Good Victims, Bad Victims: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
A morality trope about the arbitrary distinctions writers make between certain sorts of victims. If a character in fiction has a problem or ailment or social situation, and the creators intend him to be sympathetic, the character will have acquired the problem in the most socially acceptable way. If the character isn't sympathetic, then he will have contracted the illness through "your own damn fault".
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'''Bad'''
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|'''Rape '''||chaste woman ||promiscuous woman
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▲{{cell}}Absolutely unforeseen, at least by the general populace, new, not result of victim action
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▲{{cell}}Personal financial problems/unemployment, [[Crazy Homeless People|mental illness]], drug addiction
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|'''Vampirism '''||in-utero, transfusion ||bitten, voluntary
▲{{cell}}as a result of prescribed medication
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|'''Lyncanthropy '''||bitten||inherited, voluntary
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|'''Superpowers '''||accident, experiment||inherited, voluntary
▲{{cell}}[[The Complainer Is Always Wrong|Disagreement with anything short of a]] [[Dystopia]], [[Loners Are Freaks|being a loner]], [[Values Dissonance]]
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▲{{cell}}[[Asshole Victim]], [[Disposable Sex Worker]]
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Note that, to an extent, this trope can be justified. A person who gets carpal tunnel syndrome from writing a Nobel prize winning novel is a bit different from someone who gets it playing [[World of Warcraft]] is a bit different from someone who gets it by spending too much time whipping slaves. Where the [[Unfortunate Implications]] crop up is that most of the time, the moral gulf between the good victim and the bad victim is nowhere near that extreme.
See also [[Good Flaws, Bad Flaws]]. Compare the varying media standards between Hitmen and Assassins (both in [[Career Killers]]). Also see the difference between [[High
No [[Real Life]] examples, please, as they are just an invitation to an [[Edit War]].
{{examples}}
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* ''[[Blade]]'': The main character is a heroic half-vampire who contracted it not in the normal way (being bitten) but in-utero when his pregnant mother was bitten. Victims of bites are uniformly evil.
* [[Mutants]] in the ''[[X-Men]]'' mythos are feared and despised by having natural powers, yet people like [[Spider-Man]] and Mr. Fantastic are loved by the public, even though the only difference is that they got their powers in accidents.
** This is a bit of an
** Mostly because newer writers keep forcing [[What Do You Mean It's Not Political?|thinly-veiled social allegory]] into the X-Men series, whereas writers from other superhero comics are more preoccupied with creating entertaining storylines.
== Literature ==
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130623165356/http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,318628,00.html This article] discusses this trope as related to AIDS in the 1990s.
* ''[[Anita Blake]]'': Most of the shapeshifters contracted lycanthropy from an attack by a were-whatever, making them the survivors of a vicious attack. Only a very few chose the life voluntarily.
* ''[[Wild Cards]]'' has Aces and Jokers — they have the same virus, but their reception by the public varies based on which manifestation of it they got. And they're not written necessarily sympathetically if they're pretty aces, or hatefully if they're deformed jokers either.
* In the [[James Bond]] novel ''[[Goldfinger]]'', Bond dislikes Pussy Galore's lesbianism until she tells him [[Rape and Switch|she was abused]] by her [[Creepy Uncle]]. So apparently (in the 1950s at least), lesbianism by choice was bad but lesbianism because of previous abuse by men was OK.
* ''[[Two Weeks With the Queen]]'' is surprisingly tolerant in this
== Live-Action TV ==
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== Video Games ==
* The demon-allied [[Our Orcs Are Different|orcs]] of ''[[
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Morality Tropes]]
[[Category:Pages Needing Wicks]]
[[Category:Good Victims, Bad Victims]]
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