Moral Disambiguation

noreallife

Teacher: Your simple arguments have all been made before
The world's not black and white
The choice not either/or
Light: Perhaps it's time we drained the color from it, then
Til we're back to seeing black and white
and wrong and right again.

— "Where is the Justice?", Death Note: The Musical

The inverse of Graying Morality, this is when an element of good and evil conflict is added to an otherwise morally ambiguous work. If a series previously had a morally ambiguous outlook, sooner or later, there will be more polarization in terms of morality, and then there are many Shades of Conflict.

Perhaps one of the belligerent parties is shown to be of higher moral caliber than the other, while the other is proven to be more depraved. Perhaps one of the belligerent parties started as morally gray but become progressively worse, possibly to the point they cross the Moral Event Horizon, or is revealed to be a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist. Or perhaps a third belligerent party shows up who is far worse than either of the other belligerent parties, necessitating that both parties team up against the third belligerent.

At the logical extreme, all pretenses of moral ambiguity would be dropped for an outlook of good versus evil, but this isn't always the case. For the most part, with this trope, elements of good vs. evil are inserted in the work, but the work is still predominantly morally ambiguous in terms of how it operates.

Moral Disambiguation can happen for several reasons. Sometimes the creator wants to highlight that morally grey characters can become good or evil under certain circumstances. Alternatively, maybe they just wanted to make the fan favourites more likable while also darkening their enemies to make their fight more justified and/or to keep the overall level of evil equal. Or maybe the work has caught Issue Drift and uses the more black-and-white view to get its message across.

Compare Motive Decay, when a character's understandable reasons for their actions give away to less justifiable reasons; it can overlap with this trope, but tends to take place over the course a less expansive timeframe. Compare and contrast Bait the Dog, when someone who is seemingly moral/charismatic is turns out to be immoral or unlikeable, although an ambiguous character can also turn out to be reprehensible.

See also Civil War vs. Armageddon, when a gray-and-grey conflict is juxtaposed with a black-and-white one; Neutral No Longer, when a single character picks a moral side; and Debate and Switch, where a moral dilemma is sidestepped. Also compare Heel–Face Turn and Face–Heel Turn. Viler New Villain can often result from Moral Disambiguation. Compare Flanderization, as Moral Disambiguation sometimes overlaps with it (the somewhat-good grey character becomes fully good, while the somewhat-evil grey character becomes fully evil).

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gundam: Mobile Suit Gundam 00 underwent a notable case of this. Much of season one had been spent building up the conflict between Celestial Being who wanted to end all conflict and the various political factions of Earth, with all of them having sympathetic characters even the very morally dubious Human Reform League. Ali al-Saachez was the only real outlier. Then the Trinity Siblings were introduced who took Celestial Being's ideals to extremes, killing civilians and causing the public to turn against Celestial Being and causing the factions to pool their resources. Alejandro Cormer, an affiliate of Celestial Being, was revealed to have orchestrated the scheme to hijack Aeolia Schenberg's plan for his own selfish ends and equips the United Nations with new mobile suits to take down the Gundams. Even after his death in the season one finale,his Bastard Understudy Ribbons Almark takes power and proceeds to secretly puppet the new Earth Sphere Federation from the shadows, creating the ruthless A-LAWS. When Season Two begins, Celestial Being are now firmly the heroes fighting against the A-LAWS who go on to commit multiple atrocities at Ribbons' command.
• Kill la Kill had shades of it from the beginning, with its Anti-Hero protagonist and her rebellious allies fighting an Evil Overlord, but the best example of it is when Satsuki fights Ragyo. The former is the aforementioned Evil Overlord, who trapped hundreds of innocents in Life Fiber traps to fulfill her goal of revenge, being well aware that all of them could die, and the latter is her abusive and incestuous mother, who plans to kill every single human and blow up the Earth in the name of the Life Fibers. The only reason it doesn't count as Evil Versus Evil is because Satsuki was revealed to have been Good All Along. After that, the series shifts to Black-and-White Morality.
• Talentless Nana: Nana starts off as a Talentless sent by the government to infiltrate and kill various Talented individuals. While she's a ruthless murderer, she's portrayed sympathetically due to her Dark and Troubled Past and her genuine belief that the people she kills will become much greater threats to humanity at large if they're not "nipped at the bud". But as the story progresses, she begins to grow more and more disillusioned by her mission and eventually turns against her employer, Tsuruoka, who is the true villain of the story. Unlike Nana, Tsuruoka has no sympathetic motives for wanting to oppress and kill the Talented, and the people he subsequently employs in Nana's place are just as power-hungry and cruel as he is, and the conflict gradually becomes less about the ethics and morality of handling dangerous superhuman powers, and becomes a more standard villain vs. hero face-off.

Fanfiction

• Code Prime: The introduction of the Autobots and Decepticons into the Code Geass world ends up simplifying the morality of the Black Knights and Britannia - the Autobots steer the Black Knights in general and Zero in particular toward a more heroic path. Britannia, meanwhile, has its more dubious elements brought to the front while working with Megatron's forces. The end of R1 sees any remaining ambiguity removed when Megatron and the Decepticons outright conquer Britannia and kill Charles, with what remains of Britannia eventually joining the Autobots and Black Knights.
• Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K: Invoked in "Episode 23: The Cost of Honor". Viewpoint character Kombirr justifies his desire to join the rebellion against the Imperial rule of Axum by pointing out that whereas the war between the Galactic Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems was morally murky, which was why he refused to take sides in it, the Imperials are a bunch of brutal colonizers who are systemically genociding Axum's non-human population.

Films — Animated

• Zootopia: The film starts out with Fantastic Racism between animal species being widespread among all the characters, but as the story progresses, the heroes learn to overcome their prejudices, while the villains aim to escalate racial tensions for their own purposes.

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla:
  • Tohoverse: In the original 1954 movie, Godzilla was a tragic creature seeking revenge on humanity after being a victim of their hubris, but as the franchise went on, the character generally became a campy Anti-Hero opposed to more generically-evil and sadistic kaiju and space aliens, such as Monster Zero, Gigan and the Xiliens.
  • MonsterVerse: In the first couple of movies, Godzilla and Kong are on humanity's side more due to circumstance than anything else. Godzilla causes mass destruction in his own right, and it's ambiguous how much he is out to destroy the more hostile MUTOs because they're disrupting the balance of nature at large, and how much he's just out to kill his natural enemy. In his debut in Kong: Skull Island, Kong is an Anti-Hero and not above massacring U.S. military forces when they unwittingly disturb and threaten his kingdom. Meanwhile, Godzilla and Kong's kaiju foes in early installments are doing what nature built them to do rather than being deliberately malicious. In subsequent movies, Godzilla becomes more heroic and pathic to humans, and Kong becomes exclusively heroic, whilst the antagonistic kaiju get more petty and malicious, to the point of King Ghidorah being an Omnicidal Maniac who displays true malice and wants to wipe out humanity just because he can.
• Jurassic Park: The human bad guys get more ambitious and heinous in the Jurassic World movies than they were in the earlier Park movies, and the heroes get a little bit more concerned about the bigger picture besides their own survival. In particular, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park; Ian Malcolm only cares about the good guys getting back to civilization alive, and one of the other good guys is an unrepentant Eco-Terrorist, whilst the bad guys are only a couple steps away from being Villainy-Free Villains who are acting well within their legal rights. By contrast, Jurassic World Dominion sees Malcolm, Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler actively sticking their necks out by investigating BioSyn of their own initiatives, and trying to stop an existential threat to the planet; a threat which BioSyn unwittingly unleashed whilst the corporation was trying to engineer famine just to further their own greed.
• The Ocean's Eleven trilogy starts out as a group of charismatic and morally flexible thieves led by Danny Ocean robbing a slightly more detached and equally morally flexible casino owner, Terry Benedict, with Ocean's Twelve involving Benedict trying to retaliate with help from a rival of Ocean's. Ocean's Thirteen sees Ocean and Benedict team up against Benedict's rival, the downright smarmy casino owner Willy Bank, who betrayed Ocean's mentor Reuben Tishkoff in an unsavoury deal. Benedict finances Ocean's heist due to Bank's new casino casting a large shadow over the pool of one of Benedict's casinos. Benedict is shown throughout the trilogy to be much more benevolent of an employer than Bank, even if only out of pragmatism. Likewise, Ocean is shown to be extremely charismatic and not without his own standards.
• In the original Spider-Man, Norman was more willing to go with Green Goblin's plans, making it harder to tell where Green Goblin ends and Norman begins is ambiguous. In Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's a lot more obvious that they are separate individuals with the same body, with Norman wanting to get as far away from his other half as possible.
• Pulp Fiction: The storyline between Butch Coolidge and Marsellus Wallace is initially presented as a conflict between a hardened and unscrupulous prizefighter and a local mobster, with both parties presented as morally flexible. When they are both captured by pawn shop owners Maynard and Zed, the conflict becomes more clear cut in terms of morality, with Zed and Maynard being portrayed as sociopathic sexual predators and sadists, who the comparatively upstanding Butch and Marsellus team up to eliminate.

Literature

• The Night Huntress novel Halfway to the Grave starts out with Cat Crawfield hunting vampires in general under the impression that they are evil. After finding out from her encounter with Bones Russell that vampires are not always the monsters she has been led to believe, Bones enlists Cat's help in dismantling a human trafficking network run by both vampires and humans.
• Sword of Truth: It starts out with a deep discussion of good and evil, right and wrong, and cause-and-effect, including black, white, and lots of distinct shades of grey. As the focus of the series switches to the war against the Imperial Order, it becomes a very us-against-them, black-and-white morality environment, to the point where the protagonists were doing things at the end of the series that they would have decried as evil at the beginning.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: Like the books it is based on, it generally started out as a Grey-and-Grey Morality deconstruction of fantasy, showing that no character is really good or evil and war is a murky affair at best. With few exceptions, there's not really any fighting for the greater good or justice, only dynastic interests. Over time, it has become closer to Black-and-White Morality, with many characters experiencing changes to their personalities to make them more clearly heroic or villainous, and the appearance of an Always Chaotic Evil faction that has been foreshadowed since the start of the show.
• Merlin (2008): Originally, the series had a quite complicated morality. However, by Seasons Four and Five, the series' morality became a lot more black and white, as, following Uther's death, Arthur proves to truly be The Good King who brings peace, stability, justice and a lot more social mobility to Camelot, not to mention recruiting the Knights of the Round Table. Meanwhile, Morgana takes multiple levels of Jerkass and goes through a massive amount of Motive Decay. By the end of the series, she's just as deluded and paranoid as Uther, but proves to be an even worse tyrant than him. This is arguably the whole point of the series; Merlin needed to ensure Arthur would become king, as that was the only way things would get better.
• Supernatural's black-and-white moral system turned gray as the main characters started to fight demons, which requires them to murder innocent human hosts, the supernatural creatures stopped always being evil due to their race, and they started to make deals with demons in order to survive. Eventually, the brothers wouldn't bat an eye when forced to kill a room full human hosts, make moral decisions which trod the line between dangerously irresponsible and willfully evil, and constantly trade away the safety and wellbeing of huge numbers of people. By the end of the series, it tilted back towards black and white with the Winchesters balking at dancing so close to Villain Protagonist status, the introduction of Jack Kline on their side, and the final three Arc Villains after Amara being more evil and powerful than anything the Winchesters have faced before them.
• Cobra Kai: Johnny has some Jerkass traits and gives his students the same Cobra Kai training he had, but he's doing it so that they'll become more confident, assertive, and able to fight back against anyone who bullies them. Daniel is understandably wary of the rebirth of Cobra Kai, but he grabs the Jerkass Ball and goes out of his way to antagonize Johnny even though Johnny couldn't care less about his former rival. By the end of the first season, the series Reconstructs the Black-and-White Morality from the first The Karate Kid film. While Daniel's teachings turn Robby into a better person who's willing to let go of his anger towards his father, Johnny's only end up leading his students into the very path that ruined his life. However, he does realize what he has done. The following seasons become a fight between The Good, the Bad, and the Evil, with Johnny and Daniel eventually joining forces to stop the morally black Kreese. Although there's still shades of Graying Morality by revealing that Kreese is motivated by a horrifying Freudian Excuse.
• House of Anubis: The first season involved morally ambiguous teachers chasing immortality but not wanting to hurt the students, and a villain that stood out specifically for actually intending to cause harm, while the students ran the gamut from being normal heroes to anti-heroes, and anti-villains. By the third season, Sibuna was entirely morally good, and the villains were trying to cause an apocalypse, raising the stakes but removing the grayness.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Over the course of the series, antagonistic characters would have Pet the Dog moments or otherwise be made three-dimensional, some would even have redemption arcs. Some allies would slowly become morally gray. By the series finale, Dukat and Winn had shed any redeeming qualities and had fully embraced evil, Gowron became a full-on villain, Damar had a complete Heel–Face Turn, and all the major Alpha-quadrant powers had fully alligned against the evil Dominion.

Video Games

• Dark Souls, with some rare (and mostly minor) exceptions, doesn't really have 'villains' or people who are downright evil. This is most exemplified in the supposed Big Good of the game, the Lord of Light Gwyn. He killed all the Everlasting Dragons and built civilization in the new world, but he's also an Abusive Parent amongst other rather morally dubious actions. His sacrifice by throwing himself in the First Flame to revive it make him come off as at least somewhat heroic in the end... And then Dark Souls III (specifically the Ringed City DLC) reveals that he's a lot more villainous: most importantly, he "gifted" the Pygmies, the ancestors of humanity who helped in the war against dragons, with a city/prison at the edges of the world, cancelled them from the annals of history, and branded all of them with a "ring of fire"; all because Gwyn was afraid of the inherent Darkness in human souls, and wanted to seal it away as much as possible. In doing so, humans lost control of their dark souls, the ring of fire turned into the Darksign, creating the Undead, and caused the Abyss to be spawned. And his sacrifice was pointless, as every linking of the fire causes the First Flame to weaken and the world to slowly collapse on itself through sheer entropy, meaning that the world is in a worse state than if he just let the fire fade in the first place. Through his fear and paranoia, Gwyn was responsible for almost all of humanity's woes in the franchise.
• Destiny 2:
  • Throughout the run of Destiny} and its sequel, the Consensus Factions - New Monarchy, Dead Orbit, and the Future War Cult - have been a source of Grey-and-Gray Morality due to their differing views, which they aren't able to reconcile even after the city gets invaded by Cabal. Come Season of the Splicer, though, and they finally find enough common ground to unify on. The problem is that this common ground is Fantastic Racism toward the House of Light, who the Vanguard allowed into the Last City in exchange for their splicers' aid in breach the Vex network. All three factions actively work to kick the Eliksni out of the city, culminating in Overide: Last City, where Laksmi-3 ends up opening a Vex portal inside the city, which almost leads to the City's destruction. Predictably, all three factions collapse once the mess is sorted out, leading to the removal of all three factions and their gear, as well as an end to the Faction Rallys.
  • As the main story of Destiny 2 progresses along, the Guardians commit multiple morally ambiguous actions (working with the wild Cards Rasputin and Osiris, going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Uldren Sov that risks war with the Reef, and vanquishing the Nightmares on the Moon by using their own essences against them), culminating in them drawing power from the Darkness itself during the events of Beyond Light and Lightfall after receiving some encouragement from the Drifter, Eris Morn, and the Exo Stranger. Not helping matters is the Stranger revealing that she has fought the Darkness across timelines, with all previous timelines ending in the Guardians falling to the temptation of the Darkness. Then Lightfall's campaign and the lorebook Inspiral drop a major bombshell: as had been implied over the last few years, the Darkness is not an inherently evil force, merely one that governs emotional and abstract powers as opposed to the Light governing physical phenomena. The true enemy of the Guardians, the Witness, has been pretending that the Darkness is intelligent (it's a Background Magic Field with no mind of its own) to convince others to go along with its plans for The Final Shape, and has destroyed other civilizations that peacefully used the Darkness to enforce this mindset.
• The Verdant Wind route of Fire Emblem: Three Houses eases the Grey-and-Grey Morality of the others and ends in something more closely resembling a traditional Fire Emblem story. Claude drops much of his secrets and becomes an Ideal Hero, Dimitri is so consumed by his revenge he gets himself killed offsceen, Edelgard is undisputibly The Heavy who Claude sympathises with but feels must be opposed, Rhea finally explains Fodlan's history, is implied to be The Atoner, and gets a Redemption Equals Death moment, and the route's final enemies are the unambiguously villainous "those who slither in the dark" and a revived King Nemesis, who is revealed to be even more evil than history portrayed him.
• Warframe initially leaves it vague how good or bad the three main factions (Grineer Empire, the Corpus, and the Player Characters, the Tenno) are relative to one another. The Grineer and Corpus are both acknowledged to treat neutral third parties horribly, but these third parties are only mentioned in lore, and could easily be chalked up as propoganda. The Tenno, meanwhile, follow the enigmatic Lotus, who is later revealed to be a defector from the Sentients, the Tenno's Arch-Enemy, leaving it up in the air how good they really are. Any debate was fully laid to rest, however, with the release of the Relays, Cetus, and Fortuna, which finally introduced the normal peoples of the Origin System to the game, and emphasized not only how badly they are treated by the major powers (the Grineer outright destroy several relays in the Eyes of Blight event, while the inhabitants of Fortuna are debt-slaves to the Corpus), but also what the Tenno are to these wayward souls.

Web Animation

• RWBY: General Ironwood was originally portrayed as someone who ultimately meant well and just wanted to keep everyone safe, but made drastic and controversial decisions in order to do this. He begins suffering from Sanity Slippage after the villains play him like a fiddle to successfully topple Beacon, making him extremely paranoid and hell bent on protecting everyone at any cost. During the Atlas arc, he loses it completely and starts making unambiguously immoral choices, trying to kill Oscar and even plotting to drop a massive bomb on his own people.

Webcomics

• Act 1 of Girl Genius built up to a conflict between Agatha and the Inspector Javert Anti-Villain Baron Wulfenbach, who feared Agatha was really the Other, a plainly malevolent force through-and-through. But by the time of Act 2, said battle was over, and the conflict shifted towards Agatha fighting the Other more head-on. Plus, even during Act 1's Final Battle, Wulfenbach was under the Other's mind-control, adding a moral layer to it.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: In the first season, Sasha is an Anti-Hero who resorts to immoral actions to get her friends back. Grime leads a Machiavellian toad army with the redeeming quality that they want to maintain (an admittedly feudal) order. After King Andrias is revealed to be a would-be Myopic Conqueror who intends to conquer Earth and then the multiverse, and he's willing to stoop much lower than Sasha and Grime were, Sasha and Grime unite with the main heroes and the heroes' formerly-neutral goals shift toward saving both Earth and Amphibia from an existential threat. Whereas Andrias is eventually revealed to be a more complex and multi-layered Tragic Villain than his initial atrocities let on, his master — the true Big Bad leader of the Myopic Conqueror campaign — is a pure, unrepentant monster to the end (literally and metaphorically), and would sooner destroy everything within its reach than admit defeat or try to redeem itself.
• The Owl House: The Boiling Isles is for the most part a World of Jerkass, the deuteragonist Eda is only really concerned about keeping herself and her household alive against the Isles' authoritarian system, and Big Bad Emperor Belos is Ambiguously Evil for a while. As Season 2 goes on, however, Belos is revealed to be a genocidal existential threat to all the Boiling Isles' denizens (and one who killed his own beloved brother and has been sadistically killing Expendable Clones of said brother for centuries afterward), and all the denizens of the Isles find themselves increasingly pushed to one of two sides in the conflict: Eda and many other characters who were originally varying degrees of jerkass join the resistance to thwart Belos, and generally those who remain on Belos' side up to the Day of Unity are established to be irredeemable and are among the vilest characters in the series short of Belos himself.

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