Moral Myopia: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|"God, I love the 'fine morality' of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year. Such are beneath your contempt, aren't they?"

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* When [[Evil Old Folks|Enya Geil]] from ''[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' finds out that her son has been killed by the protagonists, she swears revenge and stops at nothing to try to kill them. Said son was a deranged psychopath who enjoyed raping and killing women.

* The Chinese and Russians in [[Dale Brown]] books. If the Americans remotely try to stand up for themselves they eagerly mouth off about imperialist aggression, not caring that they're frequently guilty of actual atrocity, and if Pat McLanahan shows them the error of their ways they whine like babies throwing a tantrum.

* Done various times in ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' books. For example, in ''Echoes of Honor'', a [[State Sec]] general eagerly anticipates a deadly vengeance on Hades's prison-breakers for killing his comrade and friend, wilfully ignorant of the atrocities the wardens have committed.

* ''Sisterhood'' series by [[Fern Michaels]]: This definitely happened in the book ''Payback''. When three men wearing presidential gold shields give Jack Emery a [[No-Holds-Barred Beatdown]], Jack goes to his girlfriend Nicole Quinn and gives her a [[What the Hell, Hero?]] speech. He basically accuses her of bringing this on him just because he snooped around on her business and tells her to go to hell. She in turn gives Charles Martin the same type of speech for calling in those men on Jack. Charles responds by pointing out that she only cares because they beat up her boyfriend, and that she wouldn't care if they did that to someone she didn't know. She ends up admitting that he has a point.

* Vlad Tepes in ''[[Count and Countess]]''. As a kid, he was fairly ethical, but as an adult, he seems to live by a bizarre code of standards that changes to fit whatever mood he's in.

* In S.M. Stirling's [[The Draka]], Draka officer Yolande Ingolffson goes absolutely ''apeshit'' over the death of her lover Myfwany to the point where she literally destroys most of Western civilization as part of her vengeance. The part where Myfwany died on a battlefield, while serving as a military officer, ''during a war that the Draka had started unprovoked'', is something that never enters her thoughts for a moment.

 

* In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' the Mayor, normally too upbeat to be overly concerned about the deaths of others, goes into a rage when Buffy critically wounds Faith.

** Who, for that matter, thinks killing humans is wrong. Unless it's someone who's tried to kill [[Angel]], then she'll go through said boy toy if that's the only option she has left. Then tell Willow that killing a multiple murderer [[Complete Monster]] is wrong.

* ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'': Dean's attitude towards the possibility of Sam turning into a monster or otherwise being abnormal: he's perfectly willing to kill strangers who might go darkside, but simply refuses to do so with his brother even when presented with clear indications of this happening, because he (pretty literally) couldn't bear to live without him.

** In season seven, {{spoiler|a Kitsune who saved Sam in the past had managed for years to get by without killing humans by working at the morgue. When her son gets sick gets sick, she is forced to go vigilante on the lowest scum of society to tap their brains and nurse him back to health, but when he's healthy again she stops instantly. Dean still kills her under the logic 'You killed once, you'll do it again'.}} No one, not even Bobby points out about all the times ''they'' had to kill monsters to save a loved one. Hell, to kill the Queen of the Monsters, Dean had to kill a Phoenix for its ashes. Unsurprisingly, [[The Heart|Sam]]{{spoiler|, barely holding on with Lucifer (or at least a convincing hallucination) messing with his head,}} eventually tries to make Dean feel better by agreeing [[I Did What I Had to Do|he did what he had to]].

** Caprica-Six's Baltar hallucination actually calls her out on this: That Cylons are awfully fast at glossing over the genocide they committed and accuse humans of horrible crimes while preaching their god's love.

** Later, in the beginning of season 3, Cavil whines like a bitch that, after being left to die slowly by ''the people he had rounded up en masse to be shot to death in cold blood'', he had to crawl over to a piece of shrapnel and sever an artery so he could resurrect, which caused him to suffer a migraine. Never mind the fact that, as a Cylon, he's directly responsible for the deaths of several ''billion'' people, none of whom have the luxury of resurrection, migraines or no.

*** The elves fighting Redcloak's occupying force are little better; the commander casually pushes a captive hobgoblin to his death while remarking the only good goblin is a dead one and his subordinates kill a civilian goblin couple, but when the commander encounters Redcloak personally he flies into a rage and charges him, swearing vengeance for every elf that was slain. {{spoiler|Redcloak kills him and the majority of his team almost instantly, considering saying anything to them a waste of time.}}

* In ''[[Thistil Mistil Kistil]]'', [http://tmkcomic.depleti.com/comic/ch05-pg18/ one of her master's sons is annoyed that Hedda is running away] from a nasty form of [[Human Sacrifice]].

{{quote|([[Pie in the Face|Pie hits one guy in the face]])

'''Clara''': Ha!

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Older Than Steam]]

[[Category:Evil Tropes]]

[[Category:Morality Tropes]]

[[Category:Hypocrite]]

[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]