Characters with standards in Literature.
- Patrick McLanahan from Dale Brown's books is a major Military Maverick, but even he finds the National Guard pilots he's scouting out in Battle Born too lax and defiant for anyone's good. At least at first.
- In The Adventures of Pinocchio, Pinocchio may have many faults, but he won't accept bribes. A few weasels learn this the hard way.
- Captain Underpants: George and Harold have no qualms about writing gross stories with Toilet Humour, but in Book 6, the narrator's description of Booger!Melvin is so disgusting and graphic that George actually yells at him for making everyone sick.
- Cooking With Wild Game has the Noble Savages of Forest's Edge, who consider attraction to young teenagers acceptable (as long as the older party waits 'a few years' to act on it), but are as horrified by attraction to children as a modern person would be. The protagonist is needlessly scared of them for several volumes, because he can't quite grasp that people so pragmatic and intimidating would nonetheless believe in Sacred Hospitality.
- Darkover: In Rediscovery, the Terrans free two of their number from capture by bandits by committing two unforgivable sins due to Culture Clash: using guns, and deliberately starting a forest fire. Afterwards, the bandits give up in utter disgust.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
- Hard Luck: Greg refuses to cheat on a science project using one that had been made by another student, after he notices his brother's science project (the school dumped tons of old projects and papers in a storage room, and some bullies were using it as a money-making venture). He knows it's going to land him in huge trouble, and thinks it's stealing. (He thanks his instincts as he later notes the teachers staged a raid after a tip-off from another student, and the bullies landed in summer school.) He also hides a precious diamond ring near the end, so Mom's family won't kill each other over it. Also, he does not like the fact that a nice kid got put in detention for earning his hero points (which the same school bullies as above counterfeited, which caused the teachers to get suspicious) legitimately.
- The Meltdown:
- The Upper Surrey Street kids immediately stop fighting and call a ceasefire when someone gets hit in the face with an ice ball and loses a tooth.
- When faced with the problem of the Lower Surrey Street kids scaling their defensive wall with ladders, the Upper kids ignore the obvious solution of simply pushing the ladders over, likely because it could injure those climbing them. They instead resort to dumping barrels of slush over them to force them to retreat.
- In No Brainer, Principal Bottoms is a Dirty Coward who engages in some pretty ludicrous promotions to raise money (like renting sticker space on the science textbooks to a flat-Earth-believing magazine called Science Scoffers). Still, when he puts the name of the school up for bidding, even he refuses to accept a bid from a school in a rival town who submit the name "Slacksville Rules! Middle School."
- Discworld:
- In Sourcery, Evil Vizier Abrim got rejected from Unseen University. They said he was mentally unstable. How do you manage to be too mentally unstable for Unseen University?
- Recurring character Cheery Littlebottom is a dwarf who starts their version of the feminist movement — that is, actually dressing so that people can tell you're female, when dwarves traditionally keep that sort of matter private. She still has a beard, though. I mean, she's a dwarf.
- Sam Vimes mentions this trope in reference to growing up in the poor parts of Ankh-Morpork. People were too poor to have much of anything else, but they did have standards. "You sold your clothes at the pawn shop, and bought your clothes at the shonky shop, and never asked where the shonky shop got its stock, but you never bought clothes from the pawn shop." He also notes that porches where he grew up were clean enough to eat your dinner from, even though the people who lived there couldn't afford dinner every day.
- In Night Watch Discworld, the part of the Watch that Vimes joins (twice, even) is dysfunctional and mostly non-maliciously corrupt. Accepting bribes is routine, nobody asks questions when it comes to handing people over to the Unmentionables and the horse's food is redirected to everyone's private animals. However, they do have one rule: You Do Not Drop Your Mates In The Cacky. When Quirke rats out a young Vimes for receiving a cut of a bribe he accepted, the other watchmen immediately turn on him, because you especially don't rat out the dumb rookie who doesn't know any better.
- Dolores Claiborne: Vera may be a bitch, but she is absolutely disgusted when she finds out about what Joe has been doing, and helps Dolores carry out the planning for his death.
- Father Brown: As Father Brown points out at the conclusion of "The Crime of the Communist", the man who was framed for the murder may have been a Communist who wanted to bring down Church and state in a bloody revolution, but he was still an academic of the old school who'd never dream of smoking while he was drinking his port.
- The title character of Franny K. Stein may be a Mad Scientist, but mad science done in the name of evil and with the intent of harming others is where she draws the line, as shown in The Fran That Time Forgot when she is aghast at her teenage self from the future creating an army of elephant monsters to terrorize everyone just for being laughed at over her Embarrassing Middle Name.
- In the Frozen (2013) Tie-In Novel A Frozen Heart, Prince Hans does have some morals, although he's still willing to murder to get what he wants. He hates his father for being unnecessarily violent towards their subjects. According to Hans, a king should be strict but fair in ruling a kingdom, not beating his subjects into total submission.
- Harry Potter:
- Everyone in Hogwarts, be it Snape, Harry, or Filch, wanted Gilderoy Lockhart gone. It's believed that the only reason he got the job as DADA teacher is because no one else applied (the position is cursed — no one lasts longer than a year) besides Snape. And the only reason why the far more qualified Snape didn't get the job until the sixth book is because Dumbledore still needed him — not only for his plans against Voldemort, but also as the Potions teacher for the school.
- It's made clear that house-elves find Happiness in Slavery, and that Dobby actually enjoying freedom is mostly because he's a weirdo (and only slightly because his original master was abusive). But even Dobby has limits; when Dumbledore offered him a high salary and weekends off, he actually negotiated for less.
- In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry invokes this on Fudge's behalf after reading an article in The Quibbler accusing him of ordering the assassinations of goblins. Where he stops specifically is the accusation that "he's had them cooked in pies."
- As teenagers, James Potter and Sirius Black could be pretty cruel, especially toward Severus Snape. But Sirius's attempted Deadly Prank on Severus was far too much for James to accept, which is why James saved Severus's life (and why Severus held a grudging life debt toward James and, by extension, James's son Harry).
- Especially when you take into account that this was due to Severus trying to find out about Lupin's condition, which royally annoyed Sirius.
- Sirius came from a very notoriously pureblood supremacist family that also happened to be horribly abusive to him because he was a White Sheep. James's parents, Fleamont and Euphemia, while pureblooded, didn't feel the same way. When Sirius got fed up with it when he was fifteen, he ran away to live with them. Fleamont and Euphemia took him in, no questions asked, because they saw a kid who desperately needed a home, even though he came from a family they'd otherwise hate. They continued to treat him like their own until their deaths.
- Even Snape (who has spent the entire series hating Harry for reminding him of James and Lily) is aghast at Dumbledore's plan hinging on Harry willingly sacrificing his life to Voldemort so the last Horcrux could be destroyed, leaving Voldemort out of lives for good.
- According to Pottermore
, Perseus Parkinson, the Minister of Magic from 1726–1733 attempted to pass a law making it illegal for Muggles and Wizards to marry. Despite the intense anti-Muggle fear going on at the time, the public (including several of the pure-blooded supremacists) agreed that banning wizard/muggle marriages was too extreme and Parkinson was promptly voted out of office.
- The Hypnotists: In The Dragonfly Effect, the military has some shady goals for the hypnotists but shelve a plan to hypnotize everyone in enemy cities through TV screens and the Internet into standing still after realizing it would kill hundreds of civilians and cause billions in property damage per city in the best case scenario due to traffic collisions, unfought fires, and such.
- It: The police officers who process the youths who assaulted Adrian Mellon and apparently murdered him (although he was actually killed by It) are homophobic, but they're also appalled by what happened to Mellon and are determined to see his 'murderers' sent to prison.
- The Last Days of Krypton: Even the most selfish and abrasive members of the original council are disgusted when they watch the video of Gur-Va gleefully butchering endangered animals alive.
- In The Little Mermaid, the Mermaid fails to win the prince's love, but can return to mermaid form if she kills him with a magic knife. She refuses (this helps her earn the chance to gain an immortal soul).
- A Master of Djinn: Portendorf, though “racialist” too, thinks Dalton's theory of ancient Egyptian rulers having been Caucasian is still absurd.
- Murder for the Modern Girl: Being a vigilante killer who only goes for men who take abuse and advantage of vulnerable women, Ruby has three rules where she finds a possible target, determines if she has to kill somebody and if they are intending to commit heinous crimes before she commits a murder. She strictly sticks to these rules and doesn't casually go around killing people.
- Necrotic Apocalypse: Digby was a thief and a jackass when he was alive, and now he's also an undead abomination that eats people. Still, he's not willing to attack people who have done nothing to him (and initially hesitates to attack some people who are actively trying to kill him), and only eats people who were dead when he found them. He's also quite protective of children, and absolutely refuses to work with Skyline after he witnesses them execute a young Zombie Infectee without even trying to find a cure.Digby: I'm not a monster! ...well, I am, but I'm not evil.
- Nina Tanleven: In The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed, lawyer Stephen Basset winds up representing the book's villain Carla Bond during the final chapter, but is willing to stand aside and let her confess when it's clear what kind of person she is.
- The Obsidian Chronicles: Lord Dragon is a ruthless, mostly nihilistic man who will do virtually anything. The sole exception it appears is breaking vows he makes.
- John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series:
- Mike Harmon is an ex-Navy SEAL who pushes the Anti-Hero needle waaaaay into the red. He fantasizes about raping and brutalizing young women, and deals with it by hiring underage prostitutes for BDSM and rough sex (followed by extravagant payment), and then finding the whoremongers behind the prostitutes and murdering them. After he's done with the prostitutes, he sometimes buys them outright. He flat-out admits that the reason he hates rapists and white slavers so much is that they torture women in a truly non-consensual way, which his conscience (barely) prevents him from doing.
- Katya is an absolutely frigid self-serving sadist bitch, but Kurt Schwenke's use of chemical tortures on prostitutes appalls even her.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray: Dorian's grandfather, Lord Kelso, hired an adventurer to challenge his commoner son-in-law to a duel so he could be killed. While the gentry couldn't understand why Dorian's mother chose somebody below her station, even they were appalled by Kelso's cruelty. According to Harry's uncle, "He ate his chop alone in the club for some time".
- In Red Sister, the archons know that the High Priest is a sadist who abuses his power for petty grudges. They have the power to remove him from office but choose not to do so since it would make the Church of the Ancestor weaker and open them up to interference from the emperor and his sisters. However, they then discover that the High Priest's newest grudge is fueled not by Revenge Before Reason but by a massive bribe by a noble who wants to use the Church as the instument of his own revenge. This they will not stand for since they firmly believe that the Church should be independant from secular influence. A High Priest can be a lot of nefarious things but he cannot be "bought" since that will quickly erode the Church's power.
- Safehold: This idea is consistently overlooked by Grand Inquisitor Zhaspahr Clyntahn. As he piles on atrocity after atrocity in his attempts to crush the schismatic Empire of Charis, it never seems to occur to him that he's alienating the various clergymen and world leaders who should by all rights be his allies. Various characters do things like defect to Charis rather than face his telling them You Have Failed Me, or Mercy Kill enemy soldiers rather than take them alive to face the tortures of Clyntahn's Inquisition.
- The Sherlock Holmes spin-off novel The Beast of the Stapletons, written as a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, features Holmes and Watson meeting various old acquaintances from the previous case, learning more about what happened to their associates since the case. Most notably, Sir Henry had a brief relationship with Laura Lyons, and after he broke it off Laura attempted to ask her father Franklin for help suing Sir Henry for breach of promise. Although Franklin has a reputation for using his legal knowledge to create a Frivolous Lawsuit over simple matters just to show off his own expertise, he made it clear to his daughter that he wouldn't bother filing such a suit in this case because he could see that there had been no legal issues involved, since Sir Henry hadn't made any legally binding promises so there was nothing to legitimately sue him over.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Westeros is a Crapsack World, full of torture, rape, murder, horrible people who commit horrific acts because it amuses them, and scheming nobles who seek to advance their own power, uncaring of the suffering of the smallfolk. However, Sacred Hospitality is Serious Business, and when the Freys violate it and slaughter the Starks at the Red Wedding, the entire continent is sickened by it.
- As befitting for a Crapsack World, Rape, Pillage, and Burn is fairly common, seen as a legitimate war tactic, some societies have it as a fundamental part of their culture, and Gregor Clegane's men and the Brave Companions exist pretty much solely to inflict this on enemies. However in A Feast For Crows, Rorge leads a group of men on a campaign of this that is so brutal, it manages to genuinely shock most of the continent, and quickly leads to people demanding the nobles stop those responsible.
- Starship Troopers: During his boot camp period, Rico mentions that the local breed of Drill Sergeant Nasty will withhold food, drinking water, clothes, shelter, sleep, soap, and whatever else they deem necessary for training. They will, however, never, under any circumstances, withhold your mail. This includes helicoptering mail-sacks to units on field exercises.
- Star Wars: Tatooine Ghost: Downplayed. Corrupt Politician Threkin Horm is selling the Killik Twilight painting rather than returning it to his people, but he admits that the idea of the Empire having it rubs him the wrong way. Of course, he's still willing to sell it to them until Leia blackmails him.
- Mollie Hunter's novel A Stranger Came Ashore pits Robbie Henderson against Finn Learson, a Tall, Dark, and Handsome young man who is in reality the Great Selkie, lord of all the other selkies, who intends to take Robbie's sister Elspeth under the sea to be his "bride". To save Elspeth, Robbie turns to Yarl Corbie, his schoolmaster who has been rumoured to possess dark magic. In the final confrontation, Yarl Corbie turns into a raven to attack Finn, specifically going for Finn's eyes. While Yarl Corbie swears Robbie to secrecy about his magic, when Robbie expresses discomfort with the idea that Yarl Corbie had permanently blinded the Great Selkie completely, Yarl Corbie observes that the concern does Robbie credit and explains that he only took out one eye, reasoning that this will ensure that Finn can still hunt in his natural state but will be unable to charm women in human form again, basically affirming that while he is dark he wouldn't be cruel.
- The Stormlight Archive: Edgedancer has a moment when Nale catches a street urchin in public and executes her for stealing a fruit. Everyone present is horrified, and when Nale turns back and Lift makes a point of stealing a fruit from the same vendor, the merchant doesn't even peep.
- In The Hero Took Everything from Me, So I Partied with the Hero’s Mother! Zect had no problem throwing out Ceres to turn the party in his personal harem, but, differently from other similar stories, doesn't steal his stuff, and when the party realizes just how much they depended on him for a lot of basic necessities (including the paperwork for their expense report, necessary to get their funding from the Church) Zect's main problem about asking him to rejoin is that he understands how much he screwed him over and he has nothing to compensate him properly.
- A rather dark take on this trope features in the later volumes of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series. The prison camp guards are perfectly happy to keep African-Americans in a horrific, inhumane concentration camp, but lining them up and machine-gunning them in cold blood is too much; some are Driven to Suicide, others driven to drink and a few end up in asylums. This prompts the Nazi Expys to think up gas vans as an alternative that's easier for the rank and file to cope with. This is in fact based directly on what led the real Nazis to implement the gas chambers.
- There are a few in the Warcraft Expanded Universe.
- In Tides of War, there is a double example. Anduin, a pacifist, realizes that Garrosh has gone too far and must be stopped in the wake of Theramore's destruction, but is glad that his more warlike father Varian isn't going as far as Jaina originally planned to.
- In Of Blood and Honor, Uther is willing to have Tirion exiled for helping an orc, out of the belief that all orcs must die and partly out of the belief that Tirion disobeying an order is unforgivable. However, when Barthilas, Tirion's arrogant subordinate, starts disrespecting Tirion during his trial, Uther gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, saying that Tirion, who fought alongside him and saved his life, deserves more than to be "harangued by an unseasoned boy" like Barthilas.
- In Beyond the Dark Portal, Turalyon, who has no love for the orcs (the epiphany he had in the previous book that cleared all his doubts was the realization that the orcs are not from Azeroth and not part of the Holy Light), is quite disturbed to see Alleria's obsession with killing the orcs to avenge her dead brother and all the people she lost in their invasion of her homeworld, which has resulted in a rift growing between them, and which causes him and the rest of their friends to become worried about her getting herself killed in her quest for revenge. Turalyon's also quite disturbed when he sees an orphaned boy playing with a sword and wanting to grow up and kill orcs.
- Warhammer 40,000: In the Gaunt's Ghosts books, even the utterly ruthless Rawne and his like-minded inner circle disdain Meryn for his unscrupulousness. This later turns out to be well-deserved.
- Waste of Space: Sonja Sjoberg may be every bit as nasty as everyone else in her family, though she does draw the line at letting her husband use their daughter as The Scapegoat for his crimes.
- In Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell is willing to set up Kangaroo Courts for Henry VIII and uses the opportunity to really twist the knife into the late Cardinal Wolsey's enemies, but only metaphorically. For instance, while he forces Harry Percy—who once wanted to marry Anne Boleyn—to sit on her jury, he sits quietly while Harry rails because he doesn't want to be tempted into hitting a sick man. He uses the hapless Mark Smeaton as a fall guy to start the adultery proceedings but turns down the suggestion of torture because apart from it being impractical, it would feel like stomping on a dormouse. He's also the only one involved who speaks to Anne with courtesy while her own family hands her off like a garbage bag. When the judges try to insist that she can only be burnt, not beheaded, he comes close to open anger as he countermands them.
