Characters with standards in Webcomics.
- Darths & Droids: Pete views killing NPCs as a chance to grab bonus XP, but even he finds Annie's sheer glee in killing them during the "Revenge of the Sith" intro to be unnerving, and views the plan to use their half-dreadnought's fuel and all its missiles as a braking method to be too insane even for them.
- Porn star Bimbo of Exploitation Now has slightly more morals than Ralph when it comes to a sexual lifestyle. She finds his excessive nightly masturbation sickening and feels there's "something wrong" with watching porn while eating breakfast.
- One of the tentacle monsters in Ghastly's Ghastly Comic thinks it's wrong to sexually assault human women, although this is at least in part due to a personal distaste for them.
- Head over Heels: This is a subtle hint that Alpha Bitch Lee Soojin is Good All Along. Upon a Rewatch Bonus, in Chapter 1, when one of her Girl Posse starts being violent towards Ha Yan, she looks shocked and concerned about her safety.
- The Last Days of FOXHOUND: Berthold is appalled when he learns that by taking off Mantis's mask, Raven has exposed him to the thoughts of every human in a wide radius, and demands that Raven put it back on even though the two had been fighting moments previously, describing it as "too cruel, even for him". (Biting him on the arm for being an asshole moments later is not too cruel, though.)
- Ménage à 3 draws most of its humor from the fact that most of the cast are self-absorbed and sex-mad. However, they almost all retain some sympathetic features, and it's clear that they have lines they won't cross. For example:
- Zii objects to Gary attempting to "pimp her out" to Amber (it's a long story); she may be very sexually active and broad-minded, but it's a question of consent. Some readers have suggested that her standards there are a little ambiguous, given her own past behavior, but they do exist.
- DiDi, whose capacity for empathy is questionable and whose quest for an orgasm is dangerously obsessive, becomes wildly sentimental about any kind of sob story, and makes some effort to avoid hooking up with people who are already in serious relationships.
- Amber may trick Gary into giving her oral sex, and use her sexuality to scam herself a free apartment, but she's a nice person really, just very uninhibited; the idea of someone manipulatively withholding sex disgusts her.
- Matt may be a hopelessly vain jerkass Casanova, but he's reliably decent to his friends and treats Ruby (from the spinoff Sticky Dilly Buns) notably kindly during their one brief meeting.
- And even total jerkass Nathan has some lines he won't cross — for example, he can see that actually realising his twincest fantasy would probably be traumatic for the twins.
- In Motherly Scootaloo, Jet Set and Upper Crust may be jerks, but the only reason they accused Scootaloo of murder in the Trial was because their attorney had assured them Scootaloo was 100% guilty.
- The Order of the Stick:
- In an early arc, Roy is surprised when Hayley is on-board with a plan to stop and help some poor villagers who couldn't realistically pay them anything in return. She actually gets annoyed by this, noting that just because she loves treasure doesn't mean that she's opposed to doing anything for free.
- Roy thinks lowly of Gannji, but thinks he doesn't deserve to be forced into fighting his friend Enor.
Roy: It's like watching someone duel their own puppy. - Comes up in the Penny Arcade comic "We Do In Fact Have Limits
", where Gabe suggests to Tycho that they could do a strip about spawn camping where a terrorist waits for a woman to give birth just so he could kill the baby. Tycho is less than thrilled with this suggestion and grabs Gabe by his shirt while giving his honest opinion on the idea.Tycho: No, we can't ever do that. No-one can even know that you said it, or that I heard it. It will be our secret, forever. - Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger has a Courtroom Episode arc that is an extended Take That! to The Cold Equations, and one of the invited witnesses is a Fedork engineer. The Fedorks are a parody of the United Federation of Planets that do things believed In-Universe to be Too Dumb to Live, such as utilizing antimatter for their ship reactors and an over-reliance on energy shields. Even they believe wholeheartedly in having backup systems and extensive safety margins on their ship designs, and the engineer has a Freak Out when he's told that the shuttle design he's been told to review is not some kind of a joke, it actually exists, it has been mass produced, and someone had to be jettisoned out of one (and was nearly killed) because her weight critically compromised the ship's already hair-thin performance. It turns out that the whole she-bang of the plot, from crappy security to death-trap design, was all part of a scheme by the company's leading Corrupt Corporate Executive circle to bait and kill galactic hitchhikers and try to legally get away with it.
- Tagon of Schlock Mercenary has few moral standards beyond getting paid, but while he may not be a particularly good person, he refuses to be a bad commander and is A Father to His Men. In the original charter for the Toughs, there's a note that death benefits for both enlisted troops and officers come out of the captain's dividends, to ensure that lives are spent responsibly.
- He also has a particularly hard time choosing whether or not to go public about the wormgate conspiracy, which would start wars across the entire galaxy and give him lots of business to profit from."So what should I do? Taking no action means dooming the innocent, but going public to protect the innocent will start a war that won't end until galactic civilization has been destroyed. Sure, I'm licensed to perform heroic acts of violence for money, and war is good for business, but I try to keep the innocent out of the line of fire. I don't see a way to do that this time."
- He also has a particularly hard time
- In Sonic the Comic – Online!, even Sonic is pretty disgusted when he gets a chance to see just how much of an ass he was in the past.
- Skadi: Skadi's tribe likes to eat meat and part of their religion is that whoever manages to eat the meat of every animal will ascend to godhood, but they draw the line at cannibalism.
- Stand Still, Stay Silent: In the prologue, Michael Madsen's boss threatens to fire him if he doesn't come back from his personal ferry trip to Bornholm island by the next day. Because of this, Michael suggests various solutions, including taking a night ferry. His boss, despite his insistence on having him back as soon as possible, hesitates about that option as it sounds like "something smelly" to him, and suggests seeing if he can hire a helicopter instead.
- Parodied in this page of xkcd, where the Black Hat Guy's standards are rather arbitrary.Black Hat Guy: I plead the third.
Congressman: You mean the fifth?
Black Hat Guy: No, the third.
Congressman: You refuse to quarter troops in your house?
Black Hat Guy: I have few principles, but I stick to them. - Tapiseri Soujourn: Daedalus refuses to help Caleb without knowing what he will receive in return, stating that not working for free is "One of [his] few moralities".
- Zomgan: Even though he admits to trying to kill Gyeong Lee for annoying him, Mirae On decides to not go through it as he doesn't like killing humans compared to Zomgans, which he has no issue with killing mercilessly.
