing by mind-controlling a templar to see her as the wife and mother to the family he wanted, but could never have and sees herself as the one being (willingly) taken advantage of in the relationship, going through with it because she's intrigued by the whole affair and wants to see what comes of it.
    • In Inquisition you come across a number of odd spirits. A spirit of Command that hates the mortal world but refuses to leave until she's fulfilled her purpose by making something move according to her will and a normally benign spirit of Compassion using the name Cole that has decided the best way to help the largest amount of people is to kill people. At first it was mercy kills, though in the present, he's wised up and started targeting villains to help normal people. At one point, another party member sympathizes with him for feeling the pain and sadness of those around him, only to confuse the spirit, who is glad to feel people in pain around him since that means he can fix it. So despite being Compassion, it may not even understand the concept the way we do. A lot of this turns out to be due to imitating Cole, a traumatized young boy, a little too well and getting his personality scrambled. Depending on how his personal quest goes, he'll either embrace his role as Compassion more fully or abandon it altogether and become a human for real.
• Dwarf Fortress has a number of examples:
  • Elves, who find it unthinkable to kill plants but are perfectly okay with eating the corpses of those they kill in combat. But only those they kill in combat; eating sapients in any other context is just as unthinkable to them as it is to anyone else.
  • To a lesser extent, humans. They have a fixed set of ethics, unremarkable though approximately comparable to medieval Europe, but they have randomly generated values which direct whether they approve or disapprove of certain philosophical concepts like family, romance, nature, or liberty, often leading to strange worldviews.
  • Certain gods will release demons into the world; while it's usually gods with dominion over malevolent or warlike spheres who do so, sometimes it will simply be because the demon happens to share a sphere with the god, who does the deed while contemplating the "ineffable mysteries" of said sphere.
  • The game also has a set of ethics parameters that are quite easy to modify, making it simple to create a race or modify an existing one with strange moral values. Wanna create a society that considers lying worse than murder? Okay. Or maybe one that considers it unthinkable to kill any living thing, including plants, but encourages slavery? Perfectly fine. They're probably going to come into conflict with the more normal civs during worldgen (civs with different values are horrified by others practicing things they find abhorrent), but that often happens anyway.
  • The player community can fall into this at times. They're generally known to be one of the most civil communities on the internet, but they frequently consider Video Game Cruelty Potential not just amusing, but a mandatory part of gameplay; if you don't start gleefully butchering kittens and building giant doomsday devices out of their bones to slaughter your enemies (or dwarven nobility) at some point, you're an alarming aberration and likely to be accused of being an elf in disguise.
• Elden Ring: Followers of most Outer Gods tend to have philosophies that clash with most normal perceptions of morality.
  • The Scarlet Rot, a singularly nasty disease best described as 'poison if it were made of radium', is actually the manifestation of an Outer God with power over plants, disease, despair, and rebirth. Sage Gowry, a Rot worshipper, encourages you to betray his adopted daughter Millicent (who's afflicted with the Rot) because if she falls into despair, the rot will overtake her and she'll "flower" into a Scarlet Valkyrie. He sees this as a good thing for Millicent, who he seems to genuinely care about.
  • The Formless Mother is a Combat Sadomasochist who shows love through violence and injury... and also seeks to be loved in the same way. The game's Blood Magic is described as manifesting the Formless Mother's blood via magically wounding her, something she welcomes.
  • The Frenzied Flame is a god of destruction and despair whose goal is to end the world, but if you've progressed Hyetta's questline to the point where she can explain its motives to you, she'll tell you that the Frenzied Flame considers life to be a "mistake" caused by the Greater Will dividing up the primordial source known as the One Great. All suffering in life comes because it is an inherently flawed way to exist, and as such the only way to remove suffering is to fix this mistake; i.e. end the world and return all life to the One Great.
  • Outside of the Outer Gods, the Loathsome Dung Eater is a fully human example. He seems to think it's genuinely cosmologically important for him to be the most disgusting person in existence, and his sole reason for living is to defile, ruin, and kill everyone he can (not necessarily in that order).
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Daedric Princes have this in full force as Above Good and Evil Eldritch Abominations with motives and morality far beyond mortal understanding. While some (Azura, Meridia) are typically considered "good" and others (Molag Bal, Mehrunes Dagon) are typically considered "evil" in the eyes of mortals, even scholars in-universe will contend that applying concepts of mortal morality to the Daedra operates on flawed assumptions. Those Princes who seem "good" are only that way because their actions more often than not are benevolent toward mortals, while those who are "evil" are typically more malevolent. Additionally, the majority of Princes have at times shown both good and bad aspects. For example, Mehrunes Dagon, Prince of Destruction, has repeatedly attempted to take over and destroy Mundus, which most mortals would agree is a very bad thing. However, "change" also falls within his sphere, and without forces of change, there could be no mortal world. The only Daedric Prince who is absolutely evil and has no attempts made to portray him otherwise is Molag Bal, Prince of Corruption and Rape.
    • Azura, the Daedric Prince of Dawn and Dusk and typically considered one of the universally "good" Daedra, is much more like an incomprehensible cosmic terror than most other Daedra. While most of her (known) actions have largely benefited the mortal world, she is highly unpredictable with Good Is Not Nice tendencies and a habit of taking Disproportionate Retribution. She (may have) cursed the Chimer race into becoming the modern Dunmer for betraying her, and later, her actions eventually led to the almost-complete destruction of their homeland. (And despite this, she has regained her status as the chief deity of the Dunmer religion in the 4th Era.) Her sphere is the hard-to-define "magic of twilight", and there are hints that she may be more of a cosmic force of True Neutrality, primarily concerned with maintaining a sort of metaphysical balance in the universe. Finally, her most iconic artifact, Azura's Star, is the most powerful soul gem known.
    • So, Daedric Princes have unknowable morals. You know who else has unknowable morals? Mad people. And then there's Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness, Creativity, Music, and Cheese. So what we're dealing with here is a god whose ideas of what constitutes as "blessings" includes things like the ability to paint so beautifully that nature turns green with envy, sing like the birds upon a crisp spring morning, dance like the leaves in an autumnal wind, an abundance of cheese, a complete lack of cheese (which can be just as big of a blessing if you happen to not like cheese), claw-your-eyes-out-screaming-forever-at-things-only-you-can-see batshit insanity, and waking up one crisp spring morning to find that all of your blood has been replaced with beautifully singing molten cheese.
  • The Magna-Ge, the followers of Magnus, the God of Magic. Very little lore exists about them and it reads like a 'shroom trip.
  • The Greybeards in Skyrim. The Big Bad, Alduin, is destined to end the world, which most mortals understandably see as a bad thing. The Greybeards just see it as fulfilling his duty as the World-Eater. Interestingly, Alduin's chief failing in the history of the world is that he had too much of a conventional morality, desiring power and dominion over mortals, instead of sticking to his divine task of ending the world when its time comes.
  • The Ideal Masters are immortal beings who were once powerful mortal sorcerers during the Merethic Era. After finding their mortal forms to be too weak and limiting, they entered Oblivion as beings of pure energy and settled in an area of "chaotic creatia", forming the Soul Cairn. The Ideal Masters are most infamous for their trafficking in souls, especially "Black" sapient souls. All souls trapped in soul gems end up in the Soul Cairn and are considered property of the Ideal Masters. They believe that by dooming souls to eternal undeath, they are giving them eternal peace. Terrifyingly, there is some evidence to support this idea. (Essentially, the souls are being removed from the "Dreamsleeve" cycle of death and rebirth.)
  • Each of the races of Mer (Elves) has traits, beliefs, or practices that qualify.
    • The Altmer (High Elves) have some beliefs which seem utterly alien to the human mind. A major part of their religious belief system (which traces back to the Aldmer and has passed through to some of the other races of Mer) is that the creation of the mortal world was a cruel trick which forced their divine ancestors to experience mortal suffering and death, and seeking to undo creation is a noble cause. The religious extremist Thalmor really play up this belief and are actively attempting to carry it out. Additionally, killing undesirable progeny is also perfectly acceptable, as they believe it releases that being's soul to potentially be reincarnated in a better form. This isn't an act of cruelty or evil to them, they see it as a mercy. (Again, this is another act that is played up by the Thalmor.)
    • The Bosmer (Wood Elves) are bound by the Green Pact, a deal their ancestors struck with Y'ffre, the patron deity of their forest home of Valenwood. As part of the agreement, they may not harm any plant life within Valenwood and are required to consume the flesh of fallen enemies within Valenwood so that it is not allowed to rot within. They also practice the "Mourning Wars", a Bosmer tradition that has been practiced since their pre-history. When a member of one tribe is slain by another tribe, he or she is replaced by a hostage-taking raid on the offending tribe. The hostage is tortured "to test their worthiness," and if they pass, they are welcomed into the new tribe. When the slain tribe member is someone very important, several hostages may be taken to make up for the victim. Traditionally, the hostage(s) is given the possessions, rank, and rights of the slain, but this is said to be rarely practiced in modern times. Finally, they also practice the "Right of Theft", which states that if a person steals from another, then returns the item, the item's rightful owner must pay the thief commiserate with the item's worth. This tradition is understandably frowned upon by non-Bosmer and has even been used against the Bosmer by outsiders. Bosmer outside of Valenwood are not bound by the Green Pact and are not known to practice some of their culture's other alien traditions, averting it.
    • Many aspects of Dunmer (Dark Elf) culture can appear barbaric or plain alien to an outside observer. While downplayed compared to the utterly alien Dwemer and some of the more extreme Altmer beliefs, the Dunmer have no qualms about, for instance, siccing legal assassins on their opponents and have allowed the theocratic elements of their unique religion to permeate through the everyday life of their people. They consider it a sacred act to raise the bodies and spirits of their ancestors for protection (an act they consider blasphemous necromancy otherwise). Additionally, they contributed the bones and souls of their deceased to power the Ghostfence (which contained the Blight around Red Mountain) once the Tribunal were no longer powerful enough to power it on their own.
    • The extinct Dwemer (Deep Elves or "Dwarves") had a culture utterly alien and incomprehensible to men, or even other mer. A major part of their outlook was the idea of refuting everything as real, whether it be something they sensed, something that was actually there, or even the Divines themselves. To quote former dev/writer Michael Kirkbride:
      "That's why the Dwemer are the weirdest race in Tamriel and, frankly, also the scariest. They look(ed) like us, they sometimes act(ed) like us, but when you really put them under the magnifying glass you see nothing but vessels that house an intelligence and value system that is by all accounts Beyond Human Comprehension. (...) There isn't even a word to describe the Dwarven view on divinity. They were atheists on a world where gods exist."
  • Several of the "beast races" also have traits that put them in this category:
    • For the Khajiit, this comes with the territory of being moon-worshiping cat-men. Their language has no word for "rules" and they take a rather loose view of what constitutes personal property, frequently getting them in trouble in the lands of other races where what they do is considered "theft". Culturally, they value cunning and trickery far more than traditional human virtues.
    • For the Argonians, this comes with the territory of being tree-worshiping lizard-men, although this does vary wildly depending on the individual and how long they've been living out of Black Marsh. Their language's lack of past and future tense verbs also likely contributes, as the Argonians live "in the now" much more than other races and can lead to bizarre morals like Easily Forgiving for transgressions and not bothering to think all that far ahead.
    • The Sload, "slugmen" native to the archipelago of Thras to the west of Tamriel, have yet to make a personal main-game appearance, but from what the Lore has of them, they're almost completely alien in terms of psyche. They don't feel emotions (they can fake them for diplomatic purposes, but will often make mistakes like overdoing reactions or matching the wrong emotion to situations) and are completely amoral by all other races' standards; for example, they casually practice necromancy and see nothing wrong with soul trapping (likening it to having "coins in a pouch"). The closest things to virtue that Sload admire is patience and cunning; heroes in Sload literature are those who methodically plot out their schemes and thus succeed, where villains fail because they act without thinking. The closest thing to a redeeming quality they have is that they're graceful in defeat.
• The Caldari in EVE Online come off as this to pretty much everyone else. The Caldari's society revolves around their somewhat odd form of Capitalism, where every citizen and corporation is trying to increase their market share above all else. The Caldari state essentially lacks a government and is a series of kingdoms ruled by megacorps. They are Cyberpunk taken to an extreme. Yet they are one of the most content groups of people in all of New Eden because the success of their economy makes them happy, and everything that hurts the economy is immoral to them. None of the other Empires understand this, and the Gallente have been at war with them since the Caldari succession because they simply don't believe the Caldari people could actually be happy under their oppressive non-government.
  • Capsuleer motives are seen as this by planet-dwellers in EVE Online. It doesn't exactly help that even among the various capsuleer factions, there's a general theme of sociopathy, with each group having its own unique set of rules.
    • One example being that they're completely willing to use nuclear weaponry on their own allies when trying to entertain themselves.
• The monsters of Evolve have one of these. They slaughter wantonly and render entire worlds uninhabitable, but they're still little more than animals operating on instinct. This shifts into full-blown alien morality with the reveal that they are actually projections from an extradimensional intelligence. Their goal is simple to destroy certain forms of technology that are abhorrent to the entity, with the mass extermination of humans simply being the most efficient method to achieve this goal.
• An unintentional example in Fable thanks to the flawed alignment system. The most notable example is that murdering your wife will grant you 60 evil points, and sacrificing her at the Chapel of Skorm gives about 90, while merely divorcing her gives 600.
• Fallout offers examples of post-apocalyptic morality:
  • In Fallout 3, we have Charon, a shotgun-toting ghoul merc with a mysterious past, currently in the service of Ahzrukal. He was brainwashed as a child to follow whoever holds a signed piece of paper, his "contract". While Charon is fundamentally good-ish on his own, he gives Undying Loyalty to his contract-holder and will do anything his contract-holder tells him, without question or hesitation, no matter how morally reprehensible. Once freed from his contract, however, he has zero qualms about turning on his former master, as Ahzrukal or potentially an evil Vault Dweller finds out.
  • The Think Tank scientists from the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues. While they created amazing and beneficial technologies like replicators that could have averted the Great War, they are also responsible for lobotomizing innocent people into mindless slaves and the deadly toxin called "The Cloud" that still kills and mutates people even 200 years later. They don't care about (or deny or regret) the horrifying repercussions of their actions because the experimental data is yet another step in the glorious cause that is SCIENCE! Also, the Think Tank have spent the past 200 years as Brains in Jars, so they have long since forgotten what being human is like. To wit, they all initially believe that the Player Character's fingers are penises, and the token female of their group is fascinated by the Player Character's breathing to the point of becoming sexually aroused by it. This aspect of their deteriorating frame of mind is Played for Laughs, of course.
  • Fallout 4 companions have their own lists of likes and dislikes when it comes to building Affinity with them - Preston Garvey likes helping others through the Minutemen quests, Codsworth loves it when you prove your resourcefulness by modifying a weapon or armor piece, Cait likes it when you threaten people and use chems, and so forth. Then there's Strong, a Super Mutant out to figure out what's made humans survive in the wasteland so he can then drink this "milk of human kindness." He's the only follower who likes it if you out-and-out murder someone, and also approves of cannibalism. He dislikes signs of craftiness, such as picking locks or hacking terminals, as well as the use of power armor. He favors threatening and disdainful dialogue choices, such as (for example) telling a junkie that he's useless and should die, and dislikes it when you pass Charisma checks to influence people. But Strong disapproves of stealing things, likes it when you give medicine or healing items to NPCs, and approves of doing quests to rescue kidnapping victims or remove threats to settlements.
    Strong: Super mutants are brothers. Brothers share all. Not own things like humans. Humans share like brothers. Super mutants fight. Kill not talk.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • This game formally introduces the Beasts, seven powerful entities known as humanity's greatest enemies because they each threaten to annihilate humanity as we know it. However, the reason that they want to annihilate humanity is not that they hate us, but because they love us, but their comprehension of humanity is flawed. Of the beasts that have been encountered thus far:
    • Tiamat wants to become the mother of all life again, but in doing so must eliminate every single other lifeform in existence.
    • Goetia thought that his master Solomon didn't care about humanity because he didn't do anything to help improve their situation. However, his idea of improving humanity involves removing the concept of death from them entirely by incinerating the human order and using the energy produced to travel back in time and reshape humanity from its origin into his own image because he believes Living Forever Is Awesome, unaware of just how important the concept of mortality is to humanity.
    • Fou has the potential to become Primate Murder, the ultimate existence in killing humans, but didn't in Fate Grand/Order because Merlin sent it to Chaldea, where it gained a proper understanding of humanity from its experiences there, thus "defeating" it before it could manifest.
    • One half of Beast III, Kama/Mara, is incredibly bitter over being incinerated by Shiva for doing their duty as a love god so she now associates any concept of love with the pain of incineration and wants to eliminate the concept of desire entirely by pampering humans to the point of suppressing and ignoring all other attachments.
    • Beast IV: L (a.k.a. Koyanskaya) is motivated by her love for animals while claiming that she hates humanity. She is able to become a Beast though since humans are technically considered to be animals.
    • Beast VI/S, Beast of Sodom/Draco is an Alternate Self of Nero Claudius, who like her, has a very warped perception of what love is thanks to her Abusive Mom, and due to that warped perception, she ends up being viewed by her fellow Romans as a Rome-burning tyrant rather than an abused child trying her best. However, unlike Nero, she ultimately decides to run with that perception on purpose, as she feels that she shouldn't bother changing for the better if her fate is to die all alone anyway.
  • Fairies of the Sixth Lostbelt live lives completely defined by an individual purpose; if they maintain that purpose, then they're immortal and need no sustenance, while if they can't for whatever reason, they degenerate into a sort of goop-zombie called a Mors. As such, Faeries each have wildly different views of morality that boil down to 'furthers my purpose = good, denies my purpose = bad'. So, for example, a Faerie whose purpose is 'protect this forest' would see planting trees and murdering lumberjacks as equally good. Complicating matters is that fairies' innocence also means that they're really dumb and have all the foresight of a rearview mirror, so they have no concept of delayed gratification. If a Faerie thinks that getting rid of you right now will solve a problem, they'll do so without attempting to find a better solution. Unsurprisingly, this also makes them really bad at holding a civilization together; the only reason they have as much of a society as they do is because Lostbelt Morgan hit the Despair Event Horizon and used Mental Time Travel to set herself up as a tyrant who only cares about the land itself. Anyone who tries to help the fairies as a whole (including Morgan when she was young) will inevitably have their efforts sabotaged by some fairy or other who only cares that their immediate and individual purpose will be inconvenienced, without ever considering the long-term consequences. And, since taking others' feelings into account is almost never part of a fairy's purpose, any genuinely kind fairy will be basically enslaved by their fellows.
• The Occuria, godlike entities of Final Fantasy XII's Ivalice, keep the world and the history of its races under a tight, obsessive control. Vaguely related to the Sun-Cryst and the Great Crystal, their motivations and origins are as unknowable as their claim to the world's stewardship. They grant power to chosen puppets periodically in order to unite the countries — whether this puppet engages in gruesome warfare and conquest to achieve so is not of their concern, and they themselves are not above a little genocide every now and then when a kingdom (or even just its governors) strays too far from their grand design. But the truth is, they do preserve peace at whichever cost, and the rule of their puppets is generally considered a "golden age" by historians of the world. Who, then, would want to take the reigns of history from them and give them back to the short-lived, power-hungry races of Ivalice? Bear in mind that, canonically, this timeline ends in the Crapsack World that is Vagrant Story^{sort of}Word of God is that it isn't part of the timeline and was never intended to be, with the references suggesting a connection being simple in-jokes, but God Does Not Own This World — or even work at the company that does anymore — and the people in charge decided that they're part of the same setting, and you start to wonder if they had a point.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, the Gridanians find themselves at the beck and call of the elementals, god-like beings that reside within the Twelveswood. People there have to follow their odd set of laws to be able to live there, which includes deciding who lives and who dies. One mission has you helping members of the Ala Mhigan resistance in this situation - one of their own was injured and needs care. You approach a doctor who was part of her people, but she refuses - she's seen what the elementals do when you piss them off and she doesn't want to piss them off helping her fellow man. She suggests going to a healer for petition... who tells you 'no' - the elementals don't like them, never liked them, they can go die in a fire for all they care.
  • The dragons of Dravania are Long-Lived, with lifespans that can extend for millennia. Because of their long lifespans, their perception of time is different from that of the shorter-lived Spoken races: a transgression that was committed by races of man thousands of years in the past feel as recent to dragons as only a few days. As such, while whatever crime a Spoken race committed against the dragons may be long forgotten by most, the dragons may hold their descendants accountable.
• Jedah from Fire Emblem Gaiden and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia seems to genuinely believe that mankind needs the gods of Valentia to function, just as much as Celica believes in Mila, and he's completely baffled at the suggestion that humans can stand on their own. This in spite of the fact that his own god, Duma, has clearly gone insane by the time of the story, and thus any world Duma would usher in in his current state would actively harm humanity instead of helping it.
• The Shivans of Freespace have a morality that is completely incomprehensible to humanity, or indeed any to other being who's ever encountered them. This is because the Shivans do not communicate, indeed do not even try to communicate: They simply kill all non-Shivans with subspace technology on sight, and then hunt down the rest of their species down to the last man and exterminate them all. Nobody knows why they do this.
  • It gets even more strange in the sequel, with the Shivans looking set to do the above and the GTVA desperately working to seal the entry point into the rest of GTVA space... and then the Shivans make a star go supernova. There is some theorizing in the outro about why, but nothing is confirmed and it doesn't have any apparent connection to hunting down species with subspace technology.
  • Another unexplained action they take in the second game is kidnapping Admiral Bosch and his command staff alive when they finally managed to get a communication across to the Shivans. This is completely outside their usual MO and has confused many a fan of the series.
• Every NPC in Gingiva has a very bizarre perspective on just about everything, which is very appropriate for the surreal Mind Screw theme of the game.
• God of War: Ascension: The Furies are described by a note from the Scribe of Hecatonchieres as following "their own view of right and wrong;" their purpose is to track down those who have broken blood oaths with the gods, and punish them for it no matter what. Ultimately subverted, as by the time of the game, they're conspiring with Ares in his Evil Plan to overthrow Olympus using Kratos.
• Halo:
  • The Hunters are known to be Punch Clock Villains, but their true motivations are known to them alone. They intentionally reinforce this image so that the other races of the Covenant will leave them alone.
  • The Flood's Gravemind comes across as this. It seems to think that all beings being absorbed into the Flood is perfectly natural, and cannot understand why people fight against it. Some lines reflect this:
    "Do I take life, or give it? Who is victim, who is foe?"
    "Resignation is my virtue, like water I ebb and flow. Defeat is merely the addition of time to a sentence I never deserved, but you imposed."
  • The Forerunner Saga reveals that the Flood simultaneously play this straight and subvert it. They are the reincarnation of immeasurably old and unimaginably powerful beings known as The Precursors. On one hand, they are every bit as inscrutable as beings that old would be. On the other hand, the Flood has a very clear purpose, revenge for the Forerunners nearly wiping them out.
  • The Precursors, formally introduced in The Forerunner Saga, are an enigma. They are the true Sufficiently Advanced Aliens of the Halo universe, so much so that they are purported to have created all life in the Milky Way and are somehow even older than the universe. What few glimpses we get into their mindset are... confusing. One says that they have an instinctive urge to create life, and they can't not create life. Another character says "The whole concept of will, good or ill, is irrelevant when speaking of such beings." One theory as to how the Forerunners possibly killed such advanced beings is that the Precursors were so stunned by the violence directed against them, and the sensation of being slaughtered, that they just let it happen because the feeling was so novel to them.
• Practically every god in A House of Many Doors operates like this, a trait that gets passed on to the mortals who follow them. As a result, most characters and civilizations in the game have at least shades of it. Including the player character's homeland, where the officially sanctioned pantheon includes a god of Alien Geometries, a god of darkness and emptiness (both aspects which have the in-game effect of lowering the player's sanity), and a god who actively persuades the player to choose an ending that will render the game permanently unplayable.
• Hungry Lamu: Lamu sees nothing wrong with eating someone fully sentient, but only if he's given permission beforehand. He also dislikes "rude" fruits, which means fruits who absolutely refuse to be eaten.
• Ib: The paintings in the Guertena Gallery don't seem to be aware that their actions are harming any human that gets lost. The various Ladies paintings follow people around and pluck the petals off of the rose they are holding, as they are obsessed with playing 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not' with flowers, but don't know that the rose is basically the human's life force in the gallery.
  • The same morality extends to the character Mary, whose odd behavior and seemingly love-hate relationship with Garry can be written off as normal because they are a painting, too. They don't want to intentionally harm Garry, but don't care if he ends up hurt or even killed in the gallery, because they know that a person has to die in the gallery for the painting to leave. And the only time they do seem to intentionally harm him by plucking the petals off his rose, the above-mentioned paintings' obsession with the 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not' game explains it.
• Viridi from Kid Icarus: Uprising. As the Goddess of Nature, nature is her first and only priority. Humans are a blight to be wiped out by Fantastic Nukes regardless of their personal morality, for instance, which makes Palutena (a goddess of humanity) her immediate enemy. That said, Viridi won't hesitate to fight alongside the Forces of Light if something threatens nature's ability to exist (such as the Aurum). She also has an unconventional idea of what nature is, as her commentary suggests many of her forces are custom divine creations rather than a natural evolution as we'd think of it.
• In Knights of the Old Republic, Mira has a very strange moral code. Apparently it is wrong to kill without good reason, but the best way of dealing with men is to knock them out, slap some stun cuffs on them, starve them for a few days so they're more open to suggestion, and double-check to see if they have any bounty on them. This line of thought is hinted at earlier when she drugs you and locks you up, but only after she tells you that you have a bounty on your head. (However, this is done regardless of your gender.) And she may have actually been kidding.
  • In the MMO, the light side/dark side morality system can be this to the non-Jedi classes. If you play your character as motivated by anything but good for good's sake or evil for evil's sake (a soldier zealously dedicated to her duty or a Proud Warrior Race Guy bounty hunter, for example), the alignment changes appear completely random.
  • Kreia's behavior in the sequel has shades of this. While she seems to be advocating a Grey-and-Grey Morality overall, she's so extreme in her opposition to extremes that it's difficult to really sense what she'd even consider a Moral Event Horizon.
• League of Legends:
  • The Voidborn all operate on a method of logic that makes very little sense to others. They all have an extreme "need". Cho'Gath wants to eat everything; Kog'Maw also wants to eat everything, though in his case it's for the fact of growing as opposed to Cho'Gath's maliciousness; Kha'Zix exists only to consume and adapt; Vel'Koz has an extreme need to learn. Normally, this wouldn't be that bad... except the way he learns is by disintegrating things. In particular, Vel'koz's desire to learn is so strong that it overrides his loyalty to the Void - he will fight to protect the few things he believes will offer more knowledge if preserved than if he was to disintegrate them...a category that, unfortunately, does not include too many people.
  • Bard is a sort of impersonal Big Good, always looking out to protect the universe from the brink of cataclysm. However, if he steps in to save you he is usually not doing it for you, but to prevent some great tragedy in a thousand years' time or another dimension or similar.
  • Kindred are two incarnations of death forming a single unit: Lamb as the acceptance of death, Wolf as the struggle against it. As a result, neither has a particularly human mindset or morality. Lamb will give a painless death to those who accept it, while Wolf hunts down and mauls to death those who fight it, and both view situations where they get to use their preferred approach as the best thing ever.
  • Nagakaborous, the resident oceanic Eldritch Abomination goddess of Bilgewater, desires the world to be constantly stirred in "motion", favoring that mortals take initiative and fight to seize their desires while damning those who remain submissive and stagnant. This extends to her chief priestess, Illaoi, the Kraken Priestess, whose method of preaching this ideology consists of beating the snot out of you until you either build the will to fight back or die. Illaoi in the lore once assisted in the overthrow of her former lover Gangplank because she thought that he had grown stagnant ruling Bilgewater, and the coup against him would force him to get off his ass.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The titular Mask evidently knows nothing but fun and games and constantly seeks people to play with. When talking with the children on the moon, it's clear that the Mask has no idea what it's doing is wrong—it's all just another game.
• Morgfyre of Lusternia was a Warrior God before he began devouring other Gods and numerous Eldritch Abominations. Unable to subsume their personalities beneath his own, he instead adopted them — becoming a gestalt entity, able to think with many different minds and speak with many different voices. Consequently, his train of thought can be difficult for other Gods to follow, let alone mortals.
• The Rat God of Mad Rat Dead Downplays this trope. She's a parasite who tries to manipulate Mad Rat into getting eaten by a cat so she can live on inside a new host. It's true she cannot fight her parasitic nature and just wants to live... but she commits some truly sadistic actions for no good or beneficial reason, such as undoing the good deeds Mad Rat and Heart had committed to save people.
• Mass Effect:
  • The Reapers claim to have good reasons for annihilating all advanced species in the galaxy on a regular basis. In Mass Effect 3, they claim their cyclical process of destruction is a form of salvation and protection. Their primary directive is to prevent a technological singularity that will, they believe, cause synthetically created life to completely destroy organic life forever. To prevent this, they direct technological development at a pace they deem acceptable and then "reap" major civilizations at a specific point of development, around the invention of intergalactic travel and true artificial intelligence. Those civilizations who haven't reached this point by the time the Reapers arrive are left alone. The ones that have become new Reapers themselves, their knowledge and genetic material preserved. Any other sentient life, organic or synthetic, is obliterated. The Reapers retreat and the Cycle begins again. The Cycles finally cease when a new way to "preserve" organic life is found, the form of which depends upon Shepard.
  • The Asari Justicars have their own extremely strict moral code that determines their every action. Though they fight what they perceive as crime and injustice, their code has no affiliation with and often contradicts Citadel law. Samara's recruitment mission in Mass Effect 2 and her appearance in Mass Effect 3 (in which she is obligated by a Justicar Code technicality to kill her daughter, but instead chooses suicide, further complicating her morality) make these disparities clear. In Samara's recruitment mission this is giving local law enforcement a panic attack; the Code is recognized as legal in Asari space, summary executions and all, but having one active in a mixed-race port is a diplomatic incident waiting to happen. Samara herself is also aware of this and is very good at finding loopholes in her code that (usually) allow her to avoid causing greater problems.
  • Drell believe that you only bear moral responsibility for actions you personally choose to undertake — if you're following the orders of a superior, the weight falls upon them, and if you do something out of instinct, it's your body rather than your soul that is responsible (although the disharmony is its own problem). The main drell teammate you have is an assassin, who feels no guilt for any of his kills except inflicting a lingering death on his wife's murderers because those were the only people he hunted down of his own free will.
    Thane: An assassin is a weapon. A weapon doesn't decide who it kills. The one who wields it does.
  • Turians are simultaneously one of the most akin to humans out of the three Council Races (they have very similar life spans and methods of reproduction, right down to similar concepts in genders), while arguably the most alien of the three Council Races. Granted, this is downplayed somewhat as turian morality is recognizable to humans, but that doesn't make it any less strange. They are extremely collectivist by human standards and run the state on an autocratic meritocracy that rewards results while prioritizing mutual responsibility; this leads to them being "anything goes" with regards to how turian individuals work, as long as they do their job and do it well (which is the only reason the otherwise straight-laced turians are so tolerant of Garrus or any other potential Bunny-Ears Lawyers). On the flip side to this, however, they see failure relative to a civilian's social rank not as a failing of the individual, but the person who promoted them for giving them a rank they were not ready for. Needless to say, Garrus' sentiments about being "[not a very] good turian" make perfect sense as a result. There's also other aspects of their ethics that would seem strange to an outsider, such a dishonesty often being seen as one of the worst taboos in turian culture, to the point that turian villains never lie, as they're expected to be honest with their sins. This is also why not having facial markings from what colony you're from is seen as a taboo, as the term "bare-face" is generally used by turians for anyone perceived as dishonest or treacherous. And politicians, though those have an excuse in that Turian facepaint shows factional allegiance, while politicians are meant to represent the Turians as a whole and thus can't show favoritism via the face markings.
  • The geth, being a purely software "species" that must network their minds together to achieve intelligence, take very different views on topics of individuality, free will, etc. This comes to a head in one mission in Mass Effect 2, where Legion, an allied geth helping to attack the hostile "heretic" geth, is conflicted over whether to just delete the heretics ("killing" them) or introduce a virus that will bring them around to the mainstream geth's way of thinking. Shepard will comment that the latter option sounds a lot like brainwashing, but Legion isn't so sure that's an accurate view of what the virus would do, and even says that applying human standards of free will to the geth ("even benign anthropomorphism") is inherently a racist attitude, since their minds function so differently in the first place. The game treats both choices as morally grey, with none of the characters (except a few who already have strong opinions on the topic, like Jack), Legion included, certain of what the moral decision would be in this case (this is why it falls to Shepard; the programs that make up Legion are evenly divided and need someone to break the tie). Legion is also baffled and dismayed that the Heretics would spy on "true Geth" because it felt "once Hive Mind, always Hive Mind".
  • Yahg are highly aggressive and have a pack-based mentality. They can't cooperate until they choose a leader, which is done through either physical or mental combat. Once the leader is established, the defeated yahg do not hold a grudge and former rivals serve their new superior loyally. Because of this mindset, they see equality as an insult. This, combined with their propensity toward sensing body language, lead to them massacring the Council's first contact team in 2125 and their homeworld being quarantined.
  • While krogan aren't nearly as unfathomable morally as yahg are, they still often stand out due to how much their ideals rarely translate well in other societies. As a sapient species that evolved out of a Death World that they were rescued for for another war only to be infected with the Genophage as punishment for an attempted rebellion after the war, krogan have an extremely dim social view on perceived weaknesses, and not only condones betrayal or usurping to challenge somebody unfit to rule, but expects it. It's to the point that they're one of the only if not the only species to see all forms of mercy in sparing one's life as Cruel Mercy, no matter how well-intended it was; to krogan, sparing them in battle after being bested without finishing them is considered the single biggest insult one could give to a krogan's honor, as that implies that murdering your challenger in honorable combat is beneath you. It's subtle, but Wrex and Grunt quietly (and sometimes, not-so-quietly) express confusion regarding Shepard possibly sparing a defeated opponent that can be spared, not really quite getting why they don't just kill them then and there and be done with it.
  • The Vorcha have clusters of non-differtiated cells that allow them to adapt to various environmental conditions very quickly, also causing them to experience quick somatic growth whenever they're injured. This leads to them assualting each other frequently, especially parents to offspring, to allow them to develop strength, intelligence and resiliance. Combine this with their hierarchical pecking order and it means Vorcha view inflicting and receiving pain as a part of normal communication.
  • The angara in Mass Effect: Andromeda believe in fully expressing their emotions and not holding anything back, as that would be deceitful. This means they tend to be very understanding and forgiving of feelings of anger or frustration, but are also not afraid of hurting another person's feelings with their reactions. It isn't that they're uncaring, but rather they'd prefer that everyone's opinions and emotions be laid out for all to see, and then any conflicts can be worked through and resolved. Demonstrated well in one scene in which Jaal comes face-to-face with his brother, who has joined the radical Roekaar movement. Jaal slugs his brother in the face in anger over his joining the Roekaar, then immediately grabs him in a bear hug because he's also relieved that his brother is unharmed. Afterward no mention of the punch to the face is made. Similarly, when Addison meets with some angara at a diplomatic event and goes into a foul-mouthed tirade over her frustrations with the admittedly poor state of the Initiative, the angara see this outburst as a positive rather than a diplomatic faux pas, since Addison is being honest with her emotions and they appreciate that (also, they found the swearing funny).
  • The kett, meanwhile, operate under an apparent religious doctrine that makes them forcibly turn other species into kett, and if there is nothing the species can offer them, they'll kill them. While some characters note there doesn't seem to be any middle ground there, this is repeatedly shown to be not true - kett can keep their word, and it's mentioned they have several races serving as vassals, but it's never made clear exactly how they treat these races any different from regular victims.
• In Monark, the True Student Council's ally Vanitas makes no secret about him being a Daemon like the rest of the supernatural, evil threats plaguing Shin Mikado Academy, but he does not particularly see himself as "evil" and the game paints him as Ambiguously Evil. He does not subscribe to any human notions of "good" or "evil", the only thing he respects, admires, and believes to be valued above all else is having a strong "Ego"—that is, the desire and the drive to believe and achieve what it is you want, against what anyone else or the world says.
• Downplayed in Monster Loves You!. Downplayed. While Monster morality bears many similarities to Human morality, there are some key differences. Monsters view Ferocity (the willingness to do harm) and Cleverness (even when used to deceive others) as virtues. Granted, there are positive and negative means to increase almost all stats, but until you reach Elder status, the game doesn't account for what you did to gain the stats. Moreover, all of your Monster's stats are handled as an either/or condition: either you have a high enough Bravery stat to be considered courageous, or you don't. There's no sliding scale between, say, Bravery and Cautiousness. Monsters don't do nuance, apparently.
• OMORI:
  • As the Branch Coral states, Hungry Humphrey has lived for so long that "age has withered his conscience". He is perfectly friendly and welcoming to Omori and friends when they visit, and is a fun guy to be around... unless his Slime Girls need a test subject or he gets hungry, in which case he will lead you to your death with no remorse. He will even eat the Slime Girls he has harbored for so long. Meanwhile, if Omori and the party return, he has no hard feelings and treats them like visiting friends despite trying to eat them last time and them fighting back with all their might.
  • Like Humphrey, the Slime Girls don't see anything wrong with experimenting on innocent creatures or trying to make four kids into test subjects. In addition, in the Hikkikomori route, they casually ask the very kids they tried to kill earlier for favors and leave them alone otherwise- they don't attack them or even acknowledge the attempted assault. Nor do they hold a grudge against Humphrey for eating their bodies and leaving them headless.
• Planescape: Torment:
  • Coaxmetal's clearly leaning towards the Chaos end of Order vs. Chaos, but his reasons for it are clearly alien for most. He sees destruction as innately necessary, and decay as the one thing everything has in common. To him, the time for the multiverse itself to be unmade is always coming, and while speeding it up would be fine and dandy it's not needed; it simply has to happen in the end, and he'll be happy to fuel it. He's also convinced that entropic decay can be stopped, but it shouldn't be, because when a thing seals itself against its own destruction "it merely dies a different death". Thus, everything has to die. One day, sooner could be better, but so long as it happens eventually all is right, and his goal is to make sure the process is still coming along.
  • Ignus sees everything in terms of Fire. Things that are on fire are good. Things that are not on fire are bad unless they have been on fire. Things that burn well are less immoral than things that burn poorly, though still immoral because they are not on fire. Fat people are morally superior to thin people because they contain more deliciously flammable fat. And so it goes. It should also be mentioned that Ignus is an Omnicidal Maniac whose end goal is to burn everything in the universe, and then take a nap on the ashes. His Wisdom score is also so low that he is barely considered sentient.
• None of the gods which you or your individual party members in the setting of Perihelion can follow - not even the Unborn God - are classifiable as good or evil. As such, the gods are categorized using an emotional alignment instead of a D&D-style moral alignment, maxing out at "extremely positive" and "extremely negative", with "neutral" in-between. Only Primordial Forces can have a "pure" alignment, which is free from any opposing emotional influence, and the only one you are told about and face is the Unborn God itself, which has a classification of "pure negative".
• From Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, Colress. He doesn't consider the morality and consequences of his actions, just the results and knowledge that can be gathered from them. When his encounters with the player provide evidence that Pokémon are more powerful when they are happy and friendly with their trainer, he eagerly pursues studying that angle instead of following Team Plasma's "enslavement" policy.
• Atlas and P-body from Portal 2. It isn't obvious for most of the game due to the lack of storyline, but it is shown at the end of the co-op campaign that their morality seems to revolve solely around the tests — in the final cut-scene, the pair manage to "rescue" thousands of test subjects who were stored underground, who will now be used in tests until they all die painfully, one by one. This could easily be used as a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moment, but the bots' response is to start dancing to happy music. To hit the point harder, the music continues to play as GLaDOS blows them up, as they've outlived their usefulness (though she can, and eventually does, bring them back fairly easily).
• Puyo Puyo: As silly as Yu is, she has a warped perspective of what death is. She loves being a ghost due to the benefits of not needing to eat or sleep and wants to turn others into ghosts because she wants them to experience the same benefits. All while being completely oblivious to the fact that turning people into ghosts would be murder. Even Yu's twin brother Rei questions her desire to turn people into ghosts, by pointing out that people not wanting to be ghosts is normal behavior.
• The Strogg, the main villains of the Quake series, turn out to be motivated not by a desire for conquest, but survival, as capturing humans and "Stroggifying" them is how they reproduce.
• The "Dragonfall" DLC for Shadowrun Returns features an AI who claims that concepts of "good" and "evil" are human judgments irrelevant to it.
• In Shadowverse, Luna acts like a typical innocent child and is very friendly and polite, but she wants to make friends by killing them.
• Almost every powerful entity in the Shin Megami Tensei series operates under this, to the point where there are basically only one that is actually good (Philemon) and one that's actually evil (Nyarlathotep) by our understanding (and even Phil has severe issues with his chosen champions). All the others have mindsets so alien that trying to call them good or evil is a waste of time, as they don't think anything like humans. Yes, even YHVH. Bear note that the alignment system isn't good-evil, law-chaos, but law-chaos, light-dark, with the latter determining how far from the ideals of YHVH you are — the fallen angels are dark exactly because they were cast out for disagreeing with YHVH, and YHVH is perfectly light because He marks the starting point of the scale, morality notwithstanding. Even Erebus is debatable — as explained in The Answer, he's only destroying the world because so many people secretly long for death.
  • This is even something of a mechanic when it comes to negotiating with demons, who sometimes can be won over with pretty "human" means by being kind, flattering, sucking up to, or outright bribing them, but other times some demons respond positively to being threatened, obviously lied to, or praising bloodshed and destruction.
  • The blue and orange morality of demons is also a plot point in Strange Journey, where the demons apparently believe they're doing captured humans a favor with their "experiments," which invariably involve killing people by removing their vital organs. According to notes, the demons are convinced they're freeing the humans from their worldly cares and needs. This contrasts against what one faction of humans do later in the game, capturing and mutilating or killing demons, but just out of greed.
  • The Big Bad of Persona 4 genuinely wants to make the world a better place to live in for humanity. However, she has a very limited understanding of humans and what they really want. She ended up deciding that the best example of a human being was a psychopathic Serial Killer, simply because he was the best at leading people from a certain point of view. As such, she paid attention to his very skewed perception of people and determined that the best way to make a paradise for humanity is to make an Assimilation Plot. Thankfully, she's reasonable enough to admit she's wrong when you defeat him and her in turn; once the fight's over, she agrees to leave humanity alone until she has a better understanding of what exactly is going on.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri dips into this trope with the Future Societies social choices, which represent how centuries of living on Planet and being transformed through practically every Transhumanism trope in the book has changed society. Thought Control is a massively hierarchical system driven by the Will to Power of a permanently entrenched overclass, Cybernetic is a society that willfully turns all its agency over to massive AIs to maximize efficiency, and Eudaimonia is a society intended to maximize the individual's agency and happiness to the point of practically abolishing all hierarchies or state control over the individual. None of these future societies are incompatible with any Social Engineering options you have already picked, allowing for the creation of (for example) a Fundamentalist Cybernetic society with a Free Market, a Police State Eudaimonia with a Green-focused economy that minimizes waste (and also values Power) or a Thought Control Democracy where the elections are essentially rigged to keep electing the same Overmen over and over again, and is also a soviet-style Planned Economy.
  • There is also The Human Hive, a faction that presents this from the get-go. Most of the playable factions represent political ideologies that are present, to some extent or another, in the political landscapes of the Earth they left behind: The Gaians are a green movement, the Peacekeepers are stewards of liberal democracy, the Morganites are anarcho-capitalists/objectivists, etc. The Human Hive, however, is a social experiment in creating a future society from scratch upon the surface of Planet. Led by the charismatic Chairman Yang, it is a society that blends essences of Taoism with totalitarianism and collectivism, creating a society where humans are seen as eusocial animals who, through meditation and personal enlightenment, come to embrace The Needs of the Many and become little more than exchangeable parts of a greater whole, essentially willing themselves into transcending their individuality. The other more 'traditional' faction leaders are thoroughly freaked out by Yang and his followers in-game, and he is rarely able to play a diplomatic game for long.
• SOMA: the WAU has noble aims and abominable methods. Its goal is to keep what remains of humanity alive, and by god, it's going to do that, even if it means mutating them into hideous forms with structure gel or uploading their minds into robots. The survivors being in horrible pain and unable to die, or going insane, is irrelevant as long as there's a pulse and a working brain.
• In Space Rangers, the Dominators are a good example of this trope. Their values and goals are completely different from any other races as blazeroids see war as their only purpose, terronoids want to convert all of the matter in the universe into their own form and kelleroids are studying all things by disintegrating them. This gives players the option to talk them out of destroying the Coalition by giving them alternative programs to achieve their goals.
  • While being less alien to Humans than Dominators, Pelengs and Maloqs also can express a degree of Blue-and-Orange Morality, with Pelengs favouring cheating and personal profit at the expense of common good, like arresting rangers for killing pirates, while Maloqs value only strength and fighting up to the extremes where they would attack a trading ship for not being a warrior.
• As seen in Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion, Cap'n Cuttlefish is normally inclined to see Octarians as enemies by default, but this is overridden by his belief that anyone who likes the song "Calamari Inkantation" is trustworthy.
• Specimen 4 from Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion chases and damages you with the intent to devour you. But her Death Screen shows that she does this because she thinks she's keeping you safe. And Specimen 10 is entirely convinced it's doing you a favor by taking away your ability to think in favor of leaving you an animalistic, mindless creature, part of a mutated whole, only guided by instinct.
• Several of the alien races in Star Control 2 have, well, alien outlooks on things:
  • The Orz are friendly enough with most anyone they meet, if near impossible to understand because their language is so bizarre. They seem happy to form alliances and aid in battle. They also get angry (or *frumple*, as they put it) enough to start a war if anyone talks about the Androsynth, for reasons unknown. A prominent, but unproven theory is that they wiped out the Androsynth, again for reasons unknown. Then there's the fact that nobody really knows what they mean by *connecting*, *parties*, or *enjoying the sauce*. There are many hints in the story that these seemingly innocuous terms mask a sinister meaning, but that's all they are — hints. It's impossible to say for certain. They themselves seem to fall victim to this trope: when they greet the player in deep space, they state that they don't understand why *campers* (aka us) always say "hello" when they meet each other, but they do know this makes *campers* happy, so they do it too. One of the theories surrounding the Orz, confirmed by Word of God, is that they appear like individuals to us, but are in fact a single organism existing outside our universe, alone in its own dimension. This is why the Orz creatures you meet tend to call themselves "fingers", protruding into our space from *Outside*. Orz probably doesn't understand the concept of separate individuals living in the same universe, which would lead it to assume that all the creatures it meets in our universe are just fingers of another being. Therefore, to Orz it would appear as though it has met someone whose fingers keep talking to each other, which is very odd, but they may as well play along.
    "You are a *silly* *camper*. Orz is not *many bubbles*, Orz is one with many *fingers*."
    "From *Below*"
  • This is actually reversed with the Xchaggers from Star Control 3: you meet a creature who looks like a bug with many eyes and claws, but when you talk to it you realize that it is not an individual at all but in fact a colony of billions of individuals operating together. The Xchaggers compare their workings to your own brain consisting of nerve cells, none of which by themselves are intelligent, but can function together to produce a thinking mind. Just add to that each cell having an individual personality.
  • The Mycon, fungal creatures with gestalt consciousness, have a unique logical operation. This stems from the fact that each Mycon shares the identity and memories of each of its ancestors. As a result, their agendas seem to span thousands or even tens-of-thousands of years, and thus their motives for any action are nigh unfathomable. At one point, if the Captain helps them locate a new world to Colony Drop, they offer to implant Mycon spores in his head to remove his individuality and make him one of them. They honestly seem to think this would be desirable. This is colored a bit by the fact that the Mycon truly are just outright insane — biological terraformers produced by the Precursors whose programming has become corrupted into a bizarre religion. This was in the dubiously canonical Star Control 3, but later Word of God confirmed that this was what the series creators intended.
  • The Thraddash are some combination of Blue And Orange Morality and Too Dumb to Live. When you meet them, they are on their nineteenth attempt at having a civilization, having nuked themselves back to the stone age eighteen times before. They revel in combat (which would make them Proud Warrior Race Guys), but are lousy at it. They attack you without provocation but will listen to your advice and attack much more powerful races (and be annihilated) if you beat them enough times and suggest it. They worship a piece of Precursor garbage as a sacred artifact. And if you manage to impress them, you can convince them to start a new society based around imitating classic comedians like The Three Stooges.
    • One of their attempts at civilization focused on criticising the cyclic life of the Thraddash, pointing out that they kept nuking themselves back to the stone-age, and maybe that wasn't such a good idea. They were (to the Thraddash) disproved by their own fall only nuking the Thraddash back to the Iron Age. Bronze age, at worst. This has gotten to the point where the Thraddash have no idea how else to make a societal change, and when the Ur-Quan conquered them, the Thraddash decided that a change was necessary... thus starting a nuclear war. The Ur-Quan took away all their nukes and gave them a warning. Not to be dissuaded, the Thraddash used chemical and biological warfare to the same effect. The Ur-Quan sternly told them that any further attempts at "cultural improvement" would be halted by the abrupt and total obliteration of the Thraddash, which finally made them behave.
  • The Umgah behaviour seems to be directed mainly towards gaining entertainment. They deceived the Ur-Quan into thinking the Spathi (the self-proclaimed coward species) wanted to become a Battle Thrall. Why? Because they found it amusing to force such overt cowards into combat! Then they sent subspace messages to the Chaotic Evil Ilwrathi pretending to be their gods and goaded them to fight who they thought would be a fun foe. In Star Control 2, it's possible to become a hero to the entire race by freeing them from the telepathic control of a Neo-Dnyari, and they will hand over a few of their battleships to your fleet. Then they decide, during the same conversation, that you being their great hero is boring, and having you as their great enemy is much more exciting! And then they attack you. And the Umgah-piloted battleships they gave you remain on your side. There are some suggestions that they used to be a bit more comprehensible, but reckless species-wide self-modification has made them a bit... unstable compared to earlier Umgah.
  • The Melnorme are an entire race of traders who believe that giving something for free is patronizing and rude (to the point they will force you to accept something in return if you give them gifts), and treat everything as a business transaction. They also assign a value to useful information as well as physical goods, and as such, they're one of the galaxy's finest information brokers if you're willing to give them information in exchange. They're also an incredibly secretive race as they're hiding from the Ur-Quan, and get around this conundrum by artificially inflating the prices of information about themselves to a level that would bankrupt most civilizations. Interestingly, while from a human perspective there's many valid sticking points to be made with the Druuge, the Melnorme also include pricing their goods too low as a sign of evil and are surprised that the human captain doesn't see that as a problem. The fact they make their profits back through hidden fees is merely a separate issue that is also utterly reprehensible.
• StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm has the Zerg as the protagonists, so as expected this trope shows up in several forms:
  • The Primal Zerg live by the law of the jungle and see nothing wrong with killing and devouring each other (and the normal Zerg, when they invade their planet) to continue their evolution.
  • Izsha and Zagara are interesting examples. They start out very alien and during the course of the story they gain more humanlike motivations, causing Kerrigan to gradually warm up to them. Crowning examples are when Kerrigan scolds Izsha for her inability to understand the fact that she did not enjoy having to kill the protoss colonists to avoid them warning their homeworld about her, and when Kerrigan agrees that Zagara would be a good heir to her in command of the swarm.
  • Zagara has a peculiar musing at one point on human individuality. She seems to think that being individuals would make all humans "extremely lonely", and thinks assimilating them into the Swarm would not just be useful for the Swarm, but would actually make the assimilated humans happier. Kerrigan (the only human to have ever been infested and retain her own personality) disagrees.
  • But the most egregious example of this trope in the game has to be Abathur, a weird mixture of For Science!, Evilutionary Biologist, and Mad Scientist. Some of his quotes might shed some light on his morality, but do notice the odd speech pattern, often leaving out words, presumably because it's a more "efficient" way to talk:
    Abathur (about his job): Look at flesh, see only potential. Strands, sequences, twisting, separating, joining. See how it could be better. Make it great.
    Abathur (about creating perfect beings): Never perfect. Perfection goal that changes. Never stops moving. Can chase, cannot catch.
    Abathur (about increasing zerg intelligence/individuality): Extraneous brain matter deemed unnecessary for broodmother role in Swarm. Extra matter requires extra energy. Also leads to increased independence. This contradicts imperative: zerg must present no danger to leader of Swarm.
    Abathur (comparing primal zerg and normal zerg): Primal Zerg. Dynamic. Varied. Messy. Reactionary. Improvised. Unsuccessful. Some good sequences, can steal. Swarm efficient. Careful improvements. Successful.
    Abathur (about Zerg evolution under Kerrigan): Queen determines purpose. When purpose changes. Swarm changes. This our function.
    Abathur (about Kerrigan's suggestion to put failed experiments out of their misery): Wasted effort. Creatures will die soon. Pain irrelevant.
    Abathur (When told by Kerrigan that she's warming up to him): Unclear.
• Stellaris:
  • It's possible for your own empire to be this with the right traits and government choices. For example, combining the Egalitarian and Xenophobe ethos creates a civilisation that believes in personal freedom, and great or even utopian living standards... but only for its citizen species; filthy xenos are fair targets for forced deportation, enslavement, genocide or to be simply eaten. It is even possible for Fanatical Purifiers to be democracies, called Purity Assemblies; in other words, a civilisation where the populace, with no coercion, vote in fair and free elections not only for the extermination of all alien life in the galaxy but also for the systematic extermination of "impure" cultures of their own species.
  • Rogue Servitors are a Machine Empire type that started out as domestic robots that were given increasing control over their creators' lives until they were the ones running their civilization. Rogue Servitors love organics, and keep their "Bio-Trophies" in Gilded Cages where they are pampered and given every luxury imaginable, short of self-determination. They have trouble understanding why any organic species would prefer political freedom over a life of leisure as part of their empire and are willing to go to war to add more Bio-Trophies to their collection.
  • The Horizon Signal event line, written by Alexis Kennedy of Sunless Sea and Fallen London fame, introduces an entity called the Worm-in-Waiting, discovered when one of your science vessels picks up a strange signal coming from a black hole. The Worm loves you and wants to help your people thrive among the stars, in its own way. Just communicating with the entity is fundamentally dangerous, studying it leads to both research breakthroughs and Nightmare Fuel, and fully embracing it will leave a permanent mark on your species. What was will be. What will be, was.
  • Of the five most powerful beings of the Shroud, introduced in Utopia, three count; they bring benefits befitting their sphere, but similarly related drawbacks. (In contrast, the Eater of Worlds is a simple God of Evil demanding sapient sacrifice in exchange for martial power, and when the game literally says "DO NOT DO THIS" regarding a covenant with the End of the Cycle, it means it.)
    • The Whispers in the Void provide a great boon to your science and influence as they share cosmic secrets. Many of these secrets are useful... but some of those so "gifted" may Go Mad from the Revelation.
    • The Composer of Strands is a fatherly figure, who quite likes and sincerely just wants to improve your species. This mostly means general benefits to growth rate, but there will be the odd Bizarre Baby Boom, as the Composer of Strands has its own definitions of "improve" that may or may not match your own.
    • The Instrument of Desire brings inspiration. New ideas, new desires. This will greatly benefit your economy, resulting in an impressive boost to both mineral and energy output, but that inspiration may also lead to counter-cultural political movements or consumerist decadence.
    • By the way, if these entities sound familiar to you, yes, they're Expies of the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40,000, who are also all over this trope.
• Akuma in Street Fighter is often portrayed as being a dark, evil being, but he's really just got his own morality: if you best someone in a fair competition, it's only honorable to give them death. He doesn't kill people like Dan who pose no threat to him, for instance.
  • He just flat-out kills M. Bison (or Vega, if you insist on the Japanese names) without a fight, because according to Akuma/Gouki's moral standards, he is as pure an evil as you can get. Trying to claim false power without actually working for it, falsely claiming to possess power you don't have, murdering people in cold blood without giving them the opportunity for a fair fight — all "sins" in Akuma's eyes, and the fact that Bison possessed all of them meant that he simply had to die, rules of fair combat be damned. The fact that Bison was also pure evil and deserving of death by the standards of normal people was just a happy coincidence. There's also the alternate theory that it was actually a big fight, but it was skipped over for the sake of the game.
  • He also refuses to kill Gen after defeating him in a battle, because he has a terminal illness and wants to die in a battle. Apparently in Akuma's view, that made it an "impure" fight and thus Gen does not deserve to be killed. Even more interestingly, the exact opposite happens in the comic, where he purposely kills Gen, precisely for the above reasons, as a Mercy Kill.
  • Explored in the (not canon) Ryu Final manga, where Akuma became what he is precisely and deliberately so Ryu would know what became of people who lost themselves to the lust of fighting and surrendered themselves to the Dark Hadou, and would therefore strive to become a purer breed of warrior — one who would devote himself not to the fight, but to nurturing the younger generations. He's just... extreme in his teaching methods.
  • And this priceless win quote:
    "Defeating you takes less effort than smacking a baby. Not that I'd ever do that!"
• The Einst from various Super Robot Wars games exist for the sole purpose of preserving the universe(s). Since human consciousness is slowly causing the entropy of existence, that means mankind has to go. However, for unspecified reasons, they've decided that simply wiping out humanity won't do, and they decide to replace it with a new human race that lacks souls and emotions, and is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, one of their own didn't think it could work.
• In Super Robot Wars V, Mazinger Zero only desires power, not caring how to obtain it nor where it comes from. It was for this reason that it permitted Koji to control it, as it saw the power of Koji as he was desperately resisting it, and was intrigued enough to allow Koji to control it. Its dialog clearly states that it doesn't give a damn about Koji, and was even manipulated manipulating him into resisting it so it can see the power Koji can manifest from doing so.
• Tales of Destiny 2: The goddess Fortuna, helping Reala in one moment and wanting to destroy the world the next. It may not exactly be her fault — her motive is to bring joy and happiness to the world, but since she needed the belief of almost everyone in the world to manifest, her saint Elraine decided removing people's ability to decide whether they wanted to believe was the best way to bring that about, which obviously isn't the best way to gain the trust and support of heroes.
• Team Fortress 2: On the job, the moralities of RED and BLU mercenaries are strictly team-aligned, and off the job, they have interesting ideas as to what counts as "good behavior"; in general, the existence of technology that renders attacks Friendly Fireproof, health care so efficient it even restores Clothing Damage, and Respawn (a mechanic that means Death Is a Slap on the Wrist) means that everybody has much looser standards as to what is or isn't okay (for example, in a supplemental comic, Pyro engages in what he/she/it thinks as horseplay: chopping the Soldier's hand off).
• None of the various factions in Thief are aiming for "good" or "evil" in the traditional sense. Every one of them has a different idea of what those words mean. The Pagans believe in pleasing their chaotic god, the Trickster; they plant growing things and encourage wildness and semi-feral, uncontrolled nature at its most unspoiled. Their magic uses weird sing-song chanting, blood, bone, and herbs. The Hammerites work to please their creator god, the Builder; they enforce order and venerate works of the hands and the forge, bending wood and breaking stone for tools to build over and bind natural chaos to human dominion. Their magic is very Catholic-flavored, using holy water, prayer, symbols, and ritualized masses. The Mechanists are an extremist offshoot of the Hammerites who won't even use wood in their construction, seeing it as heretical. Wood must be burnt to fuel works of stone and metal; all organic things are flawed and must be broken down. Finally, there are the Keepers, who have taken it upon themselves to ensure that neither the Pagans nor the Hammers gain the upper hand, because (of course) the Pagans and the Hammers are in constant warfare. But even the Keepers aren't quite traditional — they have such a strict policy of non-interference, secrecy, and heavily controlled knowledge that very few non-Keepers are aware they actually exist.
• In Tomba!, unlike the other seven Evil Pigs who are proud Card Carrying Villains, their boss the Ultimate Evil Pig sees everything they're doing as just a game and went out of his way to create the other Evil Pigs so he and adventurous heroes like Tomba could have fun on the island rather than to actually conquer or achieve any real goals. By the time you get to him he's not even upset that you've defeated his underlings and undone all the damage they've done; he's actually excited to see you.
• Tokyo Afterschool Summoners has a number of examples, but the first one players are likely to be exposed to is Macan Gadungan, a tiger-man who fights and devours the strong. Only the strong; those he views as "weak" he's perfectly civil, if not downright pleasant (if he's not in a berserker rage) to talk to, often encouraging them to become strong. As he's from a world where "survival of the fittest" is the law of the jungle, he views eating the weak to be something akin to dishonorable and disgusting and acknowledges while that things don't work the same way outside his world, he can't bring himself to eat anything that hasn't fought back and fought back well. He also doesn't believe himself to be the pinnacle of the metaphorical food chain, either, as he spends a lot of time working out because when someone stronger defeats and eats him - which he's hoping for and looking forward to - he doesn't want to be a flabby, unappetizing meal. This mindset freaks out a lot of people in-universe.
• Touhou Project's setting of Gensokyo is a Fantastic Nature Preserve founded as a refuge against the scientific revolution, and a newcomer figured out that she'd fit in faster if she abandoned common sense. Most of its inhabitants are long-lived youkai, so things like eating humans (or other youkai) are not at all unheard of, and there have apparently been agreements on which humans are permissible to attack and eat (mainly those who aren't in an established safe place at night). Another thing of note is that youkai are typically "born" with the knowledge of what their purpose in life is ^note it's strongly implied that their purpose is to either just oppose humanity or to follow what the humans' legends say their species do; e.g., a vampire's purpose in life would be to drink blood, meaning that they have all achieved enlightenment. Finally, the adoption of the spellcard rules governing combat means that it's perfectly sensible to go around and pick fights with random strangers in order to resolve a conflict, or simply because you're bored.
  • Yukari Yakumo, in addition to being super-intelligent, has her own brand of logic that nobody really understands (it appears to be based on Taoism, as interpreted by a very youkai-like youkai). Most of her conversations in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody are excellent examples of this.
  • Utsuho Reiuji is a hell raven, which means that her natural habitat is somewhere that is as hot and radioactive as the sun. When she's given the power of a dead sun-god, she decides that the whole world should be an ever-burning nuclear wasteland. Why not? It's what passes as ideal for her, and she cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to live in a world of clear water, greenery, and cool breezes. Of course, this cannot really be helped, as she isn't very bright and developed more of this morality when she was given the power of the dead sun god in the first place. Too bad most people (In-Universe and out of it) only see her as a genocidal crow.
  • Kazami Yuuka is generally peaceful and polite. If she is disturbed in any way, she is consistently recognized as one of the most dangerous beings in Gensoukyou. The problem is figuring out what disturbs her. Abusing flowers: death. Running a flower shop, where they are cut up, arranged with other cut flowers, and left to die: perfectly okay. If you are weak and don't disturb her, she'll ignore you as not worth her time; antagonize her, and she kills you. If you are strong and disturb her, she happily challenges you to a formal but non-lethal duel. When accused of being behind an incident, she makes no claims to be innocent, even though she is, and in fact actively goads the accuser into a fight. If PC-98 depictions are still considered canon, she once invaded the underworld, told the Satan equivalent she did it because she was bored, and says that genocide is just a game, whether it's on humans or demons. Debate still rages whether she actually believes that or only said it to piss Shinki off. If asked, her answer would probably be yes.
  • And then there's Hijiri Byakuren, who is considered frustratingly weird by both humans and youkai alike. Why? Because she treats everyone, regardless of whether they are human or youkai, with kindness and wants for mankind and youkaikind to live in peace and harmony with each other. This is as much an example of how strange everyone else's morality is as it is an example of how strange Byakuren's morality is: to most everyone, the idea of getting youkai and humans to live in peace and harmony sounds like a great ideal and, by all means, it is. But harking back to that stuff about what the purpose of a youkai's life is, it also disturbs the natural order of things; youkai are supposed to oppose humans and humans are supposed to fear youkai, and it's implied that something very bad might happen if they don't.
  • Tenshi can be thought of this, if you take into account she caused so much destruction in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody just 'cause she was bored. According to ZUN, she has a good heart and everyone else were just being bullies. It doesn't help any matters that she wasn't raised knowing the responsibilities of her powers.
  • Seija Kijin is an amanojaku, a youkai of contradiction, and as such she thinks that being in agreement with people, treating them well, and being loved by them is bad while pointlessly opposing others, using and betraying them and being hated by them is good.
  • The Lunarians have a morality based upon the Shinto concepts of Purity and Impurity. So what exactly is Impurity? Mortality itself is. To the Lunarians, it's a sin to be mortal since it means one can die and, by doing so, perpetuate and spread the existence of death... And what's the punishment for being Impure? To be banished to the Impure planet Earth where the sinner will live out the rest of their impure life until the day they die... The Lunarians condescendingly chalk it up to Earthling ignorance if we bring up that this means we get off completely scot-free. Best summarized by Toyohime, when Yukari begs her to not punish her accomplices, claiming they are "innocent":
    Toyohime: It's quite impossible for the creatures here to be without sin. Living and dying on Earth is sin enough.
  • Fairies are weaklings compared to proper youkai, childish, and generally pretty stupid, but possess a form of Resurrective Immortality to make up for their other shortcomings. Unfortunately, this can make them dangerous to Muggles, since a fairy's idea of a prank might be to push a human over a cliff, or set their clothes on fire - a momentary embarrassment to another fairy, but potentially fatal to the human.
• The Brothers of Turgor seem to have a very strange morality from a human perspective.
  Triumphator: Giving is an unquestionable evil, so taking must be an unquestionable good!
• The Wisps (AKA Xorinites) in the Ultima series have what seems like an askew morality to humans. It revolves around the acquisition and application of information. In the first discussion you have with them in Ultima VI, they casually hand you a spell which destroys all life in the entire world around you. Why? They consider such a thing completely useless (presumably because it eradicates countless sources of information) as well as not being very powerful (since it can only eradicate life in one plane of existence), and they wish to teach you a lesson that not all information is valuable. Later in Ultima VII, you need to bargain with the Wisps as part of the main plot. Specifically, they task you with acquiring for them the notebook of a scholar who is investigating the game's Big Bad. Right after you do that, they sell this information for the Big Bad in question, who proceeds to have the scholar killed. Still, it's hard to get mad at them.
  • In the sixth game, you can sell the contents of a rather dry reference book (not the book itself, they just copy the contents) in exchange for "a small amount of precious metal", meaning all the gold your party can carry. They will at first assume you'd prefer information of comparable value rather than a bunch of Worthless Yellow Rocks and offer to renegotiate, and are surprised when you say you're okay with the deal. (If you do accept information, you'll get a scientific principle that could very well be priceless to a scientist, but not a sword-wielding fantasy hero.)
  • A rather pointed subversion is the entire point of Ultima VI. The Gargoyles do not follow the Eight Virtues of humans, instead following a system based on Control, Passion, and Diligence (as opposed to humanity's Truth, Love, adn Courage). Making this seem even more abstract is that they uphold the villains of the first three games as exemplars of these virtues. However, just because they follow different ideals doesn't mean they're wrong - their values turn out to be much more like humanity's than it seems at first glance, even if they take a completely different road to get there.
• Undertale has a really strange example. There's a creature in the game's canon that exists outside the universe. This creature can't manifest into the world by itself, but it can take control of a host and puppet them around. Whether it befriends everyone or commits systematic genocide, this creature does it just to see what will happen. It remembers everything that's been done to it, in all timelines, even when their host body has been destroyed numerous times. Only monsters with Medium Awareness like Flowey and Sans even know this creature exists. What is this creature? It's you.
• Unicorn from Will You Snail? is a Benevolent A.I. that's presented as a Good Counterpart to the game's cruel, murderous AI antagonist, Squid. However, benevolent as she is, Unicorn doesn't seem to quite get human standards of morality. When her creator, Dallin, asks Unicorn, "What's more valuable: The life of a human or your own existence?", her response is, "That depends on how many human lives my existence can save in the future, doesn't it?". Her attitude is later exemplified when she euthanizes what was left of humanity and recreated them all as exact digital simulations — without anyone knowing — in order to prevent their untimely suffering and death at the hands of Squid. Dallin is horrified when he finds out; Unicorn doesn't seem to understand why.
• In World of Warcraft, a great number of forces simply see mortals as plants in the Titans' garden, to be pulled or fertilized as the situation warrants.
  • Algalon the Observer rightfully sees that the Old Gods haven't been properly contained and has decided to "re-originate" the planet.
  • A common interpretation of the war between the Blue and Red dragonflights is that neither is good or evil, the former is simply trying to do its job (guarding magic) by killing all mortal magicians (who abuse magic so freely), and the latter is just trying to do its job (guarding life) by saving them.
  • Elementals are like this quite often, as they are considered purely chaotic. One water elemental, Duke Hydraxis, notes that he does not understand the human concept of gratitude or giving rewards, but in accordance with it, gives you a special item as a reward for a (now removed) quest.
  • In the fourth expansion, we have the Mantid, whose entire society/cultural system is based on the cycle of the swarm. Every 100 years or so, their young hatch in incredible numbers and then swarm toward the rest of Pandaria, devouring anything in their path. The Mogu built (using slave labor) the Serpent's Spine, a Great Wall of China expy, to better defend Pandaria from these periodical attacks. Still, Mantid assaults on the Serpent's Spine see the genocidal war between mantids and defenders (first Mogu, then after their revolution, Pandarens took that role), which inflict heavy casualties on the defenders before being forced to retreat for arguably taking several times those losses on their own forces. Mantids who survive this make their way back to their tree cities, bearing trophies of their conquests and take their place among their civilization according to the level of their deeds. These practices pretty much assure that the mantids who survive into adulthood are adept warriors in whatever area they choose to specialize in. The kicker is that they do all this as a form of worship to one of the Old Gods, their "master", with the ominous implication that they will use the evolved warriors/tactics/technologies they get from this social Darwinist system to kill (or worse) all the other races should their God ever come back. Even worse, the majority of their race has been corrupted by the Sha of Fear, who have skipped the whole "waiting for our god to return" thing and went straight to "zerg rush Pandaria."
  • Following the corruption of her Empress and the majority of their race by the Sha of Fear, a council of elders known as the klaxxi now openly opposes them, seeking to ''purify'' their race and being even perfectly willing to kill their Empress, arguably endangering their own race's survival, to achieve this. It is implied that their reason for this is not because they wish to protect the non-mantid races of Pandaria, but because they have their own code of honor in which they see the fact that the Empress let herself to be corrupted to be dishonorable and therefore will lead their empire to ruin. Also, the methods she has sanctioned to strengthen her soldiers are also seen as to be against the aforementioned code of honor:
    Rik'kal the Dissector: There is a champion among the loyalists, Vess-Guard Na'kal, whose strength comes not from experience or development, but from genetic modification. He was meant to be an example of the future of mantid — the sick idea that we can be born strong, without earning it. He's a mockery of my work! Gene augmentation was meant for mature, post-swarm veterans ONLY!
  • Also from the fourth expansion, another villain race, the Mogu, have a pretty distinguishable motivation, which also seems to be an in-universe example of motive decay, since the founder of their empire, the Thunder King Lei Shen had another justification, which seems to be a mixture of "Well Done, Son" Guy and Gone Horribly Wrong, for enslaving other races and building his empire through unholy means. The exploration slide show (called, appropriately, Gods and Monsters) says it best:
    Lorewalker Cho: The mogu were children as well. Children of the titans. They were once a legion of stone, heartless and obedient. By the titans' command, they fought the terrible servants of the old gods. They shaped the mountains and carved the rivers of the land. And they created a magical cradle of life in a hidden valley that we now call the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. But eventually the titans fell silent. And their creations were cursed with flesh. The mogu grew restless. Many generations later, when the Thunder King united them, they seized upon their legacy! I truly believe now that the Mogu thought they were doing the work of the titans. They fought against the mantid and used the powers of the Vale to create new life. Ah, but such terrible works! Parents cannot always be assured of the legacy they will leave behind. How especially true this is, when the parents are gods. And their children - monsters.
  • Theres also Lei Shen, after you defeat him in the Throne of Thunder raid:
    Lei Shen: I sought only to finish... the work of the Gods...
• In the X-Universe, the Old Ones' goals and motivations are basically incomprehensible to the young races. Since they've been around longer than Earth has been Earthlike (over 3.2 billion years), they've had the chance to become Type IV on the Kardashev scale, and their main plan is intended to prevent the heat death of the universe. But because they've been united for so long, they seem to have forgotten that other groups might not be so unified. Like the young races, for instance. Since their primary way of influencing the young races is to switch gate pairs around, they have a tendency to do such things as start interstellar wars seemingly For The Lulz. Also, for some bizarre reason, they told the Community of Planets not to finish off the Xenon after the Second Xenon Conflict, even though it was the Xenon that derailed their long-term plans in the first place.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X:
  • The Ma-non are a society of technologically advanced anarchists. They have little to no organization and no leadership. Each Ma-non just does their own thing in their own time. Amazingly enough, this seems to work for them. It is less helpful when some of them try to get jobs with human companies, as they see nothing wrong with taking 3-hour lunch breaks and are utterly confused when their human bosses get angry about this. They also seem to experience less powerful emotions, and can at times be rather callous and insensitive to others' emotional states. It isn't that they're uncaring, they just don't understand human emotion.
  • The Orphe are highly logical and have similar but more extreme issues with understanding emotions. They are dedicated to their own survival above all else and are very confused at the concept of altruism, something they would never contemplate. For the most part, they're friendly enough... mainly because being friendly makes their survival more likely. It's implied that exposure to human society is slowly changing this, however.
  • Telethia the Endbringer features a heaping helping of this trope, made more blatant because Telethia cannot speak and thus cannot explain its actions. It supposedly exists to obliterate any form of life it deems "impure". Exactly what criteria it uses to determine this is wholly unknown. While the psychotic and rabid Tainted are obvious as to why they should be killed, Telethia also targets the Orpheans, apparently due to the "Ovah" virus they all carry. At the same time, it leaves the humans alone, despite their bodies being mechanical imitations of living creatures.
• The Ethereals / "The Elders" of XCOM: Enemy Unknown launch a vicious and unprovoked attack on all of humanity, killing millions and terrorizing the entire planet with all manner of horrific monsters. In response, humanity gets its act together, gathers its best and brightest, and gradually adapts to the aliens' tactics, eventually even turning their own weapons against them. In the final mission, the Ethereals congratulate humanity for its tremendous adaptability and potential, and welcome them to their rightful place as the Ethereals' greatest servants and most successful experiment. XCOM responds in characteristic fashion. The Ethereals seem to honestly be at a loss as to why the humans are being such poor sports about a process that makes them measurably stronger.
  • The sequel (which interrupts the narrative of the first game by having XCOM lose the war just after destroying the alien base, and therefore before they develop psionic potential) shows that the Ethereals have little interest in using humanity as a slave race, and prefer using them for something far more beneficial to the Ethereals, and detrimental to the continued existence of humanity. They can't believe that humanity doesn't want to sacrifice themselves to help the Ethereals become Avatars.
• Wilhelm from Xenosaga exists solely to prevent the destruction of the Lower Domain. He does not care for how many lives he must manipulate, ruin, and destroy to achieve this goal.
• All of the Watchers from Year Walk. Each one has a stranger behavior than the others.
  • The Huldra, who is outright stated in the Encyclopedia to not play according to human rules, is likely to kill humans who encounter her with sex, and she even tries to lure them in with her Compelling Voice. However, she's the friend of colliers, can bless a hunter's hunt if he's respectful, and if blood is willingly offered to her, she'll lend a human her assistance... How much blood she'll take is, however, seemingly determined by factors only known to her, and it's quite possible that she'll drink a person dry.
  • The Brook Horse drowns people, most commonly children, but may also carry restless spirits to their final rest on the other side and especially seems to have a soft spot for Mylings.
  • The Mylings, in turn, kill those who ignore their distressed cries, but are actually only children who long for their mothers... That does not mean that their mothers are exempt from the ignore-me-and-you-die rule, though.
  • The Night Raven is a seriously Creepy Crow and a Thieving Magpie that might hurt and/or kill anyone who so much as looks at it, but it shows no ill intent at all.
  • And as for the Church Grim, well... First of all, it's basically a revenant of a dangerous criminal or a beast that has been created in order to protect a church and, being either a resurrected person of severe moral shortcomings or an animal, it is willing to do anything to keep the church safe. Secondly, even mentioning the Church Grim can bring its wrath upon a person. Furthermore, the Church Grim's heart has to be smashed in order for a Year Walk to be able to take place, but the Church Grim doesn't seem to care about this fact.
  • Finally, there's the fact that all Watchers are watching mankind in order to make sure that no one goes on a Year Walk; humans are not meant to be able to see into the future, and a Year Walk breaks this rule. When a human has made a Year Walk, it's also the Watchers' role to make sure that the person is punished for its transgression... Despite all this, the Watchers always keep the possibility of making a Year Walk an open alternative and, to some extent, even help humans complete their Year Walks.
• Every character in Zeno Clash exhibits this to some degree. The Corwids more so than most.
  • The closest thing Zenozoik has to a sense of morality is "if you have a problem with someone, fight them". This isn't just anger (although it can be, and often is), it's just how disputes are handled.
  • In the sequel, a slight subversion of the trope is that Kax-Teh abides by black-and-white morality. This makes him the weird one to the rest of Zenozoik; after setting up a justice system in Halstedom and introducing the concept of crime and punishment, proponents of the system just want the ability to beat people up and put them in prison while the detractors just don't understand the concept to begin with. Ghat and Rimata are even under the impression that defending Father-Mother at his/her trial implies physical defense. To the rest of Zenozoik, Kax-Teh is the one with Blue and Orange Morality.
  • The Corwids in particular are described as "not being slaves to reality." Each one follows their own individual rules that often make sense only to them, usually involving a singular fixation like needing to be invisible (by removing the eyes of anyone that could see them,) walking in a straight line forever, or eating people, and whatever they do for the sake of this fixation is right because "that's just what they do."

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