History Main / BalanceBetweenGoodAndEvil

* Parodied in the amateur film ''CollegeSaga''. The antagonists in the movie are vegetarians who plot to kill off all meat-eaters. At the end, the hero says "I have found my healthy balance" and bites into a hamburger with salad.

* In ''TheLongestJourney'', the worlds of [[AnotherDimension Stark and Arcadia]] are the order and chaos halves of what was once one world. They are kept from remerging destructively by the Guardian of the Balance; said guardian's absence triggers the events of the game.
** In addition, one of the villains had his chaotic essence separated from him, turning him into a cold-hearted and purely rational being while the swirling chaos was released to terrorise Arcadia. It also turns out that [[spoiler: he's the next Guardian , whom the villains caught and separated in an attempt to control him, and before you can have him take up his proper job you have to reintegrate both sides. Once you do that, he becomes a surprisingly nice guy.]]

* The Keepers of ''{{Thief}}'' give "the balance" as the reason they try not to interfere. This turns out to be more than just talk: after a major blow is dealt to a force of Chaos in the first game, a force of Order gets uppity and becomes the major villain in the second.

* [[SadlyMythtaken Contrary to popular belief]], not present in Daoism or anything else that uses the yin-yang symbol. Yin and Yang represent harmony through complementary opposites like dark/light, female/male, earth/sky, etc. In such philosophies, evil is generally seen as something that ''disrupts'' harmony, i.e., not part of yin or yang.

** [[{{Subversion}} That being said]], it's quite clear that in the end [[{{God}} Ahura Mazda]] will triumph over [[TheAntiGod Angra Mainyu]], so Zoroastrianism isn't of the "balance for balance's sake" school of thought.

* {{Galactus}}, the big guy without fashion sense who eats a few billion people a month, was also rationalised as "necessary for the cosmic balance" by the sentience of the Marvel Universe, for very trippy and flimsy reasons in John Byrne's "Trial of Galactus". The character has been rationalised as anything from a Mussolini-esque "storm to test the worth of civilisations, so those who don't survive '''deserve''' to die", to "the balancing force between life and death" (as if overpopulation didn't take care of itself), to keeping an even greater threat in check through Thuggee-style continual blood sacrifice/absorbed life force, to "a force of nature VideoGame/BeyondGoodAndEvil... that nonetheless is fully able to frequently hold conversation with his food, or enlists its aid, is completely sentient, has a personality etc", despite being stated as perfectly able to feed on various non-sentient energy such as stars. The writer Jim Starlin has later portrayed Galactus as an absolutely entitled, conceited, and ruthless egomaniac in complete violation of his automatic social contract, which is much easier to accept given the circumstances.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Goblins}}'', it's mentioned that the balance is currently tipped towards the favor of evil in the world.

* In ''[[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8914135/18/Betrayal Betrayal]]'' Harry received three innate animagus forms shortly after the final battle. One of them, a catlike creature called a Night Stalker, was assigned to act as a "balancer" between light and dark, which in practice meant that he was driven to subdue or kill people or beings who attempted to kill others. When Daphne Greengrass asked what would've happened had there been too much ''light'' in the world he replied that in that case, they would've been faced with an evil version of him which was driven to "bring the light down to a manageable level."

* Taken to an almost ridiculous extreme in the poorly known (only recently translated to english) series Amos Daragon, in which a person (the "mask wearer") is chosen to keep a balance on good and evil. Needless to say that, since all the evil gods are trying to ensure the extinction of mankind, this seems remarkably stupid - unless the author actually meant a [[LowestCosmicDenominator "balance between light and dark"]] instead of actual good and evil, because I really don't think that its necessary to ensure [[spoiler:that dragons and other reptilish monster go around killing off mankind]] just because some fairies and a goddess told you to "keep a balance"

* This is built into the laws of reality in the DeathGateCycle- good existing unchallenged long enough ''causes'' evil and vice versa, meaning that (by the standards of the cosmos as a whole) a rough equilibrium will always be maintained. [[EldritchAbomination The bad guys]] want to fix everything towards the evil end, as [[EmotionEater they feed off of mortal suffering]].

** Not really evil or random. While a great many hollows have been shown to have simply embraced their darker instincts, it's been shown that Hollows tend to attack humans and pluses out of a need to feed rather than out of [[ForTheEvulz simple randomness]]. That doesn't mean that they're all irredeemable (just look at Nel Tu, who's entire pre-turned into a child philosophy revolved around the idea that Hollows were able to overcome their instincts by becoming Arrancar, or even ''Ulquiorra'', of all people, [[spoiler:who was finally able to understand friendship before dying]]). The problem with the Quincy was that they were destroying the souls of both the Hollows and, by extension, those they fed on, using the methods they had developed. This threw out the balance not of Good and Evil, but of the very reincarnation cycle of their universe; hence the war between the Quincy and Soul Reapers.

*** It's later revealed that what Hild does care about is the balance, the reason she antagonizes the goddesses is that [[spoiler: their presence in the Morisato home actually causes an imbalance that she needs to rectify]]. Off course, the reason she does this is because of [[spoiler: her daughter, the goddess Urd]].

** Actually, that had nothing to do with what kinds of wishes were being made, so much as the fact that wishes were being made at all and at an alarmingly high rate, too fast for the dragonballs to keep up. So it was more a lesson about overusing magical wish-granting trinkets to solve one's problems.

* The setting of ''{{Gundam 00}}'''s first season, with three global superpowers squaring off against each other. The opening narration even uses the phrase "zero sum game" (in GratuitousEnglish for the original Japanese version).

At times, this can get silly, with there being no reason behind ''why'' the absence of evil would be a bad thing[[hottip:*: Arguably, the ''definition'' of "evil" is "that which would better the world by its absence"]]. Sometimes this is explained with the universe becoming [[GoodIsBoring boring]], society stagnating or collapsing from within in the absence of something to struggle against or giving people a chance to show [[VirtueViceCodification real nobility and virtue]] by risking their lives to defend each other. Other times, its ''enforced'' by depicting [[{{Utopia}} ultimate good]] as repressive (often LawfulStupid[[hottip:*:more to the point, no longer good]]), or by declaring positive or neutral concepts such as [[TheEvilsOfFreeWill free will]] or [[AmbitionIsEvil ambition]] as evil. This can confuse people who equate Good (the opposite of Evil) with good (the opposite of bad), as preserving the Balance of Good and Bad eventually means that you have to, for example, defend a murderous rapist's right to murder and rape. In those cases, "Good" and "Evil" become something more similar to physical forces like "Hot" and "Cold" and don't seem to have much to do with morality at all anymore.

* ''MagicalProjectS'' had re-establishing the Balance as its main goal, represented by a giant set of scales that adjusted themselves after every Sammy victory. Convenient! [[hottip:* :Course, you could argue that since every Sammy victory was just her vanquishing the Evil introduced specifically to fight her in the first place by Pixy Misa, there should be no net gain in Good over Evil. But this is an AffectionateParody of MagicalGirl shows, so [[MST3KMantra you really should relax]].

* [[VideoGame/SoulSeries Soul Edge]] was originally too evil to simply exist by itself, so Algol created Soul Calibur to act as its balance from a fragment of the cursed sword[[hottip:*:Although this was a reactionary move to the evil sword corrupting his son and forcing Algol to slay him.]] Unfortunately, [[spoiler:creating a holy sword from a cursed sword causes the holy sword to think that "Balance Between Good and Evil" really means "freeze everyone so no one can hurt one another ever again". It is kind of a "balance" but in functional terms all you get is a world of carnage or a world of nothing, neither of which help the people caught in the middle.]]

* Zoroastrianism is among the best example of this trope. Unlike Abrahamic religions in which God is omnipotent and Devil is much weaker, in Zoroastrianism there are [[TheAntiGod two equal Gods of good and evil]].
** [[{{Subversion}} That being said]], it's quite clear that in the end [[{{God}} Ahura Mazda]] will triumph over [[GodOfEvil Angra Mainyu]], so Zoroastrianism isn't of the "balance for balance's sake" school of thought.

* Zoroastrianism is among the best example of this trope. Unlike Abrahamic religions in which God is omnipotent and Devil is much weaker, in Zoroastrianism there are two equal Gods of good and evil.

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* Game theory, used in fields as diverse as economics and evolutionary biology, is concerned with quantitative evaluation of competing strategies for success. Except under extreme, usually-temporary circumstances, most game theory analyses of alternative strategies (cooperation vs. conflict, high vs. low investment, fair dealing vs. deception, etc) find that it's the moderate and/or mixed strategies which "win" in the long term, providing the most gain for the least cost. Balance prevails, either due to moderate strategies' success, or rival strategies' persisting side by side at stable frequencies.
** There is a fair amount of selection bias here, however. Situations where a single simple strategy is obviously superior (hence no balance between different ones) are so boring, from a game-theoretic viewpoint, that nobody wastes time doing a formal analysis that would count in this statistic.
** Also many situations in game theory are not zero sum (gain on one side means loss on the other) like the BalanceBetweenGoodAndEvil is, so a different set of strategies is required. In zero sum games, cooperation is a ''bad'' idea, since any one player can only gain at the cost of any or all the other players. In such a case, cooperation can only lead to complete equality, with no one ever acting to gain or lose anything.
* There's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier%27s_principle Le Chatelier's principle of equilibria]], where any equilibrium will act to rebalance itself after any disturbances.
** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz%27s_law Lenz's Law]] in electromagnetism is a special case.
* One has to wonder, how would humanity define good if there was no evil to compare it to, or vice versa? It's entirely possible that for people to be able to recognise good, they have to understand evil enough to know the difference. As such, the existence of evil is required to be able to recognise the existence of good for what it is instead of taking it for granted.
** However, this idea is not necessarily set in stone, especially when one considers things like RousseauWasRight. Since empathy and some other aspects considered "good" are humanity's natural default, suffice is to say that the presence of "evil" would be much more than superfluous.
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** Not even. While a great many hollows have been shown to have simply embraced their darker instincts, it's been shown that Hollows tend to attack humans and pluses out of a need to feed rather than out of [[ForTheEvulz simple randomness]]. That doesn't mean that they're all irredeemable (just look at Nel Tu, who's entire pre-turned into a child philosophy revolved around the idea that Hollows were able to overcome their instincts by becoming Arrancar, or even ''Ulquiorra'', of all people, [[Spoiler:who was finally able to understand friendship before dying]]). The problem with the Quincy was that they were destroying the souls of both the Hollows and, by extension, those they fed on, using the methods they had developed. This threw out the balance not of Good and Evil, but of the very reincarnation cycle of their universe; hence the war between the Quincy and Soul Reapers.