Basic Trope: Where everyone was born good until something drives them into evil.
- Straight: All the people in the story are either heroic and moral or had something happen to them in the past that made them so evil.
- Exaggerated:
- All the heroes are all loving people who won't hurt a fly and help everyone they come across, only to become evil upon receiving a paper-cut.
- It gets to the point where every single Eldritch Abomination the heroes met/fought ends with a case of Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?. The heroes start wondering how on earth villains could appear in the first place.
- Downplayed: Everyone is morally neutral with good tendencies unless they have a Freudian Excuse.
- Justified:
- It's a point of fact in this universe that God Is Good, so he doesn't make anything pure evil with no redeemable qualities.
- The story takes place on a White-and-Grey Morality setting, as true heroes exist, but true villains don't.
- Inverted: Humans Are Bastards and Hobbes Was Right
- Subverted:
- The heroes, for the first time, face a villain who is a Spoiled Brat who gets almost everything they want.
- The villains were lying to get the heroes' sympathy.
- The heroes face a Complete Monster.
- The villain did live in an orphanage...but the most terrifying thing about that orphanage was themselves, as they were a psychopath even at a young age.
- Double Subverted:
- ...or least one who doesn't like talking about their Dark and Troubled Past.
- It turns out their real Freudian Excuse is much worse.
- ...or they seemed like one, until their backstory gets the heroes to Cry for the Devil.
- These villains are exceptions to what is otherwise the rule.
- Parodied:
- Greg The Hero gets mad one day and kills a fly, then becomes a Card-Carrying Villain who merely pokes the poodle.
- Alex says "Humans are good by default." While there's a man killing babies right behind him.
- Zig Zagged: Some Villains have excuses, some don't. Except those villains turn out to have excuses after all. Except Emperor Evulz. Who is actually Satan. But even he has an excuse. Which is fake. Or is it?
- Averted: Everyone's mind, when born, is a blank slate.
- Enforced: The writer wants to create Sympathy for the Devil so he shows how formerly good people went wrong.
- Lampshaded: "It's good knowing no-one is really evil."
- Invoked: Daya T. creates everyone as a blank slate.
- Exploited: Aliens attack the planet because they know the innocent natives won't fight back.
- Defied:
- "Nobody is good by nature. It's up to us to choose to be good."
- "To hell with the whole "everybody is good by nature" nonsense! They all must die!"
- "Everyone's good by nature? That means everyone's an idiot by nature, then."
- Discussed: "Look, not everyone is good deep down, Ok!"
- Alternatively, continuing from Defied: "Well, babies are born without any knowledge..."
- Conversed: "If only everyone in real life was that nice, eh?"
- Deconstructed:
- Because humans are inherently good, when circumstances push them into being evil, they never bother to turn away from it. It's gets even worse when some humans believe that they are good despite Kicking the Dog and crossing the Moral Event Horizon one times too many.
- If humans start good, the only way there can even be evil or malicious humans is for someone (or something) to be malicious to them in turn... implying the existence of an inhuman force that is inherently evil (i.e. demons or Satan).
- Reconstructed:
- The conflict is now full of Black-and-Gray Morality; while there are some people who are not morally perfect, they strive to morally improve themselves, managing to prove they are (slightly) better than the evil humans they fight.
- Or alternatively, the conflict is (back to) White-and-Grey Morality, as the humans who remained good contribute to improving life for all. After all, if everyone is capable of redemption, then even the worst individuals can realize their horrific errors and atone for their destructive deeds. While they're forgiven, others still remember what they've done. Redemption may not be easy, but it is still possible, and it is Worth It.
- The fact that humans start good implies that whatever created them wanted them to be that way.
Back to Rousseau Was Right, it only does those things because it has to!
