Even Evil Has Standards / Literature

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Examples:

• Alex Rider:
  • In Scorpia Rising, while Zeljan is discussing his Evil Plan with the rest of Scorpia, he calls Damian Cray a madman.
  • Earlier in the series, one of the senior members of Scorpia, Max Grendel, attempted to retire from the terrorist organisation, disturbed by the fact that they were developing a biological weapon that was designed to specifically target children.
• Rat and Jolly U in Alice, Girl from the Future are two space pirates who are medically diagnosed with a “complete conscience atrophy”. But when The War with the Liliputs introduces the Panchenga clan, the latter’s atrocities (slave trade’s just barely the beginning of the list) disgust even them.
• In The Alice Network, the German officers occupying Lille are portrayed as immoral and cruel, but one German officer does objects to the execution of Edith Cavall on the grounds that killing women, even spies, is not an honorable way to conduct war.
• Assuming that Patrick Bateman from American Psycho actually kills anyone, he's perfectly fine with killing men, women, children, and animals... but he can't bring himself to kill people who genuinely love him. He has no ability to return that love, but he won't kill them. This inadvertently saves a guy's life when Lou, misinterpreting Patrick's threats as a come-on, reveals he's gay and has a crush on Patrick; Patrick is sickened by the revelation but gives up on his plans to kill him.
• Anna Pigeon: In Destroyer Angel, Reg — one of a gang of kidnappers — refuses to kill a crippled dog when his boss orders him to, arguing that it's not right. The Dude points out that as he has already expressed his willingness to kill a paraplegic woman and a teenaged girl, this seems to show a somewhat skewed sense of morality. Reg is also disgusted by Sean's sexual interest in underage girls.
• Even at his worst, Artemis Fowl II won't stand for mistreatment of the environment. He also won't kill people. Lemurs, maybe, but not people. When Holly compares Artemis to the villain Jon Spiro, Artemis uses this fact as his defense.
• Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues: A parody that positions the Arch-Enemy of the Joes into Ayn Rand's novel. Much of the humor comes from how even a card carrying Evil Overlord is appalled by the actions by the Gulchers, especially Dr. Hendricks, who has a miracle cure for strokes he will never share with the outside world purely out of spite.

  Cobra Commander: I work with arms dealers, con men, mad scientists, and even a man who was literally constructed out of the DNA of all of the worst people in the history of the world. And I have met so many atrocious 'heroes' in my visit through this pathetic ensemble you have assembled and you, sir, are the absolute most horrid human being I have ever met in my entire life. You're not even a person anymore. You are a monster.

• Banished from the Hero's Party: Godwin is the alchemist who crafted the Devil's Blessing drug and who is perfectly willing to use explosives on his own men to trap the protagonists. He openly acknowledges he's a villain by most standards. However, for precisely this reason he absolutely can not stand villains who have deluded themselves into thinking they're the good guys. Despite having been a coward when dealing with the confrontation with Ares the Sage in the ancient elf ruins as he tries to force Ruti to resume her role as the Hero, he ultimately aids the protagonists because the opponent's insistence that he's the one in the right just pisses Godwin off.
• Simon Lovelace from the first book of The Bartimaeus Trilogy uses people as a matter of course, but he's still appalled at Arthur Underwood trying to sell out his own apprentice to save himself.
• In the BattleTech novel 'Star Lord,' it's implied that there are rogue mercenary and pirate bands who turned down offers to work with an otherwise charismatic and surprisingly well-heeled leader not unlike a Bandit King when they discovered he was a direct genetic descendant of the setting's greatest and most infamous monster looking to finish what his ancestor started. These pirates are generally taking slaves, burning villages, and otherwise being barbaric... and they still don't want to be associated with this guy. Some groups eventually did join his army, in a flat aversion of this trope.
• Bazil Broketail: General Kreegsbrok serves Obviously Evil masters, he is in charge of an army which consists mainly of monsters like trolls and imps, and yet he is visibly creeped out by the Prophet and his uncontrollable urge to kill.
• The Belgariad:
  • The Mallorean has a deeply chilling example in the fourth book. Belgarion finds a prophecy written by Torak, the villain of the first series. It reveals exactly what Zandramas, the current Big Bad, is planning (in essence, creating a new god of darkness). At the end, Torak has added a personal message to Belgarion... which says, in part, "If you're reading this, you've already destroyed me. What is foretold in these pages is an abomination. Do not let it come to pass." As Belgarath notes, Torak was stunned out of his madness long enough to feel revulsion at what he foresaw.
  • A less serious example is the spies within Drasnia making it a point to not spy on Queen Porenn when she's breast feeding her baby. Naturally Porenn uses this time to talk with her chief spy in total privacy by dressing him as one of her maids.
  • Also in his Elenium novels, after being talked into helping the newly restored Queen officially, Platime (who was the leader of all the criminals in the country) agrees so long as he's given a full pardon, when asked for what crimes, he admits to committing every crime except barratry, treason, and carnal knowledge of an animal, and the barratry was only because he didn't know what it was.
  • Platime's counterpart in Emsat, Stragen, who plays a bigger and nobler role in the sequel The Tamuli, has standards of his own. An actual bastard, he knows what it's like to be at the bottom of the social pecking order, so he trains and orders his guild to target only the nobility.
• In the Belisarius Series, Narses practically lives this trope. He betrayed Empress Theodora who was practically his adopted daughter. But when told to assassinate the family of a Rajput chief, he refuses and almost becomes a hero.
• In Black Legion even traitor Astartes find Fabius' experiments — especially human-demon fusion and cloning — appalling. This is true even of some Emperor's Children, infamous for having no standards at all.
• In Edgar Allan Poe's story, "Bon-Bon," Pierre Bon-Bon is a chef, and drunkard prone to philosophical banter. One night, the Devil shows up at his restaurant, and Pierre invites Mr Scratch for a philosophical conversation over wine, hoping to glean some esoteric insight he can publish and making himself famous. During the conversation, the Devil explains how he sees and eats souls, and then proceeds to namedrop some of the many, many famous souls he's eaten, and how they tasted. Meanwhile, Bon-Bon has become roaring drunk, being unable to speak without hiccuping incessantly. Even so, he repeatedly offers to give his own soul to the Devil as a stew or a souffle, but the Devil repeatedly refuses, citing that he will not take advantage of Bon-Bon's "disgusting and ungentlemanly" drunken state.
• The cast of Bioshock Rapture, the tie-in Prequel to the video games BioShock and BioShock 2, is full of shady characters, ranging from self-centered to bloodthirsty to morally apathetic, but sometimes there are still flickers of human decency.
  • Fontaine is at first genuinely creeped out and physically sickened by the methods Suchong and Tenenbaum come up with for producing more ADAM. He gets over it when he realizes how much money can be made, however.
  • Andrew Ryan's personal bodyguard Karlosky is a hardened man who obeys his employer's orders without question, however extreme they may be, but when Ryan's scientists conclude that the only way to compensate for the ADAM shortage crisis is to have Little Sisters harvest it from the corpses lying around Rapture, he's visibly unnerved. Ostensible protagonist Bill McDonough takes notice and thinks that it would take something truly brutal to sicken Karlosky.
  • During their conversation in Ryan's office, Fontaine is disgusted when Ryan insinuates that perhaps the reason he's set up the orphanages around Rapture and pays the girls much more attention than the boys is because he's sexually abusing them. Fontaine immediately snaps at him and says that he only likes grown women. Ryan is just as appalled at the thought and sounds like he's about to threaten Fontaine with violence if he were to be using the girls for the suspected purpose. Since he was already contemplating having Karlosky kill Fontaine on the spot in this scene, it's not a stretch to think that if his suspicions had been confirmed, he would have gone through with it.
  • Ryan looks down upon the tactics that a major Rapture grocery store owner uses to drive his competitor out of business (gaining a monopoly on trash collection in the area, then price gouging his competitor for far more than he can afford, causing the trash to rot outside the guy's store). He voices his distaste to Bill, but clarifies that he won't infringe on another man's business practices—that's not The Rapture Way, after all. After he sees that The Rapture Way doesn't care about him or his business, the competitor goes back into his store, gets a gun, shoots the fatcat, and then himself.
  • At the end of the novel, Bill tries to escape Rapture with his wife Elaine and young daughter Sophie. Bill has been Ryan's closest friend for years; Ryan saw potential in him when he was a humble plumber and took him under his wing, bringing him and his then-fiancee Elaine with him to Rapture and confiding in him about many matters — he's even close with Bill's family, often asking after Elaine and Sophie to make sure they've been safe amidst the spiraling chaos of the city. Before they can escape via bathysphere, Ryan's men, all of whom know Bill personally, corner them and tell Bill that they have orders to bring him in and kill him, as is Ryan's decree for anyone who tries to defy his rules — however, they all realize that Ryan only said to take Bill, conveniently leaving out Elaine and Sophie. Ryan, knowing that Bill would never have tried to escape without his family, implicitly granted permission to let the two of them leave the city permanently, something he's never let anyone do before or since.
• All the members of Glanton's gang in Blood Meridian are violent scalp hunters who joined of their own volition and kill as many Native Americans and even Mexicans later on as they can, but the Kid, Toadvine, and Tobin have certain lines they either won't cross at all or only cross very reluctantly. Toadvine doesn't like when the others massacre peaceful Native Americans and is horrified when Judge Holden kills a child he had previously "rescued", Tobin talks back against the Judge's disturbing Hannibal Lectures and tries to be a mentor figure for the Kid, and the Kid sometimes shows mercy towards the gang's intended victims or to injured members of the gang that none of the others will help.
  • Glanton himself is one of the worst out of the bunch, being vehemently racist on top of being violent, especially towards Native Americans, but he's not against the Delawares in the group. And at one point, when a Mexican bartender refused to serve the black member of the gang, Jackson, Glanton is insulted on his behalf.
  • In general, the gang is quite accepting of Jackson. Besides the bar scene, at one point Jackson kills the extremely racist "White" Jackson for repeatedly mouthing off at him and the others don't object at all, and even Holden sticks up for him by explaining in great detail to the ignorant Mexican sargeant what black people are and various anthropological speculations about different races, though he won't include Jackson in the conversation for whatever reason.
• In The Box Of Delights, Abner's henchman Joe objects to keeping clergymen and choirboys prisoner at Christmas, partly because he hopes it would "tell in our favour, if ever we come to be tried", but also because it's "not Christmas dealing".
• In Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, the demon Azzie replies to a little girl who mentions using the model guillotine he brought her on puppies:
  I am evil, but I am not cruel to animals. There's a special Hell reserved for those who are.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • In the light novel, Accelerator quotes this quite often when fighting other evil people, then goes to show them "what being a true villain is all about" usually ending with a swift death. Ironic because Accelerator himself has moments of this trope, especially when Last Order is around.
  • Shizuri Mugino, one of the most psychotic characters in the franchise, is sickened and horrified by cannibalism.
• In the Haft Awrang book "Chain of Gold," one of the stories is that of a man who, overcome by lust, mounts a camel. This appalls even Iblis, who curses him.
• Christine: Buddy Repperton may be a bully, but he will not tolerate racist jokes.
• Parodied in the Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls. Cain considers the uniforms of the PDF so garish that even Slaaneshi cultists would find them distasteful.
• In A Clockwork Orange, the gangs may be brutal rapists and robbers, but they have a strict prohibition on having more than five members in each gang; Billy Boy has six, which is the main reason Alex holds him in such low regard. Also, it’s implied they completely refuse to kill anyone; at any rate, Alex is horrified when he learns he accidentally killed the old woman he robbed.
  • And later, Alex is horrified and indignant at the use of Beethoven's music during the Ludovico Treatment. "He never harmed anybody! He just wrote music!"
• While there are dictatorships, communists and fascists, secret polices, many wars, nukes and even worse weapons, the Chaos Timeline has no equivalent of The Nazis and the Holocaust.
• In Confederation of Valor: Valor's Trial by Tanya Huff, the Others hit the ground battle from space with some sort of strategic warhead that fuses the entire battlefield and everything on it into smooth volcanic glass. According to an Other lieutenant that Torin Kerr teams up with later on, at least part of the Others' own ruling council considered this weapon horrific and tried to prevent its use.
• In Daemon, Brian Gragg/Loki is a Jerkass Cracker whose Establishing Character Moment is organising the date rape of a teenage girl at a rave and letting one of his associates take the fall for a data theft he committed. Yet even he is sickened when the Major backstabs and executes Roy Merritt in front of his eyes and spends the rest of the two books doing his best to find and destroy the other guy.
• A Deal with a Demon: Azazel is a crafty bastard and likes to trick people into deals. But he also keeps his word and even keeps the women who act as his courtesans safe and ensures that no one hurts or forces them to do anything they don't want to do.
• In the novelization of Demolition Man Simon Phoenix is shocked that Cocteau had Associate Bob castrated to curb Bob's ambition. Phoenix is a murderous bastard, but taking a guy's balls just isn't right!
• The Destroyer series of novels tells of the House of Sinanju, who have been assassins to the governments of the world for five thousand years. The current Master, Chiun, has been an assassin since childhood (and is over a hundred) and has perhaps half a million or so kills to his credit all done with his bare hands. But he kills child-killers and people who train children as terrorists without pay, since it's immoral to involve children in "the Games of Death".
• Tom Walker in Washington Irving's story The Devil and Tom Walker is lacking in redeeming qualities, but when he first makes his Deal with the Devil and the Devil proposes that he serve him through the slave trade, Tom immediately refuses, saying he won't have anything to do with that. He then eagerly accepts the Devil's second proposal, which is that he become a ruthless Loan Shark who ruins the lives of those around him. It's been suggested that this might have been meant satirically toward the stereotypical Northern businessman, who like Tom, was a greedy, unscrupulous miser, but abhorred slavery.
• Deviant: Cerberus might be a group that has very little qualms about mowing down a bunch of gang mooks, but that's about the extent of any activities that could be considered "villainous", as they spend most of their time fighting people far worse than them. Notably, the Degenerates.
• In Devil's Cape, the Robber Baron asks Costas, one of the major figures in Devil's Cape's underground crime, whether he would kill his own wife in exchange for immortality. Costas considers the question, and decides he wouldn't. The Robber Baron, on the other hand, would. He did it centuries ago.
• The Devil is a Part-Timer!:
  • Played for laughs when Alciel, the unrepentant right-hand servant of Satan, is horrified to discover that his temp job involves working for a company that scams people into buying worthless merchandise.
  • Lucifer is a Fallen Angel who, in his first appearance, went on a destructive rampage through the city for fun, but when his then-partner Olba Mayer tries to chew out Emi for teaming up with Maou, even Lucifer himself calls him out on the hypocrisy of his statement.
• In Alex Grecian's The Devil's Workshop, Jack the Ripper, of all people. Jack believes that murdering and mutilating people is part of a divine "plan," and his crimes are a kind of favor to the victims. Killing children, though, is right out, as they aren't "ripe."
• Terry Pratchett likes doing this in Discworld, especially with his Assassins' Guild. Like Leon, they do not accept contracts to "inhume" women (though they let women be Assassins, as of Men at Arms at least) or children, nor do they ever work for free, and they cannot accept contracts on someone who cannot defend himself (though "rich enough to hire bodyguards" qualifies as "capable of defending himself").
  • In Witches Abroad it's stated that Genua's branch of Assassins all left years ago because "some things sicken even jackals".
  • In Hogfather the head of the Ankh-Morpork branch is horrified by the excesses of Psychopathic Manchild Jonathan Teatime and frightened by his unpredictable actions (there's mention of him having nailed a "client"'s guard dogs to the ceiling). Teatime later hires a bunch of criminals who are also scared and repelled by him; they did kill people, but unlike Teatime, only when it was necessary. The scene that introduces Teatime notes that Lord Downey, leader of the Assassins Guild, does not have actual morals, but he does have standards. Teatime... doesn't.
    • Before it occurs to him to use Teatime, after receiving a contract from a mysterious "Auditor" that appears as a cloak (and nothing else) and speaks in a Creepy Monotone on the Discworld's answer to Santa Claus, Lord Downey hesitates and realizes that he doesn't want to hear that the (massive) payment that just appeared in his coffers is real; he wants it to be fake so there won't be any obligation after all. (When Downey realizes that it is real, he hesitates and turns to the above, but assures himself at the end of their briefing that the assassin he's chosen will still fail, and that should be about it.)
  • In Guards! Guards!, the dragon is rather disturbed by Lupine Wonse's plan to use human psychology so that the citizens of Ankh-Morpork will begin to grow used to the idea of having to sacrifice young maidens to the dragon, and bluntly replies to Wonse that dragons "never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."
  • In Going Postal this is part of Moist's reason for going against Gilt. Admittedly, Moist is more of a Loveable Rogue to Gilt's Corrupt Corporate Executive.
    • Moist also abhors violence (not only the violence done to him, but doing any violence himself to try to prevent it being done to him, to the extent that he absolutely refuses to carry weapons of any kind) while Gilt has no qualms about having people brutally murdered right and left and employs a particularly terrifying killer to do it for him.
    • It's deconstructed with Mr. Pump's speech to Moist, however, in which he points out that Moist's standards didn't stop him from ruining people's lives, kicking those who were already down and hastening their deaths anyway, even if he's not aware of it — just because what you do doesn't directly kill people doesn't mean you're not harming them, and just because other people are doing worse and more evil things than you doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't still evil. Functions as a rather interesting cross between a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and a Wham Line, especially when Mr. Pump declares:
    Mr. Pump: I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People.
  • Also, with the Assassins' Guild: Sir Samuel Vimes asks one of their assassins, after having failed (for the nth time) to kill Vimes at his booby trapped home, why they just don't shoot him down in the street. The assassin is horrified, "Like a common criminal?"
  • Vimes finds out in a later book that he's been taken off the register. Aside from being slightly disappointed at that at wondering if he can appeal, he reflects that the Assassins only take someone off the books if killing them would cause too much political chaos (Vetinari being the only other person they will not accept a contract on). They seem to have found another use for him though, as a training exercise for over-confident students.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, the Magpyrs' Igor gets increasingly fed up with not only their lack of respect for vampiric tradition, but their condescending Social Darwinist attitude, complaining constantly that "the old marther" never went as far as the current bunch. This eventually drives him to side with the witches.
  • We learn (in Going Postal) that Igors have a tradition and rules about making a break for it when The Marthter starts going off the deep end. You make sure the larder is full and everything is all tidy before you go, and it is, apparently, permissible (but not encouraged) to suggest that other, particularly likable servants might like to take a holiday in a different town right now. (Igors know that there's no percentage in being around when the pitchforks and torches come out.)
  • There's also the Thieves' Guild, which takes a very hostile attitude towards unlicensed theft. The Guild also requires thieves to stamp a receipt for the "customer", so the same people aren't hit too often or for too much. They also strictly refrain from killing victims, although that's more to avoid trespassing on the Assassins' economic turf than for standards' sake with a certain amount of pragmatism in that if you kill someone while robbing them then you can't rob them again later.
  • In The Fifth Elephant, It's insinuated that even Serefine von Uberwald was horrified by some of the actions of her son Wolfgang, which included altering the family tradition of Hunting the Most Dangerous Game so that the human prey had no chance at survival and murdering his infant sister because she wasn't able to change form like "proper" werewolves. Subverted in that she didn't actually do anything about it.
  • Thud! has Chrysophrase of the troll mob, who doesn't deal in drugs. Well, not any more. And not the bad drugs, the kind that kill their users or cause them to become psychotic. Commander Vimes isn't impressed. Also during that book, one of his goons makes the mistake of making an indirect threat toward Vimes's family ("He knows where I live." "Yeah, he does."). Later, Chrysophrase says the threat was not on his orders, and the offending goon has been... dealt with, and incidentally would Vimes like a rockery for his garden?
  • In Eric, Astfgl's attempts to run Hell like a corporation disgust even the other demons.
  • In The Last Hero, Evil Harry Dread has quite an extensive list of criticisms directed at modern-day villains who don't follow The Code. Yes, Harry may be a bungling Punch-Clock Villain who's never rated better than a Shed of Doom, with a donkey Steed of Terror and a hamster for his Right-Hand Cat, but at least he plays his role properly.^note  There's a slight amount of pragmatism, especially with heroes that also follow the code: you get to escape through a secret tunnel and the heroes don't search for you too hard, vs. the 'newer' heroes that are more inclined to just collapse your lair on top of your head....
  • In Interesting Times, the Silver Horde may be a bunch of (very old) village-burning rapists, but even they don't like the idea of poisoning food.
  • In Jingo, 71-Hour Achmed's name comes from the fact that he killed someone 71 hours after sharing hospitality with him, one hour short of the customary three day truce following such an act. This makes him anathema and outcast in the normally thoroughly amoral D'reg society. But he doesn't care. He did it because his quarry was a despicable mass murderer, and he figured the criminal would strike the moment time was up, so he broke tradition and got the jump on him.
    • From the same book we have those same D'regs comment that they don't kill the merchants they rob, because if they let them go then they can go get rich again so the D'regs can rob them again. As one D'reg puts it "But if you plant merchants they don't grow so well." (This was in response to someone comparing their system to farming. Cue "But if you plant...")
  • In Making Money, the Assassins also wouldn't kill a dog, even if he is the chairman of a bank.
    • They also wouldn't break a contract in exchange for a more lucrative one in a case of I Gave My Word. This, and the above reason, are exploited by the old lady who left her money to her dog — by leaving the dog to Moist^note He would've been her primary choice but he's not legally allowed to run her bank because of Conflict Of Interest with a contract to kill him if the dog dies of anything other than natural causes, she effectively made Moist unkillable by the Assassin's Guild.
• The Divine Comedy:
  • The uncommitted souls and fallen uncommitted angels aren't even considered worthy of entering hell, although they're still punished.
  • In the fiery desert of the seventh circle, blasphemers and sodomites keep themselves away from the usurers.
• In the DragonLance short story "Boom", by Jeff Grubb, the wing-commander of one of Takhisis' Dragon Armies, a man who leads monsters and evil men to conquer and kill on behalf of the chief God of Evil of the setting, refuses to use a mad gnome's atomic bomb equivalent. Part of the reason is that, like all gnome inventions, it's less practical than spellcraft, but mostly it's because the sheer scope of its devastation, described as resulting in miles of fertile land reduced to ashes and leaving behind a poisoned wasteland, horrifies him as being far too terrible to use.
• From The Dresden Files
  • "Gentleman" Johnny Marcone is a self-described professional monster. He directly controls all of the organized crime in Chicago and most of the police are fine with this as Marcone's desire to keep his house in order has actually resulted in crime going down since Marcone took over the mobs. He is shown to have a hand in numerous illegal and immoral enterprises... yet he draws the line at anything which exploits children and personally executes anyone he finds out has been dealing drugs to minors or pimping out children in his city. In Changes it's even part of the reason he agrees to help Harry recover his daughter from the Red Court... that and the fact that the Red Court have been trying to muscle in on his business.
  • Queen Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, is a cold and ruthless woman who if you injure her, she will kill you. If you betray her, she will make you beg for death. If you make a deal with her, she will keep up her end of the bargain. It may not be the nicest, cleanest means in fulfilling her end of the deal, but, like all Fae, she will honor it to the letter of the deal. It is for these reasons Harry considers her the least Evil of his options when his back is broken and his daughter will be killed soon. He could call on a Fallen Angel or some evil Necromacy ritual, but those would turn him into a truly evil monster. Mab would make him one in time, but he would only have to kill as she commanded it. And like many weapons, she wouldn't use him callously.
  • The more malevolent of the Fae, including the above mentioned Queen Mab, can be considered this as a whole as the Fae have a sense of morality based on deal making. Honor the deal and you do well. Break the deal or renege and you will suffer. Also, the later books have revealed that Queen Mab's Winter Court serves an important role in defending reality against the Outsiders.
  • Ernest Armand "Binder" Tinwhistle is a century-old magical mercenary. While he is very pragmatic in his methods, he has been shown expressing a great deal of disapproval for sadism and unnecessary collateral damage on the grounds that they're 'unprofessional'. He does abide by two simple rules. The first is nothing personal. When the job is over, he won't hold a grudge towards anyone even those who he fought. After he survived meeting Harry in Turn Coat he is friendly to Harry when they meet in Skin Game now working on a heist together. This also means he won't take advantage of his female partner who is highly attractive and wants to sleep with him. Their relationship is strictly professional. The second rule is money or nothing. He will do his job for cash or valuable items like gems. Political favors from the fae or White Council can be twisted and open for interpretation. For this reason he also refuses the coins of the Denarians, which would put a Fallen Angel in his head in exchange for greater power. Binder also shows deep respect for a Knight of the Cross when he encounters one.
  • Then there's Heinrich Kemmler. A necromancer who developed methods of using spirits as batteries for magic, and who counts orchestrating two world wars among his lesser atrocities. Even Queen Mab, whose moral code is so far divorced from anything human it is hard to identify and Bob, who is a spirit of pure intellect and therefore cannot fathom things like morality and ethics, unironically refer to Kemmler as a monster.
• Theatre/Faust: The demon Mephistopheles tries to convince Dr Faustus that selling your soul for magic power is a bad idea. Several times, actually. He explicitly points out that a few years of screwing around with physics isn't worth the loss of eternity with God.
• Durarara!!:
  • Izaya Orihara is a supreme Jerkass and a Troll, but he won't hit women.
  • Somehow freaking Saika gets a moment of this, though only in the light novels. When Anri confronts Izaya about his involvement in making her friends suffer, Izaya in return delivers a Breaking Speech while getting in jabs about Anri suppressing her emotions and threatens to shoot a nearby couple just prove his point. After all that, Saika realizes this is the only time she has ever been disgusted by a human being.
• Tedrin, the villain in Eden Green, is a sadistic monster who sees no problem with killing and infecting other humans with his alien needle symbiote, but balks at the idea of raping the main character.
• In Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain, Mollusk is perfectly willing to wage war and end lives if it means victory over a ruthless foe, but even he sees the incalculable destruction his Doomsday Device had done to Saturn as a step too far on his part.
  A few million life-forms snuffed out with the push of a button. It didn't feel like that anymore. It wasn't fun. It wasn't science. It was just ugly, indiscriminate death.
• Empire of the East: Lord Chup has manipulated, schemed, and killed in combat, but he draws the line at throwing his wife to a demon. Not because he loves her (although he does); she tried to have him killed, and he would be perfectly happy to murder her face-to-face. But to regain her trust and then sacrifice her soul, simply to gain promotion, is beyond the pale.
• In the opening chapter of Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle, a German spy undercover in England is forced to murder his landlady when she discovers him hunched over his radio equipment. Afterwards, he tears open her nightgown to expose her breasts, to make it seem as if she was the victim of a random sex maniac. He knows that a coroner will quickly discern that she wasn't actually raped, but he refuses to go that far, "even for the Fatherland."
• In the third story of the first Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights novel, while Millie is trapped inside of Funtime Freddy, he rattles off options on how he can kill her. Eventually, he comes to the option of boiling her alive. When she declines, even the murder-crazed Freddy seems slightly relieved.
• Flashman is, and admits he is, evil in many ways... but even he has lines he will not willingly cross.
  "A scoundrel I may be, but I ain't an assassin, and you will comb my memoirs in vain for a mention of Flashy as First Murderer." (Flashman's response to a clear hint that, if all else fails to turn him aside, Flashman is to bump off John Brown. Later, he says nearly the same thing about a proposal to have him do in Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia.)
  • He was also not very fond of slave trading after having helped loading a slave ship.
  • And when he witnessed an Indian ruler's widows committing suttee, he came away seething with rage at the cruelty of it.
• Three witches from Christopher Moore's Fool admit being evil incarnate but they say to prefer staying away from politics — apparently even crushing toddler's skull is better than it.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' Book 6 (The Bones Of Haven), when Hawk and Fisher are sent in to quell a prison riot, they learn that the escaped rioters have been trying and executing some of the other prisoners — specifically, those who were in prison for rape and/or child abuse.
• The Groupmind AI from Royce Day's For Your Safety series is perfectly willing to lock up humanity in a Gilded Cage for eternity, but refuses to do physical harm to a single person.
• The Fourth Protocol:
  (Jim) Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone "trash" his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional "faces", if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts.
• The Fragility of Bodies: The corrupt union boss is horrified when Juan Garcia orders the last two child competitors to be killed, despite having been fine with the Game of Chicken competition beforehand, since he saw some kids dying as accidents, and feels actively killing them is too much.
• In Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles, Black Jack has agreed that Wessner can kill Freckles, however he likes, once they are gone, but he objects to watches while Wessner torments him, especially since Freckles would beat him in a fair fight. Another man is angry that Wessner didn't just keep Freckles from seeing any of them.
  "You see here, Dutchy," he bawled, "mebby you think you'll wash his face with that, but you won't. A contract's a contract. We agreed to take out these trees and leave him for you to dispose of whatever way you please, provided you shut him up eternally on this deal. But I'll not see a tied man tormented by a fellow that he can lick up the ground with, loose, and that's flat. It raises my gorge to think what he'll get when we're gone, but you needn't think you're free to begin before. Don't you lay a hand on him while I'm here! What do you say, boys?"
  "I say yes," growled one of McLean's latest deserters. "What's more, we're a pack of fools to risk the dirty work of silencing him. You had him face down and you on his back; why the hell didn't you cover his head and roll him into the bushes until we were gone? When I went into this, I didn't understand that he was to see all of us and that there was murder on the ticket. I'm not up to it. I don't mind lifting trees we came for, but I'm cursed if I want blood on my hands."
• Fuzzy Nation: Amoral Attorney Meyer never wavers in trying to help Aubrey get away with his illegal attempts to deny the fuzzies their rights, but she does look horrified while watching a video of Joe stomping a young fuzzy to death.
• In Gilded Latten Bones, Garrett ponders this trope when he asks Sarge and Puddle, two of assassin-for-hire Morley Dotes's criminal associates, about the doings of TunFaire's resurrection men, and both are repulsed by the notion of stealing dead bodies for necromantic research.
• Gentleman Bastard:
  • In the first book, we find Locke Lamora risking his life, his treasured vengeance — and he's a vengeful sort from a vengeful people and his freedom to warn his enemies about something that he thinks is just plain wrong. And The Thiefmaker is perfectly willing to kill children — but he always makes the correct offering to the gods for the murder, and absolutely won't sell a child to slavers for any amount of gold. The Thiefmaker's attitude may partly be Pragmatic Villainy; being The Fagin is tolerated, but dealing with slavers is not, and the authorities are generally very serious about that.
  • In the second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies, he goes out of his way to trash and rob Salon Corbeau, a city dedicated to letting the decadent rich do as they please, because he's disgusted by one of their pastimes.
  • In the third book, The Republic of Thieves, we find out what the Jeremites do to young redheaded girls. Even the Thiefmaker, who is utterly unfazed at the prospect of his young charges facing hanging for petty theft done at his command, is appalled... and he makes darn sure that Young Sabetha always covers her hair and dyes it when going out in public.
• Damon Runyon's characters are generally pretty blase about crime, but there are things they would never, ever do. In the story "Gentlemen, the King!" three New York City hardboys recruited to kill a king in Europe abort the mission instantly when they find out that the King in question is a child... and end up killing the man who sent them, instead.
• In Gone, Caine is understandably appalled at what Penny did to Cigar in the twelve hours she had him. To put it simply, she tortured him to insanity. When Lana regenerates his eyes he thinks back to some of the hallucinations she caused, and we get to see them.
• It's stated in Good Omens that even demons find certain actions unthinkable, including using holy water on another demon.
  • Ironically, Noble Demon Crowley is the one who crosses that line, though it's done to save his hide more than anything else. Later on, Crowley rejects the idea of tormenting Hastur by playing the tape he's trapped on in his Bentley until he becomes a Queen song (It Makes Sense in Context) because even a demon can only sink so far.
  • There was also an earlier scene where Crowley reminisces about how he found out about the Spanish Inquisition — he was in Spain at the time, and Hell gave him a commendation for it. When he saw them in action and realized humans had done it all by themselves without any influence from hell, he drank himself into a stupor.
  • Demons like Crowley also have this view about Satanists. Most of them (like the Sister Mary and the other nuns) are actually harmless—having been raised in the faith for generations they're like your average non-observant Christian, acting ordinary six days per week and then attending a token black sabbath without being particularly devout. Some Satanists, on the other hand, like the ones you sometimes hear about on the news....
• In in the Gor series rape and slavery are fine. On the other hand raising a girl from infancy with no concept of the outside world, sexuality, violence, or even men and then raping her is still viewed as horrific. That it drives the girls insane and they have to be killed the next day is probably a contributing factor.
• The Guns of the South: The Confederate Army are fighting to keep men in bondage and are often tremendously racist, but some of them are clearly horrified by the abuse their Rivington allies dish out to their black slaves. When the Rivington men turn on the Confederacy and try to assassinate Robert E. Lee, the Confederates are eager to wipe out the Rivington group. After his defeat, Andries Rhoodie is killed by one of his abused slaves, and the Confederates, (who are obligated to kill the slave for daring to kill a white man) let the slave go, because as far as they're concerned Rhoodie really had it coming due to just how inhumane he was to the slaves.
• Harry Potter:
  • Sirius Black's evil blood-purist parents, who disowned Sirius (after he ran away) when he was sixteen, didn't join Voldemort because they thought he was going too far.
  • Inverted with Dolores Umbridge; not only does she lack standards, she makes Snape in the book she's introduced in, look good next to her and genuinely find her repulsive.
    Snape: Unless you wish to poison Potter — and I would be in the greatest possible sympathy with you if you did — I cannot help you.
  • Speaking of Umbridge, it is stated in other official Harry Potter sources that when she gets drunk, she has spouted views on Muggle-borns, half-breeds and creatures of human and beast appearance (i.e. centaurs, merpeople) that were so appalling, even other pureblood supremacist wizards and witches were taken aback by her.
  • Godelot Sr, writer of Magick Moste Evile and a previous owner of the Elder Wand, wouldn't touch the subject of Horcruxes.
  • One of Voldemort's ancestors, Corvinus Gaunt, discovered the Chamber of Secrets and helped hide it while the school was being renovated but refused to open it and consequently massacre the Muggle-born students himself.
  • Cornelius Fudge, one of the antagonists of the fifth book is very much willing to discredit Harry and Dumbledore to keep himself in power and the Wizarding World in line, but he will not have tolerated Dementors being released on his opposition or torturing them with the Unforgivable Curses, which is why Umbridge had to go behind his back to do the above.
    • There's also his account of the fateful night that Sirius Black was arrested and thirteen Muggles were blown up courtesy of Pettigrew, a by all means, perfectly reliable account of the horror and the screaming that he experienced first-hand.
  • Durmstrang Institute is a school infamous for teaching The Dark Arts and forbidding Muggle-borns from enrolling. But even they kicked Gellert Grinderwald out after discovering his "twisted experiments."
  • Although evil probably isn’t the right word at that point, Grindelwald dies laughing in Voldemort’s face because he doesn’t want him to have the Elder Wand and doesn’t want Dumbledore’s tomb to be desecrated to get it.
  • The pureblood supremacist Malfoy family has always been willing to marry half-bloods so they don't have to resort to inbreeding like the rest of their peers.
• In A Harvest of War Queen Thyll is a Card-Carrying Villain but instinctively and lethally draws the line at paedophilia, to her own surprise.
• Sven Hassel writes of soldiers in a penal battalion, some of the roughest, cruelest, most degraded men in the forces of Nazi Germany... but sometimes they run across things done by the Nazis, or the Soviets, that repulse even these hardened, callous killers. When they get a chance to express their disapproval of such things in concrete form, it can get... messy.
• In the H.I.V.E. Series about a school of evil villains, villains like Dr. Nero disapprove of needless violence even if they are evil. Nero's internal monologues suggest he sees villainy as a matter of natural talent and individual empowerment: his goal is to see those inclined to become criminal masterminds or hired killers or mad scientists or sleazy bankers/lawyers/politicians "be all they can be" while at the same time dedicating himself to curbing the excesses of expressing those talents.
• In Hollow Places, Benjamin is offended that the authorities assume he killed his girlfriend (who went missing decades ago) along with the other women they found hidden in his closet. He says he would never harm his girlfriend and is adamant that he only ever killed five women.
• Homage to Catalonia: When Orwell and his wife's hotel room is being searched by secret police, they refuse to check the bed since the wife was laying in it during their search. Orwell notes this as a sign of the nobility of the Spanish despite the secret police's normally brutish tactics.
• Honor Harrington:
  • In the novel In Enemy Hands, Citizen Captain Vladovich is so vicious he is unpopular even with other State Sec members.
  • It's stated that even at the height of the regime of the People's Republic of Haven, when they were clearly acting as the bad guys in general, anyone engaged in genetic slavery that fell into their hands could expect a short trip out the nearest airlock. They would, of course, shoot the slavers first. In a heavily space-dependent setting, execution by being Thrown Out the Airlock is also considered a special kind of evil by all but the worst of pirates and slavers.
• In the novel The House of Silk (the new Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz) we learn that even the Napoleon of Crime himself (never named in the book but it's obviously him) has standards: he finds the child sexual abuse practiced in the eponymous house so appalling that he gives Watson information which directly assists in solving the case. The section where this happens is very well-written and despite this moment of dog-petting the reader is left in no doubt that Moriarty is a very sinister man indeed.
• How To Build A Dungeon The Book Of The Demon King: Aur the Villain Protagonist, doing his part as Demon Lord, goes to a village and demands a virgin maiden as a tribute for him, to which the village chief offers him Maria, a little girl. Aur asks if they are trying to mess with him, to which the chief responds that all maidens were taken by bandits, royalty and the like so Maria was the only virgin left. Aur decides to take Maria anyway, reasoning she could of some use one day, but unlike all the other women that Aur likes to have his way with, he pulls the break on little girls, treating Maria with some kindness even, like a mascot. Aur's servant Lilu, however, starts lecturing the innocent Maria on sex education so that when she matures, she can finally start servicing Aur.
• Robert E. Howard:
  • In "Iron Shadows in the Moon", a pirate attacks Conan the Barbarian after he had killed their captain. Fighting ensues:
    "What, Aratus, would you break the law of the Brotherhood, you dog?"
  • In The Hour of the Dragon, Orastes realizes that bringing back Xaltotun was wrong.
    "When we employed the Heart of Ahriman to bring a dead man back to life," Orastes said abruptly, "we did not weigh the consequences of tampering in the black dust of the past. The fault is mine, and the sin. We thought only of our four ambitions, forgetting what ambitions this man might himself have. And we have loosed a demon upon the earth, a fiend inexplicable to common humanity. I have plumbed deep in evil, but there is a limit to which I, or any man of my race and age, can go.
  • In the Kull / Bran Mak Morn story "Kings of the Night", Cormac of Connacht contrasts Religions of Evil.
    The Druids of his own isle of Erin had strange dark rites of worship, but nothing like this. Dark trees shut in this grim scene, lit by a single torch. Through the branches moaned an eerie night-wind. Cormac was alone among men of a strange race and he had just seen the heart of a man ripped from his still pulsing body.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Residents of the Capitol have no problem with watching children as young as twelve murder each other for entertainment. But when Peeta "reveals" that Katniss is pregnant, they go ballistic. Also, while they are known to demand sexual favors from the winners (one of many downsides if you're a winner who's on the attractive side) doing so if he or she is underage crosses the line (at least they say that publicly). In the first book, it was explained that after Finnick won at fourteen, "they couldn't really touch him for the first year or two. But ever since he turned sixteen..."
  • Played straight in that they will not however, permit cannibalism. Katniss recalls one Tribute in a previous Games who was eliminated for doing so.
  • President Snow is a complete and utter bastard. However, if he gives his word, he will keep it. He also does not do things For the Evulz, preferring to be pragmatic about it.
• In the novel Humanx Commonwealth: Bloodhype, the AAnn commander on Repler is a proud member of a xenophobic imperial race that would cheerfully eat humans for dinner were it not against the terms of their treaty, but even he is appalled when confronted with Dominic Rose, a drug lord (and distributor of the eponymous narcotic) who would gladly sell out his own species for survival.
• In the Incarnations of Immortality series, Perry, when serving in the position of Satan, is this. While he is the absolute master of Exact Words deals, he always honors his agreements, which is much more than he can say for his recipients, who take and use the gifts then try everything they can to weasel out of the deal they made.
• In Death: An example of this occurred in Betrayal In Death. There was a trio of thieves named Naples, Gerade, and Hinrick. However, when Hinrick found out that Naples planned to have people working for Roarke murdered, he pulled out, greatly enraging Naples. Hinrick doesn't deal in murder, because he considers it rude.
• Peter may be a sociopathic attempted murderer but he will not leave a debt unpaid, which is why he ends up saving Tris's life in Insurgent.
• In IT:
  • Bully Henry Bowers and his fellow gang members just barely allow Patrick Hocksetter to hang with them, even though he fucking terrifies them. Bowers eventually has enough and tells Hocksetter that he's quite well aware of the abandoned fridge that he kills animals with, which eventually leads to Hocksetter getting attacked and devoured by It.
  • Henry's cronies Victor Criss and "Belch" Huggins are fine with beating up smaller kids, but they are shocked when Henry tries to carve his name on Ben's stomach with a knife (though this maybe has more to do with them being afraid of getting in trouble than moral objections). Victor also has an internal monologue in which he's fine with putting fireworks in Mike's shoes, but using the powerful ones that could blow his feet off is going too far, and even approaches the Losers at one point to warn them of Henry's deteriorating insanity. He even briefly considers joining them, but is inevitably too loyal to (or too scared of) Henry to do it and is ultimately killed by It instead.
• In the James Bond book On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond's ally Marc-Ange Draco admits that he is a criminal with lots of shady businesses, but even he thinks that Blofeld is a horrible person.
  • In Thunderball Blofeld tells his SPECTRE underlings of a successful operation to kidnap a teenage heiress for ransom. However, Blofeld reports that it was discovered that the girl had been in a sexual relationship with one of her captors. Although he notes that it's unclear whether this was voluntary on the girl's part, Blofeld not only wrote a note of apology to the family but also returned the girl and half of the ransom money as compensation, since they had promised the girl would be returned "unharmed." Blofeld then executes the agent responsible, telling the others that they may be criminals but they still hold to a code of conduct.
    • In the same book, it's noted in passing that after finding a suitable turncoat of a pilot to help them steal the nuclear bombs — disloyal and enamored of flashy, expensive things — the SPECTRE lieutenant who approached him was "almost put off" by the greed with which he took their bait.
• In The Jenkinsverse, the Alien Protection Army is perfectly fine with committing arson, mass shootings, and suicide bombings against anyone sympathetic to colonizing other worlds, as well as stealing and using Cruezzir and assassinating any aliens they see as Category Traitors. However, they repeatedly refuse to collaborate with the Hierarchy; after all, their goal is humanity's isolation, not humanity's extinction.
• Kingdom's Disdain: In book 9, Worm, who worships a God of Hate and prays for his enemies' agonizing downfall, is so horrified by Drathe's willingness to summon the Beast of the Gulch just to take over a hunting barrak that he drops his planned manipulations and joins his sworn enemies to stop her.
• Knaves on Waves has Carnage, who will gleefully tear men apart with his bare hands, or leave an entire village in ruins, yet even he considers the Empire's casual use of slavery and exploitation to be reprehensible.
• The Last Days Of New Paris: The Nazis have made a deal with Hell to help them fight the magical living artwork in New Paris, but Hell isn't happy fighting art, and is desperately seeking a way to break the deal.
• The Laundry Files: The avatar of Nyarlathotep is stated to "love humanity the way a beekeeper loves his bees, he'll protect us as long as we produce honey." but even it balks when someone brings up The Holocaust when asked for "a final solution" to "the Jewish problem". As far as Nyarlathotep is concerned, everyone who follows an Abrahamic religion is Jewish, the problem is that they aren't worshipping him, and just killing them off is an unacceptable waste.
• In Layer Cake, one of the gangster characters has a sex shop as a "legitimate front" and has a practice that if anyone asks for child pornography, he will arrange a covert meeting and then will beat them to within an inch of their life.
• In Legacy of the Aldenata: Honor of the Clan, Matt Prewitt, hired for a hit on the family of a group that defected to the Bane Sidhe, has no problems with a contracted murder of the family, but when his immediate boss, a complete psychopath, knowingly leaves a baby to burn to death instead of taking the time to put the child out of her misery, Prewitt puts two rounds in the boss's head because of it, telling the now-corpse "even I wouldn't leave a baby to burn, you sick son of a bitch".
• The Lensman universe features depraved psychopath Herkimer Herkimer the Third, rich dilettante playboy and goon for hire to the human Big Bad Morgan. Morgan warns Herkimer to keep his sadistic streak in check; and when the latter is killed because he failed to heed this advice, Morgan considers that Herkimer got what he deserved.
• Humbert Humbert of Lolita is an irredeemable character - an abusive, violent paedophile who is quite willing to commit murder to get his own way. But even he is contemptuous of the misogynistic teaching philosophy of Beardsley College, which teaches young women that being housewives and attracting men is more important than academic learning.
  • Charlotte Haze is a cruel and neglectful mother. But when she discovers that Humbert only married her to gain sexual access to her daughter, she immediately assures him that he will never see Dolores again.
  • In Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, the titular mermaid princess has been told by her paternal grandmother that merpeople, unlike humans, don't have immortal souls. The only way for the mermaid to obtain a human soul would be if a human loved her and married her; he would thus give her a soul while retaining his own. She has rescued a Prince from drowning, and she goes to see the Sea Witch in order to become human in order to marry him. The witch agrees to make the mermaid human in exchange for her beautiful voice, and warns her that if the Prince marries somebody else, the mermaid will not obtain a human soul. She will turn into sea foam at sunrise the next morning. Alas, as the Prince is on the verge of wanting to marry her, he ends up marrying another princess, thinking that she was the one who saved him. The next morning, just before sunrise, the mermaids' five elder sisters (she is 15, and they are 16 to 20), appear with a knife that the witch has given them in exchange for their hair. They tell her that she must use it to kill the Prince, for his blood will turn her back into a mermaid. She refuses to do this, and thus succeeds in her goal of obtaining an immortal human soul. The witch, however, does not interfere with the mermaid's attempts to win the Prince's love.
• The Machineries of Empire: Jedao may be a mass murderer and merciless assassin, but he's absolutely repulsed by rape and anything that's Powered by a Forsaken Child. Mikodez considers this somewhat unreasonable.
• Karsa Orlong from the Malazan Book of the Fallen may have started out believing that there is nothing wrong with rape, but he is nonetheless completely appalled when he finds out about Bidithal's paedophilia, and ultimately kills him. This effectively solidifies his transition from a Villain Protagonist to an Anti-Villain (he ultimately ends up an Anti-Hero). In The Bonehunters, he mentions that he hasn't raped anyone in years, so it's quite possible that seeing the effects of sexual abuse on Felisin Younger cured him of these tendencies.
• The Magician's Nephew: The rulers of Charn became more evil and bloodthirsty throughout the generations, but even they knew better than to use the Deplorable Word, keeping it a secret amongst themselves and making oaths to never seek it out. Not that it stopped Jadis from using it when her sister refused to give up the throne.
• Dark elf Malus Darkblade is a sadistic, bloodthirsty, spiteful, backstabbing opportunist, so it really says something about the world he lives in that he still finds things there to be genuinely appalled about, such as the way his forest-dwelling cousins mutilate their dark elven slaves — cut out their vocal cords and ears and pluck out their eyes. Mind you, dark elves are very fond of torture as well, but the city-dwellers like Malus would usually finish off their victims after they're done with them, and definitely not force them to drag on such a wretched existance.
• Miskatonic University - Elder Gods 101: Levi bullies Ralph for being a Deep One hybrid relentlessly but draws the line at being cruel to him because he's gay. Probably because he's a gay man himself.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, there are only two people Zane won't kill: Vin and his father. The former is because Vin's the one person the voices in Zane's head don't continually goad him to kill, while the latter is for no other reason than because, in Zane's words, "a man shouldn't kill his father".
• Terry Pratchett does this again in Nation, where even cannibals revile First Mate Cox for shooting dolphins and being so casual about hurting people.
• Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime: In "I Killed Santa Claus," Kevin is just as much of a pervert and thief as Buck, but when he hears that the previous mall Santa died of injuries sustained when Buck ran him off the road, he is briefly upset, while Buck is merely amused to recall how he got away with it.
• The Neverending Story: Gaya, the Princess of Darkness, is ruler of vampires, witches and the like. After sweet-talking Gmork into revealing his evil plan to destroy her home of Fantastica, she captures him and declares she is a creature of Fantastica, so he's her enemy.
• The concept is invoked, and then twisted in the most vicious way possible, in Joe E. Landsdale' short story Night They Missed The Horror Show.^note The story, which is EXTRAORDINARILY ugly and brutal, revolves around two teenage boys somewhere in the south in the late 60's or so, and as a result basically every character is a virulent racist (the story utilizes a certain word that starts with n for black people A LOT to REALLY drive this home). Bored out of their minds as they lack girlfriends or any sort of direction, they find a dead dog killed on a road and, on a whim, decide to chain up the corpse and drive around dragging it just to break up the tedium. While driving, they stumble over a rival football team menacing a black teenager who goes to their school and is their best player on the football team: the two teens are, as mentioned, incredibly racist, but save the black kid anyway because he's 'theirs' and is their football lynchpin. But in trying to escape their attackers, the three go off road and end up stumbling over an out of the way barn which is playing venue to a homemade pornographic snuff film, captained by a pair of twin men who immediately take the three hostage and reveal themselves to be even WORSE racists than the viewpoint characters, as they shoot the black teen with a blaise attitude and then recruit the two viewpoint teens to get rid of the body. Upon arriving in the teen's car at a deep lake, the two men discover what's left of the dog's body, and utterly disgusted by the perceived cruel murder of the dog (they refuse to believe the dog was already dead and the boys just dragged around a corpse), throw (and lock) one boy in the trunk of the car with the corpse of the black kid and tie the chain around the other boy's neck, and then shove the car off the edge, sending both boys to a drowning death while they head back, telling themselves they did good by killing the likes who would do that to a dog (and hang around with black kids).
• A lesser-known O. Henry short story used this to create the author's trademark twist ending. On Judgment Day, the narrator sees a long line of men waiting to go to Hell. Then the reader hears a sad story about a shop girl who only earns $5 a week. The story goes into details about her budget, how she sometimes goes hungry without anyone noticing, etc. She's about to accept a date from a rich man who has a taste for shop girls (whether he's a Romeo pimp or just likes to have kept women is not specified), but changes her mind at the last moment. The narrator says her story won't end until a night when she's feeling a little hungrier. Meanwhile, an angel tells the narrator that the long line of men are store owners who only paid their shop girls $5 a week, and asks "Do you belong with them?" "Not on your immortality," the narrator replies indignantly, "I only burned an orphanage and robbed a church!"
• Overlord:
  • Satoru Suzuki/Momonga/Ainz Ooal Gown, the titular character, was perfectly willing to let the village of Carne be slaughtered while he watched through a magic mirror. Understandable, as he didn't have enough information to intervene until he saw a full-grown, armed and heavily armored soldier chase down, torment, maim, and prepare to execute two helpless little girls and shows disgusts, when said soldier proves himself a Dirty Coward when he intervenes.
    Momonga: "You can chase down women and children, but you lack the conviction to face an enemy?"
  • He was truly disturbed when he saw what Clementine did to Ninya. Let's remember that by this time Ainz had already lost all empathy towards humans and his emotions were mostly suppressed. When he got his hands on Clementine, he made sure that she would pay.
    Ainz: "You took your time killing her, didn't you? So I will take my time as well."
  • One of Ainz's most consistent and defining redeeming qualities is that he truly cares for those who serve under him, such as Albedo and Shalltear. Messing with a citizen of Nazarick is a great way to piss him off.
  • When the nobles of the Re-Estize Kingdom kill Zanac in an attempt to save their own skin, Ainz calmly has them sent off to Neuronist and decides that the Kingdom is unworthy of his leniency, upon which he commands his forces to wipe out the populace (barring those he has already spared).
• The demons in Tom Holt's Paint Your Dragon may be Punch Clock Villains working in an infernal bureaucracy, but it still has to be said that their day job is torturing souls. And yet, associating with George makes them feel ill.
  Chardonay: George, when you die, be sure to go to Heaven. We can do without your sort where I come from.
• In the Dale Brown novel Plan of Attack, Russian Army General Nikolai Stepashin, who sees nothing wrong with sneak nuclear bombings on North America, is disgusted by president Gryzlov's nuking of a Russian airbase to take out American infiltrators and the man's refusal to check for Russian survivors. This most likely contributes to his Redemption Equals Death later.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain:
  • It is implied that harm towards children is frowned upon by the mainstream villain community. Both Lucyfar and the Bull react negatively when Claire is threatened by Jagged Bones.
  • The head of the villain community, Spider, is known for her strict adherence to the rules of conduct between superheroes and supervillains.
  • The Apparition is firmly against turning the Inscrutable Machine over to the Council Of Seven And A Half's thugs on the grounds that the former are her friends.
• The Power of Five:
  • The Triads may smuggle drugs and serve as assassins, but they're not about to let the Old Ones take over the world so easily.
  • Michael Marsh claims he doesn't like hurting children unnecessarily. This is fifteen minutes before he tries to cut Matt's heart out.
  • Lohan has this reaction when he sees a vivisected child being prepared for use as a 'drug mule'.
• The Radix: Metzger may be a cold-blooded hitman, but he would never shoot someone in the back.
• Rainbow Six: Dimitriy Popov is an ex-KGB agent contacted by the bad guys to foment terrorism in Europe, which he does with enthusiasm for a rather large paycheck. The bad guys, who are planning human genocide on a planetary scale with only a handful of select survivors, eventually decide to let him in on their plan and include him in the chosen elite. He's so horrified by their plan that he runs away and rats them out at the first chance he gets. His information is instrumental in stopping them, effectively saving humanity.
• The Calvarians of The Reynard Cycle will kill foreign men, women, and children en masse without compunction, but they abhor rape and torture. The fact that their propaganda depicts ALL foreigners as rapists and torturers (amongst other things) is a large part of why they see nothing wrong with wiping them out.
  • For example, in The Baron of Maleperduys, Reynard and Hirsent discover the bodies of three Calvarian soldiers who were hanged by their own kind for the crime of raping a Southerner.
    • Of course, they also killed the victim.
• In Robots and Empire Levular Mandamus balks at aiding and abetting the mass murder of billions of Earthpeople by Kelden Amadiro.
• Rules Of The Scam Mysteries: Talia's parents may be con artists, but they don't do murder.
• Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures: The Demonocles positively thrive on The Sound Of Screaming, prefer to eat prey alive, and will beat their friends to death over nothing and then blame them for it. Break the intricate bony structure in a Demonocle's huge, complex tongue... and not only have you effectively crippled him, but you've demoralized any other Demonocles who witnessed the sight. How could any living creature do anything so cruel to another?
• Safehold's present day Big Bad, Zhaspahr Clyntahn is the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of God Awaiting who finds new atrocities to commit every book as he tries to bring the world to heel under the Church's (read: his) power. One of Safehold's Greater Scope Villains, long-dead Eric Langhorne, took what was intended to be a temporary disavowing of high technology to keep xenophobic aliens from finding humanity's last colony and turned it into a Path of Inspiration with him and his confederates as its Archangels that eventually became the Church of God Awaiting. Merlin Athrawes reluctantly admits that, as bad as Langhorne was, he did what he did thinking it would save humanity and would never have condoned the kinds of methods Clyntahn readily embraces except as an absolute last resort.
• The Secret Histories series has Mr. Stab, a Jack the Ripper Expy who loves to carve up his victims. When he sees the torture the conspiracy group Manifest Destiny has inflicted on several magical beings they captured, even he is horrified.
  Mr Stab: "There's only one monster here, and for once it isn't me."
• Septimus Heap:
  • Simon Heap, when he has shoot down Nicko with a ThunderFlash:
    Don't worry, I don't harm family.
  • In Darke, Linda decides to invoke You Said You Would Let Them Go on a pair of lovebirds after holding one hostage to make the other bring Jenna to her. The Witch Mother stops her because a witch must keep her Darke bargains, and Linda seems to be forgetting the Rules.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Dayless the Conqueror may have been a Serial Rapist while he was in power, but he considered sex with girls under fourteen (the legal age of consent during the Dawn Empire) to be unethical, and made sure that every girl he took was at least that age. He also absolutely refused to use sunucles linked to anyone other than himself, and is disgusted with Captain Blackheart for doing so, giving him "The Reason You Suck" Speech before killing him in "the most unholy way I can think of!"
• Fairies in The Shadowhunter Chronicles are the descendants of angels and demons. They are said to be as beautiful as angels but also as evil as demons. And although many fairies have a cruel sense of humor and devious schemes, they still differentiate themselves from the demons, who only want to murder and destroy.
  • Valentine Morgenstern was the leader of a cruel group of shadowhunters, and during his life he tortured, maimed, and murdered many innocent people for no other reason than because they were vampires, werewolves, warlocks, or fairies. He even killed other shadowhunters when he found them a nuisance or when they got in the way of his plans. However, he is still disgusted of his (partially demonic) son Sebastian, who murders and destroys for sheer joy.
• Spademan, assassin and Nominal Hero of Shovel Ready has no problem killing adults, but if you're under eighteen, you're safe from him. When he finds out that his latest "client" is pregnant, it instigates his Heel–Face Turn.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter gets disgusted when Migs, the patient in the next cell over from him throws his semen at Clarisse on her way out. Hannibal is so insulted that he agrees to help her find Gumb to make up for it, and talks Migs into killing himself. He is a cold-blooded, cannibalistic serial killer and a brilliant psychiatrist, at that.
  • Additionally, in the sequel Hannibal, Dr. Lecter is disgusted by Mason Verger's pedophilia, and the fact that he used his family's wealth and connections to evade punishment for raping and torturing children. He decides to take matters into his own hands, leaving Verger a faceless quadriplegic. He's equally disgusted by the corrupt, sexist Justice Department official Paul Krendler, whom he subjects to an equally gruesome fate.
• Spider-Man: Sinister Six Trilogy: Four of the titular Six (Vulture, Electro, Mysterio and the Chameleon) all express open disgust at the casual brutality with which their new 'employer', the Gentleman, treats the team's new member Pity, particularly the Vulture and Electro. The Gentleman actually calls them out on this, claiming the Six have little right to complain considering some of the things they have done, although the villains draw a distinction between attacking strangers and hurting their teammates. The Gentleman crossing such a line was also referenced to a lesser degree earlier on when he brought up the fact that the Chameleon was defeated by a civilian (specifically, Mary Jane) during the Day of Terror a week ago just to rile the Six up, when the rest of the team (even the normally brutal Doctor Octopus) had been avoiding that same topic out of respect for their colleague's feelings.
  • The Gentleman justifies his decision to leave his enemies' children alone as this, although in his case 'standards' more refers to things he won't do because he considers it beneath him rather than out of any moral consideration. As Fiers states himself, he only avoids killing children so that he can have a more sporting time of it by facing opponents who understand why he's doing this and might even try to resist him, rather than him not wanting to cross a line.
• Six of Crows: The Crows are often rather justified in their crimes, despite being gang members who've committed more than their fair share of crimes, since they are often up against people far worse than them. While they're happy to commit murder, rob just about anyone, blackmail people, and beat other gang members, they all draw the line at crimes like rape.
  • Kaz is disgusted by a clerk who was blackmailing a prostitute into sex by threatening her with her mistress' wrath (due to the fact that she is keeping extra money one client is giving her). Kaz ends up drowning the man.
• Dies Irae of the Song of Dragons triology is a man who committed near-total genocide against his own race, humans who can turn into dragons. He alone holds the power to release the nightshades, which are unkillable, untameable beings of darkness trapped within an enchanted well. Even sealed, they can mess with your mind. But he wisely refuses to release them.
• Whilst it is difficult to codify "evil" in a series with Grey-and-Gray Morality, a lot characters from A Song of Ice and Fire fit this trope, though it is frequently not a moral standard:
  • Lord Tywin Lannister of Casterly Rock will not shy away from monstrous acts, but he does them according to an ice cold calculation of benefits and he prefers them carried with equally cold blooded efficiency. He reacts with disgust to the murder of Princess Rhaenys Targaryen not because a young girl was murdered, but because his brutal Mook Lieutenant who did it stabbed her something like 50 times when, as Tywin puts it "Anyone with the wits the gods gave a turnip would have spoken some soothing words to her and then smothered her with a pillow." (For context, Princess Rhaenys was a 3-year-old toddler who had been found hiding under her father's bed while the capital was being sacked.)
  • Lord Roose Bolton of Dreadfort is the same - he is a horrific villain, but a pragmatic one. He has disdain at best for his son Ramsay Bolton, who is also horrific, and not pragmatic about it at all. That said, he does have a legitimate moral standard in believing that Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil; it's this reason why he has never offed Ramsay despite how much of a headache he is for him.
  • The Guild of the Faceless Men will only kill their targets, not bystanders or even bodyguards.
  • The Ironborn hate slavery, although they have a very flimsy definition of it. Indentured servitude and forced concubinage (similar to prostitution, but crossed with being a semi-official short or long term mistress to one guy, but who never got asked her opinion: lending her out to shipmates is optional, but it... terminates the "contract", so to speak): okay for them, but buying and selling people? NEVER! This stems from the fact that buying stuff is anathema to them, as paying money is weak and unmanly when you could just take what you want by force.
  • Victarion Greyjoy has no problem whatsoever with kidnapping a woman to be his 'salt wife' (forced paramour). But when he finds out his brother Euron has impregnated her (again, it's unlikely to have been consensual), and he must kill her according to Ironborn law, he breaks down in tears and swears vengeance on Euron. Note how "break the law by sparing her life, killing the sprog by abortion or drowning-at-birth and then screaming vengeance at the heavens" wasn't a palatable option.
    • Victarion is a fairly dumb and brutal Blood Knight, but he does respect a Worthy Opponent when he finds one. After he fights with one during A Feast For Crows, he tries to see if the man can be rescued from drowning when said opponent falls overboard, (Victarion knows it's almost impossible, given that the knight was wearing armor, but he asks his crew if they managed to save the man) and later, when Victarion's Eviler than Thou brother Euron rapes and humiliates the women of the lands they conquered, Victarion is briefly disgusted when he realizes the widow of his worthy opponent is likely among the women being raped. In Victarion's mind, it's one thing to mercilessly defeat an enemy, it's another to humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize them and everyone around them for twisted kicks, as Euron does.
  • Euron Greyjoy tends to invoke this reaction from other Ironborn in general, being a ruthless, psychotic, murderous pirate. Given that "ruthless psychotic murderous pirate" is more or less applicable to all Ironborn, the fact that they think this guy is seriously bad news says a great deal about him.
  • Ser Jaime Lannister is, at least in the early part of the series, a pretty nasty fellow, but he was still known for this trope enough that the Starks ruled him out of the attempted assassination of Jon Arryn because it was felt Ser Jaime would look down on the use of poison.
    • It's also revealed that Jaime saved the life of a random smallfolk girl from rapists, who Tyrion would later marry. It initially seems that this was a subversion, as Tyrion reveals the whole thing was faked by Jaime and his father... but it turns out that was all a lie, meaning that Jaime did actually save Tysha.
  • Bronn is a mercenary who has spent most of his life being paid to kill people or do other terrible things, and when asked he indicates that he is willing to hurt or kill a child. (Although he does subtly imply that he would need to be paid very well before he'd be willing to do it.) Bronn is taken aback when Tyrion tells him the horrific tale about what his father did to his first wife, and after a moment of silence Bronn comments that he would have killed anyone who did such a thing to him.
  • While Cersei Lannister generally turns a blind eye to all the horrible things her son Joffrey gets up to, she does try to make him stop beating his fiance Sansa Stark. Unfortunately he uses Loophole Abuse and just has his bodyguards beat her instead.
• In Alistair Maclean's South By Java Head, von Effen, the Nazi spy who has helped the Japanese capture a number of British refugees (and recapture their stolen invasion plans for Australia) listens as the Japanese captain tells how his colonel will exact revenge on the British for the death of his son — including torturing women and a two-year-old boy to death. He politely asks for the loan of a gun so he can shoot one of the British himself; and instead uses the gun to shoot as many Japanese as he can manage, to allow the British to escape. (He had earlier helped the little boy to survive at some risk to his own life and person.)
  Averting the Redemption Equals Death trope, von Effen is still alive when the British board a fast motor-launch and, presumably, when they meet a British destroyer a few hours later.
  "Winning a war costs a great deal... But sometimes the cost is too high, and it is not worth the price. Tonight the cost, the price asked, was far too high. I—I could not pay the price"
• In Sophia McDougall's Space Hostages, although Christa Trommler was shown to be a bully to individuals, even she's unwilling to allow Earth to be enslaved, and fights her father to save it.
• Mage-Governor Vaughn in the second book of Starship's Mage is perfectly willing to destroy one of his own cities to further his political goals. That there are some lines even he won't cross is rather terrifying.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation novels
  • In Imzadi, the Sindareen leader of a raid on Betazed has no qualms about theft, violence and killing if necessary but his captive Deanna Troi's empathic abilities tell her he won't rape her.
  Troi : "You're not a rapist. A thief, yes. A killer as needed. But not a rapist."
  • In The Q Continuum, while 'evil' might be a strong word, Q uses his time with Picard to reinforce how he differs from 0, Q's former 'mentor' who inspired Q to test lesser races; Q always sticks to the rules of his games and allows his 'opponents' a chance to win (even if Picard considers Q's standard of 'playing fair' a flexible one considering the vast power difference between Q and his potential opponents), whereas 0 'changed the rules' to ensure his own victory when it looked like the Tkon were going to pass his test.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the Tales of the Bounty Hunters anthology:
    • There's a Boba Fett story. Apparently Jabba gives Leia to the bounty hunter for the night, as a reward. Fett is disgusted by this, but doesn't send her back. He gives her the bed and stands near the door, and tells her that sex before marriage is immoral and Han Solo is evil for smuggling spice — spice, in Star Wars, being anything from a drug to a rare medicine to an unusual food additive. Leia calls him out on this—one, he's a bounty hunter, essentially assassinating people for the prices on their heads, and two, he's working for Jabba the Hutt, who does a lot worse. Fett says that morality does not enter into that, because what he does is legal. Leia doesn't press it.
    • Leia is essentially wrong on this one, as well — Fett takes his job as a bounty hunter very seriously, and most of the guild's rules are meant to ensure that hunters act professional. In this vein, Fett is not an assassin, and nor are many bounty hunters. While hunters in the Star Wars universe can and do kill their marks, this is only if the job specifically gives them that leeway, and does not justify putting civilian lives in danger. And while Jabba is technically a crime lord, what he does may or may not be construed as legal depending on what the Empire says — either way, Fett can't be nailed for taking a job from a criminal, it's legal whether Leia likes it or not.
    • Dengar's Tale has one scene between the title character and Darth Vader where the Sith Lord implies he kills for many reasons — but unlike the Emperor he won't kill for pleasure.
  • In Star Wars: Allegiance, the heroic Mara Jade does not generally get on well with Darth Vader, who always suspects her of trying to replace him. Still, she's got a much rockier relationship with the Imperial Security Bureau, saying in the narration that she knows that they are Necessarily Evil, but there's all too much evil and not enough necessary. And they do go after a stormtrooper for refusing to kill unarmed civilians; plus, they try to kill her. At the end of the book, while they're trading warnings, Mara sees that Vader doesn't like the ISB either, though probably for very different reasons.
  • In the X-Wing Series, Kirtan Loor has a couple moments like this. He's petty, puffed up, and vindictive, but when Isard talks about how the Krytos plague will decimate the Sullustans to such an extent that it might be best if they set aside some breeding stock for when the plague has run its course, Loor is taken aback and feels uneasy. The narration says that while he does consider Sullustans to be inferior, talking about them like they're grain to be poisoned for rats, with some pristine kernels held back, is a bit much. He's also sickened in General Derricote's plague lab when he sees the disease working on test subjects, and orders what he assumes to be a stricken mother and child to be taken away and cured, although he does hastily tell the General that this is part of the plan to drain the New Republic's resources. Later he becomes the leader of a terrorism front that detonates speeders filled with explosives in health centers and public places, but when his new boss orders a school to be bombed, he's horrified. His new boss sardonically mocks him. Here he is, not wanting to kill children, and yet he's performing strikes to keep people away from health centers, meaning that the Krytos Plague, which doesn't spare the young, will be less impeded.
  • In Legacy of the Force, Tahiri Veila chooses to offer Luke's son Ben sex in exchange for information rather than torturing him. Either option is disturbing when you consider that he's just turned 14 — but, knowing 14-year-old boys, is surprisingly good psychology....
  • Dark Lord—The Rise of Darth Vader: Even though they're enemies, Vader disapproves of former Jedi Master Roan Shryne turning to smuggling. He outright tells him that it's unbecoming of a Jedi.
  • The Young Jedi Knights books has the "Emperor's Plague" which only affects humans. It is so horrific Palpatine had the only known samples stored on a depot on an asteroid, then had the coordinates of said asteroid erased, so only he would know where it was.
• In Andrew Vachss's Burke book Strega, both Mama Wong, implied to be with The Triads and the Tongs, and some neo-Nazis express disapproval of child sex offenders. Burke himself, as well as his Badass Crew, are Unscrupulous Heroes who all have no problems with Pay Evil unto Evil and breaking any number of laws in the process. Sexual crimes are right out, though.
• Natan Alterman's Summer Celebration: Miriam Helen asks notorious robber Misha Barkhasid to help her fight off Woldarski, the man she eloped with who turned out to be a dangerous criminal. Woldarski has threatened to mutilate her face with acid if she doesn’t work as a prostitute for him; when Barkhasid hears this, he says that a man of honour can live on robbing trains and the like, but 'will never live off the profits of a woman's body'.
• Sword Art Online:
  • Akihiko Kayaba may be amoral enough to create a death game holding thousands of people hostage, but even he is horrified when Sugou uses his game (Alfheim Online uses SAO's source code to the point that characters can be transferred) to molest and nearly rape Asuna, which is why he doesn't hesitate to help Kirito to bring him down.
  • Dee Eye Ell is exceptionally cruel, even among the various forces of darkness in the Underworld, but even she's horrified when Emperor Vecta asks her to sacrifice three thousand orcs to use their life essence to fuel a powerful spell.
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: Even though the villainous ruler of Jerez thinks nothing of buying sex slaves to swell the ranks of his harem, he will not touch his captives until they show themselves genuinely willing to have sex with him.
• In The Tales of Alvin Maker books by Orson Scott Card there's a quick procession of these with the latest baddies. First is the rather vile riverboat captain, who would not stoop to killing innocent (white) children. He's killed by Mike Fink, who in turn finds that he can't bear to stand and watch while their mutual employer, William Harrison, massacres a village. Finally Harrison, the worst of the three, tells Calvin that while he might be a dirty scumbag, at least he never sold his own brother out.
  • Although it's implied Mike only left because the hex his mother left him protected him from the curse leveled on the perpetrators of the massacre.
• The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart when he refuses to kill the old man until he is awake "for it was not the old man who vexed me but his Evil Eye." (though granted his standards are insane.)
• This is a major theme in one of O Henry's short stories, 'The Tempered Wind'. Two conmen, Parleyvoo Pickens (the narrator) and Buckingham Skinner, team up with a third conman and set up a business in New York selling fake bonds. However, a newspaper report exposes the business as fake, and the conmen get a nasty surprise when their customers show up at the office and are revealed to be poor factory workers, disabled war veterans, old women, and even children. One woman tells them about how she had invested all her life savings and needs the money back for her dying child, while the factory girls are losing money for missing work, and one woman is in tears because she was saving for her wedding. Pickens and Skinner give all the money back. When the reporter who wrote the article interviews the conmen again, Skinner says:
  Me and Pick ain't Wall Streeters like you know 'em. We never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we've worked we took money from the people the Lord made to be buncoed—sports and rounders and smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to throw away, and farmers that wouldn't ever be happy if the grafters didn't come around and play with 'em when they sold their crops. We never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir. We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves.
• In the sequel to Those That Wake, Arielle Kliest is fine with torturing Mal and threatening him to get what the Old Man wants—but when she sees the totality of his plan, which involves assimilating every mind on earth, she's horrified and betrays him.
• Tortall Universe:
  • The Immortals:
    • In Wolf-Speaker, Lady Yolane is strip mining her fiefdom to sell opals to Carthak, an operation overseen by mages loyal to the Carthaki emperor. Yolane falters when the mages discuss using bloodrain, which will poison the land for miles and kill everything in the vicinity, an effect that will take seven years just to start fading. Ambitious though she is, she did swear to keep Dunlath safe. Opal profits can keep her people fed even if the mining disrupts their usual livelihood; this magical poison is something else entirely. The mages and her husband wave this concern away, though.
    • Said Carthaki emperor is a Friend to All Living Things, provided that they're animals, and takes a genuine close interest in the wellfare of the animals in his collection, particularly the birds. If with all his resources he can't get a given animal to thrive in captivity he has it returned to its place of origin and released. Their health and happiness is paramount and his standard of care is very high. He's also the Big Bad and only cares about himself and animals. In the earlier-set The Numair Chronicles where he started off as a kinder person albeit one with a lot of red flags, poor animal husbandry was a Berserk Button.
  • Inverted into Even Goodness Has Limits in Protector of the Small. Kel makes a point of burying enemy dead rather than leaving them for Stormwings (creatures who desecrate battlefield corpses in a largely vain attempt to discourage humans from war). When it comes to Blayce the Gallan, a necromancer who only used children for his own sick satisfaction, she leaves him and his guards for them without qualm.
  • Pearl Skinner from the second Beka Cooper book has a soft spot for dogs, and implies that she would do very nasty things to anyone she caught abusing them. She also asks permission before petting Beka's scent hound, which is the first time in the whole book that she's ever polite. Beka is just irritated by this because Pearl has no other redeeming qualities.
• Jean de Vrailly of The Traitor Son Cycle is a power-hungry mysoginist, but he's horrified when his archers kill a group of knights without giving them a chance to defend themselves and earn an honorable death.
• Magnificent Bastard Long John Silver in Treasure Island may be a pirate, mutineer and murderer, but he draws the line at harming Jim Hawkins once he has heard the boy speak bravely to the pirates. Also, he is outraged when he thinks Abe Gray (after reverting to the honest men's side) has revealed pirate secrets. Mutiny, murder and sea-thievery are one thing, but snitching is beyond the pale. (In fact, Captain Smollett agrees as far as that goes, and angrily tells Silver that he'd see them in Hell before he'd resort to it.)
• In The Tripods: The Pool of Fire, Will is horrified by a German town in which criminals are given to the Tripods to be hunted for the crowd's amusement. He notes that in England executions are regarded as an unpleasant chore, not a sport.
• Sam from Villains by Necessity could be a poster child for this trope. An assassin, who is explicitly stated by the text to be an agent of Evil, Sam still refuses to kill anybody who isn't his target while on an assignment. He also refuses to steal from his targets, and hates rapists so much that they are the one exception to the above no killing rule. This is in a book where the villains are the good guys, so it all works out rather well.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, one of the main industries of Jackson's Whole is making clone-slaves; including clones that allow rich men to achieve immortality by transplanting their brains and throwing away the old one, thus killing its personality. Nearly everyone else outlaws that. On Jackson's Whole there isn't any law except The Deal. Mark Vorkosigan (Y'know, the one trained from childhood to be a deep-cover assassin) has made it his life's work to stamp the brain-transplant business out.
• In the short Warhammer 40,000 story "Misbegotten", by Dan Abnett, a pre-Horus Heresy Horus and his Luna Wolves forces discover a colony that has been the hiding place of Basilio Fo, the self-proclaimed "Worker of Obscenity", an Evilutionary Biologist crossed with a Mad Artist whose genre of choice is Bio Punk, who left Terra during the Age of Technology five millenia ago. After destroying the obscene bio-engineered killing machines that stand in their way, they capture Basilio Fo, who explains that he wasn't chased from Terra all those centuries ago, he left it voluntarily to get away from the man now calling himself the Emperor of Mankind, whom he declares is a far worse monster than Basilio Fo ever was, and the Space Marines, in particular, he condemns as far more horrifying than his own mad tinkerings. These statements, combined with his calm acceptance of death as being far better than living in the Imperium, so unnerve Horus that he takes Basilio Fo alive and sends him back to Terra to prove him wrong. The story's epilogue is a single paragraph in which Basilio Fo is described laughing in bitter triumph as the Horus Heresy ends with the destruction of Horus and the near-death of the Emperor.
• In Warrior Cats, there's a place called "the Dark Forest'', where the most vile and evil cats reside. In it is one villain called Mapleshade, who is so screwed up every other resident in the Dark Forest is either scared of or disgusted by her.
• Vince in Dean Koontz's Watchers is a ruthless killer, but he's also a rather considerate guy who has a code of honor and a clear sense of empathy for others. However, he is Ax-Crazy and his code is based on Blue-and-Orange Morality, so it really doesn't make him any less evil or any less terrifying.
• Whateley Universe:
  • One of the very few things that both sides of the powered community agree on is that family is not to be brought into the matter. For villains and heroes, their life being at risk is one thing — their kids being at risk just because of association? That's something else entirely, and people finding out about it is just about guaranteed to draw the ire of the whole community. And threatening the family of a Whateley student? The lucky ones are in jail for life. And on life support — also for life.
    When a Religion of Evil named 'The Tong of The Black Madonna' tried to pressure Bladedancer by leaning on the family of her girlfriend Gateway, the Whateley Alumni Association in conjunction with the Syndicate basically declared open season on everyone and everything associated with them - anyone who contributed to destroying them would be given assistance, and benefits (such getting any booty they take from them, or being excused of past debts to The Syndicate), for doing so. One of the parents, the Affably Evil Well-Intentioned Extremist Dr. Diabolik, suggested that Orbital Bombardment might constitute a 'measured response' to the Tong's actions. This was considered a relatively mild suggestion by most of the other supervillains (and probably some of the superheroes as well).
  • The Card-Carrying Villain Mephisto deals in murder, extortion, drug smuggling, and more in the name of the Red Brotherhood, all while serving as a distraction for the superheroes so that the real gangsters could stay in business. But when it comes to the Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom, he comes down firmly against them:
    Mephisto: Now, I'll admit that the Brotherhood doesn't play nice. Hell, by the standards that the vast majority of the populace subscribes to, we're evil as hell. But, we have the long-term good of the human race at heart. Selling kids to the Pit does NOT serve the greater good in any way, shape or form. There is shit even we don't put up with...
  • Dr. Venus is probably speaking for everyone when she gave Dr. Macabre a "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
    Dr. Venus: The rest of us do horrible, illegal things... but YOU? You experiment on KIDS! [...] You grab kids off the street and shove them literally kicking and screaming into that Monster Chamber of yours! You turn them into fucking monsters! That's sick, Cobb, SICK!
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Granted, it's not a moral standard...''
    "I dare the truth, Elaida," Egwene said quietly. "You are a coward and a tyrant. I'd name you Darkfriend as well, but I suspect that the Dark One would perhaps be embarrassed to associate with you."
  • The Forsaken, the thirteen strongest of Shaitan's human servants, are all a truly despicable lot, with a countless number of atrocities to each of their names. Yet Ishamael, the strongest among them, is viewed by the rest as a terrifying lunatic, and with good reason.
• Wings of Fire: Pike is a racist thug who enjoys bullying anyone who displeases the Alpha Bitch... but he had nothing to do with the school bombing, and tries to carry a victim of it to water. If the protagonist's telepathy is any indication, Pike even seems to care about Bigtail's death...in his own douchey way.
  So pointless, having dead enemies, nobody to yell at—
• The Witcher: Witchers from the School of the Cat have an unfortunate tendency to be Psycho for Hire, due to intentionally recruiting remorseless killers and then giving them an unstable mutation that dials that trait up. While highly effective at slaying monsters, they're widely feared for their cruelty and willingness to kill people just as readily, and they have even been rumoured to perform assassination work occasionally (when most Witchers are sworn to political neutrality). Brehen is a rogue Witcher from the School of the Cat who was banished because even his fellows were disgusted by his extreme methods and sadism.
• Worm:
  • The supervillains of Brockton Bay include the Neo-Nazi group Empire 88, the Diabolical Mastermind Coil, the mercenaries of Faultline's Crew, and the Undersiders. However, they all look down on Skidmark and his gang, who are incompetent drug-dealers who sell to kids. More in line with the spirit of the trope, they are also all willing to join forces against psychopaths like the Slaughterhouse Nine.
  • Bonesaw, a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, gleefully delights in inflicting Body Horror of the worst kind, but in her own words, even she isn't crazy enough to try to clone an Endbringer.
  • Before the story starts a notorious and extremely powerful villain named Marquis refuses to attack women and children, the heroes use this fact and the fact that he is trying to protect his daughter Panacea to capture him.
• Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues: A parody that positions the Arch-Enemy of the Joes into Ayn Rand's novel. Much of the humor comes from how even a card carrying Evil Overlord is appalled by the actions by the Gulchers, especially Dr. Hendricks, who has a miracle cure for strokes he will never share with the outside world purely out of spite.

  Cobra Commander: I work with arms dealers, con men, mad scientists, and even a man who was literally constructed out of the DNA of all of the worst people in the history of the world. And I have met so many atrocious 'heroes' in my visit through this pathetic ensemble you have assembled and you, sir, are the absolute most horrid human being I have ever met in my entire life. You're not even a person anymore. You are a monster.

• Xanadu (Storyverse): In "The Care Bear Caper!", the pre-transformation main characters are kidnappers who have come to the convention to snatch its wealthy organizer and hold him for ransom, and who view their crimes as strictly business. As they move through the convention, one notices another would-be kidnapper from another story who is instead obviously targeting the child attendees, and thinking of "what she may be after" gives him a sudden urge to fill her with bullet holes.

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