Light Is Not Good / Western Animation

He’s left them feeling lightheaded.

Examples of Light Is Not Good in Western animation.

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• Adventure Time:
  • The Guardian Angel from "Dungeon" is clothed in white, but she only saves Finn so she can eat him herself.
  • Death lives in a castle made of light, and wears white.
  • The light cloud from the eponymous episode. While its controller is good (if misguided), letting it spread destroys free will.
• Amphibia: The Core's mind palace looks like a bright, beautiful library, and the newts it's previously assimilated including Aldrich manifest as translucent, glowing golden figures in this place. They're all still very much aspects and agents of an utterly evil and malevolent monster that cares about nothing above its own power.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The Fire Nation has this secondary to Kill It with Fire. The Power of the Sun? Check. Lawful Evil tendencies? Check. The best Firebenders use of Lightning Bolts? Check. Subverted with the the good Firebenders.
  • Amon from The Legend of Korra. He wears a white mask with gold patterns and a sun symbol, has a Knight Templar goal, and uses a special brand of bloodbending to mimic the Avatar's energybending, making him a false prophet.
  • Unalaq from the same series, who follows the Knight Templar mold and uses a waterbending method that infuses water with golden light and purifies evil spirits. He's an obnoxiously self-righteous jerk and invades the Southern Water Tribe. Though he can also infuse waterbending with dark energy, making him an example of Dark Is Evil as well.
  • Ultimately, while Raava herself is good, the fact that people like Unalaq can use her essence willy-nilly showcases that light is neutral in this setting.
  • Several of the spirits that Jinora and Korra meet in the spiritual world, work for Unalaq but can pass off as normal light spirits. The "best" example is probably the dragonfly-bunny spirit.
• The Big Bad in Batman Beyond's first season, Blight, emits a bright radioactive green glow. This contrasts with Batman, who is dark, and can even turn invisible.
• Ben 10
  • Forever King Driscoll wears a shiny white suit of armor, but he is not a nice guy.
  • Mike Morningstar from Ben 10: Alien Force. Sparkly, golden, glittery light powers. But to fuel these powers... he sucks life-force from girls, turning them into his private zombie army. Yes, that does sound familiar. This becomes Dark Is Evil when he turns into the hideous Darkstar, though in one episode he manages to return to his old sparkling self by draining the life from his enemies, though it doesn't stick.
  • In another episode, an alien named Ragnarok attempts to drain the energy from Earth's sun. Kevin is obsessed with stopping him because Ragnarok killed his parents.
• Anarky, the Big Bad of Beware the Batman, is dressed in an all-white, shiny costume, sharply contrasting with Batman's all-black one.
• Chaotic:
  • The Overworlders count for this. Although being contrasted with the evil-looking Underworlders no side is given to be more or less evil then the other.
  • In "Chaotic Crisis", Maxor, during an attempt to force the Underworlders back to Perim, reveals his intentions to conquer Earth for the Overworlders ( It was All Just a Dream).
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Delightful Children have a brighter color palette than most characters in the series. They're also a living example of Lawful Evil.
• Megavolt from Darkwing Duck has powers involving electricity, is constantly surrounded by light and has a usually heroic red -- yellow-and-blue color scheme. This juxtaposes with the emphatically Dark Is Not Evil hero.
• in Dead End: Paranormal Park the angels are very much revealed to be insane, imprisoning party attendees, brainwashing Pugsley and intending to go to war with the demons to the point all the realms are destroyed. To these ends this was implied in DeadEndia, but only shown here.
• Superman villain Luminus from the DC Animated Universe. The Justice Lords may also qualify.
• The Dragon Prince
  • In Season 3, the Sunfire elves use a beam of light to purge Dark Magic from their prisoners. The prisoners are directed to stare into the light, which almost blinds the already deaf Amaya and causes Aaravos' bug familiar to crawl out of Viren and bite the Sunfire priest, corrupting the sunforge and allowing Aaravos to possess him.
  • At the end of season 3, Lord Viren switches from his normal dark clothes to a white robe, takes the sunfire magic with the aid of Aaravos, and loses whatever sympathy and good were left in him.
• Family Guy often has cutaways involving the Christian God and Jesus doing risque things. In one particular cutaway, God is hitting on someone when he accidentally strikes her with lightning, then calls Jesus in to help him bail.
• Although good, the Air Tribe from Gormiti: The Lords of Nature Return resort to anything to defend their people, fitting well on the Knight Templar aspect of this trope; this is exploited by the Fire Tribe, which convinces them to do a Heel–Face Turn on the backstory of the series, with not very pleasant results. Being modelled after fairies and angels, and with white, yellow/gold and bright blue as their main colouration pattern, they look rather pleasant compared to the other tribes, which have quite grotesque members. An actual Light tribe exists in the franchise; they just haven't showed up in the series. Since the show is quite Animesque, it wouldn't be surprising if they were Knight Templar-ish as well...
• Gravity Falls:
  • Celestabellebethabelle from "The Last Mabelcorn" is a beautiful unicorn, but lies about being able to tell if humans are "pure of heart" just to get them to leave her kind alone. She goes so far as to bully a young girl by making her feel like she's a bad person because she's "impure".
  • Bill Cipher, a sadistic demon with megalomaniac tendencies, is usually accompanied by a bright glow, being based on the Eye of Providence.
  • Gideon Gleeful wears bright blue suits, has white hair, his symbol is a star and his "Tent of Telepathy" is bright and clean, unlike the shabby and dimly-lit Mystery Shack. He's also the major antagonist for the first season.
  • Both Rumble McSkirmish and .GIFfany are living video games (a pixellated video game character brought to the real world and a sapient AI, respectively) that invoke the brightness of their games, have primary/secondary color schemes respectively, and both of them have powers involving a lot of light. They're also both the main supernatural threats of their respective episodes, although Rumble is not so much "evil" as he is the result of a fighting game character trying to apply fighting game logic to the real world and even makes a Heel-Face Turn during Weirdmageddon. Both cases it's justified as they're the main characters of their respective games, designed as the protagonist or main Dating Sim love interest and thus meant to invoke Light Is Good by their designers. It's just that both of their games went wrong at some point.
• In Hazbin Hotel, the Exorcists are a class of angel that routinely perform genocide in Hell to prevent an Overpopulation Crisis and maintain the Balance Between Good and Evil. It's shown that they're Tautological Templars who believe that every single sinner deserves death even for minor crimes, even Original Man Adam who was once a human sinner himself and didn't get much better after ascending. Their leaders, the seraphim, aren't much better as they're Control Freaks who despise the very concept of free will and don't have God to keep them in check.
• Interestingly, Jackie Chan Adventures presents dark (well, "yin") as good, and light as evil. Well, more like nice and jerkass than good and evil. This is in keeping with Chinese symbolism, in which Yin represents coolness, shade and calm, while Yang represents heat, fire (or sunburn) and passion, and neither is entirely good nor entirely evil.
• In Kaijudo, the light stands for order above all things, which means that 9/10 times light based creatures are depicted as "does not compute" types that attempt to correct chaos in all the wrong ways. The same applies for people associated with the light too, such as Nigel Brightmore, who betrayed his own side simply because people weren't following Kaijudo's code to the letter.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Whereas Cat Noir is a textbook case of Dark Is Not Evil, his eponymous akumatized alter-ego in "Cat Blanc" is decked out entirely in white and is a deranged Person of Mass Destruction who wiped the entire city of Paris off the map.
• Detroit Deluxe from Motorcity is clean, sun always shining, and is represented by the color white. It is also an oppressive dystopia that denies basic rights.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • While the show has lots of Light Is Good, there are some hints that light powers ≠ goodness. It is implied briefly that the stars helped free Nightmare Moon, and considering how actual star-made beings exist in the forms of Ursa Minor and Major, it isn't a stretch to think at least some are actual entities. Discord also seems to like to teleport by using bright white flashes.
  • The main villain of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls is Sunset Shimmer, who is bright yellow/red and has a sun for a cutie mark, and has a teal aura. Even her demon form is brightly coloured and uses light/fire balls. Subverted as of her Heel–Face Turn in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks.
  • A Royal Problem introduces Day Breaker, a hypothetical Celestia gone rogue. She's still solar-powered, almost as a god of fire, and even jabs at her Dark Is Evil sister for her color scheme.
    Daybreaker: Oh look, more black. We get it, you're sad. You could use some sun! [fires a laser at her]
• In Over the Garden Wall, the Beast gets a lot of Dark Is Evil traits, but he also has eerie, glowing eyes, is absolutely obsessed with keeping his "Dark Lantern" lit, and his Villain Song compares death to a light guiding the lost. The Lantern is his Soul Jar, and if its flame goes out, he dies.
• The Owl House: Emperor Belos and his forces are a clad in white, Emperor Belos himself has a divine look in him and claims to speak for the Titan that makes up the boiling isles, But has much more hidden motives than he lets on and his rule is nothing more than a dictatorship.
• Phineas and Ferb: Little Suzy, the usually pretty blonde little girl often spouting cute nonsensical words and adorable in almost everyone's eyes on... is actually a monster. She makes Candace's life a living hell whenever she's around to the point of Candace becoming frightened of her. This also applies to Buford. "Justified" in one episode where she tells Candace that it's just how she acts in order to control her older brother... which doesn't make it any better.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • In one episode, an illustrious hero named Major Man comes to town and always manages to somehow beat our big-eyed, cute crime-fighting heroines to the scene of the crime. Too bad he's actually setting up the crimes beforehand so he can rescue people and be the hero.
  • In a later episode, there's a gnome wearing a bright red cloak, has a magical melody and emits sparkles from his hands, but he wants to conquer Townsville, just like any villain.
• ReBoot: Daemon, the most powerful villain and second Big Bad, is brightly colored, speaks with a soft French accent, and is generally styled after Joan of Arc. She also wants to unite the entire Net under her order and then destroy it, to create perfect order in oblivion. The methods of her followers are an obvious reference to religious fanatacism, complete with digital gospel singers and all.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Jiminy Lummox, Stimpy's conscience. A Jiminy Cricket expy who appears in a burst of light and goody-goody sounding music, offering platitudes with a twisted attempt at a warm facial expression and demeanor. He's really a dense, dangerous, domineering jerkwad who himself abuses Ren against his own conscience when he sees Ren pick on Stimpy (even when Stimpy deserves it, like using Ren's teeth to descale fish), and leaves Ren entirely alone otherwise despite having been lent to him to be his temporary conscience (since Ren ordinarily has none).
• Rick and Morty :
  • The titled characters once met a small nebulous being that looks like a gas cloud surrounded by cell nuclei in episode "Mortynight Run". Rick warns Morty not to free him from the prison that they find him in, but of course Morty doesn't listen because it seems like Rick is just being his usual selfish self. Just before entering the portal to his own dimension, the nebulous being gratefully tells Morty that he and his kind are coming to eradicate all organic life in the universe which they see as a disease, almost seeming to think that Morty would look forward to this as much as he does. Then Morty kills the being with a laser gun while crying.
  • By "Rickmurai Jack", Evil Morty's taken to wearing a white dress shirt with a turquoise tie, and is just as evil as ever. He ends the episode wearing a golden spacesuit with a matching ship and portal gun that fires golden portals.
• Angelica Pickles from Rugrats. When she's around adults she's a sweet, adorable polite, little angel that melts the hearts of all the adults but when she's alone with the babies she's a hateful, aggressive little brat who enjoys torturing the babies and taking their stuff. Although she always gets in trouble in the end.
• In the 2018 reboot of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the defining colors of Horde Prime are white and bright green. He has white dreadlocks, wears white garments, and is first shown in a beautifully illuminated throne room. Furthermore, in Season 5 it's established he views his power and influence as "light" that "pierces darkness" and "casts out all shadows". However, he's a sociopath who has conquered large swaths of the universe, treats his clone soldiers like disposable tools, and was ready to destroy Etheria before learning of the planet's superweapon. And unlike Catra, Shadow Weaver, and even Hordak, he does not do a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Just before his first unshaded appearance we got Light Hope, whose sole purpose was really to activate the Heart of Etheria, which would result in the complete destruction of Etheria. Although, she did undergo a last-minute Heel–Face Turn through memories of her friendship with Mara.
• The Simpsons:
  • In a segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI", Homer gets trapped in a 3D dimension. When Reverend Lovejoy asks if he sees a light Homer says yes and the Reverend instructs him to "Head into the light my son." Cue the sound of electricity and Homer screaming in pain.
  • Jessica Lovejoy wears white and pink, and even appalls Bart with her Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour.
• Oslo from Skyland. All Seijin draw their power from sunlight, but he goes the extra mile by dressing in white and making sure that he's bathed in bright lights 24/7.
• South Park:
  • In the Christmas episode, Stan helps cute forest critters build a manger for their baby to be born in, only to find out they're Satanists and the baby is the Antichrist. They are so dark and twisted, they joyfully sacrifice one of their own to the devil. In fact, their nemesis was a scary-looking mountain lion, whose job it is to prevent the birth of the Antichrist.
  • The furry little animals later return in Imaginationland as part of the Evil Imagination army. They prove to be the most evil of the group, as all of their actions involve violent rape, urophilia, or some other horrible thing that squicks out all other evil creatures. The fact that they're borne from Cartman's imagination might come as no surprise.
  • The Knights of Standards and Practises from "It Hits the Fan" are Knight Templar in nature, although they were clearly the lesser evil. The forces of Heaven, while technically good, sometimes get less pleasant.
• Played With in the Mortis arc in Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Daughter is the embodiment of the Light Side, and while she herself is compassionate & good, The Father implies that too much of the Light Side would destroy the fabric of the universe, meaning even the Light Side isn't an entirely good thing. The Daughter was also perfectly willing to kill Obi-Wan on the orders of the Father as part of his Secret Test of Character for Anakin. However, it's implied to be a case of Unreliable Narrator as Word of God states that the Light side is the Force's natural state of being, and the Ones aren't manifestations of the Force but simply Precursors heavily attuned to it.
• Grand Admiral Thrawn in Star Wars Rebels wears a white uniform, but he's by far one of the most terrifyingly competent imperials in canon. Thrawn outwitted the Rebels on many occasions, laying trap after trap all while predicting their moves. It's no surprise they had to (seemingly) kill him off, for the Rebel Alliance wouldn't had been as successful, if Thrawn stuck around too long.
• Steven Universe:
  • Yellow Diamond is named after a gemstone associated with sunlight in gemstone mythology and is represented by the color yellow. Doesn't stop her from being a callous Galactic Conqueror who wants nothing more than the destruction of Earth and everyone on it in order to avenge Pink Diamond.
  • Blue Diamond has been repeatedly been compared to having a saint-like appearance along with Garnet's portrayal of her as calm and light spoken but is just horrible as Yellow Diamond by trying to murder the Pre-Crystal Gem Ruby for altering Sapphire's vision of Homeworld winning the war and fusing with Sapphire by accident. This is made worse by the fact Ruby wasn't aware of Sapphire's vision and was performing her duty of protecting Sapphire per her duties as her guard. However, episodes showing her in the present day portray her in a better light. She "saves" Greg from the Cluster and even keeps the Rose Quartzes and the earth-born Quartzes alive (even if the former are bubbled) in Pink Diamond's memory. When she engages the Crystal Gems in battle she uses blue devil light attacks. This trope is finally subverted in "Change Your Mind", in which she's the first of the remaining Diamonds to make a Heel–Face Turn, and openly admits that what she's done to her own subjects was wrong.
  • White Diamond is finally introduced in "Legs From Here to Homeworld", and her body glows so brightly one can't even make out her gem... but even from her brief introduction, there's something deeply off about her. She's basically Yellow, Blue, and Pink's condescending abusive mother who enforces Homeworld's Hive Caste System and strict rules against mixed Fusions, and the climax of the Season 5 finale "Change Your Mind" is about confronting her.
  • Honestly, the Gems as a whole. Their bodies are literally made of light, their society indulges in that particular obsession and it is actually a plot point multiple times, but this does not affect their morality at all, with even the protagonists having their petty, hideous moments.
• Teen Titans (2003):
  • Dr. Light, who even makes a joke about it while fighting Raven, the Teen Titans' version of Dark Is Not Evil. After pasting her with a laser bolt, he asks her, "What's the matter? Afraid of the light?" (Then her Superpowered Evil Side got him, right after mockingly asking him if he was afraid of the dark. He wound up being so for a while. In a later appearance he fought as usual against the Titans until seeing Raven, at which point he instantly surrendered.)
  • Brother Blood wears white and yellow and is quite charismatic. His powers are psychic in nature, but otherwise seems light aligned. Bonus points for Word of God, which states that he was intended to be a foil of Slade; while he hides in the shadows, Brother Blood likes being the center in the spotlight.
  • Angel, an angel-themed H.I.V.E. student.
  • Played with through Val-Yor, who is an intergalactic superhero on a mission to stop a group of Mechanical Lifeforms bent on destroying all organic life and is friendly towards everyone... except Starfire. It turns out that Val-Yor is a racist Jerkass towards Starfire's people.
• In a ThunderCats episode, the titular feline heroes are faced with two aliens: one is a gruff, armored reptilian(?) and the other is a gentle-voiced, delicate golden robot in white robes. The golden robot claims he's being hunted by the reptile (either they're at war or it's a cop chasing a criminal); naturally, the opposite is true.
• Total Drama: Julia wears a white crop top and canvas shoes and initially portrays herself as a peace-loving Granola Girl but when the facade is dropped, she's a real nasty piece of work.
• The Ice Dancers of Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race are this. Despite the pink, glittery outfits, peppy attitudes and constant smiles, both are ruthless competitors, Josee more than Jacques.
• Morgana in Troll Hunters is a rather bizarre example. Everything about her is supposed to be connected with darkness and shadows, seeking to unleash an eternal night For the Evulz. Yet her magic is consistently an extreme bright gold that illuminates every scene she's in, and her real form wears a shining golden armor with a green cape. This gets all the more confusing in her combat with Claire over the staff, where the latter's essence is depicted as a dark purple to contrast Morgana's gold one.
• Endless Island in Twelve Forever is cast in intense, endless daylight but it drives people insane, partly because there is no night to measure the time with.
• Miss Power from WordGirl looks like a superhero but is anything but heroic about her...
• In Young Justice (2010), the antagonists are a council referring to itself as the Light. Initially, its leaders are not seen directly except as bright silhouettes on computer screens. It should be noted that the Light doesn't see themselves as being Evil, but rather uplifting humanity to a place of dominance in the galactic community. What makes them evil is pretty much what they do to reach their goals.
  • Superboy, who was created by them, originally wore a white version of Superman's costume before switching to a black one after his Heel–Face Turn.
• In Wolfboy and the Everything Factory as the series goes on it is revealed that the sprytes have a serious case of Fantastic Racism, attacking the disarrays and even attempting genocide on them once with balls of light. In the present day, Nyx attempts to kill off humanity.

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