Blue and Orange Morality/Playing With
Basic Trope: Characters that don't have standard good and evil expectations.
- Straight: The characters do something that is difficult for the audience to understand.
- Exaggerated: Singing at night is an indication that you are a priest, even if you don't want to be one. Few want to be a priest as everyone listens to you. Having others listen to you is just wrong, very wrong, but everyone will respect you, while also ridiculing you for doing wrong things.
- Justified: The less human the characters, the more justified.
- Inverted: Moral principles are easily-distinguishable. Good and evil are easily recognised.
- Subverted: Any time where non-humans act in a human way with human values. Happens a lot in fiction.
- Double Subverted: ... but for a few issues they act less human.
- Parodied: When a non-human explicitly points out they are who they are and not human to another of their kind (even when humans are unknown to them).
- Deconstructed: Any animal/alien psychology discussion.
- Reconstructed: And this discussion shows why their mind set work out for the better.
- Zig Zagged: Recently transformed humans have to decide whether to act like humans or follow the instincts they have obtained.
- Averted:
- Any story that doesn't deal with non-human behavior.
- Aliens aren't made distinct by having alien morality but by having human morality, or absolutely no sense of morality.
- Enforced: By having non-humans not act like humans, you can justify the actions they make more easily, allowing for more plot flexibility.
- Lampshaded: "Many humans would have objections with eating each others flesh as a sign of friendship."
- Invoked: The character transforms into another animal to avoid the moral implications involved with an action they are taking.
- Exploited: The character who suggests the transformation, then takes advantage of the form's weakness. "Go fetch the bone doggy"
- Defied: A human tries to raise an alien as human and teach it human values.
- Discussed: A mission briefing on how to talk with the aliens on another planet.
- Conversed: Humans come across an alien sitcom (All My Circuits).
- Played For Laughs: The aliens get embarrassed about the implications of their value system.
- Played For Drama: In a foreign land the characters are subject to laws they don't think are right.
Back to Blue and Orange Morality