Grey And Gray Morality / Western Animation

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• Pretty much the central conflict of Æon Flux. Aeon is a ruthless self-motivated secret agent doing spy-work for an underground organisation, or possibly simple sabotage for the sake of anarchy, but she honestly thinks her terrorist activities are done for the greater good. Trevor is a morally ambiguous totalitarian ruler who genuinely believes that people are better off submitting to his authority. May also count as Blue-and-Orange Morality; the two take their opposite ideologies to such extremes that they're difficult to quantify by realistic standards.
• Arcane: While there is a clear Black-and-White Morality revenge story of Vi against Silco, the larger political struggle is all grey. Silco is an utterly ruthless drug dealer crime lord with revolutionary goals to have the oppressed people of Zaun achieve independence arrayed against the highly corrupt Council of Piltover interested in innovation only when it profits them. Silco would murder a child for the cause without flinching while the members of the Council would be horrified at the idea, but they condemn countless children every day to starvation, poverty and violence with their current status quo. Yet Silco and some members of the council are also shown sympathetically caring for their loved ones. It can be hard to see A Lighter Shade of Grey between the leaders.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The original series: The participants in the Hundred Year War. Even in Book One, there are heroic and villainous characters on both sides of the war, as well as civilians of every nation victimized by both sides; by the end of Book 2, the Earth Kingdom's government is little better than the Fire Nation, with Ba Sing Se being run by by the Brainwashing State Sec and villagers being routinely harassed and extorted by the soldiers who were supposed to protect them. The beginning of Book 3, meanwhile, shows a lighter side of the Fire Nation; after two books of their representatives being mostly soldiers and Azula's party, most citizens of the Fire Nation are just people, victimized by a century of propaganda and hardship brought on by the war.
    • The Jet/Zuko conflict in the later half of Book 2, since both are former villains seemingly on the road to redemption, there's really no way to give one moral superiority. However, since Jet was the aggressor, and the show had spent most of the season building up Zuko's eventual Heel–Face Turn, he came off as more in the right.
  • The Legend of Korra is even better at this. In Book 4, it's outright mentioned that the antagonists have good intentions, but the courses of action they take are evil.
    • Book 1: The main enemies are the Equalists, who show Fantastic Racism towards bending and wish to eradicate it, and their leader Amon can be very brutal and callous in his treatment of benders. On the other hand, he has a point - the Council of Republic City is itself very prejudiced towards non-benders, yet he seems more focused on his own hatred rather than making lives better for non-benders and only Tenzin appears to represent their best interests as well as those of benders. There are good and bad people on both sides - Tarrlok vs. Tenzin on the council, and Amon's side has people like Hiroshi Sato, who despises benders for similar reasons but is still more sympathetic than the Big Bad. On a non-political level, Korra and her friends aren't depicted as paragons of goodness (though they try to do what's right), and even characters like Tahno and Lin Beifong have multiple dimensions to their personalities. Only Tenzin's family can be considered purely "white", while Yakone and his son Tarrlok might well be purely "black". And the latter made a Heel–Face Turn.
    • Book 2 veers more into Black-and-Gray Morality, with little spots of white mixed in. Unalaq's intentions are clearly evil, as he wants to plunge the world into darkness by merging with Vaatu. Then there is Varrick, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who uses a civil war to get rich and resorts to things such as intimidation, bribery and even kidnapping the president. He does help the heroes, but only when he knows he'll get better for it, and yet it turns out his whole plan was to start a war and ensure it goes on, so that he may profit from it. On the heroic side of things, Korra casually threatens a corrupt judge with death to have him spill the truth, while the Republic City police force is portrayed as a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats.
    • Book 3 provides perhaps the best example in the whole series. The villains are called the Red Lotus, who seek to create a world in which all people can be free. Their method of achieving that vision is planning to assassinate all world leaders, as they believe having a leader decide what's best for the people is the exact opposite of freedom. They do have a point however, as many of the world leaders portrayed in both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are at best incompetent and at worst tyrannical. Case in point being the Earth Queen, who raises the Earth Kingdom taxes to impossible levels in order to indulge herself with luxuries. The Red Lotus members portrayed are shown to be Affably Evil, as they are quite civil to even their enemies and only resort to intimidation and violence when they believe it will further their agenda and not just For the Evulz.
    • Book 4 has a similar but opposite situation. Because of the actions of the Red Lotus, the Earth Kingdom fell into anarchy, with much of the country being plagued by roving bands of bandits. On the other end of the spectrum is Kuvira, who restores order to the land by dealing with the bandits and bringing supplies to the villages having suffered under them, but soon after establishes a military dictatorship.
• Batman Beyond: In the DVD commentary of "Earth Mover", Bruce Timm says he likes this episode because of its moral ambiguity. The "villain", Bill, is not a thoroughly evil man, and has tried to make up for his past misdeeds, while the main antagonist, Tony, has understandable motives for his acts, but is irredeemably destructive.
• Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! completely deconstructs the Black-and-White Morality set-up the franchise held throughout its existence (even in Mystery Incorporated): this time, both parties often end up being alike The "monster of the week" is sometimes shown to have a (sort of) benign purpose while the ones calling the Mystery Machine gang are often (rather soft) examples of the Corrupt Corporate Executive kind.
• Nowhere is this morality portrayed stronger and more realistically than in BoJack Horseman. The title character, a former star of a sappy sitcom, ended up as a very tactless cynic who tries to find happiness in a seemingly empty life. The rest of the main cast, while nicer, also have their flaws. Princess Carolyn would go to great lengths to help the likes of BoJack or Mr. Peanutbutter, the latter being quite a vapid pooch; Diane often feels insecure to the point of lying to her husband Mr. Peanutbutter about her outing in Cordovia; and Todd sometimes ends up in situations that tend to get ugly 95% of the time.
  • In Season 5, BoJack's friend, Diane, states that "Theres no such thing as bad guys, or good guys, we are just guys who do good stuff sometimes and bad stuff sometimes and all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff but you are never going to be good because your not bad".
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: The episode "If It's Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast" explores this. One of the villains, for the heck of it plants a nuclear bomb in three areas of ethnic conflict, and gives detonators to one member of each side, in an attempt to prove humanity will destroy itself. The individuals from each conflict act petty, stubborn, and have their fingers on the button at one point. But neither side is portrayed as truly malicious, just a product of conflicts that go back generations. And when shown a vision of nuclear war, they agree to dismantle the nukes.
• Chaotic: None of the four tribes are entirely good or evil and no faction is ever portrayed as truly villainous. However, it's not entirely balanced; the Overworld is made of mostly heroic characters and there are a handful of wretched individuals coming from the Underworld.
• Daria: Despite some of the shallow natures and flaws of characters, few characters are truly malicious and at some points prove to be decent people (such as DeMartino and Britney). Daria, while mostly moral, can often become petty and cold towards others.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy is chock full of this. Kevin is evil in the eyes of Eddy, who is actually pretty cruel himself, who is viewed as merely ignorant by Double-D, who is seen as a talking encyclopedia to Ed, who is seen as a complete idiot by Sarah, who is seen as the greatest heroine by Jimmy, but is otherwise seen as an annoying and violent brat by everyone else. And that's not even covering the entire cast.
• Exo Squad. The Neosapiens do perform atrocities and Phaeton is pretty much a Card-Carrying Villain but they are responding to being essentially slaves whose earlier, more moderate attempt to gain civil rights was stomped on. The Space Pirates are more chaotic than evil and are motivated by a combination of survival and having been screwed over themselves in the past. The Space Pirates were a prison labor force that were abandoned once the Neo Sapiens were made and were driven crazy by their secret homeworld Chaos.
• Justice League Unlimited: For the Cadmus Story Arc, Cadmus is presented as rather dodgy, but with legitimate fears about the dangers of superheroes. But have more than once created supervillains, and often hiring them with disastrous results. The heroes, meanwhile, had a habit of putting the good of their own members ahead of that of unpowered individuals most at risk of supervillains. Notably, this went so far that the writers were forced to have a more 'traditional' supervillain take over the Big Bad seat, because they had no way to finish the arc in a satisfactory way with the time given without massive Motive Decay to make Cadmus arbitrarily 'evil'.
• Looney Tunes: In the trilogy of shorts where Bugs Bunny competes in a foot race against Cecil Turtle (Tortoise Beats Hare, Tortoise Wins by a Hare, and Rabbit Transit), neither Bugs nor Cecil are really better than the other. Bugs Bunny is depicted as very short-tempered and arrogant in these shorts, whereas Cecil is a Manipulative Bastard who quite blatantly cheats his way to victory.
• Regular Show:
  • Mordecai and Rigby are far from good workers most of the time, and often either slack off, or inadvertently cause destruction but they do seem to be to be friendly and caring towards others in a way that makes them seem like real people.
  • Benson is their bad-tempered boss who constantly berates and yells at them but he clearly is trying to be a reasonable manager and his yelling is understandable due to all the stuff the main duo has accidentally caused.
• One Robot Chicken sketch has Santa Claus experiencing an existential crisis as he realizes the world is morally grey, rather than the black and white he's been using to make his naughty/nice lists. Case in point: a boy stole a candy bar, only because his family is on welfare and his mom uses what money they have on drugs, and a girl cheated on her test, but only because she has a learning disability.
• A main theme of Steven Universe, according to its creators, is that almost nobody is truly good or truly evil. Antagonists aren't permanent, and are all multi-faceted with a chance of redemption. The protagonists also have the capacity to become malicious and harmful. However, they are very unlikely to become largely 'evil' compared to 'evil' characters becoming 'good', making the show lean slightly towards White-and-Grey Morality at times.
  • The major theme of season 3 is showing that while the Crystal Gems were fighting for a good cause against Homeworld's imperialist conquering, Gems on both sides suffered a lot during the Gem War. Rose Quartz was always implied to have done many questionable things during her time, with Garnet saying outright that she kept many secrets from them, even from her own confidant, Pearl. As Bismuth's reappearance in the present day proved, the decisions of a leader are never easy and not everyone on the Crystal Gems were necessarily good. When Bismuth presented her with a weapon known as the Breaking Point that was capable of shattering Gems, effectively fragmenting their beings into several self-aware pieces that are subjected to a Fate Worse than Death, Rose wouldn't stand for the thought of shattering as it would taint her belief that all life was worth giving a chance and making them no better than the Diamonds. Bismuth, understandably upset seeing her friends broken in battle and having her creation rejected, fought Rose to take back the weapon for herself, forcing Rose to bubble Bismuth, who was too dangerous to be set free. Yet, she never told any of the Crystal Gems what happened to their friend because she wanted to spare their feelings about her betrayal, making them believe she was simply lost in battle. For all that, Jasper reveals a few episodes later during one hell of a Villainous Breakdown that the vicious, uncaring soldier who spared no pity for others came back to Earth to get revenge on Rose for shattering Pink Diamond, an act equivalent to decide in Homeworld society. As a Ruby and later Garnet confirmed, Rose went against her own morals because she felt it was for the greater good, so that Earth, humanity, the Crystal Gems, and Steven to exist, compromises had to be done. And for all that, the Homeworld Gems who fought in the war are crushed to know that all their sacrifice and centuries of fighting were for nothing. As Greg said back in season 1, "There's no such thing as a good war, Kiddo."
  • Season 5 reveals that not even the Diamonds themselves are exempt from this trope. As it turned out, Pink Diamond was actually Good All Along and the one who really fell in love with planet Earth. She secretly fought against her fellow Diamonds as her alternate identity of Rose Quartz over control of the Earth after they refused to let her stop the colonization, ignoring her sincere pleas to spare the planet but never realizing her treachery. Since Pink believed that her fellow Diamonds will never give in to her demands, she enlisted Pearl's help to fake her own shattering and took Rose's identity as her only one. Furthermore, it's also made clear that the Diamonds are also victims of the Fantastic Caste System that they created, with Yellow and Blue having to follow in White Diamond's shadow out of fear. Even White herself feels that she needs to live up to her own standards and has a Villainous Breakdown when she realizes her flaws from failing to control Pink Steven.
• Tom and Jerry. Though Tom is often out to harass, kill, and eat Jerry, there's the fact that Jerry is extremely sadistic, and sometimes isn't even provoked. But that still doesn't excuse Tom, who often brings his punishment upon himself, and at the beginning of the majority of the episodes is bullying Jerry. At times it's hard to tell who the victim is; sometimes it's neither (and occasionally it's both). While it is Jerry that usually earns the Karmic Protection at least in relation to Tom, there are still a few instances he gets a comeuppance instead of Tom, or even both sides come out no better than the other.

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