DarkIsNotEvil / GoodIsNotNice for characters whose goodness or evilness is ambiguous or subjective

This has come up a few times, so I thought I'd ask about it here. There's a lot of characters who get one or both of these tropes thrown onto their entries even though the source material doesn't really take a clear stance on whether they're good or evil themselves.

As examples, two who immediately come to mind are:

1. The God of Darkness from RWBY, who committed genocide against humanity for petty reasons. He is never at any point treated as anything that could even obliquely be called "good" in the source material, nor is there ever any moment where it even obliquely goes "surprise, he's not as evil as he looked" or anything of that nature. How the viewer feels about him is mostly left up to their own personal judgment.

2. Shohei Yakumo from Shin Megami Tensei V, who advocates genocide of demons - which in the setting refers to all supernatural creatures, and who are just ordinary sentient beings in the setting, not intrinsically evil. He gets called out on this by one of the main characters, so it's clearly something we're supposed to see as potentially objectionable. He also advocates culling any humans he considers weak. You have the option to side with him, but any route where you don't do so generally treats him as a deranged maniac whose views are reprehensible; so, again, it's left up to the player whether he is evil or not.

Now, I'm not saying we should call ambiguous characters like these evil ourselves (and I think part of the reason people are so eager to apply these tropes to them is because they're not overtly called out as evil to the degree that eg. Emperor Palpatine or someone is, coupled with a general eagerness to apply subversive-seeming tropes to works they like.)

But I don't think that we should be applying moral-judgment tropes to them to imply that they're definitely not evil, either - like most good-and-evil tropes, those tropes require that the characters are unambiguously not evil in the source material, right? Like, there should be a clear "ah, this person seemed evil, but is not" moment.

I think that characters who do things that many viewers might reasonably consider evil but which are neither excused nor judged in the source material but are just presented in a sort of neutral "here's a person who existed and did these things" way shouldn't generally fall under tropes that reference good or evil, right? We ought to refrain from commenting either way.

Edited by Aquillion on Nov 13th 2023 at 8:30:54 AM

I think a lot of problematic examples will probably be trying to distill something that's not as simple as the stereotype would suggest into either Dark Is Not Evil or Good Is Not Nice, regardless of whether the work is going for exactly those tropes, or there may be something objectively going on in the work that has been badly written in an audience reaction way. I'll use the RWBY example you mention as an example of what you mean because I'm not as familiar with the other work you mention:

The RWBY Dark Is Not Evil example (and there's a corresponding Good Is Not Nice example for the God of Light that's relevant, too) was probably a reaction to the flashback episode in Volume 6 that reveals what the plot is all about and how the Secret War between the Big Good and Big Bad began. The episode portrays the God of Darkness as something humanity fears and loathes, but when a human pushes past that image of him to make a request, he immediately grants it just because he wants humanity to love him like they love his brother.

Meanwhile, humanity adores the God of Light, but when Dark genocides humanity, Light not only stands by and lets it happen but justifies it to Salem and then objectively downplays it to Ozma. So, there is an objective DINE and GINN discrepancy between how humanity sees the two gods and what they're really like, but that is a very limited episode-specific portrayal.

However, the work's wider message to the audience (and the characters) is that what's really in play is the God Is Flawed trope.

In short, I agree that the tropes probably need a look at to see what the quality of entries are, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of potentially problematic entries are because there is something objective in the work, but tropers have blurred the line between the objective example and the audience's reaction to create entries that look like audience reaction but may still be salvagable. A clean-up project could help identify what's okay, what needs rewriting and what needs removing.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 14th 2023 at 7:15:33 PM

This is also connected to Good Is Not Nice being a widely misused trope in general. Good Is Not Nice is not when a good character is ruthless to their enemies (like the god of light apparently if he's interpreted as good), that's Good Is Not Soft. Good Is Not Nice is when a character is an ideal hero type who is merciful and almost always does the right thing in the larger picture, but on a personal level is a Jerkass. But in practice Good Is Not Nice is usually misused as either Good Is Not Soft or Anti-Hero, honestly someone should do a wick check and trope repair on it.

It sounds like there's a cluster of highly connected tropes here that need a clean where the misuse and correct use may all overlap in terms of where examples should and shouldn't be.

Yeah I was thinking of TR Sing Good Is Not Nice I haven't wick checked it yet but I see it misused more often than I see it used correctly so I would be surprised if there isn't an issue.