Light Is Not Good/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character with strong associations to light is a bad guy.

  • Straight: Solaris is the priest of a Sun God and seeks to exterminate all the "lesser races". [1]
    • Seraphiel, an angel, comes to the mortal world to punish the sinful according to his strict rules--which includes almost everyone on the planet.
  • Exaggerated: Solaris, the Sun Emperor, wants to exterminate everyone in order to bring peace to the universe, because only a place devoid of life can truly be peaceful.
    • Seraphiel disintegrates people in bursts of holy glory for white lies and dirty thoughts.
  • Downplayed: Solaris is a peace enforcer of the Sun Order. However, his brutal methods and zealousness make him a borderline Knight Templar.
    • Seraphiel contains himself mostly to punishing the wicked, but sometimes a good person can still do something evil, and he'll kill them all the same.
  • Justified: "You get that pure, you start seeing the rest of the world as corrupt. The problem is, he was always of a direct turn of mind, so he decided to eliminate the corrupt, rather than, say, converting them or concentrating on providing a good example."
    • Solaris is a Villain with Good Publicity, and considers light-based powers a good way to obtain this.
    • Seraphiel is trying to recreate paradise, but to do so, sin has to be exterminated.
  • Inverted: Light Is Good - see Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
  • Subverted: Solaris seeks to exterminate all the "lesser races"... but he changes his mind after discovering that he's only ever dealt with the exiled criminal element of said "lesser races"...
    • As someone is desperately fighting back against Seraphiel's torture, his mask is knocked off and a hideous demonic face is behind it, suggesting he was evil all along and trying to get people to hate the forces of good.
  • Double Subverted: But then he changes it back, as he's already sent the troops
  • Parodied: Anyone who wears light clothing is seen as evil.
    • Solaris can think of no better use for his light powers than to shine them in people's eyes when he gets bored.
    • Seraphiel ignites people in blazes of holy fire for littering and being moody.
  • Deconstructed: The association of light with evil results in a world of shadows where food is scarce due to crop die-offs and literacy and electronic media decline from use.
  • Reconstructed: The world of shadows is still a better alternative than the preceding one where radiation powered megalomaniacs nearly brought humanity to extinction.
    • Solaris was evil for trying to destroy the balance between light and darkness. After is he defeated, balnce is restored and night and day became normal.
  • Zig Zagged: A photograph of angels of light destroying an orphanage surfaces causing the heroes to turn their back on them. However the angels later revealed those children were demons in disguise. An encounter with more of them reveals that demon children are still innocent and the demonic culture is to blame but at the same time the angels involved were rogue.
  • Averted: There are no bad guys associated with light.
  • Enforced: "We were looking for the exact opposite of our dark, but heroic protagonist, so we came up with somebody who was always in light, but was absolutely monstrous."
    • "Let's be ironic, and destroy the old Light Is Good stereotype."
    • The writers are trying to emphasize their Knight Templar villain, so they make him light-based.
  • Lampshaded: "Just once I'd like to meet a priest of the God of Light and Mercy that wasn't secretly plotting the extermination of the so-called lesser races.".
  • Invoked: Solaris dresses in bright and cheery colors, and so throws his enemies into confusion.
    • A false prophet pretends to have received a vision from the Lord of Light, gathers an army of fanatics and leads them on a "holy war" for his own personal agenda.
  • Defied: A person with a mean streak receives light-based superpowers and vows to try to be nicer to live up to his/her new abilities.
  • Discussed: "You only ever see somebody using that much Light and Purity imagery when they're either trying to convert people, or, as I assume the case is here, when he's trying to convince himself and others that the wicked, terrible things he does are perfectly justified."
  • Conversed: "So the guy with the sun motif was the Big Bad after all. I should have seen that one coming."

Back to Light Is Not Good. And don't trust that guy in white carrying a pitchfork...

  1. ↑ For the purposes of this discussion, the races in question are not Exclusively Evil.
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