Title? What Title?
A better example from Mass Effect would be the Geth sectarianism.
Being in a Japanese-produced work is not enough of a difference to warrant its own trope.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Bump.
To add to Jovian's questions, Shades of Conflict lists this trope as one form of "White, Grey and Black vs. White, Grey and Black" (with Morality Kitchen Sink as the other form), and as a form of "White vs. Grey (and possibly White) and Black". Is that correct?
edited 18th Aug '11 8:26:55 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
El Tropero Loco
In Mass Effect 2, good teams up with bad against evil in the following manner:
Good: Paragon Shepard, Tali, Samara
Bad: Cerberus (a well known human terrorist organization), and half the squadmates they have Shepard recruit (which include an assassin, a mercenary and a thief for hire, a trigger happy vigilante who's one bad day away from becoming a full time villain, a deranged biotic convict and an uberkrogan genetically engineered to be the ultimate killing machine)
Evil: the Reapers and the Collectors
edited 30th Oct '11 11:10:02 AM by Silveratus
"If brute force doesn't solve your problems, you're not using enough"
You're right, this is a mess. If I were to try to guess the trope just by the examples, it would be a general subtrope of Enemy Mine rather than Enemy Civil War — any Enemy Mine where the villain the heroes are working with is somewhat less evil than the one they're both opposing. I can see at least one example where there's no mention of a third faction the two are supposedly opposing.
The Shades of Conflict description is certainly no help either.
I would think that without an Enemy Mine element, you're just looking at Morality Kitchen Sink.
Without an Enemy Civil War element, it's just a subtrope of Enemy Mine where the temporary ally is less evil than the enemy they're both facing. I don't really care for that either.
I'd prefer both Enemy Civil War and Enemy Mine as prerequisites. The bad guys don't have to splinter because of morality issues, but the way they wind up splintering conveniently separates the gray from the black.
edited 30th Oct '11 12:46:18 PM by Tyoria
Jupiterian Local
I think it works best as a broader trope with any version of white/grey/black factions, regardless of whether there's an Enemy Civil War or an Enemy Mine involved. We already have tropes for those two things, and there certainly seem to be enough examples that don't fit them to make a separate trope work.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
We already have Morality Kitchen Sink, too. Whichever way you look at it, the trope's a more specific version of something we already have.
Jupiterian Local
Morality Kitchen Sink is for when none of the characters/factions in the work fit neat white/grey/black labels. The Good, the Bad, and the Evil is for when you have one white, one grey, and one black character/faction. They're not the same at all.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Morality Kitchen Sink is for when none of the characters/factions in the work fit neat white/grey/black labels
Nobody fitting into a convenient label sounds more like Gray-and-Gray Morality. Morality Kitchen Sink means all shades of the spectrum are represented. I see that you've pulled that from the trope's description, but look at the examples — and note the alternate titles for the trope as well. Now that you've brought it up, in fact, it looks like this one needs a TRS too. Last time it came up because of its name, but its description and examples do not match.
The only thing that would separate The Good, the Bad, and the Evil from Morality Kitchen Sink (in practice) is if you were to focus on "factions" rather than individuals. That would narrow the trope more than if you were to go back and fix examples to match its original definition (which is supposed to be a subtrope of Enemy Civil War) or instead rework the trope to be a subtrope of Enemey Mine.
Jupiterian Local
From the Morality Kitchen Sink article: "In short, none of the groups fit cleanly into the White-Gray-Black categorization, as all of them do things both good and evil with varying degrees of frequency."
From the Grey-and-Grey Morality article: "In an all-grey conflict, neither side is totally good or completely evil."
This would make Morality Kitchen Sink technically a subtrope of Grey-and-Grey Morality, but neither has anything to do with The Good, the Bad, and the Evil, which is about one white, one grey, and one black faction.
edited 31st Oct '11 3:14:40 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
I detest repeating myself, Jovian, so please read my previous post again because I've already addressed this.
Jupiterian Local
You are factually incorrect. The definitions you are using for the tropes being discussed are not the actual definitions of those tropes. By quoting the relevant parts of the descriptions, I was trying to illustrate that.
If you can't see what I'm getting at, then there's not much else that I can say.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
I get that you're pointing to the description, what I'm saying is that the examples, and even the alt-titles, manifestly do not line up with that description. (Black And White And Gray Morality as a subtrope of Gray-and-Gray Morality?) What is the point of differentiating The Good, the Bad, and the Evil from a trope which effectively doesn't exist, because the description and the examples are broken?
Jupiterian Local
Because Morality Kitchen Sink is a viable trope, even if it's being misused. So we fix the bad examples and switch the redirects to where they should be going. That's pretty standard procedure.
edited 31st Oct '11 3:54:38 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Okay so answer me this: which trope is "there are characters from the full range of the morality spectrum present (heroes, antiheroes, antivillains, complete monsters, anything in between)"? Because that is the clearest and easiest to define trope we're looking at and neither The Good, the Bad, and the Evil nor Morality Kitchen Sink actually talk about it in their descriptions, although their examples are another story.
And now are you suggesting The Good, the Bad, and the Evil and Morality Kitchen Sink are separate from that trope and each other? Are we puzzling out one unclearly defined trope or two?
Jupiterian Local
Wait, what? Where did that definition come from? That's not related to anything we've been talking about.
- Morality Kitchen Sink is about a work where the factions/characters involved in it fall outside the standard white/grey/black labels.
- The Good, the Bad, and the Evil is about a work where there's one White faction/character, one Grey faction/character, and one Black faction/character.
- "A work that has characters/factions that are the whitest of whitest, the blackest of blacks, and everything in between" isn't currently any trope that I know of. If you think that should be a trope, then YKTTW it.
- Fullmetal Alchemist - The Elric brothers and Winry are the most purely heroic characters; the heroes from the State Military are more gray, being former war criminals who want to atone for their sins; Greed and Scar are fairly sympathetic antagonists until they become Anti Heroes; there's Barry the Chopper who is the Token Evil Teammate for the State Military heroes- he's clearly Evil; finally, the other villain characters are definitely very far down toward the evil extreme of the scale. And even one of the worst villains is spared
- Despite being the protagonists of the show (as well as priestesses), the Sybillae of Simoun have moralities that are all over the range. On one end, you have the innocent Rimone/Limone, Yun, and Morinas. Then there are the more ambiguous Paraietta, Mamiina, and Dominura. The nations of Argentum and Plumbum are a little harder to place, while the Defense Minister of Simulacrum is decidedly at the bottom of the proverbial drain.
- Code Geass. There is one genuinely, unquestionably good person, Euphemia. There is one genuinely, unquestionably evil person, Luciano Bradley. Every other character's alignment can be debated. The main character himself can be convincingly argued to fall under any morality alignment
.
- Sixteen Thirty Two: The heroes range from almost pure heroism to rather questionable, the antagonists range from Complete Monster to people who could be heroic under slightly different circumstances and/or are just victims of Values Dissonance.
- In Chung Kuo, there are some very upstanding characters on both sides, who rub shoulders with pure villains.
- Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. Furthest toward the Hero end, you have Sarene, who's upstanding but can be a little deceptive. A little further away from the Hero end, you've got Raoden, who resorts to some practical tactics. On a good deal toward the Villain side, you have Hrathen, but he shifts further toward Hero before the story is done with. All the way down at the Villain end, you have Dilaf.
- One of the best examples of this trope is The Dresden Files. At the furthest extreme of the Hero end we have Michael, the Fist of God, who only fights monsters, is about as wholesome as a person can be, and never even cusses. Slightly away from the good extreme would be Harry, as he's a generally upstanding guy, but every now and then he'll get practical. Much further toward the evil end, we have Thomas who, as of Turn Coat, is once again a practicing incubus, but he's trying to promote more responsibility between vampires and their prey. Even closer to the evil end than him would be Marcone, who is a crime boss, but his reasons behind his enterprise are good ones. Arguably the furthest down the line toward the evil extreme would be the Skinwalker, who has no seeming goal except to hurt people in whatever fashion it chooses.
- Harry himself, in Changes when he decides he needs to make a Deal with the Devil for a lot of power in a hurry, goes through the list of entities he knows. He tries the Archangel Uriel, but was told he was already being affected In Mysterious Ways, the god Odin contacts him and gives some advice, but also doesn't directly interfere. He considers the Denarians, fallen angels and other Black Cloak wizards; but figures they're too big on being The Corrupter and that he might get diverted from his purpose. Besides, he could just contact demonic forces directly if he wanted that. Finally he decides on Queen Mab of the Winter Court. She's cruel and she'll own his mind and body if not his soul, but she won't make him eat babies.
- Because it's a game by Obsidian (formerly Black Isle), it should come as no surprise that Knights of the Old Republic 2 features this trope pretty significantly. If the player should choose to be Light Side, then s/he and his/her group are fairly close to the Hero extreme. A little further away from the good end, but hard to say by how much, would be the Jedi Council, who are shown to have good intentions but be seriously flawed in their execution of them. Further toward the Villain side, you would have Darth Traya. Then, practically sitting on the Villain extreme, you have Darth Sion and Darth Nihilus, with the second one the most non-Heroic, most Villainous person in the game.
- Kingdom Hearts, particularly in its later instalments, is surprisingly dependent on this trope for a Disney property. Sora's pretty close to the hero extreme (though he's more personally-motivated than he seems), while the Disney villains actually come from 'verses with Black-and-White Morality. The grey areas range from Roxas (whose lack of memories sometimes leads to a sense of Ambiguous Innocence) and Riku and Axel (who are so devoted to their friends that they'll shoot whatever dogs are necessary to save them) to DiZ (who works for the same end as the good guys out of a need for revenge) and Organization XIII (which, in itself, has everything from the apathetic Demyx to the Evil Overlord Xemnas).
- While the first Mass Effect had this to an extent, the second game features it a lot. Furthest toward the hero end, we have "pure" [[Paragon Shepherd.]] Slightly down from him/her, we've got Jacob, who seems to be a good man, just involved with bad people. In the middle, we have Miranda (who has her moments), Garrus (who rather doesn't like criminals), Mordin (who does bad things to stop even worse things happening) and Thane, an assassin who only kills bad people. On down toward the villain end, you have Zaeed, a mercenary, though he's not too selective about who he kills. Even closer to the far end, you have the surprisingly charming Illusive Man. But there are those without any decency at all, namely people like Nassana Dantius and Morinth.
- Comes with the the territory of being based on the Dungeons And Dragons alignment system in the Order Of The Stick. You have good characters doing good things because it's the right thing to do, bad people doing bad things for a greater good, and bad people doing bad things for amusement.
- There Will Be Brawl uses this a lot. Farthest towards the "Hero" side would be Luigi and Red, who genuinely want the best for the Mushroom Kingdom and its inhabitants, and work to solve the mysteries in the show without resorting to more extreme methods like Mario or Link. Characters closer to the "Villain" side are people like Wario, who's only out for his own self-interests, then Zelda who forcibly attempts to usurp the Kingdom's power, and finally Kirby at the most extreme, who just likes killing people and sowing fear among the populace.
- The Whateley Universe does this in spades. Start with the heroes of Team Kimba. They range from the 'I don't even want to hit people' attitude of Phase to the 'I had to slaughter a hundred bad guys to rescue people' switch of Tennyo to Bladedancer, who killed an ordinary family man in cold blood to prevent a possible Bad Future. The villains are all over the place too. Supervillain Dr. Diabolik is apparently a great father, and his children have said he only does the things he does to advance mankind.
- Avatar The Last Airbender fits. Most of Team Aang is unequivocally good and the most powerful members of the Fire Nation are power-hungry sociopaths, but almost everyone else falls somewhere in between. Baa Sing Se turns out to be a Crapsaccharine World, and the Northern Water Tribe has some pretty sexist moments. The rank-and-file and civilians of the Fire Nation are more often misguided patriots than outright evil. You could make a decent argument that the whole series is a subversion of the Always Chaotic Evil trope.
These examples represent 80% of the current Morality Kitchen Sink page. When "misuse" is THAT high, I feel completely justified in saying Morality Kitchen Sink means, "all sides of the alignment spectrum" are represented. You say it's not a trope yet, but a whole lot of other people seem to disagree.
edited 31st Oct '11 5:20:34 PM by Tyoria
Jupiterian Local
What exactly is it that you want to do? I'm confused.
Morality Kitchen Sink, as currently defined, is a viable trope. There are a bunch of examples on the page that aren't misuse (of the ones that I'm personally familiar with: Fullmetal Alchemist, Code Geass, Elantris (actually, pretty much all of Brandon Sanderson's work applies), Hells Gate, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, and Avatar The Last Airbender). There's no reason to change the definition (it's already clear and well-defined) or cutlist it. If you want to rename it or think the examples need work, then make a TRS thread for it.
"Has a full spectrum of characters, from the whitest white to the blackest black, and everything in between" may be a trope. It does not currently exist on the wiki. If you think it should, then feel free to YKTTW it. Crib the bad examples off Morality Kitchen Sink if you want.
Most importantly, what the hell does any of this have to do with The Good, the Bad, and the Evil? I've proposed action to be taken for that one: I think we should widen the definition to include any example of a work that includes exactly one white, one grey, and one black main character/faction. The parts of the definition that talk about Enemy Civil War and Enemy Mine are not part of the core trope, so I think they should be removed.
edited 1st Nov '11 4:21:05 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
I can't TRS it. We're at the cap.
"One gray, one black, and one white faction" is a concept so incredibly close to that in-practice definition of Morality Kitchen Sink that I don't see a lot of merit to it on its own. And since that is the in-practice definition of Morality Kitchen Sink, I don't want to change The Good, the Bad, and the Evil to make it effectively a clone.
Having it be a subtrope of Enemy Mine or Enemy Civil War makes more sense to me, and the examples mostly seem to talk about Enemy Mine. An Enemy Mine is any situation where two opponents must team up with each other, people seem to think this trope is the specific kind of Enemy Mine that happens when good and neutral team up against evil. Compare Evil Versus Oblivion.
edited 1st Nov '11 6:44:42 PM by Tyoria
Jupiterian Local
So you're saying that we should change the definition of Morality Kitchen Sink to something unrelated to its current description ("defies simple moral labels" to "has the full spectrum of morality, from saintly to demonic"), then say that we shouldn't broaden The Good, the Bad, and the Evil because your new proposed definition for Morality Kitchen Sink is too similar (even though "has the full spectrum of morality" isn't really that close to "has exactly one white, one grey, and one black"), so we should leave that as it is?
In that case, what would we do with a) the examples that fall under the current definition of Morality Kitchen Sink, and b) the examples that don't fall under the current definition of The Good, the Bad, and the Evil?
There are three tropes here. "Defies simple morality labels", "represents the full spectrum of morality", and "has one white, one black, and one grey". All of these are legit tropes with plenty of examples. Why should we try to shoehorn them into two articles (one of which would have to be completely redefined) instead of just making three articles (one new one, and one tweaked definition)?
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
You're telling me that "has one good, one neutral, and one evil faction" is dramatically different than "represents the full spectrum of morality"? Explain to me how you could have one single example under the former that isn't equally represented by the latter.
We have a trope that is about that — or at the very least is its supertrope. Morality Kitchen Sink should be rewritten since the description AND ITS REDIRECTS do not reflect the majority of its entries. The bad examples, the ones that mean every person can contain the full spectrum of morality, and thus defy easy labels, go to Gray-and-Gray Morality.
And we do it to that trope and not this one because more of its examples fit the mark than do the ones under The Good, the Bad, and the Evil, whose examples in practice emphasize the Enemy Mine aspect. Morality Kitchen Sink is less broken than The Good, the Bad, and the Evil — it simply has the wrong description and a few misplaced examples. The Good, the Bad, and the Evil has a completely confused description and examples that are all over the map. Take out the little problem and it becomes easier to bring the larger one into scale. If you "fix" The Good, the Bad, and the Evil to basically be a subtrope of what I'm saying Morality Kitchen Sink already is, then you have to completely change that page, completely change Morality Kitchen Sink, and also launch a third trope.
edited 1st Nov '11 8:52:37 PM by Tyoria
Jupiterian Local
Do we really have to get down into example-by-example arguments?
You're defining "all shades of the alignment spectrum" in a very narrow fashion — as if it literally has to mean, a work must contain at least one Messiah of Incorruptible Pure Pureness and at least one Complete Monster who does it all For the Evulz.
If factions "blur the lines," you've got Gray-and-Gray Morality. If one side is on the balance more good, they're A Lighter Shade of Gray. You want to say the humans are good so you can have a trope that needs that label, but want to deny that label applies so you can also have a trope that is about defying the label, even though that's exactly what Gray and Gray is for. Yes, the current description of Morality Kitchen Sink is redundant.
The trope that The Good, the Bad, and the Evil should be talking about, according to its description, is Enemy Civil War, not Enemy Mine. Not all of the examples zero in on that aspect, but they seem to do it more than they do with the one it's ostensibly a subtrope of.
Zzzzzzzzzz
The difference between this trope and "a shades of the morality spectrum" as I read it it, is that this is the main characters can be sorted into three distinct groups, rather than shading from one degree to another on the Good->Evil spectrum.
edited 3rd Nov '11 12:43:06 AM by FastEddie
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Jupiterian Local
Le bump.
Ignoring the Morality Kitchen Sink digression, this trope still needs clarification.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Two questions about this trope:
The description seems to say that the faction split is mandatory but the team-up with good is optional, while most of the descriptions seem to be the other way around.
There's a definite disconnect between the description and the examples, but the description is unclear enough in the first place that I'm not really sure what to do about it. I can see a few different possible definitions for the trope:
On my previous examples, they all seem to be type 3 except Halo and Avatar The Last Airbender, which are type 1. Maybe someone familiar with other examples can see which is the most common.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.