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Dear Journal, I had a horrible day today. I stopped Count Apocalyptogeddon by tossing a couple dozen cars at him; though I was a little worried he might have bruised a rib. I took a break and explained to some kids that Graffiti is vandalism and like destroying property that's not yours, they seemed to get it. Then when I told a civilian I was taking his car to get to the bank to stop a robbery, he was all pissy about me "stealing" it! The nerve of some people! Oh, and those henchmen Count Apocalyptogeddon hired after the last dozen died sure do bleed a lot, I wonder if club soda can get out blood stains?
— Love and liberty, Lady Lumina
So short is its memory span that although Sever kills, I dunno, maybe 40 Vancouver police officers in an opening battle, by the end, when someone says, "She's a killer," Ecks replies, "She's a mother."
— Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005, on Simplistic: Bullets Vs. Humans Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Moral Dissonance is the result of having a hero who has a double standard and no one notices. It can include pretty much any unintentional Double Standard on the hero's part that becomes obvious to the viewer during a walk to the fridge. It's important to point out the hero isn't acting the Jerkass, Anti Hero, or morally myopic villain, and may in fact be likable and decent, but their actions simply don't line up with their rhetoric and no one calls them on it. Moral Dissonance is pretty much the opposite of the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold and The Daria, both of whom are downers and may preach low standards, while knowingly living up to higher ones.
Usually results either from using an old Aesop or trope that's a genre staple with different values to those of the hero, usually resulting in a Broken Aesop. For example: Hero believes in giving the villain a Last Second Chance and will go the extra mile to Save The Villain from his own devices regardless of previous backstabs and never consider killing him because If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him. The Punch Clock Villain minions? Doesn't even flinch when he has to kill them because they inconvenience him. Since they don't have a name it doesn't really matter. This gets its own subtrope: What Measure Is A Mook?
With an Omniscient Morality License the old Mentor character, especially a Trickster Mentor, can do anything because of their absolute knowledge over what will occur. Anyone else even approaching that level of hubris over another person would be smacked by the plot and smacked hard. Obviously Heroic Sociopaths are exempt as they are expected to act this way.
This trope is named partly for Cognitive Dissonance, the concept psychologists use to describe the tension one feels when someone does something that goes against their beliefs, values, reasons and other cognitions with little justification for doing so. Moral, because the hero can be The Messiah and a Technical Pacifist while being very Immoral.
To be fair, very much Truth In Television (sadly). Even the most moral of Real Life individuals can and do have this kind of disconnect all the time, if only because they failed to think about the implications of their actions that time. In fictional cases, it may be up for argument whether the dissonance was on the part of the character or the writer.
Compare Values Dissonance, where the cause is cultural. Compare also Family Unfriendly Aesop, where the hero's actions line up with morals that the reader might not agree with. Also compare What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous? Contrast Not So Different, where the double standard is noticed; What The Hell, Hero?, where they are expressly called out and can even be a driving force of the plot; and It's All About Me, where the villain actively holds this kind of double standard, and it's noticed. For The Rival holding a grudge, it's Disproportionate Retribution. See also Protagonist Centered Morality.
Consider No Endor Holocaust, where often hero's actions should have had some negative effect, but doesn't because they're supposed to be the good guys. Pay Evil Unto Evil is the concept where it's acceptable to commit crimes against evil people.
Expect the Mary Sue to do this. Oh, so very often.
When adding examples, be careful that you're not just adding your own personal Ron The Death Eater.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The entire "Trix are for kids" advertising campaign, which seemed based around tormenting that poor rabbit with the fact that he will never ever get to eat the damn cereal. By far the most egregious example was when the rabbit legitimately purchased some Trix with his own money, only for the kids to take it away when he left the store, essentially mugging him. Nobody points out the sadistic glee the kids seem to take in excluding and denying the rabbit over and over.
- Family Guy subverted this with Japanese Trix where the rabbit kills the kids and takes the cereal.
- Does a parody really count though?
- Both times the Trix rabbit scores some Trix was due to two separate popular votes overwhelmingly supportive of his goal to get the sugary cereal. By that point, even kids were like "just give him the damn cereal you insensitive jerk-offs"
- The Alltel Wireless commercials have a similar problem. We're supposed to like Chad, even when he doesn't lift a finger to stop his supporters from doing terrible things to the Avatars of the other companies.
- Not to mention Chad's essentially a Holier Than Thou douchebag to the other guys.
- The recent "Take a Minute" Twix commercials where the douchebag lies and gets the girl. I used to like that candy, but I've been turned off to it because of that guy.
Anime
- Sure, Kenshiro of Fist Of The North Star may fight evil, (try to) protect innocents and even cry Manly Tears for both the suffering innocents and the villains he kill, but early in the story he more often than not just stands there and watches the slaughter of innocents happen right before his eyes, then chucks a spastic shirt ripping psycho of epic proportions where he (literally) pops the heads of the villains open. Geez Louize, Kenshiro, is it too much to ask to kill the bad guys before innocent people actually have to die? It almost seems like he deliberately lets innocent people die so that it gives him a justifiable excuse to get mad and kill the villains to let off steam. He seems to get better about this later on; in the first Raoh Den movie he wastes no time in killing a guy who was forcing innocents to bow to Souther with a flamethrower by taking it from him and torching him.
- This is mostly the result of Adaptation Decay in the anime version and is most prominent in filler episodes and mini-arcs heavily expanded by filler (such as the King arc). In the manga, Kenshiro usually heads towards the current villains' lair to kick their asses immediately after learning about them and only stands there and watches when a villain forces him to do so by taking a hostage.
- Kenshiro also runs into this when dealing with big-time villains who often had sympathetic motivations. Although Ken is quite willing to kill the evil Mooks who attack helpless innocents in the most brutal ways possible, he's much more lenient with guys like Shin (Rival Turned Evil who built a city for his/Kenshiro's fiancee to win her favor, casualties be damned), Raoh (Wanted to Take Over The World in order to unite the wasteland under his rule, didn't take no for an answer when refused), and Souther (Ax Crazy child-enslaver who built a giant pyramid to honor his dead mentor whom he was tricked into killing). In the first Raoh Den movie, Ken even kills Souther with one of his most merciful techniques (as opposed to making his head explode or something), despite the fact that Souther isn't the least bit sympathetic in this version of the story.
- An especially alarming case in the new Hokuto no Ken anime...Seiji is one hell of a Complete Monster compared to other HnK major villains, thanks to his dad's Training From Hell which, much like Heihachi's, also including throwing his son off a cliff! He's what [[Bleach Kenpachi]] would have become were it not for his Morality Chain Yachiru. After butchering half of the entire city he sought to rule over, many by his own hands, killing Kenshiro's religion-wacky buddy, raping his female companion, and encouraging a full scale war between religious fanatics and a band of mercenaries, Kenshiro is prepared to SPARE HIS LIFE due to his sob story until Seiji gets pissed at everyone having sympathy for him, then takes himself out. What the hell was with that ending?
- The jury is still out on whether Ash's dealings with Team Rocket in the Pokemon anime are self-defense or just plain sadism. This ultimately depends on the situation or how it's presented.
- It should be noted that the majority of TR's plans involve either A) Digging pitholes for the twerps to fall in (deep holes. Deep enough to hurt), B) Gassing the twerps with a smoke screen, C) Getting a giant mecha and assaulting the twerps. Due to this, it's very likely it's usually self-defense. Not to mention that by now, TR has basically lost any claim to be in the right. It should also be noted that they never actually seem to get hurt by their blast-offs and that they've built up an immunity to most of the harmful effects of electricity (like Ash).
- Also, on the rare occasion when Team Rocket isn't trying to steal Ash's Pokemon, they have actually teamed up to work together, especially if a greater evil is about.
- Most guest characters, even if they're nice, can't show mercy for crap either. In the episode "A Hole Lotta Trouble" Steven is angry at Team Rocket for ruining the environment of Pokemon by digging holes. He then goes and blows a hole through the cave to get rid of them! This makes no sense, because his hole ruins the environment more than Team Rocket's holes do, especially since it lets rain in and the Pokemon that inhabit the cave are weak against water.
- The 'wild' Officer Jenny and her bowling balls...Pure lunacy.
- Among the themes in Howls Moving Castle is What A Senseless Waste Of Human Life on the part of Howl, contrasted by his technically being soulless; for this and his pacifist neutrality on the massive war he is considered a threat by his mentor the witch Madame Suliman. She is prosecuting the war on her side by having lesser wizards transformed into War Magicians, flying monsters who will be forever trapped in the toad-like forms, and stripping the powers of those witches or wizards who refuse. (Though admittedly, the Witch Calamity had it coming). Despite this she's a Karma Houdini by the movie's end, happily calling off the war once the missing prince is found.
- Gundam Wing, Gundam Seed and Gundam00: While it is to be expected in any anti-war anime with humongous mecha due to inevitable glorification of fighting, the moral dissonance in these series is more noticeable than most.
- Several times, especially in Gundam 00, the hypocrisy is pointed out, even by main characters themselves. They do nothing to change their ways after that, though.
- Gundam 00's side stories, 00P and 00F, add an extra dimension: Celestial Being is in the habit of forcing criminals who don't believe in their ideals to work for them, by strapping bombs to their necks that will be detonated if they don't obey. Apparently this has worked quite well for them. one of these forced recruits even ends up marrying one of the willing members; the two of them are the parents of one of the Bridge Bunnies from the main series.
- Gundam0080 subverts this: its main character is a young boy who idolizes mecha and thinks war is cool - until he experiences it firsthand. There is a Humongous Mecha fight, but given that the fight is between a state of the art Gundam with an experienced pilot and a battered Zaku piloted by a rookie, it's more of a massacre.
- In the first Yes! Precure 5 movie, Defeat Means Friendship for one of The Psycho Rangers — the hero's — and death to the rest. Granted, Lemonade was pleading even to the end for her counterpart to turn to the side of good, and Mint tried to apologize to hers when she defeated her and was horrified to find that the wound was fatal, but there's no excuse for Rouge and Aqua not to have at least tried.
- Intentionally invoked in Code Geass. Main character Lelouch leads a rebellion against a corrupt society with the intention of creating a better world, but along the way his morals, (and arguably motives) start slipping.
- The same goes for Suzaku, who constantly laments and blames Zero for taking innocent lives, yet has no qualms with blowing up unarmed people because Britannian officials tell him to (he even indirectly acknowledges that he only considers killing murder if there isn't some sort of state sanction). Despite his speeches about how he'll change Britannia's genocidal ways from within, he makes absolutely no visible effort to enact any real change, merely going along with the ideas of others.
- Though around episode 19 of season two, amusingly enough, Lelouch and Suzaku seem to switch ideals and decide that the other one may have been right all along. Then they take over the world together, apparently after having admitted to themselves, each other, and CC that they were both complete hypocrites and overall terrible people, and getting over it. Which is why Zero Requiem is a punishment for both of them.
- The Black Knights, particularly Ohgi, fall victim to this when they fall for both logical and moral incongruities put forth by Schneizel to turn them against Lelouch. Ohgi, despite a near-rabid opinion that people should not be treated as pawns, nevertheless allows himself and the others to be manipulated by Schneizel in order to get rid of Lelouch. He probably thought of it as choosing the lesser of two evils. In the same scenario, Villetta Nu, while acting out of concern for Ohgi, leaves out a number of details (that she may or may not even have been aware of herself, given that it's likely all her information on it came from Emperor Charles and who knows how honest he was with her) that would have cast a favorable light on Lelouch, namely the limitations of said power, thereby needlessly (or maliciously) hurting the latter's case.
- On top of that, Ohgi uses Kallen as a pawn to draw out Lelouch, who he intends to sell out to Schneizel, as a pawn no less, in exchange for Japan. Not to mention that for all the complaints of Lelouch going AWOL during the Black Rebellion, Ohgi did the same a few episodes before the current predicament here on account of Villetta. Speaking of which, one of the charges brought against Lelouch is not only that he's a Britannian Prince, even though no one takes issue with Ohgi's tryst with Villetta, a Britannian agent, one who had been monitoring Lelouch while he was captured no less, and that they were taking the advice of Schneizel, a current royal, and the most notorious one at that, whereas Lelouch had been in exile.
- In Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka attempts to drown herself while angsting about how Tamahome has been brainwashed by the villains. Not to make a general statement about the morality of suicide, but in this particular case, Miaka had already agreed to become the priestess and summon Konan's guardian god, thereby saving the kingdom. So if she had succeeded in killing herself, all of Konan would have been totally defenseless when the hypermilitant enemy kingdom next door summoned their god, invaded, and started massacring Konan civilians (which Miaka knew perfectly well they were planning to do). You might think at least one person would be a little cheesed off on behalf of the potentially dead innocents - such as, oh, their Emperor - but nobody is.
- In the same episode, the team healer Mitsukake fails triage forever. Miaka has a broken arm, while Tasuki has suffered a nearly-fatal beating from the villains. Mitsukake uses up all of his Healing Hands mojo fixing Miaka's arm, then tells Tasuki tough luck and uses old-fashioned splints and bandages. When Tasuki complains, they pretty much tell him to quit whining, although admittedly by this point Comedic Sociopathy has kicked in.
- Although it should be noted that as far as they know at least, they needed all the Seven Stars to summon the God in the first place. Miaka is utterly useless to Kanon without her companions.
- In InuYasha, Sango is a demon-slayer who has been in training since she was a child, while Miroku, lecher that he is, is still a legitimate Buddhist monk with genuine holy powers. The series also treats soul eating as the mark of a truly monstrous opponents. Kikyo is a clay revenant animated by vague memories and burning hatred of Inuyasha who must eat souls to stay alive. How do Sango and Miroku react? They get annoyed that Inuyasha keeps running back to his undead flame and hurting Kagome, who is in love with the half-demon. They otherwise have no problems with her whatsoever, despite the fact that their training means they should be out to destroy her and send her back to the underworld.
- That may be a case of Our Souls Are Different. They make it clear later during the Mouryoumaru arc that souls have two parts: one that grants will and one that grants life. The portion of Kikyou's soul that grants will is the tiny fragment of Kagome's that's left there, so its possible that all she's absorbing is the part that grants life, which they seemed more curious about than horrified when it was their secondary Big Bad that was doing it, especially as Kikyo was only taking it from people that had already passed on.
- In One Piece, in order to rescue his brother Ace from the great prison of Impel Down, Luffy helps 241 other prisoners escape, many of whom are pirates and murderers, and the only one he's concerned about freeing (Crocodile) happens to be a personal enemy of his. Hannyabal calls him out on it, but he doesn't seem to care. What makes it worse is by the time he reaches Ace, he's already been taken to Marine Headquarters.
- Well he IS a pirate you know. While he may not pillage, plunder, and rape, he pretty much states he does what he wants where he wants when he wants and to hell with the law if it gets in his way.
- And to be fair, after experiencing the tortures of Impel Down, most of the prisoners seemed to want nothing more than to just go home and live in peace. At least until Buggy manages to wrangle them into following him.
- A lot of the dissonance in One Piece actually seems to be a result of the entire world running off of a Sorting Algorithm Of Evil involving the reward for said criminals. If the most evil ruthless mofos in the series do not do much 'pirating' then they tend to be passed up by everyone.
- Also, Impel Down is basically a huge torture dungeon and many of the marines are either ruthless zealots or as sadistic and corrupt as the pirates they hunt. So Your Mileage May Vary if destroying Impel Down isn't a good act in itself, because the criminals are the lesser evil.
- Witch Hunter Robin: A doctor has the power to transfer diseases from one person to another, and when he and his colleague decide they can't save a patient's life by mundane means, they find someone they deem to deserve life less, usually some crook or gangster. The titular main character tells the doctor that he doesn't have the right to decide who lives and who dies, but doesn't seem to realize that by stopping the doctor she effectively does exactly the same, except that she chooses the lives of criminals over the lives of innocents.
- Amakawa Yuuto from Omamori Himari is just a normal guy...only he's actually the last heir to one of the most powerful demon hunting clans in Japan, so powerful that the other demon hunting clans as well as government groups want him under their thumb. He opposes their influences because he disagrees with their "kill on sight" attitude towards demons, instead wishing that humans and demons live together in peace. His solution: do nothing. If someone attacks the demons he's currently living with he'll step up to defend them, but demons eating travelers in the mountains and inciting increasingly punitive reprisals from the demon hunting clans isn't his problem.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. In episode 8, Nanoha throws herself in the way of a rather minor attack directed at Fate. In episode 11, she hits a defenseless Fate with a Wave Motion Gun.
Comic Books
- Batman's refusal to kill the Joker is a product of his code against killing, the writers wanting to send a message to the readers and other superheroes about not killing, and more pragmatically DC wanting to keep his core rogues gallery intact. However, to the average citizen of Gotham this makes no sense since it's a proven fact the Joker is incurable and will kill more people as soon he breaks out of his Cardboard Prison. There are numerous sound reasons why Batman himself doesn't (crossing a moral/ethical line, losing the police's tolerance, it's more fun to hurt people than kill them, etc.) but few about why nobody else has tried to.
- In the backstory for Kingdom Come, the Joker breaks into the Daily Planet and slaughters the staff, with a very heavy implication that he tortured Lois Lane to death. An enraged Superman hauls the Joker into jail for murder. He's acquitted, but then the far more morally ambiguous Magog shows up and kills the Joker outright. The public overwhelmingly supports what he did, Superman abandons humanity in disillusionment, and a new generation of superheroes grows up learning that it's okay to kill somebody if you think they're a bad guy (some of which, it is heavily implied and outright stated in various out-of-story media, being inspired by the Joker himself)... things get worse from there. Of course, the slippery slope nature of that example is very pronounced and the problem of heroes leaving the Joker alive remains extremely troubling to comics fandom.
- The Joker actually was put to death once, but he managed to fake being electrocuted. Since he had already technically "served his sentence", the police couldn't touch him (although it’s debatable how legally sound that is, given that Francis v. Resweber this 1947 Supreme Court Case
 '' gives the prison legal authority to retry a failed execution). Another time, he was scheduled to be put to death, but he didn't actually do the crime he was accused of. Guess who bailed him out of that one...
- This isn't limited to Joker. Mr. Zsasz, a man with a psychological need to kill, is never put down. Despite the fact that he's, in a way, more dangerous than the Joker, since his ploys are never planned to be not lethal.
- Hang on, hang on. This is a false dilemma, the alternatives here aren't just killing him or suffer the consequences of an incurable Joker (which is a debate in itself); you could always Take A Third Option such as fixing the Cardboard Prison or even go to greater, if morally questionable extremes, such as using the Phantom Zone or something.
- Doesn't work that way. In comics EVERY prison, up to and ''including'' death, is cardboard. Blackest Night, in fact, lampshades this fact. The simple fact of the matter is, the DC/Marvel Universe is just royally screwed, because there's no way to get rid of villains forever.
- Unless, of course, you're a villain who wouldn't hurt a fly. Or would fail miserably attempting the act. Just look at this list of Marvel's way of cleaning house and note how pitiful most of them are. Some of them were even going straight at the time they were killed! But at least you leave SOME sort of legacy behind, in the DC universe, if you're too unimportant to be revived, a Crossover Crisis storyline just rubs you out of existence. What the hell, man! Especially troubling, the example directly below this one...Zsasz is far and away much more of an uncontrollable monster with an insatiable bloodlust, yet still counts as 'human.'
- Batman also has no qualms with killing Dracula in The Batman crossover film (or Red Rain crossover comic) or with blowing away Aliens in another crossover. What Measure Is A Non Human applies to Batman's moral code as well, apparently. Though Dracula comes Back From The Dead so many times that death is equal to a stint in Arkham for him anyway, this argument isn't used, and Batman justifies offing him simply by the fact that he's a 'monster', though his "crime" is hardly worse than even this series' comparatively tame version of Joker tries in every episode he's featured in. Of course, Dracula is also a vampire, and in most variations on the vampire mythos vampires technically are medically dead anyway (no heartbeat, no pulse, no breathing, nothing), thus making this a tricky example.
- There was in JLA Classified where Batman threatens Gorilla Grodd with "My code doesn't apply to apes, Grodd." and "I've killed apes before. Don't tempt me." Plus, he seems to have little hesitation against using deadly tactics on a rogue Superman or Martian Manhunter (but this might be justified by the sheer severity of the threat—think a sentient reusable nuke and you've just about got a small idea of the tiniest fraction of Superman's considerable power)
- What gets this troper is the fact that every time Brainiac shows up, Superman always states how "my code against killing doesn't apply to machines". This despite the fact that Brainiac is portrayed as anywhere from all but sentient to perhaps more sentient than humans, depending on the writer, and Superman knows other so-called machines who are treated as being basically human. This gets really stupid in JLA: Earth 2, when Superman trots out the above line, when facing the alternate universe Brainiac but stops himself when it turns out that rather than an advanced AI, this universe's version of Brainiac is an "organic syntellect"—either way, it's still an artificial life form, and the only difference is what it's made of.
- Again, it hardly matters, as it is self aware and doesn't want to die. Killing is killing. Besides, The Joker is nowhere near as powerful as the Martian Manhunter, but is he that much less dangerous? Bats needs to stop saying he doesn't kill, or live up to his words. Right now he is a liar.
- An Authors Saving Throw later revealed that none of those Brainiacs are the real one; the real Brainiac is a Cosmic Horror, who Superman doesn't kill (though he really wanted to).
- In the Silver Age, Superman did sometimes make exceptions for dangerous inorganic or artificial beings. He destroyed the very first Bizarro Superboy, but readers complained (and rightly so), so when the adult Bizarro was created, he claimed that he possessed the memories of the original Bizarro and resented having been destroyed; from that point on, Superman treated the Bizarros as living beings with rights. Another example was the monstrously powerful Cosmic Horror cloud creature Urko the Terrible, which Superman allowed to be consumed by a star before it could reach Earth.
- The DCAU however does show what it'll take to get Superman to kill, as he attempts to off Darkseid at least twice. The first time he he gives the broken body to Darkseid's slaves and is disappointed that they won't finish the job. Second time Luthor does the job for him.
- Three times if you count the fight in "Destroyer" the third time. Not to mention that in "Twilight of the Gods", Superman actually did kill Darkseid by preventing him from escaping the exploding Brainiac asteroid, though he wasn't able to confirm it. Luthor brought him back.
- Luthor also calls Superman out on his refusal to kill in the DCAU. The twist is Alternate Universe President Lex twists the knife at exactly the wrong moment, consider that he has apparently just killed Superman's friend and all-around good guy The Flash in a particularly heinous way. Superman incinerates him (with Batman's approval!), and it is shown to be in no uncertain terms to be the moment where Superman Crosses The Line, loses his faith in the humanity that has elected Lex to be their leader, and sets out to become a fascist protector/overlord].
- Wonder Woman has a different take on this problem, as when Superman, Batman and the rest of the Justice League were discussing the treatment of Dr. Light (had his mind wiped to forget him committing a rather heinous crime) Superman was at a loss to see what else they could have done. Wonder Woman replies simply with, you should have killed him. Supes and Bats are horrified and she explains, Dr. Light is a monster and she's killed those before, the fact that he's in the shape of a man shouldn't matter in the long run. She says this while she was blind after a fight with Medusa that had been broadcast on live television (remember that) and had ended said fight by decapitating the monster and was hailed a hero for it. It's brought up again later, once Diana killed Maxwell Lord (he had control of Superman and wouldn't stop using him for evil until Max was dead) and the act was, again, broadcast on TV. Diana defends her actions in the same way, but is warned people are afraid of her now, because for all he was a monster, Max looked like everyone else, which is an example of in-universe Moral Dissonance right there.
- Doubly so, in-universe, in that both Bruce and Clark refuse to give Diana the benefit of the doubt, despite being there (hence knowing the circumstances) and being her closest friends among the DC heroes (perhaps bar Donna Troy). Clark wonders if she couldn't have found another way - even though such an option probably would've involved killing or crippling him and Bruce outright condemns the act.
- Bruce at least is not being values dissonant — he is judging Diana by the exact same standard he'd have used for himself, if he were stuck in the same situation. Bruce always believes you can Take A Third Option.
- Considering Superman's kryptonian technology, and how it brought him back from the brink of death against Doomsday...yea, they're justified, somewhat. Diana just made the mistake of applying the exact same solution to two very different problems.
- And then there's the now-infamous example of the Flash, who caught Bart Allen's evil clone and killer, Inertia. He can't bring himself to kill him, so he instead uses his speed-stealing powers to turn Inertia into a living statue, still conscious and aware but completely immobile, and sticks him in the Flash Museum to stare at pictures of Bart for eternity, explicitly acknowledging that this was worse than simply killing Inertia.
- To be fair, Wally had every intention of finishing off Inertia to avenge Bart's death. He just couldn't bring himself to actually kill someone who looked just like Bart at the moment of truth. So he did something worse. It's clearly an act of revenge rather than justice, and Inertia really had it coming.
- During the Civil War in the Marvel Universe, long-standing "good guys" such as Tony Stark and Reed Richards apparently hunted their friends down with the help of supervillains, put them in secret prisons without trial, made mindless clones of gods operated by remote control, and conscripted teenagers to fight for the government(among other things), all on the idea that superheroes should be held accountable for their actions...yeah.
- Also note that after Bill Foster is killed by their out-of-control Thor cyborg, no one on the pro-registration side is prosecuted, or even investigated, for this case of manslaughter. Law enforcement officers have to undergo shooting review boards every time they so much as fire their weapons (hell, some jurisdictions make cops file paperwork formally justifying their actions every time they so much as draw their piece), and yet the pro-regs have a shooting incident involving a wrongful death and no one so much as spends 60 seconds talking to whatever they use for an Internal Affairs department, if anything. Apparently "accountability" is for other people.
- It gets better. See, the Civil War was about people actively engaged in superheroics. If you chose to refrain from doing anything superheroic, they couldn't touch you (legally anyway, not that that would have stopped them). After the Civil War was over (Tony won), Tony tracked down Ares (the Greek god of war), who was attempting to lead a normal life as a carpenter so that his son could have a shot at a real childhood. Tony bullies (read: threatens to kill him) Ares into joining the Avengers and Ares' son, Alexander, is forcibly conscripted into Nick Fury's Secret Warriors. Good times, huh?
- Most absurd version of this (that didn't actually happen if Joe Quesada knows what's good for him)? Spider-man makes a deal with Mephisto. You, know, big demon guy? Makes deals with people and then screws them over? The deal in question? He wipes his and his wife's minds, aborting their unborn baby in the process, just so his aunt who, even in terms of comic book aging is older than the Bill of Rights, can recover from a gunshot wound to live for a couple more years before finally kicking the bucket. And to add insult to injury, she only got shot in the first place because Spidey revealed his true identity to the public, making the exact scenario he has been harping about for bloody years as to why he specifically shouldn't take off his mask. In other words, Aunt May was shot because of Peter's mistake and he's unwilling to take responsibility for his actions. And we're meant to think this act is heroic somehow. Yes, before you ask, Joe Quesada is a moron.
- In the Mercury Falling storyline in New X-Men, Emma Frost manages to catch Kimura, a Psycho For Hire who can't be killed, after she captured one of Frost's students and handed her over to evil scientists to experiment on. Emma's method of punishment is to telepathically remove the memory of the only person who was ever kind to Kimura (her grandmother) from her mind. Emma then leaves her in a field. Theoretically, this would make Kimura even more evil. We don't find out though, because in her next appearance Kimura briefly mentions that she had Emma's brainwashing undone.
- Subverted hard in The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe a short one-shot, alternate history in which a group of innocent civilians who were maimed or lost loved ones because of the collateral damage effect of super "hero" battles contract out the Punisher to kill ALL SUPERHEROES. And this story RULED.
- At least until the last bit, where Frank becomes disillusioned with the entire concept and calls out the people who'd hired him, but decides to finish one last mission by killing Daredevil. This trope smacks him in the face hard when the mask comes off and reveals Matt Murdock, his best friend and a man who'd always put a lot of effort into helping people as a civilian as well as in a costume. Frank then kills himself.
- The impact of the story is somewhat lessened with the nuking part, though...roughly half of the guys tricked into going to the Moon COULD survive a nuke. One wonders what the aftermath of Juggernaut returning was. If we survived the impact anyway.
- Fabletown law can basically be summed up like this. It's okay to go around killing innocent mundies, but if you so much as reveal your true nature to even one mundy you suffer capital punishment, no matter what your intentions are.
- Could be closer to Values Dissonance, since modern moral character was in rather short supply when most of the Fables were created. They're not so much being hypocrites about morals as they are adhering to the morals usually enacted in fairy tales.
- It doesn't take a legal expert to realize the number of crimes Hal Jordon (the white Green Lantern) committed (after encouragement from John Stewert, the black Green Lantern, a crime in itself) in Action Comics Weekly #601, but Bob Ingersoll does it anyways.
- I haven't read the story since it first came out, if then, but according to that column the number is "one". It's just a somewhat serious and - maybe more importantly - stupid and unnecessary one.
- Rorschach in Watchmen has some serious problems in this regard, which may be intentionally ironic as he sees things in terms of black-and-white good and evil. He severely punishes rapists and murderers, and yet idolizes The Comedian, who is essentially a rapist and murderer on the side of the "good guys."
Disney
- The "Beautiful Enchantress" in the beginning of Disney's Beauty and the Beast not only punished the Beast for not providing sanctuary to what seemed to be a beggar woman, but also his subjects. If the Beast couldn't get someone to love him, then innocents like Chip and Mrs. Potts would be cursed to be animated tableware forever. Interestingly, the stage version has Cogsworth and Lumiere reflecting on the unfairness of the situation, and in the second Kingdom Hearts, Sora also observes this.
Film
- Subverted in The Man In The Iron Mask, when one of the main characters tells his Musketeers fighting the Cardinal's troops, "Try not to kill them if you don't have to". The aftermath only shows a handful of dead henchmen. Is this compassion for Mooks?
- It has more to do with the fact that the four guys with the guns had previously served and fought in the unit they were up against. Hell, one guy even used to be the commander, so naturally they have some hesitation at deliberately killing their opponents; quite a few might have once been their friends.
- In Legally Blonde, Elle's client Brooke is revealed to actually have an airtight alibi for the crime she is accused of—she was having a liposuction procedure done to her at the time of the crime. Problem is that she's made a fortune off of selling a fitness regimen, and such a disclosure would promptly undermine public confidence in her product. Where the dissonance comes in is that Elle is completely and unambiguously understanding of Brooke's desire to hide this information—not in the sense of a lawyer so much as "she's a member of the same sorority as me!", as she doesn't inform the rest of the legal team about the existence of this exonerating evidence. While Brooke is definitely innocent of murder, it's still a bit unnerving that this wealthy woman could have put a stop to this wild goose chase a long time ago—except that she didn't want to stop making bucketloads of money.
- This gets worse when Fridge Logic sets in—had she told the prosecutor about the alibi discreetly before the movie even happened, chances are she never would have been brought to trial in the first place and the district attorney could have solved this case without the fortunate intervention of Elle Woods. And Brooke still would have kept making bucketloads of money.
- The Bourne Supremacy — this troper is not the only one to wonder why Jason Bourne's life was necessarily more important than those of the dozens of innocents killed or maimed in the climactic car-chase.
- What really rubs your face in it is that the more the character angsts about not wanting to be a murderer anymore, the more the movies also ramp up the action sequences that mean certain maiming and/or death for innocent bystanders. The pity of it is, the much more careful car chases and action scenes of the first movie were pretty awesome. There was no reason to go all over the top with the mayhem. (Although to be fair we don't really see anyone die in the car chase, there certainly had to be some serious injuries.)
- Damon did not allow his image to be used in the Bourne video game when he learned that it was a Beat Em Up and not a cerebral Adventure Game, on the grounds that it condoned violence and his mother was an anti-violence activist. So it's okay to stab people with pens in a movie, but not in a video game?
- Godzilla is contractually obliged to destroy at least one city per movie. However, past the first few movies the people of Earth seem to regard Godzilla as a giant guardian/friend and ignore the damage he does even when he's not trying to stop an even larger threat.
- When Godzilla 1985 gave the series a Continuity Reboot, the whole Black And Grey Morality thing was intentionally cranked, with awesome results.
- In the intentionally campy dub of Godzilla 2000, the annoying girl asks her scientist father why Godzilla saves them when all humans do is try to kill him. As she says this, Godzilla spins around 360 degrees, burning everything around him with his atomic breath.
- It could be taken to mean that Godzilla considers this his world to destroy, and he simply won't tolerate other monsters stepping in on his territory.
- Wait...what? Godzilla is destroying the city due to his hatred of humanity. He knows its human-made atomic bombs that mutated him into a radioactive abomination and so he wants revenge. It's more along the lines of a "Nobody destroys humanity except for me." when it comes to fighting other monsters. In Movie-Japan's eyes, Godzilla is the LESSER of two evils since they already know what he's capable of especially when compared to any unknown evil alien forces (IE: Ghidorah, Orga, Hedorah, etc.).
- Likewise, in several Godzilla films (Particularly the Heisei era and a few Millennium films) in which Godzilla is more along the lines of an Anti Hero or Neutral Evil, the citizens of Japan are torn between whether they should let Godzilla live and study him (Since he "saves" them from more dangerous monsters) or outright destroy him (He does tend to smash their cities after all...and kill countless millions in the process). In the later Showa Era, in which he's regarded more as a "hero", his battles against other monsters no longer take place in major cities...but on small uninhabited islands, or in the wilderness far away from civilization.
- In The Matrix there's the massive disregard for life in general Neo shows in the second film. Not only does he at least consider choosing Trinity's life over the life of everyone else in the world (and they tried to paint it as a selfless act of love), but that massive wave he causes in his ridiculously elaborate rush to catch her must have killed or maimed hundreds of people.
- This is entirely in keeping with the morals and values already established by the Resistance, though. "Until they are unplugged, they are the enemy." While the heroic nature of this is debatable, it's also specifically spelled out that Neo is different from the previous Chosen Ones specifically because he's willing to make that choice.
- Space Mutiny, in which a crippled villain offers to surrender, but instead, to quote Mike Nelson, "Our brave hero roasts the disabled man."
- 300. No matter how loudly you may bellow the name of your hometown, you do not kill the messenger. Even Genghis Khan knew that. Historically, the Spartans really did kill that poor messenger, but the film shouldn't have glorified it.
- Then again, given the Unreliable Narrator nature of it, it may be justified.
- The poor messenger? The one that came to their gates bearing the skulls of slaughtered kings? The one who made veiled threats of death and torture for failing to submit? The emissary of a violent invading force bringing slavery and death? Indeed, let us weep for him, despite the fact that "Don't kill the messenger" is just treated as a given instead of some sacred pact and has been for about a thousand years. Weep. Weep dammit.
- This troper feels the messenger part was not, by far, the biggest offender. "A new age has begun! An age of freedom!" The freedom to kill any baby that is imperfect. The freedom to take all children away from their mothers so we can train them as super soldiers. The freedom to kill wounded Mooks who are pleading for mercy, and which, as you say yourself, are merely slaves forced to fight for the other guy, while having small talk with your comrades? I think I'll give dictatorship a try, thanks all the same.
- In both of the above examples, it's worth noting that this is probably quite intentional. The film consciously portrays the Spartans as a city of violent, hypocritical proto-fascists; as mentioned above, the fact that is glorified is in a large part due to the Unreliable Narrator, with a big dollop of Rule Of Cool thrown in for good measure.
- In The Lookout, the protagonist, Chris, having overcome impossible odds to save his friend and guardian from a gang of ne'er-do-wells, kicks the inhaler of the last dying kidnapper just out of reach, and Word Of God says the guy ends up dying from loss of blood. Was that really necessary? It's not like he was capable of doing anyone harm anymore.
- In Street Fighter The Legend Of Chun Li: Bison allows Chun-Li to be reunited with her long-missing father... just so she can watch up close as Bison snaps his neck. She returns the favor at the climax when she breaks Bison's neck in full view of Bison's completely innocent daughter. And after she had him down and beaten, at that. Nice message, movie!
- In Batman Begins, while in the temple of the League of Shadows, Ra's al Ghul or so we think tries to force Bruce Wayne (not yet Batman) into executing a criminal; he refuses because he values human life. He then proceeds to burn the entire temple down, potentially killing hundreds of ninjas in the process (not to mention the criminal himself, who is still in a cage at the time).
- Not to mention that (albeit in a case of bad luck), the one ninja he does save is the real Ra's al Ghul.
- Actually, although it is possible a few may have been killed, we later see all of the ninjas whose faces were seen in Gotham, at Wayne Manor, at the climax. Also, the video-game adaptation shows the criminal survived (and he wasn't in a cage at the time), his hands were bound and he had been forced onto his knees).
- Near the end of the film, Batman claims that he will not kill the real Ra's al Ghul despite the fact that he has clearly set him up to die and does not save him nobody calls him out on this.
- Except that its made clear that its entirely Ra's fault he's in that situation to begin with.
- Not to mention that He's a ninja and he helped trained Batman to be as awesome as he is. He could have survived if he tried to but instead just accepted death.
- In The Dark Knight, Batman refuses to kill the Joker, but has no problem smashing up dozens of police cars. Nobody in either movie seems to realize that those cars contain real people who aren't even guilty of anything other than trying to protect the city. The closest anybody comes to calling Bruce out is when Alfred accuses him of "thrill seeking."
- This is probably because the police in those cars are likely not dead. Police cars are generally strong enough to take major hits and keep the occupants alive. In fact, real life police men will, when necessary, use their own cars, while they are driving them, as weapons to stop dangerous suspects/criminals. Batman's logic (albeit extreme) is that the less-than-likely chance of a police officer's death from a collision shouldn't prevent him from taking the most efficient means to stop the Joker (who will with 100% certainty, cause massive casualties - the variable is exactly how many, and that variable grows with each passing second).
- Alfred does indeed mention that none of the police were killed.
- In Warriors Of Virtue, young Ryan is pulled into the mystical world of Tao and taught the importance of living with virtue. Upon returning home, he demonstrates this by abandoning Jerk Jock Brad in the Treatment Plant, trapped behind a torrent of water and screaming for help. And he's smiling the whole time, while their friends mock and belittle Brad while walking away. Yeah, real virtuous.
- No crap. Especially since the Warriors found it in their hearts forgive the guy who declared war on them and callously destroyed their ecosystem.
- I remember that movie, and only hope it was intentionally lampshading something.
- In First Knight, Lancelot rescues Guinevere by suggesting to the nameless evil dude who's holding her that they can both rape her. "I'll hold her for you, you hold her for me." He gets the guy to turn Guinevere around to look at her, so she can stab him. Cool. Then, as they're riding away, he calls her pretty; she's offended, so he grabs and kisses her to prove that that was nothing. Then he follows her around for a while hitting on her, saying he can tell when a woman wants him, etc. This is all treated as fine, of course, because secretly she does want him back, just as his spidey senses are telling him even as she vehemently denies it. Moral of the story: If you're a "good guy" and you're horny, treat her however you want. You're entitled. It's only that other kind of guy who would ever sexually assault someone, so what you're doing must be romantic instead of totally wrong and creepy.
- So hitting on someone excessive is morally equivalent to kidnapping her?
- Not totally equivalent, but it's still the same mentality that you're entitled to a woman no matter how much she says she's not interested.
- I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the kicker of this part yet; she was scheduled to be married to King Arthur (who she apparently did have some feelings for, as well as Lancelot).
- In the 1994 film version of The Shadow, the villain, Shiwan Khan, uses his powers to have people kill themselves. Three times (the first two in an attempt to cover his tracks, the third because he made fun of his clothing.) Lamont even figures out that he was behind the first incident when Shiwan pays a visit to the Sanctum, and possibly realized how he did it. Aaand then he later uses his powers to do the same with henchman Farley Claymore, making him jump through what he thinks is an exit, but is really a glass window overlooking the hotel lobby three stories up.
- Why does the Shadow know what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Because, in the movie at least, he used to be a Chaotic Evil Evil Overlord.
- The Lion King. Seriously, the Hyenas just want to eat, and that makes them villains. What does Scar offer them? To keep them from starving to death. Because Mufasa wouldn't let them eat anything. The jerk. Small wonder they're holding a grudge.
- "Everything has its place in the Circle Of Life"... yeah, try not to think about that too hard, otherwise you'll start wondering why the "right" place for hyenas is in a desolate wasteland while everyone else lives in a bountiful greenland.
- Well, we all saw what would happen if the Hyenas were allowed to live in the greenland... it wouldn't be pretty.
- The pridelands turn into a barren wasteland because there has been no rain and the prey animals have all left. They weren't overeaten. Scar simply refuses to leave 'his' territory.
- The subtext is actually pretty accurate. Lions are huge dicks towards hyenas, who actually scavenge less than lions do.
- Princess is a Danish animated film about a missionary who goes on a Punisher-style rampage after his famous porn-star sister dies and her studio continues to exploit her image. Aside from the obvious dissonance of the premise, much of the story focuses on him tenderly caring for his sister's young daughter, Mia, who has suffered emotional and mental damage because of her exposure to the porn industry. When he finds out that one reason Mia is so damaged is because her mother's manager molested her, he takes her to the man's house, has her watch as he beats him to a bloody pulp, and then hands her a crowbar which she takes first to the man's crotch, then to his head. Did I mention that she's about five? Way to fix her psychological issues, guy.
- Star Wars episodes II & III. The Jedi, the good guys of the Star Wars universe, using an army of mass-produced living slaves as cannon fodder for a war in which the soldiers have no stake. No frickking wonder the troopers were willing to slaughter them when the time came. Sheesh.
- The Jedi had no choice. The Republic chose to use the Clones and the Jedi had to fight to stop the Sith. As the source materials show, the Jedi treat the clones as full human beings and valued friends, many preserving the clones' lives at every turn and some giving up their own lives for them. The clones were 'willing' to slaughter them as order 66 had been hardwired into their brains.
- Speaking of Star Wars, Qui Gon of the Episode One performs some very questionable acts. See 1:33 in this review.
Literature
- Charlie And The Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka has no problem with imprisoning an entire race of people in one large building as long as they are paid with the food substance they have a drug like addiction too. Even worse when you consider the Oompa-Loompas were originally pygmies from Africa until Moral Guardians forced Roald Dahl to rewrite that bit. To say nothing about the judgment he lays on spoiled 10-year-old kids whose only crime is being too greedy or too cynical. This is Roald Dahl, after all.
- This might not be Moral Dissonance if you consider that Wonka is just a dick.
- The Gallager Girls series, which is all about the fun of going to a school where teen girls learn how to kill and spy for the U.S. government, left this troper with moral whiplash.
- In Blind Faith, Ben Elton falls into the Most Writers Are Male trap when he tries to make a feminist point. The Temple are sexist because they demand that woman shave their body hair and get breast implants. Elton tries to counter this with his main character, but instead of talking about women being able to do what they want with their bodies, there's just endless whining about pubic hair being sexier and shaved women looking like little girls. So, Trafford and the Temple agree on women only being there to please men; they just have different prejudices. If Trafford was otherwise portrayed as a product of his culture, it wouldn't be so dissonant, but he's really not.
- Piers Anthony's Xanth series is full of this trope, largely due to the prevailing theme (of all Anthony's works, really) that a man's word is his bond is his all. Even when that word isn't actually his. Example: in Man From Mundania, Grey Murphy agrees to honor the pact his parents made with the evil construct Com Pewter to become his slave (a pact they made with the expectation of never setting foot in Xanth again). Rather than simply telling Com Pewter to stick it, his solution? Re-write the clearly sentient Com Pewter's memory so that he agrees to void the pact. So going back on your (parents') word? Bad. Forcibly rewriting the brain of the other party so that he does? Thumbs up!
- Breaking Dawn: Bella and Edward's halfbreed spawn simply must be saved from the Volturi (vampire court). So they start gathering vampires from all over the world to stay with them and to serve as witnesses that Renesmee is a halfbreed and not a vampire child. Yet they don't make an effort to get the vampires to stop killing humans during their stay. In fact the Cullens lend them their cars so they can commit murder in a more widespread area. The Cullens have an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality about it but just think how many people were murdered in the Washington state area because of them.
- The entire series has this little quirk. The Cullens don't eat humans, but they don't stop any other vampires from doing the same. The only humans they ever care about are Bella, anyone Bella wants to live, and anyone in Forks—only so they won't be kicked out if too many people end up dead.
- Don't forget the first book's climax. Edward is too good and noble to kill James but his siblings sure aren't!
- Also, there is the fact that Bella is worth fighting for and dying for for the Cullens and all the werewolves, but the concept of fighting to stop the vampires from eating anyone else is ignored. Because nobody could ever be as perfect as Bella.
- In Dragonlance, the very leader of the White Wizards, the order stated as being aligned to the Gods of Good, permanently curses Raistlin and gives him "Eyes of Decay", for lack of a better title. Not only does he look like a freak due to having hourglass-shaped pupils, but everything he sees is crumbling and decaying as he watches, so he can't see a building, but only an ancient ruin, and living beings are nothing but ambulatory, talking, rotting corpses. This was intended to make him more compassionate- instead, it's implied that this only furthered his disassocation from humanity and pushed him towards his dreams of divine power. It's also implied that it was his decision to add an illusion of Raistlin's brother Caramon being a wizard of even greater power than Raistlin to The Test, which resulted in Raistlin jealously murdering his brother... an act that was witnessed by the real Caramon. Seriously, What is wrong with you?
- Well, the latter part was arguably added for the sake of both brothers - both to show Raistlin that he's not so much in control of his emotions as he thinks he is, and demonstrate how horrible person he can be in the wrong circumstances, and to demonstrate Caramon once and for all that his brother is capable of extreme acts of evil, and shouldn't be unconditionally obeyed and protected, something that Caramon had a hard time wrapping his mind around, and hopefully break their unhealthily codependent relationship - except that it resulted in almost exact opposite.
- In one of the Mr. Men books, Mr. Grumpy is tickled into being not so bad tempered. This was set in motion by Mr. Happy, who was on the receiving end of Mr. Grumpy's temper after coming into his garden without even asking permission, refusing to leave when told, and telling Mr. Grumpy to change his ways. It's no wonder Mr. Grumpy deliberately stepped on his foot.
- Granted, Mr. Happy should've asked to come in, but Mr. Grumpy kept on frightening the butcher, the baker and all the other Poor people half to death with his behavior. NO WONDER, Mr. Happy stood up, and told Mr. Grumpy to change his ways!
- The Sword Of Truth. Slaughtering a crowd of unarmed pacifist protesters, torturing an enemy soldier to death after he gave them the information, most everything explained in terms of Moral Clarity, Kahlan thanking the person who killed her half-brother... So Yeah.
- L. E. Modesitt's Spellsong Cycle has a double example. The magic system of Erda differentiates between "Clearsong" (which lets you control inorganic matter, and can be used as a formidable weapon) and "Darksong" (which lets you control organic matter, and allows you to control human minds) - you can use the former all day long without any averse effect other than eventual fatigue, but using the latter causes the universe to slap you down. Anna, the protagonist, considers Erda to be suffering from Moral Dissonance in that punishes her for using Darksong to turn bad people into good people, but it has no objections to letting her use Clearsong to turn living people into dead people. The reader, in turn, might find some Moral Dissonance in the fact that Anna hates killing her enemies but apparently sees nothing wrong with Mind Raping them into submission...
- Most of Robert A Heinlein's heroes. Stealing is wrong and thieves should be killed on the spot...unless it is the hero stealing something he needs, then the moral is if you are smart enough to not get caught it is ok. Indeed, all sorts of crimes tend to be excused if you are the hero, up to and including murder. But cut in line and you should be killed!
- Due to Values Dissonance, some stories of The Bible will seem like this to certain kind of modern readers, but the discussions are best left to the Bible's Apologists and Critics.
- One story, however, does deserve mention on that (and this troper is a believer), Sodom and Gomorrah. The townsfolk of Sodom demand to have sexual relations (in essence they want to rape) two male travellers with Lot (who were previously revealed to be angels), one of the events that finally forces God's hand into destroying the town over Lot's pleas to save the citizens for the presence of a few good people within. The problem is, that Lot's response is: "I beg you, my brothers, do not do this wicked thing. I have two daughters who have never had intercourse with men. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please." In essence he says "Don't rape these two men -- here are my virgin daughters, you can rape THEM if you leave the men alone."
- That was after the point where the deity was going to blam Sodom; the angels were visiting specifically to warn Lot to head for the hills, and fast. Given what his virgin daughters do later, there's more than enough Values Dissonance to go around, though.
- The same thing happens in Judges (19:22-30). In that case the man throws his concubine to the mob after denying them men. They gang-rape her to death. In the morning (because apparently rapists can only rape at night) the man finds her body at his doorstep where she's obviously been clawing at the door to get back in. He cuts it into twelve pieces and sends the pieces all over Israel.
- The Redwall series has some very, very unpleasant moments. Most of them aren't obvious to younger readers or in the first reading, but on a second reading they get very ugly. In the first book, it's outright stated that between a fifth and a third of Cluny's army, including every stoat, weasel, fox, and ferret, were recent 'recruits'. These beings had the choice of being press-ganged into the Horde or being killed (and it's hinted eaten). Now, the ones killed in battle can be excused somewhat, and the Abbey's defenders at least let the ones who run away run. Except they run into a very large cat and an even larger owl. The cat has sworn off any meat but fish, but the Owl has only said he won't eat mice and shrews. Yes. Normally this'd be a matter of Values Dissonance, since not taking prisoners was more common in the feudal ages, but the Abbey-dwellers show horror at rumors of Cluny's anthropophagism earlier in the series.
- Add in every time the badger — and it will be a badger — talks about no quarter given nor asked in the same book a character complains about how the vermin won't let them live. It's true, but no less Dissonance for it.
- And let's not forget when Constance, confronted with a fox willing to sell vital information to Abbey-dwellers, decides to trick and ambush and threaten the fox with death in exchange for the data rather than pay for it. But it's okay because she and her son used to steal things.
Live Action TV
- In the Master's first appearance in Doctor Who he's attempted to bring about an invasion of Earth which nearly succeeded, killing numerous people and nearly killing hundreds more... and after he escapes the Doctor chuckles and claims to be looking forward to a rematch with his arch-foe.
- The Daleks, thanks to Joker Immunity, are frequent receivers of this trope. Although used extensively in the new series, the first and most famous example is from the otherwise fantastic Genesis of the Daleks, where the Doctor refuses to kill the Daleks once and for all (by blowing up the breeding nursery for the then-new Dalek mutants). His justification for allowing the most murderous and literally evil creatures in existence to live? Some planets form alliances due to fear of the Daleks. One justification is that he couldn't commit genocide, even against the Daleks, but considering that he has compared the Daleks to a virus that would kill all life if it was released, this justification falls rather flat.
- "The Two Doctors" has the Doctor rant about how the Androgums are Always Chaotic Evil, how it's never possible to change one's nature to be good, how he doesn't consider an Androgum corpse to be a human body and how Androgums have a "pedigree" like animals instead of an ancestry, and generally about how Androgums are inferior beings because it's in their nature by being Androgums. It's a clumsy Writer On Board script about the evils of meat-eating, but if you just look at the Doctor's actions, he treats an entire race of beings in a way that starkly contrasts with his normal tendency to go to the opposite extremes of tolerance and forgiveness.
- His latest companion Donna calls him on these tendencies a lot in the newest series.
- Considering The Master always comes back, it's likely a sanity-saving disassociative move on Doc's part. Think of how OFTEN he's likely had to deal with trauma related to his frequent battles with The Master.
- In the last episode of series one of The Sarah Jane Adventures, Mr. Smith reveals that everything he's done preceding was a Xanatos Gambit to get Sarah Jane to trust him until he can destroy the earth. In response Sarah Jane erases his memory and forces him to serve her (and help save humanity every week).
- So she should have let him destroy the world instead, thus affirming her moral highground from a comfortable armchair in hell?
- Stargate Atlantis is probably the king of this trope. Let's start with the infamous retrovirus experiment. They turn a Wraith into an amnesiac human. He remembers who he is as he begins to revert and gets loose. Back home, his own people turn against him because he's tainted now and he winds up helping Atlantis use the retrovirus against other Wraith... just so long as Atlantis doesn't do it to him again, which would be like another form of death. Here's where it gets Dissonant: Our "Heroes" do exactly that, and by the end of the episode, try to nuke the colony of amnesiac Wraith once they stop taking the retrovirus and start remembering. Somehow, he's not too pleased with them lately, though his plans prove him to be just as bad, so we can't really root for him, either...
- Of course, if the SGA team hadn't betrayed him, he'd never have hatched said plans. This one's all their fault.
- The Asurans are a worse case. "Our Heroes" meet a group of sentient Artificial Humans, who are actually colonies of nanites. While not a Horde Of Alien Locusts like their SG-1 cousins, the Replicators, they do have jealousy towards humans due to being The Unfavourite of the Ancients, and violent tendencies left over from their days as combat 'bots makes some of them decide to attack humans, starting with Atlantis, and take off in their own Atlantis-esque flying city. Niam and some allies don't believe in leader Oberoth's attack, and help the Atlantis team with a program that will remove the violent programming. Well, once they stumble upon a way to paralyze the Asurans in the process, Our Heroes™ immediately abandon any plans of helping Niam, in favor of destroying the city and killing all of the hundreds of Asurans on it. They offer to take Niam with them, but not his allies. Somehow, the Asurans aren't too pleased with them lately, though their plans prove them to be just as bad, so we can't really root for them, either.
- It's actually even worse: The episode makes it quite clear that the Asurans were replicators created by the Ancients of the Pegasus galaxy for the sole purpose of killing the Wraith... basically, they were created as slaves and cannon-fodder. But they did not act aggressively towards the Atlantis team when they first met (until they heard the humans were from Atlantis). The Asurans didn't even try to hide the fact that they were replicators. Some of them merely wished to remove the "kill" programming from their source code and to that end asked the humans for help.... going so far as to give McKay access to their own source code and means to rewrite it!! In exchange for help, they could have given the Atlantis team exactly what Atlantis needed: new, charged ZPMs, because the Asurans still had the knowledge how to build them. So, here were have two species that both fight the Wraith. Instant allies, you think? Nothing a bit of diplomacy couldn't solve? Naa. Instead what happens? The team hatches a plan to steal ZPMs, to use McKay's access to the source code to paralyse the Asurans, to betray them and blow up their city. When the Asurans react pissed-off and decide to destroy Atlantis, the script was now free to label them evil aliens.
- Betrayal of sympathetic nanites is a tradition in the Stargate Verse. Carter sweet-talking Fifth only to time-freeze him and the other Replicators in the end wasn't the most heroic thing they could've done, though she admittedly did the last under orders and protested them.
- Making Fifth their enemy later came back to bite them, too.
- In "McKay and Mrs. Miller", they take the universe-threatening side effects of Project Arcturus and shove them into an Alternate Universe, effectively sending that reality to its doom. Talk about Somebody Elses Problem taken to the extreme. This actually can be considered evil.
- They actually discussed this problem, mentioning that life was such a rare phenomena that any given universe they shunt the side-effects into would have no life within range, and thus risks to other life was negligible. When they find out they are screwing over a universe much like their own, they do everything in their power (Including completely draining their own ZPM, the duplication of which was the point of Project Arcturus) to reverse what they had done. The Atlantis expedition has done things that are morally ambiguous on their face, this was just a major screw-up.
- The recent episode "Outsiders" involved a Wraith delegation threatening to cull a village unless they surrendered certain humans they were looking for. Present were the usual reasonable village leader, contrasted with others willing to sacrifice people / not trusting the heroes. Now, first we get lulled in with moral stuff like "Don't sacrifice some to save all". But what do our heroes (cut off from support) do later? Use one of the villagers who opposed them as bait so they can blow up the Wraith along with that person. Man, they are so lovable!
- Stargate SG-1 doesn't take it to quite the same level as Stargate Atlantis, but it isn't innocent, either:
- And then, the Anubis situation is a big example of the Ancients and their bizarre rules. They're already listed under Neglectful Precursors, but this one takes the cake: They ascend Anubis to their level. He turns out to be bad. They only descended him 'halfway' just to get back at Oma Desala. When he tried out his Kill Sat on Abydos and ascended-for-the-season Daniel tried to stop him, they yanked him out of there and descended him soon after for interfering with mortal affairs. Anubis wiped out Abydos... or did he? Turned out the entire civilization had been ascended...by Oma Desala, the one who ascended Daniel. (That's one effect of her "punishment" - as long as Anubis was still out there, she could ascend "lower" beings with impunity.) So, in short: letting one of your own stop one of your own from committing genocide: too much interference. Ascending entire planet? Not too much interference. Ooo-kay...
- The thing with all the Stargate examples is that most of them—particularly with Fifth, as well as, to an extent, the Michael ones—are intentionally portrayed as "wrong". Quite often they highlight that SG-1 and the crew of Atlantis are not true Superheroes, or Star Trek style 'enlightened' humans always on the side of right, but are normal human beings who are doing the best they can...to serve their own (or at least, national or planetary or species) interests. O'Neill gives a speech that says this exactly in 'The Fifth Race' episode.
- O'Neill gained a personal What The Hell Hero moment in season 6, when he claimed that double-crossing Fifth was perfectly okay because he wasn't human. The others (including the resident nonhuman, Teal'c) had the decency to look shocked, even if nothing was done about it in the end.
- Not completely true. Carter, Teal'c and Daniel were saying they had used and betrayed Fifth's "humanity" to escape, O'Neil simply pointed out that just because Fifth looked human, didn't mean he was. He was a replicator, and freeing him from the time bubble was a huge risk that shouldn't be taken.
- There was nothing Carter, Teal'c, and Daniel could do. They have to follow O'Neill's orders. They were completely cut off from all of Jack's superiors, so it wasn't like they could've called up Hammond. They were under a time crunch, so convincing him that what he was doing was wrong wasn't an option either. They did all they could do, which was portray the actual views of the series pretty clearly at the end of the episode (O'Neill did not win that argument) and make O'Neill feel guilty about it for rather a long time afterwards.
Sam: She [Replicator Carter] learned betrayal from Fifth, and he learned it from me.
- At one point, visiting an alternate universe, doesn't Teal'c go around killing people in his way without a care in the world, using the justification "our reality is the only one that matters"? (This was the "real" Teal'c, not an alternate universe's version, too.)
- He saved that version of Earth, so he may just have been trying to deal with the fact that he had to shoot that universe's version of himself.
- Plus, let's not forget that he did give that version of himself a chance to join them against the Goa'uld, and was called a traitor in response.
- Three words: the Prime Directive. In theory, it's Starfleet's, if not the Federation's, highest law, which any Starfleet officer must be willing to die for rather than violate. In practice, it's a law unless Kirk really, really disagrees with how the society is run. Society run by a computer? Shoot it, or tell it it's violating its own Prime Directive and hope it quietly shuts itself down instead of telling you you're violating yours and should go first. Simulated war, where people walk into disintegration chambers when their area is determined to have been "hit", so as to keep up the fight without destroying their cultural heritage? Fry the database so they'll have to either make real war or peace. Kirk took the Directive as a Prime Suggestion and never took any heat for it that we saw. Later series implied that the Prime Directive was relatively new at that point and that Kirk's "cowboy diplomacy" was usually too effective for Starfleet to protest.
- Vulcans tend to be remarkably quick in scolding humans for not bothering to understand other cultures... five seconds before scolding humans for not behaving exactly like Vulcans. This is especially evident in Enterprise, and although it would eventually be blamed on the differences in Vulcan thinking in the 100 years separating it from The Original Series, this sort of behavior isn't uncommon in the remaining series.
- Let's not forget how Star Trek The Next Generation preaches life is precious, yet simply puts on sad faces when an sentient race that can be saved is destroyed by natural causes since saving them would violate the Prime Directive. In the episode Homeward, when Nikolai Rozhenko illegally transports an pre-agricultural alien race into the Enterprise-D's virtual environment and asks the Captain to take them to another planet since the original is uninhabitable, he is treated as a trouble-making deviant.
- There's also that Season 2 episode Pen Pals in which the Enterprise is passing by a planet of early industrial tech level and while scanning the planet Data accidentally receives radio messages from a little girl who is calling for help, because her planet is being wracked by horrible earthquakes caused by Dilithium chain-reactions in the crust. Data asks Picard to intervene because otherwise everyone on the surface will surely die. Picard at first cites the Prime Directive that prevents him from interfering, although he himself is not happy with sitting there and watching. In the end, Picard and Data find a legal loophole by claiming that the radio messages constituted a call for help to outside civilizations, which allows the Enterprise to classify this as a humanitarian mission. And they find a way to stop the earthquakes without the natives down below noticing the presence of advanced "aliens" in orbit.
- Originally the Prime Directive was meant to help Starfleet captains make decisions, by providing them with guidelines about First Contacts (and when to avoid First Contacts, such as in cases when a culture has no own warp capabilities and does not yet know about the existence of other species). But it quickly turned into a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" trap.
- At least one episode says let the species die because their equivalent of Neanderthal are more advanced on the evolutionary ladder.
- The episode where they almost killed The Wesley not only broke the Prime Directive to save him from their laws, they broke it by visiting the place openly in the first place. You're not supposed to do shore leave on a planet populated by pre-warp.
- Warp isn't the only defining factor for who you can and can't contact. If a species has sub space communications they're good to talk to, and this species did, so it was perfectly ok.
- The episode makes a lot more sense if you interpret Picard's wringing over the Prime Directive issue as a means to get rid of Wesley...
- Hell, The Biology of Star Trek (which discusses what they got right and what they didn't) describes the Prime Directive as "like having a sign that says 'the speed limit will be enforced', without posting it or mentioning that the speed limit is whatever makes Officer Jean-Luc uncomfortable."
- There was one episode in season two of TNG where an alien race is dying out because they do not have enough different genetic material in their race of clones. The crew refuse to help them simply because they are all uncomfortable with the idea of there being 'more than one of me'. When, in their desperation, the race take DNA samples of Riker and Doctor Pulaski and make clones of them without permission, the two discover the room where their own clones are being grown and ruthlessly murder them all seemingly without a second thought. Despite the fact that Pulaski is a doctor, and the fact that they are effectively killing (for lack of a better term) their own defenceless siblings.
- Technically, since the clones were incomplete, it was more like abortion, but it's still plenty disturbing. One might also count this as at least somewhat in-character for Pulaski, as throughout her run on the show she is consistently portrayed as Dr Jerk (and let's not even get started about her attitude toward Data). She even mocked the clones by saying that they'd be dead in fifty years and the Federation would get a free colony out of it.
- Her 'mocking' was more part of Picard's attempt to convince them to accept the 'back-to-nature' colonists they'd rescued earlier in the episode as a source of genetic variety, basically putting the doctor in the role of 'bad cop'. She had also previously pointed out that creating more clones was just going to delay the problem for a few generations - they'd still be copying genetic material from copies and the material would eventually degrade again, and they'd again be in the same position they were in at the time.
- The whole situation was an Idiot Plot when one considers that all the clones would have realistically needed from the crew were some sperm and egg samples and a petri dish. They could have gone right ahead being asexual without cloning anybody.
- Doctor Phlox. Oddly enough, he was perhaps the most morally consistent of the crew, determined to uphold medical ethics...except when the captain ordered him not to.
- Not necessarily human medical ethics, though, and that's where the dissonance comes in. The episode "Dear Doctor" displays this to the fullest, when Phlox can save a species from extinction, but chooses not to because he believes that evolution is purposely killing them off to make room for a competing sentient species. That might fly where he comes from, but an Earth doctor bound to the Hippocratic oath doesn't worry about asking "should I save this person?" but rather "can I save this person?" And they definitely don't go around interpreting the will of evolution like some kind of divine prophet.
- In the Voyager episode "Time and Again" the crew beam down to a planet that recently lost all life on it due to some reactor explosion, and for some reason Janeway and Paris are transported one day into the planet's past. When Paris insists on warning the inhabitants of the planet Janeways refuses citing the Prime Directive. When Paris points out that anything has to be better than the extinction of an entire race, Janeway simply orders him to obey her with an angry expression on her face.
- and of course, turns out they did it.
- The original purpose of the Prime Directive was to allow civilizations to develop without outside interference. When the civilization is facing annihilation without help, this motive becomes irrelevent and so does the Prime Directive. Kirk understood this ("For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky") and Spock agreed with him.
- Probably the biggest moral dissonance of all the Next Generation-era series is that, at least by the time Voyager premiered, it was clear that all holodeck characters were completely sentient, and yet the castmembers would still blink them in and out or existence on a whim and treat them like toys. To be fair, in Next Generation when the tech was new, it seemed clear that Moriarty was the exception, and that most holograms were nonsentient. But by the time entities like the Doctor and Vic Fontaine had become the norm, their continued treatment as playthings by a society that always claimed a towering moral superiority was nothing short of infernal. The one episode that finally addresses this, "Author, Author," treats it mostly as a joke.
- An episode of Will And Grace "Dolls and Dolls" had Will become addicted to pain pills and treated it as a horrifying thing, even though Karen, another regular character, constantly takes pills of all kinds and it's played for comedy.
- Buffy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer spent months doing nothing when her vampire boyfriend Angel turned evil and went on a killing spree. Yet, when Anya, a friend's lover, kills some people in the final season, Buffy just can't wait to kill her. One could say that she'd learned her lesson after the Angel situation, except that later the same season, when Spike, another vampire boyfriend, has a trigger in his head that makes him go off at random and kill people, she protects him. No one except Anya, who as mentioned had gone on something of a spree herself and was targeted by Buffy for it, called her on it. There are many things that could be said that exempt Spike and Angel: for example, Spike was killing while mind-controlled and Angel was even less in control (given that Angelus is an entirely separate entity in Angel's head). Furthermore, she then threatened to kill Robin when he, justifiably, later tried to eliminate Spike as a threat, though at the time they were essentially fighting a war, and as the "general" thought Spike was more useful than Robin (which proved to be very true in the Grand Finale).
- Could make exactly the opposite argument with Xander. He gets girlfriend Anya, a vengeance demon who's spent the last 1100 years or more cursing and torturing and even killing people who happened to cheese off the women in their lives ("Oh, he humiliated me! I wish he were dead!"). And she had a soul when she did this. Spike, now, has only being killing people for some 100 years, and while he has tortured many, mostly he just ends their lives fast (and he's never cursed them with fates worse than death - such as eternal spreadsheet grading). Anya chose to become a demon in the first place; Spike never had a choice. Given this background, his reaction to the fact that Buffy's been sleeping with Spike ("I never forgot what he really is... I'm not saying I didn't make any mistakes, but last time I checked, slaughtering half of Europe wasn't one of them") rings of a little hypocrisy.
- While Hogans Heroes can't really be faulted for doing their resistance work to the best of their ability, it's a little unnerving how much glee they take in framing Nazi officers for crimes that will likely lead them to them being tortured and killed by the Gestapo and blowing up factories and trains containing innocent German civilians.
- Burn Notice often has main characters ensuring that villains of the week die for their crimes, which is usually done by manipulating other people to kill them. However, as they are not the ones pulling the trigger, they have no qualms with these actions. It's rather entertaining to see the lengths they will go to not physically maim the villains, while ensuring that they will ultimately die in the end.
- Technically, Mike, Fiona, and Sam have all been in the spy game for a long time, and have no problem killing bad guys. They probably just do it this way to reduce the paper trail and keep the law from paying too much attention to them, especially during Season 3.
- A recent episode had Sam playing a Corrupt Cop to help find a kidnapped child. He and Mike (pretending to be a junkie Sam was getting information from) convince the leader of the kidnappers that one of his employees is planning a coup. This ends with the kidnappers in a Mexican Standoff, with Sam hiding in the distance. Sam proceeds to shoot at the ground, which causes the kidnappers to open fire.
- In a minor subversion, Michael Co. recognize exactly how bad stealing cars is, and (although it is rarely shown onscreen), they apparently always returns the vehicles they pilfer. In addition, if it is stolen from a workplace on a weekday, they always try to return it by 5:00.
- Many crime dramas (Law And Order being the most notable) frequently show the cops committing illegal searches, usually by exploiting the loopholes in the Fourth Amendment. One trick is for the cops to pretend to hear crying or fighting inside a house, or a verbal threat to the cop, which gives them the power to enter or search for that threat. Other times they baldly lie about where they found something, so that it falls into the "Plain View" exception. While occasionally the evidence is later excluded, it is almost always portrayed as a sleazy Defense Attorney trick or as a ridiculous ruling by a Judge. Never are the cops themselves criticized for creating the situation in the first place, or for violating the defendant's rights.
- Particularly notable in CSI Miami. Since he's The Hero, we're supposed to accept that it's OK for Horatio Caine to go off to Brazil, murder someone, return, be extradited for the crime (and not charged), murder some more folks whilst there, and return to continue lecturing criminals about obeying the law like nothing happened...
- To be marginally fair, Caine is immediately released after being extradited... Alone. In a dangerous neighborhood. That was the turf of the gang whose member he had previously killed. Unarmed. And it turns out the guy who ordered the extradition was a Corrupt Cop whose plan was to release him this way all along. So Yeah.
- Another shady way these types of cops get around search warrants is by mentioning to the proprietor how exactly they will make his life and/or business a living hell when they get a search warrant and will search his place publicly for days. In Law And Order, this seems to be the default response when they want searching property. If the owner refuses, or if the cops try to get a warrant first, it's a sure sign the owner is the criminal they're looking for, or his close friend/relative.
- In Supernatural's first season Sam, Dean and Bobby make a huge case out of what happens to the host of a demon when they exorcise it, or the Colt to kill one. They debate over exorcising Meg, as the demon is the only thing keeping her from dying of the wounds she suffered in previous episodes. Dean has a small Heroic BSOD after using the colt on a demon that was attacking Sam. Come later seasons, that concern is gone, especially once our heroes acquire Ruby's knife and a new supply of ammo for the colt. They kill demons by the dozens, exorcise demons and have the hosts drop dead, and no one even bats an eyelash. A lampshade is hung when the human Meg returns as a ghost, accusing the brothers of having caused her death by not figuring out that she wasn't in control of her own body and exorcising her until after she fell out of a window but otherwise the brothers seem undisturbed by the sheer number of possessed humans they've wasted. This is likely intentional, to show how both are being adversely affected by the war they are embroiled in, which is far more harrowing than the usual nasty hunting they get up to. They simply have so many of the damn things to deal with they cannot stop to think about such things like they used to.
- This debate returns in Season 4. Sam has mastered his demonic powers such that he can exorcise demons from people quickly and without hurting them. Dean wants to just use Ruby's knife, which Sam points out kills the host too. The show never completely answers who is right.
- Weeeeell... Using those demonic powers turned out to lead Sam to inadvertently jump-start the Apocalypse - exactly as Lucifer had planned. So in hindsight, Dean was right - but at the time, there were certainly compelling arguments for both sides.
- Nuh-uh! Dean started it! Sam just finished it, thank you very much.
- The Power Rangers are told in several incarnations (or even have it be part of their song lyrics) to only use their powers for defense. This explains why they never use the Megazord to stomp the monster before it grows (they won't risk the property damage until the enemy forces their hand) or why they never directly attack the villain's base (although they did so in Dino Thunder after they found it's location; guess Tommy'd become Genre Savvy). However, there have been more than a few occasions where they blew up the monster while it was basically helpless and in some cases practically begging for mercy. There's one particular instance in MMPR where the Red Ranger seems downright sadistic...
Jason: Give up, birdbrain!
Monster: (terrified squawks and "I surrender" gestures)
Jason: Then we have no choice! (kills the monster)
- Then there's Scott in RPM who uses a baby stroller as a weapon against the mooks with the baby still in the stroller... Shaken Baby Syndrome anyone?
- In Power Rangers In Space, the Megazord (this troper forgets who was driving at the time) goes completely medieval on Monster Of The Week Clawhammer, who was attacking them, to be sure... but maybe ripping out his tendrils, kicking him repeatedly in the groin, and throwing him into lava was a tad excessive. Maybe whatever he'd done in the Super Sentai episode the fight footage came from was a lot worse...
- Speaking of the Space Rangers, the worst moment from the whole series must come from the Silver Ranger's debut episode. They go to a planet seeking weird plant pod things. Trees turn into identically-dressed faceless goons who attack them, and who eventually hatch a giant bug thing... the whole thing is treated like it's a fight with a Monster Of The Week and accompanying Mooks, just business as usual, which is, camera-work-wise, what it looks like... but this is the native population of a planet they'd started taking stuff from. That didn't stop the Rangers from fighting them with no more mercy than monsters and mooks get, including the usual kablooification of the "monster." The idea of apologizing, giving back what they'd taken, and asking nicely or offering a trade was not brought up.
- In Heroes, Peter Petrelli is probably no more or less of a Jerk Ass than most of the other characters, but the repeated implications that he's The Hero and an all-around nice, sensitive guy qualify him for this trope. He uses his uber-powers to attempt a No Holds Barred Beatdown against a romantic rival and inadvertantly gets his girlfriend killed. Mohinder Suresh saves him from being Killed Off For Real after Peter comes out on the losing end of a Curb Stomp Battle with Sylar, but afterwards Peter never seeks Mohinder out to see if he's all right, let alone thank him. He accidentally teleports himself and his Irish girlfriend to a Crapsack World alternate future, gets separated from her, and then leaves her there and never seems to think about her again.
- Peter's treatment of Caitlin is particularly egregious considering he was also the indirect cause of her brother's murder. You'd think he would at least feel some obligation to make that up to her.
Sylar: Peter, you stayed?
- Also he killed his brother in a possible future timeline while under the influence of Sylar's power.
- Not to mention in the Volume Three finale, Mohinder's mutations have moved to his lungs and are killing him. He needs the improved Super Serum in order just to live. Peter doesn't really care and kicks his ass anyway, in an attempt to destroy the serum so that nobody can use it. Later, Peter injects the serum into himself, so he can have the power to save himself and Nathan from a burning building. Even Nathan calls him out on that. Peter went from hero to selfish jackass, as apparently only the lives of Petrellis matter to him.
- Let's not forget all the casualties he racked up during the destruction of the serum lab (In addition to anyone who didn't get out of the building in time when Peter blew it, Peter's also an accomplice to everyone Knox & Flint killed during that one) and Peter's bungled attempt to hijack the prisoner plane in season 3, which led to several of the passengers being sucked out of the plane without a parachute and God alone knows how many not surviving the plane crash. Given that the felony-murder statute would apply, Peter Petrelli is now possibly on the hook for more counts of murder than friggin' Sylar.
- And in the first season, Peter's decision to become a hospice nurse is presented as evidence of his kind, compassionate character. So it's kind of hilarious that the second he discovers he has superpowers, he drops this profession and barely looks back.
- Although much of this can also be explained by Peter being Too Dumb To Live.
- In the Lost episode "The Beginning of the End" Jack grabs Locke's gun, holds it directly against Locke's forehead, and pulls the trigger right after Locke says "you're not going to shoot me". This scene doesn't come out of nowhere since they've long disagreed about both goals and methods, and in the same episode Jack previously stated that he planned to kill Locke on sight. Nevertheless, for one of the most consistently-heroic members of the regular cast to attempt to kill another, "moral dissonance" covers it.
- Likewise, in the season 3 finale Locke kills an unarmed woman throwing a knife in her back, shocking all fellow Losties. True, as a character he has always been morally complex and occasionally prone to ambiguous decisions, but he is still one of the series' main (and most liked by fans) protagonists, so the scene qualifies.
- Jack seems particularly prone to being a dick but still gets portrayed in mostly positive light.
- Jack Bauer is a man of incredible moral dissonance. Whenever Jack has an opinion of morality (often), he is always portrayed as being in the right, yet often these opinions are completely contradictory. Amazingly for a series about a protagonist who regularly tortures to save his country, 24 almost always takes the "What The Hell, Hero?" route, strongly implying that this usually isn't the most moral way to go about things. There was a big potential moment at the end of Season 7, where Tony Almeida reveals the reason that for his Face Heel Turn was that he wanted get close enough to the ultimate mastermind so that he could kill him...But it's subverted when an enraged Jack points out that, good intentions or no, that still doesn't change the fact that he allowed innocent people to die so that he could get his own petty revenge.
- Keifer Sutherland has come out saying that if anything that his character — Jack — does in the show is thought of as legal, or even forgivable, then America is a very screwed-up place.
- Charmed has a few of these.
- Phoebe and Paige needed a warrior's soul to sneak into Valhalla. Of course, they asked their good buddy Darryl for his soul. Naturally, he refused. So, what did they do? They snatched his soul anyway and left his body in an alley.
- The Charmed Ones are tired of hunting demons so they teamed up with the Avatars to bring about Utopia. Naturally, they changed their minds once they realized what they did but they blamed the Avatars for tricking them.
- Cole had been possessed by the Source. The Charmed Ones vanquished him. They had been possessed a few times but they didn't think that he was possessed against his will.
- Worse than that. Cole had a few chapters with an existential crisis, and finally decided to get rid of his evil side to become a full human. Phoebe convinced him to became fully the Source, and she became the Queen of all Evil. Willingly. She then divorced him and blamed him of everything. Later, he tried several times to redeem himself, at one time actually becoming human, and they realized some other demon would eventually get the Source powers and do evil stuff with them, so Cole gets the powers again. They never try to help him in any way, either he is ignored or actively persecuted.
- Remember how when Harry Potter saw the Marauders bullying Snape one time in a Pensieve Flashback, he actually felt sorry for Snape? Now imagine the "heroes" do that to the guy they hate in every single episode. I give you Frank Burns in the fifth season of M*A*S*H.
- On the TV show Kings, an episode early on had David's brother on death row for treason having tried to start a mini-rebellion against the government. The only thing that can save him is a pardon from the king, but the king will only hear 10 court cases on the day before the execution (yes, yes, the show was ridiculously complicated...it's not really much of a shock that no one watched it). The final case is meant to be a petition for nationwide healthcare by David's girlfriend/the King's daughter. He begs her to forgo her petition in order to save his brother's life. She agrees, and her decision to sacrifice the health and well being of millions of people so as to save one man's life is portrayed as a good thing. This troper is still stunned.
- Of course, since the show wasn't going into the details of the various healthcare plans, you really have no idea if the health and well-being of millions of people were being sacrificed.
- In Criminal Minds, Garcia secretly sabotages her boyfriend's chance at a promotion because it would mean he'd have to leave her and this is seen as a good thing (and makes her later worries about Morgan getting too close to a victim's sister a bit creepy). It's never brought up because she's just that good.
- In Friends, Monica lies about her and Chandler in order to be considered for adoption. When they are caught out, Chandler tries to argues that Monica's actions were justified because she really wanted a child. The kicker comes when the mother of the child agrees and lets them adopt, presumably ahead of everyone who told the truth on their form.
Myth and Legend
- This can show up in mythologies of many kinds. Take Achilles and Hector from Greek myth, for example. A lot of people know Achilles was favored by the gods and got to go to a special sort of afterlife, while Hector just got the standard underworld deal. However, Achilles desecrated Hector's corpse after slaying him as vengeance for him slaying his Heterosexual Life Partner, but Hector just killed said partner because he was disguised as Achilles himself. Just goes to show ya, the gods are just as human as we are.
- Another is in Norse Mythology, a guy comes along and offers to rebuild Asgard's walls after their war with the Vanir. He asks for an outrageous price (the sun, moon, and one of the goddesses), and Odin is understandably incensed, but Loki convinces them to take the deal, as long as he can complete the task in an unreasonably short amount of time (so more of the work will be done for them to complete). The guy takes the deal with the stipulation that he gets to use his horse (which the gods agree). When it becomes apparent that the guy, whom they made a deal with, appeared to be coming close to completion, Loki is pressured (read: threatened) by the other gods to weasel them out of the deal. So Loki turns into a mare to seduce his horse. When the guy finds out that the gods weaseled themselves out of the deal, he understandably gets pissed, reveals himself to be a giant, and gets promptly killed without a second thought.
- Do note that the giants were the gods' enemies
and since the goddess he'd asked for was the one who made the other gods immortal, the whole contract was clearly a plot by the giant to try to weaken the gods No, that's Iðunn, he asked for Freyja. Still doesn't excuse the gods for being stupid enough to agree to the contract, though.
- Plus the fact Loki, the one who agreed to the price is a giant himself...
- Please keep in mind that you're talking about mythical gods; as in, ultimate cosmic badasses rather than moral paragons.
- In one version this troper heard, the myth ends with even more dissonance: While in this one the gods new that the man was a giant all along (and they even asked him to build the walls to begin with, as he was famous for his skill), they still contract him for the job. After Loki lures the horse away, the giant continues to build on the wall, and still manages to make the deadline. As he approaches the gods to receive his payment the gods decide to simply murder him, instead of holding true to the deal.
Professional Wrestling
- In the summer of 2009, Triple H was having some problems with Cody Rhodes and Ted Di Biase of Legacy (long story) and decided to reform his and Shawn Michaels old stable from the 1990s, D-Generation X. Problem was, it seemed that Michaels had retired from WWE a few months earlier. Triple H went looking for Michaels and finally found him working as a chef in an office cafeteria. At first Michaels insisted that he was happy in his new line of work, but gradually his friend was able to convince him that he wasn't happy or respected as a chef (and wasn't very good at it, anyway). Following one humiliation too many at the hands of his boss, Michaels finally decided to go back to his rebellious ways and kicked the boss in the face. He then burned his chef's hat....and then, even for WWE, went a little too far. He confronted the boss's spoiled daughter (sort of a prepubescent version of The Libby) and KICKED HER IN THE FACE AS WELL! (Believe it or not, this was all played for laughs!) True, the bratty girl had thrown French fries in Michaels's face and called him a "monkey," but it's hard to think of a more Disproportionate Retribution for a young child. WWE seemed to be suggesting that child abuse is A-OK as long as it's funny and the kid has it coming.
Tabletop Games
- In earlier editions of Dungeons And Dragons, the supposed heroes (quite a few were not quite so heroic) were sometimes confronted with children to fight. Now, it's not quite so bad when they're skeleton or zombie children, but when you're expected to kill a child just because she happens to be a lycanthrope (or an orc), it gets really disturbing. Really young ones were treated as noncombatants, but that just meant they were killed by one hit. Fortunately, the system only includes children as a variant rule. D 20 Modern includes rules for children in case players want to start the game as them, but makes them weak, gives no XP for them, and seems rightfully disgusted at the idea of hurting them.
- Subverted in the 3.5 Fiendish Codex (can't remember which one): In one of the short blurbs at the start of each chapter, there is a child-fiend, a sort of anti-cherub. However, there are no stats for this monster anywhere. If you go online, you see what happened; the design team had stats, then realized that the good guys are never allowed to kill children (to them, even demons who look like children was pushing the line), and took it out, but forgot the one paragraph already mentioning it.
- Moral dissonance is a prime reason why the Dark Powers of Ravenloft are so difficult to pin down, in alignment terms. On the one hand, they remove Evil beings from circulation in the wider D&D multiverse, imprisoning them under conditions that inflict unique karmic punishments for their misdeeds. On the other hand, the darklords aren't alone in the Land of Mists: many thousands of innocent people, whether natives or Mist-abducted outlanders, are trapped along with them, to suffer the depredations of both darklords and spooky monsters.
- Whitewolf's World Of Warcraft RPG says the Blood elf Farstriders are Neutral Good but then goes on to say they lynch any troll they see, including the good Darkspear tribe! Afterwards Whitewolf says the Farstriders are the epitome of valiance and honor.
Theater
- In Rent Mimi's come on to Roger (in "Out Tonight" and parts of "Another Day") sound at first to be fun loving encouragement to enjoy life while you can but Roger comes off as the jerk, not wanting to get close to her because (unbeknownst to her) he has AIDS. But when he later finds out (hinted at in "Another Day") that she also has AIDS, everything is alright between them. But given her flirty nature with him earlier in the play, doesn't that mean that she was quite willing to have sex with Roger, infect him with AIDS all in the name of "no day but today"? Hardly responsible or romantic attitude. And for another point, why does their happiness as a relationship depend on them being able to have sex anyway?
- Angel is a sweet, compassionate soul...who deliberately drove a dog to kill itself, in return for a thousand bucks. No one seems to mind.
- And let's not forget, well... everything else that happens in Rent.
- Most of the end of Into The Woods is pretty seriously dissonant. The wife of the giant who lives at the top of the beanstalk (who Jack stole from and eventually killed) has come down and is demanding that she be allowed to kill Jack for his crimes. The cast decide that they have to protect Jack from the consequences of his actions, give her the narrator instead ("He's not one of us!"), and eventually kill her. She has accidentally stepped on several people by this point, but all she wanted was justice for her dead husband. However, the dissonance of the heroes' actions is intentional; if Into The Woods has An Aesop, it's that everything fairy tales say is a lie: it's hard to tell the difference between right and wrong, people don't get what they deserve, the "villains" are people too, and there's no such thing as happily ever after.
Video Games
Webcomics
Web Original
- The Saga Of Tuck shows Tuck's parents immediately accepting their son's homosexuality, but disapprove of his indeterminate gender identity, in spite of his intersex condition.
Western Animation
- Batman the Animated Series - Sure, Bats is a good guy and sometimes bends the rules, but this particular episode bothered me. In Clayface's second appearance, he was apparently slowly melting away, so he had this woman help him out in stealing several pieces of scientific equipment he needed to turn back human again. In time Batman found him, and just when Clayface was about to turn human again... Batman had to bust in and stop the process. A fight broke out and Clayface apparently died in the rain until he returned in the 'Gotham Knights' season. Now I ask... why Batman, why? Sure the equipment was stolen, but Clayface wasn't gonna use it for world domination or anything, he just wanted to be human again. I'm sure after turning back to normal he woulda cared less if Batman took all the stuff back. And even if Matt Hagen still wanted to do evil stuff, he'd be a lot easier to take down as a regular person rather than Clayface. Plus, Clayface was dying, didn't Batman technically aid in his 'death'?
- Sometimes Bats seems to focus on the letter of the law more than the pragmatics behind it. He was totally willing to allow the Gotham Lab people to save him, but Clayface didn't trust them.
- I'd like to see him time travel about a century back and then follow the letter of the law.
- I always felt the implication was that Clayface had no guarantee that he wouldn't have a relapse if Bats let him go. Bats wanted to make sure Clayface was able to live a full life, not just a few months.
- What makes this bit of Moral Dissonance even harsher is that the company Clayface stole the equipment from was Wayne Enterprises. It was totally within Batman's power to just let Clayface have the equipment, and write it off as Bruce Wayne. Perhaps he's a little too obsessed with the law (he did seem to say that he was willing to help Clayface, if he'd just ask), and perhaps he didn't think that method was particularly reliable, but at face value, the episode does make him come across as murderously indifferent to Clayface's dilemma. Of course Clayface should've sought legitimate help, but letting him die's hardly going to teach him to be more trusting.
- The Venture Brothers offers us this insight in the mind of Brock Samson:
"Yeah, he was just this guy...guy in a Butterfly suit who got in over his head. And I could see it in his eyes that if I let him get away this One Time he'd never come back... but then, I also thought... y'know ...Kill 'im."
- Brock has to face this when one of his kills is resurrected by the Mad Scientist Dr. Venture. He goes into a long, hallucinogen-powered road of self-understanding. This ends with a chastising by a dream of his old boss who tells him that working for the government means that he's "beyond good and evil" and gets to be in a special part of heaven. This leads to him going postal. Fun times.
- Of course, Brock Samson is a deliberate attempt at this trope for comedic value.
- The third season shows that Jonas Venture Sr. himself was quite guilty of this, being responsible for making Rusty the messed up individual amongst other things.
- Compared to the Psycho For Hire titular character, Dib of Invader Zim is easily the "hero" of the series, but this eleven-year-old's paranormal obsession goes beyond a desire to simply defeat the alien invader but to actually vivisect him (as Dib's extremely disturbing classroom doodles would seem to indicate), which kind of ruins the moral high ground for him. Then again, this sort of thing is par for the course for Jhonen Vasquez, and Zim DOES deserve it.
- However, it seems that Dib wants to expose and defeat Zim simply so he can prove a point, not because he actually cares about the sake of the world. However, Zim isn't a danger, so that's justified.
- Er... I assume you mean is a danger? At any rate that's a debatable contention that appears to assume he can't sincerely want to help the world if he also wants to prove a point in doing so. His blowup at Dwicky in "Vindicated" covers both: he's obviously hurt at being lied to, but it is not until he's told it was for his own benefit that he becomes angry — and retorts that Dwicky's been wasting his time while his REAL problem is the apparent death wish of the human race.
- In This Troper's opinion, Dib was always meant to be a Darker And Edgier hero, but actually got less so as the series went on.
- In Transformers Animated, the Autobots go up against SuperSpeedster Nanosec. Unfortunately, accelerated speed brought with it accelerated aging, and Bumblebee defeated the guy by racing him right into geriatrics, thereby cutting his lifespan drastically short. To quote a fan wiki: Harsh, Bumblebee. (The effects were eventually reversed, but still...)
- And it seems the original idea was to have him die: After racing himself into old age, Nanosec collapses, and Bumblebee later said of his plan, "he ran out of time." The scene with an ancient Nanosec being taken into custody some time later seemed like an afterthought. And don't forget, Nanosec was just a petty crook who didn't know what sort of Big Bad he was working for when he was given superpowers. Harsh.
- Not to mention what happened to Swindle. He had devised a weapon with some human villains that freezes mechanics, including Autobots and Decepticons. Eventually they find out energy shield can cancel the effects, and the weapon is used on Swindle himself. It's explicitly mentioned that Autobots under the effects can't move but are aware of everything (though it's not explained why his would last forever). Them simply putting him in this state isn't so bad because it was just reflecting back and attack he was about to hit most of the Autobot team with. What damming about this is that the police arrest the humans and comment that they'll impound their "getaway vehicle" and sell off the parts and the Autobots say nothing. Pay Evil Unto Evil indeed.
- HOWEVER. As of "Decepticon Air" Swindle lives. And judging by his actions in that episode, it may have been better off if he HAD been impounded after all.....
- Not as bad a case, but when Bulkhead helped build Megatron a fully functional space bridge, he was chewed out by Isaac Sumdac for doing so. Bulkhead feels incensed at the hypocrisy coming "from the guy who rebuilt Megatron". Never mind that as a human, he would not have known about Megatron and Isaac Sumdac believed he was helping their friend.
- On the other hand, in "Where Is Thy Sting," Bulkhead finds a bot who he believes to be Wasp, who had swapped places with Bumblebee, holding his hands in the air to surrender and is ready to attack. When Wasp is later found out and takes Bumblebee as a hostage, Bulkhead gives him a brief The Reason You Suck Speech. Then when Wasp escapes, Bulkhead finds and starts pummeling him until it is revealed to be Bumblebee's face behind the removed helmet. Keep in mind that Bulkhead knows Wasp was framed, locked into the stockade for who knows how long, likely traumatized, scared, and up to finding him hasn't really harmed anyone yet. A fan wiki summed it perfectly: This episode doesn't do anything for Bulkhead's rep as an Autobot at all.
- As the episode Rise of the Construticons insinuates, the Autobots are made to look like the heroes after having driven off the aforementioned Constructicons for siding with Megatron. This is despite the fact that the reason they even came across Megatron in the first place was because Optimus drove the Constructicons out on the basis of negative first impressions, and that Megatron admittedly accomplished more than anything the collective Autobots did to convince them that they were in the right. What's especially jarring is how Bulkhead reacts to them by episode's end when they apparently lose their memories, attacking them for approaching Megatron when, as stated before, none of the Autobots gave a single valid reason that they could be trusted. Then Bulkhead tops it all off by stating that the Constructicons were just plain bad business from the beginning, despite the fact that they saved him in their first encounter. Given the other examples above, this troper has reason to believe that Bulkhead's a far bigger Jerkass than even Sentinel Prime.
- Less so, but Sari openly mocks her "Substitute Autobots" calling them losers, even though one is barely above animal level sentience, another she bribed/bullied, and the third offered his help willingly (if insanely).
- Dick Dastardly should have won at least some of the time in Wacky Races. There seem to be no rules whatsoever. However, they still say he cheated. He seems to actually have the genuinely fastest car of the bunch. The one time he does get first place, he gets disqualified because he elongated his car. And remember, no rules.
- His own fault. Dick Dastardly Stops To Cheat.
- He did win once, the prize was the "red square". Not Moscow's Red Square, just... a red square. Makes you think the judges are actively conspiring against him with "emergency prize interpretations" just in case he does win.
- The main rule in Wacky Races seems to be that you're allowed to do whatever you like as long as the Camera (and the Judges) see you doing it. When Dastardly elongated his car, they couldn't see it until they slowed the footage down. Or maybe the series is just biased against self-proclaimed evil people.
- In Samurai Jack, a warrior is sealed in stone, forever, for opposing Aku. His only desire is to reach Valhalla, and to that end, he manages to manipulate the rock surrounding him and create an elaborate gauntlet of traps to ensure that only a worthy opponent like Jack can reach him and legitimately slay him in battle. Jack does this without complaint... even though he passes by several human skeletons on his way through the traps, dead through absolutely no fault of their own save not having been quick enough.
- Considering Valhalla's a warrior heaven, it probably better damn well be a good fight to get there. Actually, the traps might have been his way of trying to ensure no one would waste his time and their life, as the average non-Badass would likely turn away from that place. He also probably thought that even if they died fighting his traps it'd be enough for them to go to Valhalla themselves, and so he was doing them a favour.
- Speaking of Samurai Jack, he's the classic kid's show Knight In Shining Armour sans armour, going to extreme lengths to help people, never killing humans (or human-like aliens) unless he has no choice, and generally fighting with honour. But when it comes to robot opponents, he'll kill them without hesitation, even if they're running away, or on occasion even if they haven't attacked him, despite the fact that at least a large minority and potentially all of them are sentient and he knows it.
- Danny Phantom: After spending most of the episode protecting his Opposite Sex Clone, Danny then proceeds to murder the finished clone of himself. Seeing it, with horror filled eyes, reach out to Vlad as it melts certainly shows that it wasn't just a mindless copy. Danny doesn't appear to feel even slightly bad about this.
- Likewise, in the final episode/move special, Vlad (after blaming Jack for turning him accidentally into a half-ghost and his love/lust for Maddie to the point where he's willing to kill Jack to get her) is unable to stop the asteroid (It's made of anti-ghost matter... do the math) and begs Jack to let him back onto the ship. Jack then refuses, and leaves Vlad to die alone in space. Uh, Jack, you're supposed to be the good guy, remember? Yes, Vlad is a crazed villain, but what you did to him was essentially MURDER!
- Roger Ebert took the opportunity to question the "It's OK to make the villains die violently" subtrope in his review of -of all movies - "The Nutcracker Prince".
- The titular Cartoon All Stars To The Rescue use some pretty brutal scare tactics to get Mike off the drugs, including nearly drowning him in a sewer, locking him inside a burning building, and trying to run him down with a roller coaster. All for his own good, of course.
- In an episode of The Fairly Oddparents, it's revealed that everything that a godchild unwishes gets put in storage, large lockers meant to hold them. This includes any sentient creature that gets created through a wish. And since all kids eventually lose their fairy godparents, this is the eventual fate of every creature wished up. In other words, every unwished wish is eventually trapped in an And I Must Scream situation. No one bats an eye at this concept. Not even Timmy, at least not at first, despite the fact that he's restrained from doing lesser things to enemies that he has more reason to hate (he avoids going all out on Vicky despite Wanda's insistence in one episode, eg).
- This also occurs in an episode where it's revealed that The Crimson Chin ruined The Bronze Kneecap's life, causing him to become evil. The Chin isn't even remotely sorry or remorseful, despite the fact that he acknowledges the he is responsible for him turning evil. Unlike most instances on this page, this was intentional. No one in the Chin's world finds it appalling, but Timmy does. This comes a few lines after he tells Timmy how great it is to help people.
- Avatar The Last Airbender: It's okay to steal so long as it's from pirates. Or so long as it's Toph cheating a cheater, or cheating someone who isn't cheating, or scamming someone for no real reason other than she could. Even Aang, the freaking Avatar, doesn't object to her actions in that episode.
- Reason why Aang doesn't object it, and more dissonance: HE WAS PART OF IT! I don't how good friend Toph is or how "young" (I don't count iceberg years), Aang is supposed to be the guy who keeps balance and other shit OK.
- In the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the turtles are rather cruel to poor Baxter Stockman. In the first episode Stockman believed Shredder wanted to market the mousers to rid the city of pests but Shredder used them to attempt to kill Splinter. When the turtles meet up with him, they rough him up, steal his van, and leave him tied to a lamppost. In his final appearance in the show the turtles destroy his only friend, a sentient computer, prevent him from becoming human again, and trapped him forever in dimensional limbo. Man that's harsh.
- In the Teen Titans episode "Troq", the Titans help Val Yor to help wipe out a dangerous robot race. All right, this may raise some eyebrows for the viewers but since Val Yor helped save innocent people and appeared to be a hero, they took his word on it. But later we find out he is an unabashed racist who constantly puts down Starfire for being a Tamaranian. This revelation does not cause them to rethink their position of wiping out an entire sentient species whose hostilities may very well stem from trying to protect themselves from a robocidal maniac.
- Another example can be found at the end of Mother Mae-Eye: The Titans, freed from the spell of the malign entity who brainwashes her victims to love her unconditionally, and then eats them, wonder what to do with the pie that contains her spirit. They decide to leave it anonymously to Hive-Five. It was meant to be humorous, but Fridge Logic essentially makes it an attempted murder by proxy - what happened to the code against killing?
- The city of Townsville must have extremely good insurance, considering that no one ever bats an eye to the oftentimes monumental collateral damage The Powerpuff Girls cause through their crimefighting. There is only one person in the show who understandably calls them out on their collateral damage (The Citysville episode, for those curious), but he's the one we're meant to see in the wrong, not the Girls.
- He treats the girls a lot better than the rest of the people in Citiesville, and explains to them why he's frustrated. (Basically that not only do they not have insurance, but since no-one actually wants to live in Citiesville they commute in to work, across a bridge that was the only way into the city, that the girls just recently destroyed). The intended moral of the story is pretty much 'The Powerpuff Girls wouldn't work in real life', like the Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons.
- In Beast Wars, when Blackarachnia eventually joins the Maximals, she strenuously objects to having her Predacon shell programme removed on the grounds that it would make her something other than what she is. Come Beast Machines, she herself reformats the Vehicon general with Silverbolt's spark despite him giving pretty much the same objection. He doesn't take it well.
- In the original Transformers episode "The Core," Optimus and the Autobots suffer a major Out Of Character Moment when they authorize Chip to use Mind Control Phlebotinum on the Constructicons. In fairness, another episode had revealed that the Constructicons were victims of a Decepticon Mirror Morality Machine and had originally been nice—but Chip's gizmo didn't reverse that, it appeared to be just enslaving them. Particularly glaring in light of the fact that the Constructicons' obvious comraderie in this episode makes them seem downright sympathetic. "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" indeed!
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