Light Is Not Good/Fan Works

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Oh don't worry, the light will fry many more brains..."

  • My Immortal plays this trope straight with the preps, which being stereotypical as they are they are obsessed with pink and other lively colours as well as white and are christians. Even the "posers" are simply hiding their "Lighter and Softer" nature beneath pseudo-"goffic" clothes which are way more lively coloured than the real "goff" clothes anyway. Their moral alignment ranges from sheer annoyingness to outright villainity, but they are not better than the "goffs" anyway. Ironically, the Big Bad, Voldemort, is dark, looking about as "goffic" as Tara and her friends.
  • This has become a recent trend in Harry Potter fan fiction. Rather than the spells themselves being evil, the authors postulate that it is the intent behind them. This is largely an answer to questions about why they never kill the racist, terrorist, murdering wizards; once dark spells are no longer evil, you can start actually fighting without being as bad as they are.
    • Isn't that sort of canon? It's established that with the Unforgivables at least, you have to truly want to cause their effects (pain, death, and mind control) if you want to use them. Thus, it's impossible to use them for goodhearted intents (like when Harry tries to Crucio Bellatrix over the death of Sirius.
      • That wasn't good-hearted. He just didn't have the practice being ruthless.
        • But it was still for "righteous anger", as Bellatrix puts it.
    • Not that you couldn't kill someone pretty effectively with the kind of severing charm they use for cooking...or Wingardium Leviosa hard into the ceiling until the neck breaks...or the old fairy tale favorite, Tarantallegra, until the heart gives out...these people are armed to kill from age eleven.
      • 'course, armed wizard could get out of most of those, but still, the possibilities to kill with stuff that isn't actually 'Dark' are considerable.
    • In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry finds that, when he becomes truly angry, he enters a coldly angry state, in which his mind works even better than it normally does (the purpose of the fic is Harry is incredibly smart, and incredibly well educated for his age in most non-magical fields.) When Snape's bullying pushes him into this cold state during Harry's first potions class, Harry asks how he would go about getting abusive teachers fired. Snape bullies him worse, and Harry tries to leave the classroom. When Snape locks the door, Harry escapes using a Time Turner, which he had been told not to use in any way that could indicate its purpose. When his anger leaves, he starts frantically thinking how to get himself out of trouble, and eventually pushes himself back into his coldly angry state in order to think clearly. He thus remembers that he was not completely in the wrong, remembers the other victims of Snape's bullying (who he had been told of previously,) and notes that his "light side" is the more selfish and cowardly state of mind.
    • In Abandon by Batsutousai, Harry and Tom Riddle fall in love and Harry and his friends joins the dark side. It is still clear that Tom is the evil one and the Death Eaters are still "the dark side", but as the story goes on Dumbledore and the light side appear more and more as manipulative bastards and the reader do not blame Harry for turning dark.
    • On a less literal level, the Houses Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. While the Slytherins make up most of the bad guys in the actual novels, it is made quite clear that, just as not all present Slytherins are evil, the potential for assholes from the Houses that are seemingly more benevolent to exist is considerably large, and indeed a few show up, although not very prominent.
  • In Cornova's Poke Wars, the Big Bad is Ho-oh, who is normally seen as a benevolent force. This later merges with Dark Is Evil when it's revealed that he gained the subtype of Darkness after the Mass Super-Empowering Event that kicked off the entire series.
  • Played straight with One Less Lonely Gurl, where C'ren Bieber, a blonde girl who hates dark and 'goffik' stuff, much like a prep in My Immortal, turns out to be the Mary Sue Villain Protagonist of the fanfic.
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