Misused: Good All Along

This trope is being misused. The definition is weirdly specific and seems to only apply to mooks. The examples and use are of a much broader missing supertrope.

Not to mention the fact that at least half the time (perhaps much more), according to the description, relevant examples are not "good" by any reasonable measure.

What about Evil All Along? It's a similar trope that deals with side characters who help the hero.

That one is written broadly enough that it's effectively any character that pretends to be on the side of good and turns out to be the bad guy. It just suffers from a bad case of example as definition.

I would support making Good All Along something like Evil All Along, but the examples on the page now that have the correct definition may have to be moved.

Mooks being pressed into service or similar is a different idea than a major antagonist turning out to have been a good guy the whole time. It's just that the name is misleading.

This also seems to effectively be very similar to What Measure Is a Mook?.

But yeah, really could use broadening.

That's about killing mooks without regard for them being deconstructed within the story.

The trope name makes me think of a Heel–Face Turn when a good guy was only pretending to be a bad guy. Since it seems as if the intention of the trope is specifically for mooks, I think the trope should be renamed. I agree with 5. We should work to split the examples into two tropes. Good All Along for general examples, and a new name for the description and those that match it.

There is also Mook–Face Turn, which seems related, but is specific in another way.

edited 14th May '13 8:25:38 PM by Rethkir

This for me looks like a trope about a set of mooks of which some are good.

I get a different impression - that a set of mooks is perceived as evil (but turn out not to be) OR as representative for their whole culture/race (but turn out not to be). I'm not convinced these are both the same trope, but they're both about the pattern of "you fight a bunch of orcs and conclude that therefore ALL orcs everywhere are EVIL". This trope is when either some orcs are different from the ones you fought (e.g. river vs sea zoras in Zelda) or when all orcs including the ones you fought had deeper motives that show they're not actually evil.

The name is somewhat misleading in both cases though; in neither case are any orcs necessarily good, but Just Because You Fight Some Members Of A Culture Doesnt Make The Whole Culture Evil is too awkward for a trope name :)

Note also that this is almost completely unrelated to Evil All Along, which is "somebody you thought was working for you was actually working against you the whole time"; it may seem like Face–Heel Turn except that the character was never a face in the first place, you just assumed he was. It strikes me that Evil All Along is a good name for what that trope is, whereas Good All Along is a Snow Clone that misses the point of its content.

edited 15th May '13 3:48:21 AM by Spark9

Basically, I would like to make Good All Along and Evil All Along both be, you thought character was working with the good/evil side, but it turned out they were always evil/good.

The trope here is a trope, but will be better off with a better name.

I see no issues with @12.

Agreed. Any trope called Good All Along should be the exact opposite of Evil All Along, which this is not. Some of the examples, however, didn't read the description and assumed this was the case. Some talk about an individual mook instead of a whole race. This trope is about races of mooks.

I support making Good All Along the good counterpart of Evil All Along and moving this trope to another page. We just need to find a name and weed through the examples…

You beat me. I think we're all in agreement, then.

There are 314 wicks. Most of these are assuming that this is the good version of Evil All Along, but we'll have to sort through them when the new trope has it's own page.

New name: Since this is a subversion of Always Chaotic Evil, I suggest Not Always Evil, at least as a placeholder so we have something to refer to it as.

edited 15th May '13 7:10:20 AM by Rethkir

I agree with all of the above, basically. And Not Always Evil sounds like a good name, too.

Is it when all of them are not evil, or just some of them? Not Always Evil sounds like the latter.

edited 15th May '13 8:51:39 AM by AnotherDuck

According to paragraph 2 of the description: "Some authors will throw us a twist and reveal that these guys aren't naturally evil... or at least, there's a whole lot of them out there, and we've only seen the bad apples. This can take many forms:"

So to answer that question: at least some of them are not evil. It can apply to all since Tropes Are Flexible. Not Always Evil can also mean that they are not evil all the time, but only when you perceive them to be. An example of this would be the Vortigaunts in Half-Life. In the first game, they are nothing more than common mook Cannon Fodder, but in the second, they are humanity's greatest ally. It turns out that the only reason they were trying to kill you is because they were enslaved by the Big Bad of the first game.

Or, it can mean that mooks aren't always evil in a meta sense.

edited 15th May '13 10:02:56 AM by Rethkir

Maybe Forced into Evil for the mooks being forced into their position trope?

EDIT: Huh, seems that that's a supertrope for what we're looking for already.

edited 15th May '13 10:24:13 AM by shimaspawn

Not Always Evil sounds like it should be the opposite of Always Chaotic Evil.

It is, yes.

My exact point. That's pretty much what this trope is.

edited 15th May '13 11:33:53 AM by Rethkir

I don't like defining things as opposites, since there are several ideas about what "opposite" actually means. Is the opposite of Always Chaotic Evil Never Chaotic Evil, Always Lawful Good, Only Sometimes Chaotic Evil, or Never Lawful Good?

It's not defined as the opposite. It's defined as "a race/culture that you thought was Always Chaotic Evil turns out not to be". That means there'll just be a line "compare/contrast <that trope>" in the description, otherwise it'll stand on its own.

Well, it's more of a subversion, really.

I divided the examples into Sandbox.Not Always Evil and Sandbox.Good All Along. The ratio of misuse is very high. I believe it's around a third.
Again, Sandbox.Not Always Evil is when Always Chaotic Evil is subverted. This includes justifications for an entire race/group of mooks or exceptions. Sandbox.Good All Along is when a character who is thought to be bad turns out to have been good all along, as the name suggests. I am not familiar with all of these works, so please correct mistakes if you find any. l split Order Of The Stick because it contained examples of both tropes.
If you have an issue with the name, this is only a sandbox and is not necessarily the final name of the trope.

edited 15th May '13 11:36:21 PM by Rethkir