Blue And Orange Morality / Western Animation

Blue-and-Orange Morality in Western Animation.

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• Adventure Time:
  • Marceline the Vampire Queen openly acknowledges this, stating in her first appearance that "I'm not mean, I'm a thousand years old, and I just lost track of my moral code". It mostly explains how she can be an example of Dark Is Not Evil while still being really terrifying at times.
  • Blue and Orange conflict is demonstrated in a conversation between Princess Bubblegum and Finn.
    Finn: I'm...into Zanoits...they're the best!
    Bubblegum: Zanoits kill hundreds of thousands of plantoids each year.
    Finn: Oh no, not the plantoids!
    Bubblegum: Plantoids produce mellotoxin.
    Finn: ...
    Bubblegum: Mellotoxin kills zanoits!
    Finn: So are zanoits....good things?
  • Prismo is a Nice Guy who, for completely unspecified reasons, is also a Jackass Genie who places "monkey's paw"-esque twists on wishes unless you're really specific. He even warns Jake that entire worlds could inadvertently be erased if one doesn't word their wish well enough, and in the end, just outright tells Jake the wish he needs to make in order to make everything well again without something backfiring. It's never made clear why he clearly knows right from wrong but still delves out terrible consequences to wish-makers who don't deserve it.
• Æon Flux: Aeon and Trevor take their opposing ideologies to such extremes that they're very difficult to judge by realistic standards, and thus their conflict falls squarely into this. C'mon, can anyone honestly say they knew what the show was actually about?
  Trevor: The dream to awaken our world.
  Aeon: You're out of control.
  Trevor: I take control... Whose side are you on?
  Aeon: I take no sides.
  Trevor: You're skating the edge.
  Aeon: I am the edge.
  Trevor: What you truly want, only I can give.
  Aeon: You can't give it, can't even buy it, and you just don't get it.
• Chaos from Aladdin: The Series thinks in terms of "interesting" vs "boring" - as far as he's concerned, anything that removes a mundane situation should be applauded, even if that mundane situation is - say - peace and prosperity. That said, he always arranges for the destructive effects of his shenanigans to be cleared up and reversed eventually, so he at least realizes his games have limits.
• Roger's species from American Dad! has this, probably because they become violently ill if they aren't casually cruel. Or as Roger himself puts it, "Let out their bitchiness." They're also not above using live crash test dummies.
  • The crash test dummy incident may not have been Blue & Orange Morality, but a case of deliberate malice. Roger himself is discovered to have been sent on a "mission" that was actually just using him as a test dummy for vehicle safety. A later episode reveals that Roger was in a relationship with his planet's prime minister, Emperor Zing, and his 'mission' may have been a spiteful exile.
• It's a possible trait of inhabitants of the Spirit World in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar Yangchen, the previous Air Nomadic Avatar, mentions to Aang that many Air Nomads have detached themselves from all worldly concerns and achieved spiritual enlightenment, but the Avatar can never do it because it's the Avatar's job to be the bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world, which requires them to be a part of the world they're protecting. It's likely the Avatar was created so that a powerful spiritual being could comprehend humanity and the concerns of the physical world, and thus not have blue and orange morality as a result of their detachment. From what we see of the other spirits — most of whom are capricious, whimsical, offhandedly cruel, violently attached to one single concept or another, or just plain alien — it was a necessary step.
  • The Legend of Korra confirms that the spirits' blue and orange morality was why the Avatar was created. Humans and spirits did not trust each other, and spirits frequently attacked humans with seemingly little provocation, except that humans were doing what they needed to do to survive. During Wan's lifetime, the spirits' cruelty to humans as well as the effects of Raava and Vaatu's eternal struggle were precisely why Wan became the Avatar; after the Harmonic Convergence in which Vaatu was defeated and imprisoned, Wan decides to use his powers to send the spirits back to their world and close the spirit portals, to protect humanity and keep the peace among the four newly-united Lion Turtle cities.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Poison Ivy establishes herself as this in her first appearance. Treating plants with tender, motherly kindness but viewing people as cancer that must be exterminated. Men in particular being there solely to feed her seductive and sadistic appetites.
• Dinobot in Beast Wars: "I have honor, but it is PREDACON honor!" That seems to mean that if you don't trust your leader's competence, you usurp them; if said leader is unable to prevent this, that leader isn't fit to command. If the predacon fails to usurp the leader clearly they are/were unfit to command. So, basically, Sith Lords.
• Ben 10's grandmother Verdona is a hedonistic Energy Being who abandoned her family the second her children came of age because none of them inherited her powers. When it turns out Gwen did, Verdona attempts to destroy Gwen's physical body to awaken her full potential. From her point of view, Gwen's Anodite form is her true form, and her body is just a meatsuit that can be recreated once Gwen is skilled enough. She even regards attacking her own grandchildren as a fun game, being far too powerful for Ben, Gwen and Kevin to properly fight her.
• The titular lovable Manchild of Dan Vs. operates on a very skewed honor code and set of morals. He's willing to do just about anything in his pursuit of revenge but when it comes to the revenge itself he won't go further than what he feels is deserved, such as hunting a werewolf who scratched his car so he can merely key the werewolf's car, or halting his vengeance against a wild west theme park that "cheated him out of $20" after he felt the things he did trying to get said vengeance (such as sticking someone up and having a Quick Draw with the corrupt sheriff) was well worth the money he spent.
• Unsurprisingly Oberon's Children from Gargoyles have this kind of morality, with most of their actions dictated by their whims. Even their more agreeable members can sometimes stoop to underhanded tactics and are known to take offense to things such as being politely asked to go away.
• The titular train in Infinity Train. The train has good intentions, as it wants passengers to work through their emotional, behavioral, and psychological problems. But that doesn't change the fact that it still kidnapped you to do so, doesn't tell you how you're actually meant to grow as a person after dumping you in one of an infinite number of pocket universes, and completely neglects to explain what the problem it wants you to fix is. The only sign that you're doing what the train wants is a number that will sometimes go up and down depending on your actions, and for most of the train's existence, you weren't even told which direction was the good one. Even if you know exactly what the train wants, it can still take months or years to actually get the "right" to go back home, assuming you last that long.
  • The Apex cult in season 3 exemplifies some of these problems, as they have concluded that making your number go up makes you go stronger, making it go down makes you weaker, and you die when it hits 0. And since they've noticed by observation that numbers go up when you're an asshole and down when you're nice, they've concluded that Virtue Is Weakness. The Apex's founder Grace disbands the cult when she realizes that this is based on a false premise (that she originally made up so she could pretend she knew how the train worked), while her friend Simon ends up the Big Bad because he stuck to the Apex philosophy 'till the end.
• In King of the Hill, Hank Hill has some thoughts on this trope: "What kind of code lets you return a bag of shaving cream and not marry a girl you got knocked up?" Much of the show's humor comes from contrasting morality systems that will seem strange to either one or another group of characters in the show or the audience. For instance, an acceptable and encouraged tradition was called the "McMaynerbury Whuppin'," which involved the McMaynerbury school band beating the crap out of the Arlen mascot. When Bobby ran away because he didn't want to get beat up, they tried to have him stricken from the school yearbook.
• Discord of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is certainly a Troll, but he seems to view eternal chaos as an end rather than a means, describing the new Ponyville as "beautiful" and seeing little difference between making it rain (explosive) chocolate milk or driving a pony over the Despair Event Horizon. Further complicating the matter is it being unknown whether he's an Anthropomorphic Personification or "merely" a very powerful Reality Warper (he refers to himself as the "spirit of chaos and disharmony", but that could be just a title).
  • "Keep Calm and Flutter On" reveals he only needed a friend, proving once again, Friendship Is Magic.
  • Discord seemingly claims higher ground when he says he doesn't turn his opponents to stone, implying that he considers his imprisonment a greater offense than anything he's done. Obviously, to an embodiment of chaos and change, being trapped in an unchanging form would be horrifying.
  • The Changelings might be this, depending on whether they merely feed on love as a food source or if they exploit The Power of Love to make themselves more powerful. If the former, their treatment of the ponies to them would be equivalent to cultivating livestock. Though in the Season 6 finale it's discovered that the Changelings can sustain themselves by sharing love between them and other beings without sucking it out. Queen Chrysalis was simply lying to her subjects that they were only able to suck love out in order to fuel her reign of terror.
• Love, Death & Robots: The short "Pop Squad" shows a future where humans have developed the medical technology to let them live forever, but the population is tightly managed and there is no room for newborn children in a world where nobody checks out. The police kill unregistered children on sight, and have no moral qualms with it at all. The immortal humans cannot even wrap their heads around why some of them would want to live a life on the run in utter squalor to have a child, and they cannot even remember what it's like to have children around or what their needs are.
• The gods in Onyx Equinox, who rely on Human Sacrifice to survive. Quetzalcoatl is better than most, in that he opposes just wiping out humanity (again) but he still has no qualms about fatally possessing the body of a child.
• The Collector from The Owl House is an immensely powerful Reality Warper with the mind of a very young child, i.e. effectively sociopathic but not actively malicious. He isn't so much evil as good and evil appear to be totally alien concepts to them; rather his values system seems to be based on what is fun and what is boring. They just want to play, but at the same time, he doesn't realize that hurting or killing people is wrong, reasoning that they can just be "fixed" like when a toy breaks. The only moral standard he appears to have is that promises must be kept; you can get them to do what you want by promising to reward him (usually by playing with him), but if you lie to them or break a pinkie swear, they will be very angry.
• Pet Alien: Some of the aliens have very strange belief systems:
  • Dinko's morality is entirely based on how his human best friend Tommy feels about something: if it would help Tommy or make him happy, it's good, and if it would harm Tommy or make him sad, it's bad. Many of Dinko's more questionable actions are done under the belief that they would make Tommy happy.
  • None of Flip's actions have any discernable logic or reason to them whatsoever and are primarily based on whatever crosses his mind at that very moment. He'll push buttons, pull levers, and screw with basically everyone.
• Rick and Morty is basically built around this trope, consistently contrasting the straightforward morality of Morty with the peculiar moralities of alien species.
  • For Meeseeks (who are actually blue and orange) their sole Goal in Life is performing a single given task and disappearing. Prolonged existence is extremely painful to them, making it understandable if they take some drastic measures to complete the task.
  • Abradolf Lincler is a failed experiment of Rick to create a morally neutral super leader by combining the DNA of Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln. The result is an extremely morally confused and ambiguous Tortured Monster.
  • Transdimensional being known as Fart reveals before the end that carbon-based life forms are like a disease to his species and that they plan to exterminate them appealing to Morty's own moral code for protecting life above everything else.
  • Unity is a parasitic entity living by assimilating other life forms into a collective Hive Mind, planning to enslave the whole universe and becoming a God. It however seems that the assimilated species, that we see in the show, is better off under its control.
  • Discussed by Morty, however, it was mainly because he was taking his frustrations out on Summer because he got rejected.
    Morty: Well, Summer, maybe people that create things aren't concerned with your delicate sensibilities, you know? Maybe the species that communicate with each other through the filter of your comfort are less evolved than the ones that just communicate! Maybe your problems are your own to deal with, and maybe the public giving a shit about your feelings is a one-way ticket to extinction!
    Rick: Jeez, Morty. I take it Catherine Hefflefinger hasn't texted you back yet.
    Morty: (sullenly) I don't wanna talk about it...
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: While Entrapta is generally a nice person, her moral compass is otherwise tied to her tendency to do things For Science!, which means she has no problem working for the Horde as long as they give her stuff to work with. She was also unfazed by seeing Catra getting sent out on what was essentially a suicide mission and the fact that her lab partner took part in intergalactic conquest.
• Solar Opposites: The family (except Terry) are aware that humans hate them. So they perform experiments on them, which is why they hate them.
  • Korvo, insincerely discusses this after the events of episode one.
    Terry: Do you feel like maybe we're the bad people in all of this?
    Korvo: We're aliens. Our ways are mysterious. We can't be judged by human standards. Now let's get out of here before we get arrested for all this shit.
  • While the family shows that they do have a conscience, they don’t have much of a problem with the Pupa eventually reaching its final form, destroying and rebuilding the planet, which... would be just a little step above the shitstorms they usually cause.
• South Park. Cartman often comes off as having this whenever he actually decides to do something unselfish or even heroic. In the span of a few episodes, he can go from getting revenge on a bully by indirectly killing his parents, then tricking him into eating chili made out of their remains, to taking on Osama bin Laden in the style of a War Time Cartoon.
• Peridot in Steven Universe is shown to view right and wrong in terms of the greater good of the Gem Empire, at one point describing an image of a hollowed-out Earth that couldn't possibly sustain life as "beautiful" because of how much it would have helped the Diamond Authority, compared to Earth's current situation of having a gargantuan fusion abomination growing inside it, which wouldn't really benefit anyone; the only thing higher than this is her own survival. She also has trouble grasping the concept of romantic affection, creating a shipping grid for a TV show based on which pairing would gain the best tactical advantages, and puts so much stock in logic and reason that she rebels upon learning that her superior is in fact motivated largely by spite, despite not being particularly rational herself in many situations.
  • Gems in general seem to have this problem, being a non-organic species that are functionally immortal. The Diamond Authority and Gems loyal to them believed that their own needs and the needs of the empire were the only ones of any importance and that organic life was beneath them and only worthwhile as a sign of a planet that could be colonized and harvested to make more Gems. They literally see no point in allowing organic sentient life to exist. Even the Crystal Gems, who do value organic life, originally only see humans in a more conservationist mindset as a human would see an endangered species of animal. It takes a long time for Rose Quartz and the other Crystal Gems to learn that humanity does have needs and desires beyond simply continuing their own physical existence.
  • White Diamond is probably the worst case of this, as she's been detached from her rapidly developing society and the rest of her "family", Blue, Yellow, and Pink, that she believes herself to be the greatest life-form in existence, and that even all the other Gems would be better off doing exactly what she says and having no identities of their own. It literally takes being proven wrong about Pink Diamond, and being embarrassed by Steven to the point of exposing a flaw in her "flawless" form^note she turns pink when embarrassed to snap her out of it and convince her that it's better to let people, including herself, be themselves, warts and all, and that she can't just live in her own head all the time.

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