Choices: All major choices that the heroes are faced with are either unambiguously right or wrong. There aren't any grey areas, and when a Sadistic Choiceis presented, there's always a third option. Furthermore, the heroes will always make the right choice unless they're about to learn An Aesop or pull a Face Heel Turn.
Characterization: The good guys are good, and the bad guys are bad. If there are any morally ambiguous or grey characters around (such as an Anti-Hero or Worthy Opponent), they will eventually shift firmly to one side or the other. They'll either switch to the side that matches their actual perceived alignment, or turn fully good or fully evil. Minor characters may maintain some degree of neutrality, but the major characters will all be on one side or the other.
Occasionally there will be a short scene explaining the neutrality is inherently evil (or, very rarely, good). To avoid an Author Tract some writers prefer to claim that being neutral is similar to supporting the stronger side. However as the Neutral Neutral page on this wiki will show, the reasons for being neutral number in the double digits, not including Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral, or any combination thereof.
Good luck finding any political campaign commercials anywhere which suggest that it is possible to disagree over an issue without being monstrous, or at the very least stupid.
This trope is played straight in Digimon Adventure: While the kids and their Digimons represent virtues (Courage, Friendship, Love, etc.) their enemies (Such as Devimon, Myotismon and the Dark Masters) are evil incarnate.
Comics
Most comic books set in the Golden Age (World War II or thereabouts) and a good portion of the Silver Age have this sort of moral code.
Steve Ditko's Mr. A comic lives and breathes this trope, being Ditko's interpretation of Ayn Rand's Objectivism in vigilante form.
'There is black and there is white, and there is wrong and there is right, and there is NOTHING in between', as Alan Moore's adolescent band once sung, in reference to Steve Ditko.
A common element in Chick Tracts, the Christian protagonists are good while the nonbelievers are evil, or at least a Jerkass.
Fan Fic
Elly Patterson of For Better or for Worse saw life in this matter in the fanfic The New Retcons. The two problems were that she could not handle anyone with different viewpoints form her, and that her ideas of what 'black' and 'white' are were so twisted that they might as well be Blue and Orange Morality. This, among other things, contributed to Elly losing her mind for about two years.
Black And White Morality is enforced by, well, the Force in the case of the Jedi. If Jedi aren't committed 100% to the Light Side, it's only a matter of time before they become insanely evil. There were a few exceptions in the EU(such as the Gray Jedi, who dabble in The Dark Side only to the point where it does not corrupt them), but those ended up taking a side in the end or died before that became an issue.
Knights of the Old Republic 2deconstructs the traditional Jedi are good, Sith are evil dichotomy. In addition to the revelation (or Retcon) that Revan sacrificed morality to become a Sith and save the galaxy, its made clear throughout the game that the Jedi are Lawful Stupid traditionalists who can't listen to anything outside their teachings, while the Sith are Stupid Evil morons who would burn the galaxy just because it's there, and will inevitably kill each other in the end. The main villain of the game has been both Jedi and Sith, and is disgusted with both.
Kreia shares a great deal in common with Vergere, a Jedi of questionable motives who helped save the galaxy from the Vong.
The Box: Anyone who pushes the button is evil and must be used as statistics in supporting human extinction and anyone who doesn't push the button is good and must be enslaved. "Arlington Steward" even apologizes to the main couple, saying this is how it must be and it cannot be negotiated.
The Disney Animated Canon uses this all the time. Pixar uses it pretty frequently too, though their villains are more likely to have sympathetic motivations.
The true exception to "sympathetic motivation" is A Bug's Life, where Hopper says that keeping the ants under control is more important than just getting food from them.
This trope is played with in the Lion King sequel Simba's Pride. Whereas the original movie played the trope straight (Scar and the hyenas are evil; everyone else is good), the sequel sets itself up the same way (lions in the Pridelands are good; lions in the Outlands are bad) but then subverts the trope. The moral of the movie is that the characters' Black and White Morality they started out with is wrong and that they must learn to recognize the shades of gray.
Hercules adds this morality in adaptation. Hercules, Zeus and Hera become purely good. Hadies becomes purely evil. In the origional myths they were a lot more morally ambiguous. The only grey character in the movie is Meg. This is one side effect of being Hijacked By Jesus.
The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion: Broadly speaking. The respective villains Sauron, Saruman and Morgoth are evil, and those who oppose them are good. On a closer level this is not so - Sauron, Saruman and Morgoth's Orcs are Always Chaotic Evil, but their human forces are not, which is lost on many a critic. More than one character notes how they must be manipulated or forced to do their will.
Broadly speaking. See the quote at the top of Grey and Gray Morality. The Silmarillion in particular tends to be white, grey and black. (Surely people like Feanor, his sons, the Noldor in general, Thingol, Turin, etc. cannot be thought of as all black or all white.)
Outside of the Silmarillion there are many other examples. Gollum, Lobelia and Denethor (in the book, the movie plays him as more of a straight forward villain) are anything but clean cut good or bad guys. Despite its lighter tone The Hobbit averts this a lot more than its darker sequel. Thorin is for the most part noble but also a greedy, proud jerkass who would risk a war to hang onto his gold while Beorn is kind and friendly but kills an Orc who had already surrendered and puts its head on a pike.
Indeed, it would probably be best to say that Middle-Earth hasBlack and White Morality, but only as extremes- Eru and the Valar are pure good; Morgoth and his directly corrupted minions are pure evil; most of the non-divine characters lean strongly one way or the other, but aren't "pure". This ties in to temptation being a major theme of LOTR in particular.
Averted in The Children Of Hurin. Turin is well meaning but also a morally ambiguous Jerkass who blows over the Moral Event Horizon when he murders a lame man in cold blood, his Lancer Androg is a serial rapist and murderer and the group's traitor, Mim the Dwarf is a Woobie Anti-Villain whose actions are motivated by the relentless persecution his people suffered from the Elves as well as Androg's cruelty. Even after his betrayl he inists that Turin be released unharmed.
Eragon tries to give this a significant amount of thought, as a number of characters point out that he's fighting because other people told him to, however right they may be. After a significant amount of angst, Eragon comes to the bizarre and defeatists conclusion that he has to cross the ocean to train the next generation of riders. He left behind civilization, everything he fought for, the chance to shape the creation of the next major golden age, and the chance to get into Arya's (the only woman for whom he could hold genuine affection)tight leatherpants.
Harry Potter starts out this way. Dumbledore is the Big Good, Harry and his friends are the heroes, the other students are generally nice except for the Slytherins, and Voldemort is the Big Bad. As the series goes on, it adds more and more shades of gray with turncoats on both sides, a corrupt government opposing Voldemort, heroes paying evil unto evil, and Harry discovering that his father and Dumbledore have...complicated backstories.
The Symphony Of Ages series: Rhapsody and those who love her: Good. Those who don't love Rhapsody: Evil.
Except for Michael has got the hots for Rhapsody and is evil.
Sword of Truth: The heroes are good and noble, and always right, while the villains all Kick the Dog like they're in an international dog-kicking competition.
Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series. The American/Lemurian alliance is good, the Grik and any Lemurians or humans who don't support the alliance are bad.
In the Tortall Universe it's true that expressing any disdain for peasants is a clear sign that someone's a villain, specifically in The Song Of The Lioness Prince Jonathan wants to be a great king and his cousin Duke Roger of Conte wants to murder him and anyone who gets in his way.
The Dresden Files tends to avert this - the wizards and muggles are, after all, human, and so many of the magical creatures have no sense of morality or even disdain the concept that it can be hard to remember that in the earlier books, the fights between literal agents of Heaven and Hell were much more commonplace. The books also imply (by way of Sanya) that angels and the like aren't really Good of themselves, but rather its their actions that make them Good, and that they'd still be Good if you replaced "angel" with "superpowerful aliens that look like angels". Despite that, even angels can be harsh and militaristic, with job descriptions such as "general" and "spook". Very evil is still evil and depraved, though. However, this is fairly true to the source material, and fits the Dresdenverse quite adroitly.
Uriel does invoke this, assuring Harry that the Archangel likes Star Wars over Star Trek because of this trope, and because it makes him "feel young". Despite the fact that "Mr. Sunshine" existed since before Creation, given the way that the superpowerful beings of the Dresdenverse interact with time, this is a slightly bizarre statement.
Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Almost all the good guys are handsome/beautiful, and the bad guys are either ugly as sin or ordinary-looking. The choices the characters make are unambiguously good or evil. The characterization of the characters is either good or evil.
Deconstructed in Warrior Cats. Hollyleaf starts out with her absolute trust in the Warrior Code, and believes that all who follow it are good, while those who don't are evil. After using the code to justify most of her actions, she learns that her very birth broke the code, and that someone she had respected had broken one of the code's core principles, but for a good reason. After learning this, Hollyleaf's mind was completely shattered, and she realized that her entire morality was flawed, leading her to attempt to murder her own mother, then flee from the Clans.
Warrior Cats is at first an example of Greyand Gray Morality with Thunder Clan and Shadow Clan each having their good warriors (Firestar, Graystripe, and Yellowfang come to mind) and their bad warriors (Brokenstar, Tigerstar, and Darkstripe) but in the fourth series... Black and White Morality is in effect as the Clans go against The Dark Forest cats who are indeed evil. Also in effect during the fight with Blood Clan who are (with few exceptions) very black.
Also deconstructed in A Wizard In Rhyme when a college student gets transported into a Fantasy Counterpart Culture version of France, where God and Satan are very real, saying damn really means you are sending said person to hell, and even magic works on this principle. Being from our world, the rigid code causes a lot of problems as he adjusts.
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. Hell, anything by Spillane.
Stieg Larsson's The Millennium Trilogy, like the works of the aforementioned Spillane, is a rather dark tale of good versus evil: the heroes are all noble and well-intentioned, and the villains are all pure evil.
Power Rangers Dino Thunder's Mesogog, while still black, was a particularly grey shade of black, as he is the sole villain of the series to not carry an evil business card. He was a dinosaur hybrid who wanted to wipe out us filthy mammals and restore dinosaurs to their rightful place as the dominant creatures, and so thought what he was doing to be right, although his methods and manner make it dark enough to still be evil. Its grey, but only in comparison to the villains whose goals are stated to be "to be as evil as possible, nyahaha".
The grayest Power Rangers villain is Ransik of Power Rangers Time Force. He wanted to take over the world in the present, because in the future, the mutations that result on rare occasion from the genetic engineering process that normally allows for perfect Designer Babies for all are shunned to a degree that would make the mutants of X-Men count their blessings. Ransik's entire gang is gathered from the homeless mutants. He cackles as much as any past villain whose title is "Your Evilness" when causing mayhem, but he's got a reason for his hate and his motivation isn't simply greed or the evulz like many of the others.
LOST: While it's unclear whether either character has purely good or purely evil motivations, the entire series has boiled down to an epic, eternal conflict between Jacob, the representation of white and seeming "good guy," and the aptly named "Man in Black," better known as the Smoke Monster, the representation of black and alleged "evil incarnate."
Charmed: Witches are good. Demons are bad. More specifically, anyone who are allies with the Charmed Ones and they like them, they are good. Anyone else is bad. Even the neutral ones because you can't trust anyone who is neutral.
Also, all witches after they first get their powers, must decide if they are good or evil within 24 hours.
Burn Notice, through and through. Westen and his allies are good, his antagonists are always evil. The villains of the week are almost always dog kicking assholes. If that wasn't enough the true antagonists, the shadowy organization behind the burn, has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. As for Westen's crew, they are always seen by everyone as perfect and never wrong, even though Westen himself has largely selfish motivations for what he does.
There is the little issue of Michael accidentally getting Jesse burned.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel both play with this. Each starts out as a clear-cut example, but later seems to drift to somewhere between this and Black and Gray Morality, with the protagonists usually doing the right thing, but not always, and most of the antagonists remaining dog-kicking villains. Also, despite usually being portrayed as good in the sense that they're well-meaning, the heroes of both shows often encounter situations that are portrayed as morally gray, leading them to disagree with each other on what the good course of action is.
Common feature of Soap Operas. Villains have no redeeming quality and absolutely everything they do have one of two motivations: earn even more money (they usually are extremely rich to begin with) or mess with the hero/heroine For the Evulz. The hero/heroine is the epitome of purity, and everything they do is genuinely for the benefit of others. Any wrongs from them will be revealed to be due to being manipulated by the villains.
Religion/Mythology
In religion, this idea is often called (Manichean) dualism:
God is good, Satan is evil. (Christianity)
Ahura Mazda is good, Ahriman is evil. (Zoroastrianism)
Abba deRabutta is good, Ahriman is evil. (Manichaeism)
Most Dungeons & Dragons settings: People who go "ping!" on Detect Good are good. People who set off the paladin's slaydar are evil. (People who don't trigger either are either using Undetectable Alignment or are the resident shade of grey, the neutral alignments).
Playable races (such as humans, elves, dwarves, and such) tend to be good, while orcs, goblins, and other 'monstrous' humanoids tend to be Always Chaotic Evil. There are plenty of exceptions, though, with a number of villains from PC races showing up from time to time. The occasional good orc or goblin may make an appearance as well (especially in Eberron, which subverts a lot of the common expectations about alignment and race).
There is a Succubus Paladin created on the Wizards site a while ago that detects as Lawful, Good, Evil and Chaotic via the sundry detect spells. This is because Demon are MADE of Evil and Chaos, while Paladins are philosophically Good and Lawful.
In Torg in the sub-universe of the Nile Empire, based on pulp fiction tropes everyone is either good or evil...until one of the evil scientists of the Nile Empire accidentally infects himself with a meme virus based on the plays of Anton Chekov and becomes the sub-universe's only Neutral character.
Talisman: The "Lightbearers" alternate ending in the Blood Moon expansion changes the nature of the normally free-for-all game into a cooperative one, where every player must choose a character of good alignment. The players cannot fight each other, and instead can assist each other in combat against the forces of evil, freely exchange items, and work together to win the game as a group before time runs out.
Video Games
Early Video Games with Excuse Plot or plot with little-to-no cutscenes are likely to be this. Even Bad Dudes do not seem to be any kind of bad other than Bad Ass.
Link, Zelda, and their allies are good; Ganon and his followers are evil.
Averted in some of the later games. In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the villain we are introduced to is actually just a puppet to the Man Behind the Man, and is actually just a bit mischievous, but is at heart a nice guy who just suffered from loneliness.
King Bulbin in Twilight Princess and Byrne in Spirit Tracks are good examples of bad guys who turn good over the course of their games. The Twili are a good example of Dark Is Not Evil in the Zelda universe too, despite having been banished for hungering a bit too much for power. Not played straight quite as much as one is led to believe...
In The Wind Waker, Ganondorf reveals his true intentions. He is still a bit extreme about them, especially how he tries to achieve them, but he did it all for the sake of providing a better life for his people. He merely got swept up in the whole Triforce thing. Also, Skyward Sword seems to mildly deconstruct Ganondorf's Card-Carrying Villain status with the revelation that he's the reincarnation of the hatred of Demon King Demise, a curse on the original Link and Zelda who defeated him. This begs the question of whether Ganondorf could be considered a victim of You Can't Fight Fate, which is up to the interpretation of the player.
Averted in later spin-offs, as Bowser developed over time and he became increasingly Affably Evil to the point that in most modern games he's less evil then simply misguided and greedy.
Played straight in the main series, though; in both Galaxy games Bowser is as one-dimensionally megalomaniacal as ever. Probably because their one attempt at giving him more "complexity" was Super Mario Sunshine, which included narmy voice acting ("How dare you disturb my family vacation!") and introduced The Scrappy, Bowser Jr.
Also played straight by the one-off villains in the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi series. Okay, not quite Count Bleck, but Fawful, Dimentio, the Shadow Queen, Cackletta, and the Shroobs are portrayed very much to the extreme end of the evil scale.
Mega Man and his friends are good, Dr. Wily and his robots are evil.
Galaxy Angel: The Transbaal Empire is good; The Val-Fasq are evil.
Gradius: Planet Gradius is good; Bacterion, Venom, and Salamander are evil.
But what about the Gradian government? Before the Northern Cross War that inadvertently killed nearly of the Wreekians, the Gradius government avoided contact with them because they were primitive. After the Northern Cross War, the Gradius government didn't do much at all for the poor Wreekian survivors; they only wanted to use their ESP power. This would put the Gradian government on the grey morality.
Deconstructed in Grandia II; see the page for more details
In the first two WarCraft games, the Orcs are evil and the humans are good, but by Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, while there are still undeniably evil forces like the Burning Legion and Scourge, it becomes less clear whether the Alliance or the Horde has the moral high ground.
As pictured above, Queen Elincia and the Herons are good, but Mad King Ashnard is evil. However, his steed isn't evil, just Brainwashed.
It has always been the trait of the Command & Conquer:Red Alert series, where the Allies are good and the Soviet Union is evil. They are later joined by a new evil side, Empire of Rising Sun.
Subverted in Golden Sun: seemingly present during the first game, but the second game deconstructs it by having you play the antagonists of the first game, and having the final boss be the mentor from the first game.
The later core games avert this though, with the evil teams having more reasonable and sympathetic motivations. The exception is Ghetsis of Team Plasma, whose villainy neighbors Cipher proportions. Cipher from Pokemon Colosseum is far more evil than anything before them and a sight more evil than anything since.
Played with in Touhou. On one hand, the series as a whole follows White and Grey Morality at worse, with copious amounts of Dark Is Not Evil and Good All Along preventing the series from having any true villains. On the other hand, the character Shikieiki Yamaxanadu possesses the ability to "distinctly judge anything to be Good or Evil", meaning that she sees the world in Black And White Morality. As she is the resident Judge of the Dead whom decides the ultimate fate of every deceased soul in Gensokyo, she gets a lot of mileage out of this.
Psaro the Man Slayer subverts this partly. He hates humans because they harmed his girlfriend. But going into the arena and beating random fighters to death isn't that nice of a thing to do either. None of his underlings are ever good.
Star Fox and the Cornerian army are good. Andross, Anglar Emperor, and their armies are bad. The Aparoids were created solely to be The Virus, and were nothing but evil and trouble.
The Overlord (you) is evil, the heroes are (mostly) good. This is one of the few scenarios where you're supposed to prefer the black morality.
Web Comics
Axe Cop. Very evident as it is written by a six-year old. There are good guys (who can do anything they want), and bad guys (who don't need to do anything bad apart from being bad to be such).
In The Fear Mythos, the character "Achromatic Morality" demonstrates this perfectly — the clue's in the name. In her words, "there are two sides. The side that I am on, which is righteous; and the side I am not, which is monstrous."
Western Animation
Really, most cartoons fit this trope. The Smurfs? Good (except carnivorous ones). Gargamel? Bad. He-Man? Good. Skeletor? Bad. G.I. Joe? Good. COBRA? Bad. ThunderCats? Good. Mum-Ra? Bad. Rinse and repeat as necessary. Newer works, however, tend to be a bit more morally grey.
Transformers: Autobots are good, Decepticons are evil (except in Shattered Glass, where it's the other way round).
Though in Transformers Animated some of the Autobots are selfish, corrupt, or incompetent, though not in the main cast. Sentinel Prime,we are looking at you. Likewise, while "sympathetic" might be stretching the portrayal of the Decepticons as a whole, they are at least clearly motivated (most of them want to reconquer Cybertron, but some have other motivations).
And in the IDW comics Continuity, the conflict has its origins in Gray and Grey Morality, as the Decepticons were a group that were rising up against the corrupt government that preceded the Autobots.
Many Transformers continuities play with and partially subvert the idea, going right back to the Marvel comic series in the 1980s. It is always with individual characters though so the trope is played straight for the overall factions even if the individuals within the groups don't necessarily all adhere. Also, the trope is played painfully straight whenever Unicron is involved, usually with "Unicron = BAD Those who fight him = good"
The new book Exodus also establishes a whole lot of gray in the origins of the war and looks like a subversion, but later on plays this trope straight. Sort of.
Captain Planet was famous for this trope. The bad guys were not only bad, they tended to put together their absurdly complicated plots strictly For the Evulz. Abiding by the EPA's regulations probably would have been cheaper than some of the crackpot pollution schemes these guys concocted.
Surprisingly subverted in Avatar The Last Airbender. At first, the set-up seems to make the Black and the White quite clear: the Fire Nation is the Always Chaotic EvilEmpire embarking on a campaign of world conquest, and those who fight against them are good. Then the writers seem to spend the entire remainder of the series picking this stark divide to pieces in every direction, with an abundance of quite likable and sympathetic Fire Nation characters and an abundance of utterly loathsome Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe characters. The Fire Lord and his daughter remain the clear bad guys, and Team Avatar the clear good guys, straight until the end, but beyond that the series drifts closer to Grey and Grey Morality than almost any other children's show you could name.
Some of the main characters, primarily Katara, come close to crossing the line more than once.
Zuko [[Pun alone]] is a subversion. It seems like the moral the show's trying to send is that life isn't so straightforward and it's important to remember that. Even Azula, the magnificent bitch, gets sympathy. After being betrayed by her friends, abandoned by her father, and given way too much power for her to handle, she has a mental breakdown that all stems from a perceived lack of love from her mother.
All of the main characters of Xiaolin Showdown explicitly refer to themselves as good or evil. While there is a decent bit of switching sides, (in fact, all four of the monks have been evil for some period of time, thoughfordifferentreasons), once a character turns good/evil they will be very good/evil. For example: Good!Jack is nothing but hugs and rainbows to the point where he weirds everyone else out, and Evil!Omi is a hyperactive Blood Knight who loves to cause destruction and get in fights.
Another example is the smoking episode "Butt Out", in which tobacco companies are portrayed as affable, proud of tobacco's role in building America, careful to ensure that customers are fully warned about the dangers of smoking, and perfectly fine with not living to old age. The anti-smoking activists are greasy, Wormtongue-esque characters who regularly make up evidence against smoking, try to murder a ten year old boy in the name of some of said evidence, and are overly rude to smokers, even when they're in a place where they're completely in their rights to smoke.
Samurai Jack. The eponymous main character is good, and Aku is evil.
In the Compilation MovieOnce Upon a Halloween, a villain is plotting to do something evil while her magic mirror tries to talk her out of while showing her clips of various Disney movies. In the end the villain decides she doesn't want to go through her plan anymore, but the mirror kills her anyway for even attempting it in the first place.
