Morality Pet / Comic Books

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• Astro City:
  • At one point in "The Dark Age", Royal Williams (an Anti-Hero out to get the man who killed his parents) has a brief encounter with "K.O." Carson, a.k.a. the Black Badge, a superhero who befriended the Williams boys in their youth. Seeing Carson reminds Royal of the virtues of heroism, eventually allowing him to turn away from the path of vengeance.
  • Quite literally, in the case of G-Dog. Andy Merton was a petty crook whose first instinct when he found a magical amulet was to use it for crime. However, when the amulet fused him with his pet corgi, turning them into G-Dog, the dog's simple, good-natured protectiveness pushed Andy to become a better person.
• Alexander, the son of Ares, serves as this to the Greek god of war in the Marvel Universe. He was the driving factor in Ares' Heel–Face Turn.
• Alfred, Robin and the rest of the "Bat Family" function as Batman's ties to family and sanity. It's worth pointing that their ideas of sanity and/or morality don't necessarily fit with the rest of the world's, the Batfamily being what it is.
  • Damian, the current Robin, varies between Bratty Half-Pint and full-on Sociopathic Hero, having used deadly force on both villains and his own adopted brothers. He also seems to be building a zoo in the Batcave.
  • Subverted: Harley Quinn, The Joker's sidekick, is just as insane as he is.
    • Harley has her Hyenas too.
    • The easiest way of making the Joker look like a complete and utter bastard is for him to betray Harley. Harley does have a stopping point when the Joker gets too out of control. Her betrayal of him is much more forgiven than his betrayals of her (which tend to be very violent).
    • She has also acted as one to Poison Ivy. Whether or not Harley is around often determines whether Ivy is a Well-Intentioned Extremist serial killer, or merely Harley's snarky and more level-headed Cool Big Sis. No Man's Land also gave Ivy over a dozen morality pets in the form of a group of orphans she takes in and cares for in the quake ravaged city. When she surrenders to the police rather than let one of them die, even Batman admits that despite her claims to the contrary, Ivy is still a human being at heart.
• Black Canary invokes the trope in Birds of Prey. As she and Lady Shiva begin to become friends she hopes that she can turn Shiva away from her violent and bloody lifestyle, and deliberately works with her in order to give her regular human contact and friendship. Shiva, however, recognizes that Canary is working to reform her, and lets Canary get into her life and see what she is really like to get her to stop.
• Billy Butcher in The Boys had three; his late wife Becky who stopped him from becoming a full-on sociopath, his dog Terror, and Wee Hughie, The Heart of the team who always tried to keep him on the right path and happened to look like his late brother.
• In Ed Brubaker's Captain America run, he introduced villain Aleksander Lukin, whose defining trait was that he was very Affably Evil. Lukin's friend Leon would always call him out on anything he did that came off as irrational, distasteful or just losing his cool, which both did not know was because the Red Skull had kinda possessed Lukin and affected his personality. While Lukin already hated what the Red Skull had done to his personality beforehand (yelling at his secretary set off some alarms), after he attacks Leon in a blind rage, he realises how far he's fallen.
• It didn't last long, and she didn't make him turn good or consider turning good, but the appearance of Loki's mortal daughter Tess Black in the Spider-Man comic "The Coming of Chaos" made the God of Mischief look less like a Magnificent Bastard.
  • It can be argued that for the third Loki this part is played by Thor, Verity Willis, and after a while the whole superhero team Young Avengers... unfortunately for them Loki's affections can take very unfortunate forms (like their subconsciousness playing supervillain in the form of their exes).
• Cyclops and Jean Grey served as each other's Morality Pets before their relationship went south. She helps him to live life and not brood so much, he helps her to calm down and balance the Phoenix's power with her humanity. Once she dies, the gap between Scott and his teammates widens, as she's isn't there to mediate between them anymore.
• Foggy Nelson seems to be playing this part to Matt Murdock in Daredevil increasingly in the last two decades (which is to say, since he found out about his friend's secret identity). Daredevil would often refrain from excessive violence and sometimes would even stop short of murder only because he wants Foggy's opinion of him to remain high. It became very evident in The Devil in Cell Block D storyline, where Foggy's apparent death caused Matt to release all inhibitions and go on a violence spree that scared all of his closest friends as well as his wife. He was only cowed by being reminded that he was not acting like the man Foggy believed in, and eventually, by Foggy returning to his life.
• In Venom (Donny Cates), Eddie learns he has a younger half-brother named Dylan who decides to run away with him to escape their abusive father. From then on, all of Eddie's actions have been motivated by a desire to keep Dylan safe, happy, and healthy while trying to serve as a decent role model for him. This is especially intensified by the fact that Dylan is actually Eddie's son, turning Eddie into a full-on Papa Wolf.
• In Final Crisis, Dr. Sivana wound up betraying Darkseid after watching one of his daughters be enslaved by the Anti-Life Equation.
• Deconstructed in Hunter Rose's relationship with his adopted daughter Stacey Palumbo in Grendel. He undoubtedly does have good intentions towards her (although there are some faint squicky implications of Wife Husbandry), but he's too basically sociopathic to understand what a child needs, and treats her as a pretty trophy at adult parties rather than giving her a normal child's social life. When she finds out that he's really the supervillain Grendel, she arranges his death in revulsion, and the after-effects of her relationship with him completely blight her adult life.
• Todd "Squee" Casil is the involuntary morality pet of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, who sneaks into his house for medical supplies and once saved Squee from a pedophile. While Squee is scared shitless of Johnny (calling him the "scary neighbor man"), Johnny tends to see himself as something of father figure to Squee, dispensing Hard Truth Aesops because he doesn't want Squee to end up like he did.
• In Mastermen #1, Overman's cousin Overgirl is pretty much the one person he has a clear, emotional connection towards. He cares for her deeply and her death just multiplied the guilt he was already feeling.
• In Lil and Put, Kieszonka is a morally bankrupt criminal, a lowlife, who is cynical, backstabing and sarcastic towards everyone, especially her brother. However, she is consistently shown to be nice and friendly toward Oscar, her total opposite - an epitome of innocence and politeness in the series, who lives in his own little world. Kieszonka is never rude towards him and appears to genuinely enjoy his company and even shows protectiveness. This might serve as her hidden depth, as it not only implies that, despite her rough nature, Kieszonka appreciates Oscar for who he is, but also realizes he would have been unable to fight back if she were ever to verbally attack him like others, so she is gentle towards him, even at his weirdest. Despite all her many, many flaws and questionable morality, to say the least, one thing Kieszonka appears not to be is a bully.
• Spider-Man:
  • J. Jonah Jameson from is more of a cranky, cigar-chomping foil than a villain (these days), but Robbie Robertson acts pretty well as his conscience, and you can count on seeing his softer side whenever his astronaut son John shows up.
  • Harry Osborn was occasionally this toward his father Norman (aka the Green Goblin); in one storyline, Spiderman defeated the Goblin by showing him his son in the hospital after a drug overdose.
• Starman: The Shade (already ret-conned from villain to just plain Anti-Hero) has a certain respect for Jack "Starman" Knight and falls in love with police officer Hope O'Dare. His true Morality Pet, though, is his home, Opal City; it is mainly because of his vow never to commit crimes in Opal City that he is able to make friends with the local law enforcement.
• Supergirl served as this to all of the Red Lanterns in Red Daughter of Krypton, but especially Guy Gardner and Bleez. The Red Lantern Corps are a group of battle-hungry, mad, violent anti-heroes (as long as Guy is leading them; otherwise they're evil revenge-seekers), but when she was their teammate, they actually tried to be less crazy.
• In the IDW Transformers comic, Sixshot is a war machine who doesn't think twice when instructed to wipe out entire civilizations, and was a prime candidate for membership with the planet-euthanizing Reapers. But there's nothing in this universe that would make him hurt his buddies/fan club the Terrorcons.
  • On a similar note Runamuck and Runabout are two thugs, basically only in the Decepticon army because they get to carry a gun and cause some damage. But if you hurt one in front of the other you're gonna be in trouble.
• In Seconds, Katie's growing friendship with Hazel is what ultimately helps mentally bring her back to reality and to understand exactly why screwing around with space-time is a bad idea.
• In Sweet Tooth, Jepperd's relationship with Gus is what causes him to move past his grief and gives him a reason to keep living.
• In Usagi Yojimbo, Jei has Keiko. Whom he calls his innocent, and she calls Uncle.
  • It's actually a subversion if you're paying attention. Jei is a Knight Templar Serial Killer before Keiko starts traveling with him...and remains a Knight Templar Serial Killer even after. By all accounts, he seems to genuinely care for her, but it's clearly not enough to keep him from killing dozens of people across their travels.
• In Violine, after his Heel–Face Turn, the Pygmy chief acts like this to the doctor, at his own request, smacking him each time he feels greedy, reminding him of the second chance Violine gave him.
• Wolverine has had a number of unofficial "sidekicks" used to balance out his ferocity and vaguely thuggish appearance. The tendency of them being young girls in most media — Jubilee, Kitty Pryde, a younger version of Rogue — is almost a cliche, possibly lampshaded in his humorous short alliance with Power Pack's five-year-old Katie Power. And when Molly Hayes visited X-Men Headquarters, guess who ended up babysitting her?
  • Inverted in the case of X-23, whom he least tries to edge away from utter sociopathy and hoped to secure a more-or-less ordinary life for before Cyclops decided she would be a good addition to the covert network squad he was putting together.
  • Oddly enough, X-23 often acts as a Morality Pet for Emma Frost. And has a Morality Pet of her own in the form of Hellion. Later she's acting as a morality pet for Gambit (and vice-versa). To a point she even managed to be one for Daken, of all people (or at least about as close as it gets for him). The latter is most noticeable in Wolverines and All-New Wolverine, as Daken is much more of a lighter shade of gray under her influence.
  • In Kitty Pryde's case, for much of her 1980s, she viewed the X-Men as a surrogate family, in part because she had poor relationships with her actual parents. She treated Storm as a maternal substitute for a while, and she was disappointed when Storm got more ruthless and failed to live up to Kitty's moral standards. Her relationship with Wolvie got closer when he rescued her from one of Ogun's brainwashing schemes. He was the only X-Man to come to her rescue. In Jubilee's case, she met Wolverine when she saved his life from the Reavers and helped him recover from a crucifixion. For several years, she was somewhat over-protective of Wolverine and would do anything to rescue him from dangerous situations.
• Sabretooth himself has had a few of these. The first was his mother when she was alive. He financially supported her in old age & put her in the best nursing home in the country after she got cancer. He then visited her every other week with gifts, and spent his visits doting on her.
  • Other cases include Mystique & Bonnie Hale. Still very much villainous and disgusting, he showed to have genuine care for both women. Bonnie he spent the entire Mary Shelley Overdrive mini trying to protective and save, telling her three times that he was going to keep her with him, and safe. Mystique shows tender moments to, such as reassuring her that she never has to prove anything to him, before gently cupping her face with a kiss.
  • A closer literal example in Weapon X (2017) where Creed takes liking to a tiger cub. He picks it up and gentle cradles it as it chews on his finger, which amuses him. When he's attacked in the following chapter, he shields the cub protectively and fights with one hand due to still holding the baby in the other.
• Ultimate Nick Fury has both Peter Parker and Miles Morales. They are the Naïve Newcomer to Fury's Seen It All, and have the optimism that he had gradually lost over the years.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Deconstructed with Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark and her brothers Ares and Hercules. With Ares it's debatable whether he has any REAL affection for her or if he just sees her as someone incredibly powerful that he can use. As for Hercules, he implied the only reason he calmed himself around was that he wanted to have her as a sexual mate despite being her half-brother, even outright saying they should repopulate Olympus after the Gods had disappeared.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Circe wouldn't intentionally put her daughter Lyta in harms way and seems to genuinely love her, but even while toting her own tot around she unapologetically helps Mind Rape someone else's daughter to turn her into a supervillain and then ensures her target is other kids among other things. She also has no problem with her daughter watching the awful things she's doing.

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