Pure Is Not Good

A heart of gold is hard and cold.

"The legend said the heart must be pure — it never said pure good."

— Harm, Young Justice (2010)

Okay, so you've been told that in order to make the Phlebotinum work, or go to this particular place, or what have you, you have to be pure of heart. And then you get there, and there's the Big Bad. What?!? Turns out Pure Is Not Good.

In fact, it's perfectly possible to be Pure Evil.

In Japanese Media, this trope is likely rooted in the philosophical concept of Makoto, which loosely means "pure (heart/mind/soul/motives)". It basically means a mind free of distractions, unnecessary thoughts, doubts, or fallacies and is mostly used in the context of hard work, loyalty, determination, and intense emotion. Makoto, while considered a "good" thing, is not limited to good intentions. For example, a villain completely dedicated to villainy, a Fully-Embraced Fiend, a Knight Templar fanatically and self-righteously obsessed with a cause, or someone making destructive knee-jerk decisions would be demonstrating makoto. Their dedication is "pure"; their goals, not so much.

This trope is solely for "pure of heart" where purity does not necessarily denote goodness. Any resemblance to being a trope about pure substances is... ahem... purely coincidental. And no, we're also not touching anything resembling "ethnic purity," which ain't good either. For that, see Prejudice Tropes.

May make use of Virgin Power as a specific form of purity. Speaking of celibacy, Eunuchs Are Evil can go either way: a villainous eunuch may be characterised as pure due to his lack of sexual development,^note though in some cases, sex can still occur after castration, or as impure due to his physical mutilation. See also Ambiguous Innocence, Light Is Not Good, Straight Edge Evil. Contrast Incorruptible Pure Pureness. Not to be confused with Complete Monster, a character who is considered "pure evil" by story, genre, and audience standards. Can be paired with White Is Pure.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In one episode of 009-1, 009-1 meets a young woman who she can only describe as "pure". Later, the woman tries to kill her when 009-1 tries to stop her from meeting up with enemy agents. It turns out that the girl is actually an android made mostly out of very pure gold that the enemy agents were trying to smuggle out of the country.
• Black Butler: Both Queen Victoria and the angel Ash/Angela's ultimate goal is to purify England of its sins... with fire and brainwashing.
• Mato Kuroi from Black★Rock Shooter is this. She happens to be a genuinely pure girl that has no sorrow or worry, and wants other people to be just like her. In a similar case like Light below, she also realizes that people aren't as pure as her and wants to change that. That desire manifests into Black★Rock Shooter and, true to her nature, strives to help others. It's just said Otherself lives in a place where suffering and sorrow are the society, and her method of saving everyone is to kill everyone and everything as a form of Mercy Kill. This makes Black★Rock Shooter extremely homicidal (as the Otherselves are an Emotionless Girl race and only acting on their counterparts' behalf) by going around and killing her own kind in a giant massacre for years without batting an eyelash because Mato is ignorant of such a world and would have never thought that her ideology will result in something like that. When Mato finds out about this, she understandably freaks out.
• In episode 7 of Blade & Soul, Alka runs into Morii again, who hadn't been seen since the first episode and suffering from the loss of her people and homeland because they housed the former from the Palam Empire. Morii takes her to see her "mother" the leader of the Boat of Cleansing. However, said house actually turns out to be a Cult, and they nearly kill Alka in a deranged Human Sacrifice.
• In Bleach, Kaname Tosen says that Wonderweiss Margera likes being near him because pure creatures gravitate toward each other, but that he isn't sure where along the spectrum Margera's purity lies.
• Code:Breaker has the pure, innocent killer child-Sakura. Her pal Ogami shows her that killing is bad and hugging is good, although she kills him anyway (they get better).
• Mao from Code Geass is as innocent as a child, and can also read people's minds. If he sees that they've done or thought anything bad, he automatically assumes that they're bad people. And then he'll use what he knows about them to Mind Rape them. And his victims include the show's resident Messiah and (then) Knight in Shining Armor! It's explained because he received his mind-reading powers when he was only six, and so learned about the bad thoughts everyone gets at some point before he was old enough to understand that you can have bad thoughts or make mistakes and still be a perfectly decent person. To really drive the point home, his signature color is white!
• Death Note: Light Yagami appears to be a young man who is kind, impeccably educated, well-read, and intelligent. However, his highly moralizing and absolute sense of justice somehow distorts his judgment to the extent that he becomes the main villainous force in the story. It's precisely his twisted and seemingly "pure" sense of justice that makes him not necessarily a good person.
• Dragon Ball:
  • It's explained that Vegeta was able to obtain his Super Saiyan form, thought to require a "pure heart", by having a heart of pure evil. Though as he elaborates on a panel later, and is shown more in the anime, it's less that his heart is "pure evil" and more that his desire to surpass Goku had grown and mutated into the all-encompassing obsession he's characterized with from this point until the end of the Buu Saga.
  • One of the difficulties of fighting as a Super Saiyan is the sheer rage that overcomes the Saiyan. This is because their purity of heart is transformed into pure rage. Even for Goku, Super Saiyan was his Superpowered Evil Side (at first, anyway), which is why he never used the spirit bomb in this form except in a Non-Serial Movie (even then, he had to actually absorb it into his body so it wouldn't backfire on him when he transformed). Earlier in the Dragon Ball manga, Fortuneteller Baba described Goku's pure heart as being like that of a baby or an animal, while Roshi argues he's just an airhead. He is capable of acting selfishly in that regard and being overcome by emotion, but malice and cruelty were beyond him until he turned Super Saiyan for the first time, and even then, only the first time he used it.
  • In the DBZ video games, Cell is able to use the Spirit Bomb as his ultimate attack by being pure evil. Incidentally, the Viz-translated manga does indeed give this line as a heart of "pure evil".
  • Kid Buu (yes, the absolutely insane destroyer of all worlds) is hinted to be pure of heart during the climax of the battle with Goku, since he was able to not only catch the Spirit Bomb and move it back, but was also quite capable of deflecting it back at Goku (during the Vegeta Saga, Goku stated that the Spirit Bomb could be deflected by those pure of heart, and thus could not hurt them). This is probably because of Buu's childlike mentality.
  • Some Japanese media, particularly video games, actually refer to Kid Buu as "Majin Buu (Pure Evil),"^note the form commonly called Super Buu by Western fans is just called "Majin Buu (Evil)" and in both Dragon Ball Online and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 Majin characters have an ability called "Purification" that lets them change into a Kid Buu-like Super Mode.
  • Akira Toriyama has discussed this topic at length with regards to Goku's depiction in the manga:
    "At any rate, I wanted him to have the sense of being that rare guy who seeks only 'to become stronger than before', so much so that it feels like 'there's no one as pure as this person'. And while he does end up saving everyone as a result of that, he himself at least has a very pure sincerity about 'wanting to become stronger'. What I wanted to depict the most was the sense that he might not be a good guy at all, although he does do good things as a result."
  • In Dragon Ball Super, Gowasu learns this the hard way, being initially oblivious to Zamasu's growing darkness because Zamasu is pure-hearted and has a strong sense of justice. However, it is Zamasu's inability to see past his own sense of justice and purity that leads him to believe that mortals are the root of all evil in the universe while the gods are too lazy to do anything about them and it is his duty as a god to destroy them. This carries over into Dragon Ball: Fusions, where Zamasu is immune to Spike the Devil Man's Devilmite Beam, a feat that no one else but Goku ever pulled off.
  • Also from Super comes the ruler of the Dragon Ball multiverse, Zeno, who is literally a child with power over all creation. He's very much like a child in personality, innocent, pure, and nice to the point he comes off as the ultimate God Is Good... but as Beerus himself states, this is what makes him so dangerous. He's so innocent and pure that he doesn't really get the value of individual lives, which is why he can so casually and cheerfully threaten his subordinates with erasure and play "games" that involve destroying planets as a consequence without so much as batting an eye. It's heavily implied that the reason he destroyed six of the original eighteen universes was rather trivial overall, and in the Universal Survival arc he outright states that the losers will have their entire universes erased as a result. In fact, he states that he was planning on wiping out all but the five strongest ones just because "there are too many universes" for a long while now, and Goku just gave him the idea to scale it into a tournament where the winner would be the fifth surviving universe. Ultimately subverted at the end; The Tournament of Power turns out to be a Secret Test of Character for all of existence. The eight universes are pitted against each other in a battle royale, with the losers being erased from existence and the last person standing on the winning team getting a wish from the Super Dragon Balls. In the end, Android 17 gets the wish and uses it to bring back the other seven universes... at which point the Grand Minister reveals that Zeno fully expected this, believing that whoever won the tournament would be virtuous enough to make a selfless wish like that. If they'd made a selfish wish instead, he would have just erased all of existence on the spot.
• Elfen Lied:
  • Lucy is pure, sweet, kind... and a psychotic killer. Her theme song Lilium is Ominous Latin Chanting for "pure as the lily".
  • In addition, Number 35 (Mariko) is a five-year-old girl, filled with childish innocence and playfulness... and cruelty.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, the Big Bad insists that he has purified himself by giving his Seven Deadly Sins their own bodies in the form of homunculi, but he exhibits basically all of those sins anyway, he just isn't as overt about them. When he reabsorbs Greed into himself, he becomes Affably Evil. When he removes Greed, he reverts to being a humorless prick.
• The two antagonists in season 2 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are both different facets of this trope.
  • Gouda thinks of himself as a pure person and a virgin who has only the best for everyone in mind but is a treacherous bastard who always dresses in black and never had his terribly disfigured face restored, so everyone who meets him will always remember him. He also deliberately designed the Individual Eleven memetic virus to only affect those who were virgins before they were fully cyberized as a further twisting of this trope, since their "purity" is the very thing that makes them vulnerable to becoming his pawns.
  • Kuze has given up on all kinds of idealism and turned to terrorism, but is completely devoted to helping the people suffering in the internment camps and sacrifices everything he has to improve their situation. He also had his cybernetic body custom build with white skin and hair, and a face so perfectly sculpted that it allows for almost no facial expressions or even mouth movement so as to not distort its unfading beauty. He also dresses completely in white when possible, evoking at the same time an image of purity and death. He gets rid of the white getup after quitting Individual Eleven and joining the Asian refugees, switching to more practical jeans and a leather jacket. Characterwise, he is compared to Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Cassius Clay (the 19th-century abolitionist, not the 20th-century boxer who changed his name to Muhammed Ali) — a person utterly convinced of the rightness of his cause and with ability to steer others to it with his massive charisma.
  • In Solid State Society, both Gouda and Kuze are considered to be two of the few people with egotistical, overwhelming rightfulness along with Batou, Togusa, the Laughing Man, Aramaki, and the Major herself.
• Hell Teacher Nube: The "Formation!! The Dōmori Youth Spirit-Attack Team" plays with this. Nube's students are given several pieces of magatama to fight various supernatural beings threatening the city while Nube and Tamamo are out of commission. The magatama's powers are activated by pure and strong emotions, such as Hiroshi's bravery, Kyoko's friendship, and Makoto's kindness. However, Miki's is activated by her pride, and the other realise that the pure emotions required to bring the magatama's power doesn't have to be positive ones.
• Hunter × Hunter has Gon Freecss. While he's a very friendly, kind, and quite naive Friend to All Living Things, he's capable of morally ambiguous deeds that really can scare others, even his former assassin best friend Killua. Normally, he would qualify as Chaotic Good, but it's difficult to describe Gon with a moral alignment due to his Blue-and-Orange Morality and said deeds. Not to mention that he actually deconstructs the archetypical shōnen hero, fighting for personal reasons essentially.
• In Inuyasha, Naraku corrupts Hakushin, a Living Buddha who has become bitter over his Heroic Sacrifice, into protecting him by erecting a purifying barrier that destroys demons (except for Naraku's). Kikyo at times is also aligned against the protagonists and uses her purifying priestess powers to thwart their efforts since she's a Dark Magical Girl who wants to face Naraku all alone. Ironically (or meaningfully), Kikyou is the one who actually convinces Hakushin to stop serving Naraku, which finally allows him to stop hating people and pass on.
• Kill la Kill:
  • Overlaps with Light Is Not Good with Satsuki, who dresses in all white and even gains her own Stripperiffic Kamui called Junketsu, which translates to English as "Purity". For added irony, she can effectively use its powers precisely because she is not at all embarrassed to be almost naked when her Kamui powers up. Becomes borderline Fridge Horror with later episodes when we meet Satsuki's mother Ragyo and find out that she sexually molests her daughter and is implied to have been doing so for years, under the pretense of "purifying" her. Yikes.
  • Kamui Junketsu has a very meaningful name. It is composed of 100% pure Life Fibers, and unlike Senketsu, it has not been genetically modified in any way. By the standards of his species, Junketsu is indeed the purest can be — a purely hostile extraterrestrial parasite.
• Monster: Johan Liebert is portrayed as a charismatic, intelligent, and seemingly inhumanly perfect individual. After all, he's a handsome, well-mannered, well-read, and educated young man. However, nothing changes the fact that he is the monster: a highly manipulative psychopath who has been carrying out a series of crimes and murders since his childhood. With his qualities, the vast majority of the world's problems would be solved, not helped by the fact that he was raised to be the perfect soldier. His unwavering dedication to his twisted goals and his lack of scruples make him an example of how "purity" in terms of determination, physical appearance, intellect, personality, and Evil Virtues does not necessarily denote moral goodness.
• Naruto: Itachi notes that Sasuke is "still pure, and can be colored by anything", and as a result, the Big Bad had a fairly easy time manipulating him. Further events indicate this purity likely stemmed from his ignorance of the darker goings-on of his village. The person to first introduce him to the reality could bend his perception of the conflict as they pleased.
• The villain of one arc of Noir is Silvana Greone, a Mafia Princess known as the Intoccabile, which translates to "the inviolate" "the untouchable" (here used in the sense of "one you should not touch upon fear of death") or "the pure". Given that she's a villain it's obvious that her type of purity is not the good kind, and terrifies everyone with her Dissonant Serenity and ruthlessness.
• O-Parts Hunter:
  • There's an angelic character who is a genuine angel and doesn't have one iota of evil in his heart even when disemboweling his enemies he loves everything. He's on the "evil" side, and since the hero's weapon is only as powerful as the amount of fear of his enemy he's screwed.
  • This is a standard trait of O Parts angels. Their so-called goodness doesn't prevent their vessels from destructive agendas. All an angel can really do is to kill their vessels' malice, bolster their altruistic sentiments and grant them a sense of justification instead of, say, actually improving their morality. If, however, the holder is good already, that's a different story.
• Psycho-Pass: Big Bad Makishima has a pure-white psycho-pass, indicating a perfectly sound mind, which peaks at its purest even as he kills the Akane's friend Yuki with a straight-razor.
• Kyouko Sakura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica describes her father like this, and she does so a while after he actually lost his mind after learning of Kyoko's Selfless Wish and went the Pater Familicide route since his mind simply broke after that. Confirmed when the Drama CD shows us what kind of person Minister Sakura was before breaking himself and everyone else but Kyouko: a soft-spoken, kind Nice Guy.
  Kyouko: He was too honest. Too kind. Every morning reading the paper, the worries of the world brought him to tears...
• Shiori Takatsuki from Revolutionary Girl Utena takes this to new levels. "Innocently cruel", indeed.
• A Sailor Moon episode has Minako depressed because the villains haven't tried to steal her pure heart crystal. In order to cheer her up Luna tells her that Usagi had her heart crystal stolen because of her pure love for Mamoru but still has plenty of bad traits like a pure love of eating.
• Shonen Note: Boy Soprano brings this up in an interesting way: protagonist Yutaka seems very pure and innocent, and he is also unusually sensitive to sound, crying at the mere sound of beautiful music. Upon witnessing him singing in public, his classmate Machiya compares him to an angel for how "pure and unashamed" he is. His way of reacting to emotion is hinted to be part of what makes him such a great singer, but it is shown that it can actually also be extremely overwhelming and exhausting for him, so he tries very hard to suppress negative emotions— and when he can not, the guilt and unpleasant feelings will actually cause him to become physically ill.
  Machiya: Maybe the reason Yutaka seems so pure... is because it's the only way he can live without being completely overwhelmed.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Despite the fact that Amon Garam/Adrian Gecko ruthlessly sacrificed his own childhood friend, Echo, for power and then attempted to subjugate the world, Yubel is unable to feed on his inner darkness. Much to Yubel's disbelief, Amon has no darkness in his heart because he is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wanted to subjugate the world to turn it into a utopia where no one will want for anything, no matter how many people he has to kill to reach his goal. However, as Yubel defeats him, a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and summoning Echo's spirit caused Amon to finally feel remorse for killing her just as he died.
• YuYu Hakusho has Sensui, who once was extremely pure. If he wasn't so pure as a good guy, he couldn't have become so tainted as a villain. And out of his seven personalities, "Shinobu" (the original) remains very pure and innocent.

Comic Books

• Black Panther: Pulled off by Doctor Doom of all people in Doomwar. When faced with a challenge from the goddess Bast that requires "purity without pretense" he offers himself up for judgement and passes as while she finds his methods repulsive she cannot deny the purity in his desire to bring about world peace.
• Judge Dredd: When some satanic cultists need to sacrifice a "pure" soul, they choose fascist Anti-Hero Judge Dredd as he's the closest thing to pure in their Crapsack World. Dredd is certainly not just, but he is utterly incorruptible and the living embodiment of law, order, discipline, duty, and sacrifice.
• Trinity War: Pandora's Box plays a major role in the story, and only the strongest or darkest heart can open it. Those that aren't get possessed by it. Superman, the world's greatest hero, was not considered pure enough. It also turns out that no one from this universe is evil enough to open it either. Even Vandal Savage, an immortal Cro-Magnon man who practically invented evil as a human concept, could not open the box. Trying to do it actually brought his repressed guilt to the surface. The Box is opened by the Outsider aka Alfred Pennyworth from Earth-3, the universe that is the birthplace of evil.
• Usagi Yojimbo: Jei-san sees himself as the only person who can eliminate evil. Unfortunately, he is pure evil (with pure white eyes and a creepy voice to boot), and everyone is evil to him, except for his "innocent niece" Kyoko, who is so innocent (or severely traumatized) she isn't afraid of a pile of corpses, only happy that "Uncle is nearby!" Interestingly, Kyoko seems to be the only one (not counting Jei himself or later Inazuma who can safely touch Jei's soul-sucking black blade. Word of God is that Kyoko was supposed to become Jei's new host, but the author felt uncomfortable about it so Inazuma and Jiro were created.
• Watchmen: Rorschach has an incorruptible black-and-white world view, that, while admirable in a Crapsack World of Black-and-Grey Morality, causes him to do some pretty horrific things to people who fall under the "black" part of it. When he knows that the only pragmatic thing to do is to compromise his ideals, he chooses to die instead.

Fan Works

• Like in Death Note canon, Light in A Cure for Love: "At one point he had felt such overpowering empathy that he had to ignore it completely, like flicking a switch. He didn't realize that it was that which had made him cruel."
• In The Games We Play, pure Light of Creation that doesn't pass through any of the spheres and isn't refined or shaped by a Semblance is only good for destruction and nothing else.
• In the Harry Potter fanfic King of Kings, Ruling over Rulers, the Twelfth One, the primordial embodiment of purity, seeks the complete annihilation of creation itself, due to creation and all things that followed being corruptions of the state of nothing that existed before.
• In Overlady, demons normally only have to follow the letter of orders given to them by their summoners, but if summoned by a "pure-hearted maiden of noble birth", they have to follow both the letter and the spirit of their orders. A couple demons are rather surprised to learn that a pure evil maiden still qualifies. It's implied the rule in question was made by demons in the belief they'd never be summoned by anyone pure of heart.
• In A Riddle for Nekhenu Voldemort tries to gain immortality with Egyptian afterlife magic, Nekhenu wonders if being pure evil is what frees his heart from the weight of guilt.

Film — Animated

• In 9, the Fabrication Machine is powered by/contains pure intelligence. Unlike the nine ragdolls, it has no human soul, and therefore no conscience, no sense of right and wrong...Toward the end of the movie, The Scientist explains that it's because of this that the Fabrication Machine is so dangerous: containing only pure intelligence and no human soul, it could be all too easily corrupted.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, the spirit of Phlebotinum Girl Lalah appears in Amuro's dream, saying "Char is pure". At that point, Char is widely viewed as selfish (and/or Messianic) and is trying to render Earth uninhabitable for human life. Amuro's response: to wake up shouting "PURE?!"
• Peter Pan shows that "pure innocent" is not as good as it sounds. Peter's unintentionally cruel behavior to the Darling kids and especially to Wendy, courtesy of his utter refusal to grow up, proves to be a good incentive for them to leave Neverland and grow up.

Film — Live-Action

• In Alien, the Xenomorph is said to be "the perfect organism", with "structural perfection" matched only by its hostility, a pure survivor "unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."
• Demolition Man:
  • By 2032, Doctor Cocteau has managed to create a society where crime is non-existent and the physical and mental well being of it's citizens are cared for, allowing each of them to live longer, healthier lives, but to do this, the lifestyles of the average San Angeles citizen have become so heavily sanitized that they are not only fined for swearing, they don't even engage in physical contact anymore, and anything deemed unhealthy is thus illegal, rendering them almost childlike in their mannerisms and feeling unfulfilled with nothing to struggle against. Cocteau outright holds his society to the ideal of being as a clear crystal ball, and is proven willing resort to excise anything and anyone he considers a threat to its purity.
  • At the end of the other extreme is Simon Phoenix, a mayhem spreading madman who follows no laws or creeds and lives only to indulge his every whim, his pure chaos leaving a trail of victims in its wake.
• In Lord of Illusions, cult leader Nix sermons to his followers that he has been named "the Puritan" by holy decree. They get to find out just how purely evil this guy is when he kills his loyal minions for being mindless slaves not worthy of a being as 'perfect' as him.
• The Lord of the Rings: Because of her insatiable hunger for living things, Shelob is able to resist the unlimited power promised by the One Ring.
• In The Terminator, Kyle Reese explains to both Sarah herself and to the police just how dangerous the titular T-800 is by describing it at pure single-minded determination with nothing else in it. It has no sense of good or evil or morality, and has no wants, needs, feelings, or anything else beyond the pure single-minded purpose of "kill Sarah Connor."
  To Sarah: Listen and understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
  To the police: Shut up! You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her. That's what he does! That's all he does! You can't stop him! He'll reach down her throat and pull her fucking heart out!

Literature

• In And Then There Were None, Emily Brent lives by a strict moral code. However, this led her to cast out her pregnant maid for not living up to her moral standards, which drove the poor girl to suicide.
• In Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series, the title character reflects on his pastor's words that one with a pure heart has The Strength of Ten Men. He realizes that it could be pure anything; pure love or pure hate, pure greed, or even pure evil.
• In the Eisenhorn novel Hereticus, Cherubael (a daemon), without being bound as a daemon host, manifests as pure light. The title character notes that its purity is "an abomination". Notably (and perhaps unintentionally hilariously), a minor character who was a priest thinks that Cherubael was a manifestation of the Emperor, and approaches it holding an Aquila^noteA two-headed eagle symbol, the equivalent of a crucifix in 40k. and chanting verses and praise. This hurt Cherubael, who ran off briefly, and the priest, confused, gave chase. This gave Eisenhorn enough time to prepare another daemon host to capture Cherubael before it could kill him. (Remember, this was just after Eisenhorn summoned Cherubael to kill a Titan.)
• Shows up in one of the stories in Fragile Things. A young woman approaches a voodooienne for a love potion. The voodooienne agrees, but also states that for the potion to work the person who uses it must have pure intent. The woman is apprehensive (she basically wants to jump the target's bones and have his babies, but nothing more), until the voodooienne laughs and states that she meant that the intent must be pure, but what that intent is is less important.
• The Pure Ones in the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series of books are owl nazis (though not explicitly stated).
• In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green-Sky Trilogy, the Kindar race has done very well in purging negative emotions like anger and malice from society, to the point where 2-year-olds squabbling over a toy is considered an embarrassing example of poor parenting, and "sorrow" is about as strong as it gets (it's also considered a borderline swear word). Unfortunately for the Kindar, this has led to a very broken Utopia, where the people are dying off.
• In Harry Potter, besides the villains' obsession with "blood purity" (which is more an example of Fantastic Racism and Fantastic Caste System), Dolores Umbridge is a sinister Glurge Addict who cruelly enforces the Ministry's will under the guise of keeping Hogwarts and its students safe. For example, in the fifth book, she changes the Defence Against the Dark Arts curriculum to a purely theoretical approach, claiming that a hands-on approach to fighting The Dark Arts is too dangerous for students to learn (really, the Ministry of Magic just considers skilled magical fighters a threat to their authority). Moreover, she seldom drops that disgustingly saccharine demeanour, not even when torturing students — which makes disturbing sense, considering how much she genuinely enjoys inflicting pain. On that note, her sadism enables her to conjure a Patronus (an Animal Battle Aura powered by pure joy) even while wearing a dark Soul Fragment around her neck, in a room full of joy-sucking Eldritch Abominations, during a Kangaroo Court session when she's sending innocent people to Azkaban. She's so twisted that that kind of environment makes her happy.
• In His Dark Materials (specifically the last installment, The Amber Spyglass), a priest is sent after our hapless heroes; this man's special because among his peers he is seen as inexplicably pure — he has spent a long time praying and being absolved so that he could 'make room' for the sin of committing murder.
• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Hunchback and Count Frollo are similar to Light Yagami in that they are so pure (they lived their whole lives in the cathedral) that when sin (in the form of Esmeralda) enters their lives, they have no idea how to deal with it. Frollo becomes obsessed with her yet hates her for giving him impure thoughts.
• In Incarnations of Immortality, God is so pure that he cannot comprehend human evil, and so spends all his time contemplating his own greatness. This turns out to be the whole point of the series. God, contemplating himself, isn't doing his job of promoting goodness (or doing anything else at all, for that matter) and needs to be replaced.
• In The Lord of the Rings, as a being of pure hunger, Shelob cannot be tempted by The One Ring's promises of power. Tom Bombadil is equally incorruptible by the Ring, and although he is benevolent to the hobbits (and to pretty much everyone who isn't working for the Dark Lord), his incorruptibility makes him too fickle to be a reliable caretaker for the One Ring.
• In one of the Magic: The Gathering novels, it's mentioned that pure hearts can become pure evil.
• One of the most common Kurt Vonnegut quotes comes from the protagonist in Mother Night, and it could be this trope's page quote: "Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!"
• In Les Misérables, police inspector Jacques Javert is fanatically devoted to doing things "by the book". His commitment to the rule of law is so pure that it does not leave any room whatsoever for understanding the morally grey areas of live or for the fact that sinners may be reformed. When his lifelong nemesis, the novel's protagonist and convicted criminal Jean Valjean, shows Javert mercy and spares his life although he was at liberty to kill him, Javert's understanding of the world is mercilessly crushed and he sees no other remedy to his despair than drowning himself.
• In Mark Twain's short novel The Mysterious Stranger, angels are pure — meaning that they have no knowledge of good or evil. The angel in the story causes many characters to suffer horribly, explaining that he can "do no evil" because he is innocent. The angel's name is Satan...
• The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray, early in the book, is described as having the "candor (purity) of youth," in this case indicating his Blank Slate nature. It is this nature that allows Lord Henry to corrupt him.
• In Patricia Duffy Novak's short story Robes the apprentice wizard protagonist is determined to specialize in "white" magic, which draws power from the forces of good. Her initiation ritual shows her that if she does so, she'll become the Knight Templar tyrant over a cold and desolate (if sunny) wasteland. She's horrified and goes with the far-less-defined "gray" magic, which she'd previously outright scorned, instead.
• Redwall: Triss has the Pure Ferrets, a Royally Screwed Up family of albino ferrets. They believe that their albinism makes them pure and superior to other creatures, but they are nothing but cruel, cowardly tyrants (though at least the late Sarengo was not a coward.)
• The Scholomance: The worst Evil Sorcerer in the series is an ordinary-looking person who has avoided the usual Red Right Hand effects of Black Magic by completely severing their anima, rendering themself a pure spiritual parasite who can only wield magic by sucking it out of other people — they can't corrupt their spirit when they don't have one at all.
• The School for Good and Evil:
  • In the first book, when the School Master finds out about the Golden Goose giving up its power, the result of an act of evil, he thinks:
    Only one could be so pure.
    The one who would tip the balance.
  • It's said that you have to be 100% pure — Good or Evil — to hear the thoughts of animals.
• Shimoneta takes this in a disturbing direction via deconstruction. Censorship has banned all mention of sex and lewdness from society, and Anna, head of the school's decency squad, has been raised by even stricter standards to be the model of purity. This means when she develops a crush on Okuma, she is unable to separate lust from love and her ignorance leads to her very nearly raping the guy, to his horror. She becomes even more desperate for sex as the show goes on, despite not knowing what sex is nor that she is the kind of pervert she should be against. To say nothing of the Yandere tendencies she develops...
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Henry Jekyll, a man with mostly good and some evil urges, thinks that if he could separate his good and bad urges into separate identities, life would be better because he would be free of morality and can indulge himself in every pleasurable vice without hypocrisy. When he creates the potion that let him do that, his bad side crosses the Moral Event Horizon and Jekyll's life is threatened. "The only thing that made Jekyll safe was his hypocrisy." Mirrored with the "impurity of salt" of the potion components: the impurities had made the potion work. "Without the contamination of the samples, he cannot make the transformation work."
  Jekyll: I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
• The White Queen in The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign, seen as a goddess among goddesses, has a strong association with purity. She's actually an insane Eldritch Abomination who is utterly Yandere for Kyousuke and doesn't care about anything else. In a sense, she could be said to be pure in her love for him... it's just that her idea of love doesn't preclude making him and everyone else suffer for her amusement.
• Uprooted: The most powerful detection magic registers Queen Hanna as being completely free of The Corruption of the Wood, despite being its prisoner for twenty years. It's later revealed that the Wood absorbed her utterly, body and soul, and she registers as pure because there's nothing left of the original human to be "corrupted".
• In Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Solomon's lamp is supposed only be destroyable by the pure in heart. In this case, "Purity of Heart" seemed to mean "not acting out of selfish motives". Or maybe, (as the hero suspects) the Purity judge was on a coffee break.
• Worm: Purity is a neo-nazi supervillain. Additionally, her splinter group, The Pure, have the same issue.

Live-Action TV

• Buffyverse:
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered", Xander attempts a love spell on Cordelia so he can dump her, and is told that the intent has to be pure. He replies that he intends pure revenge. The spell works, although not the way he wants it to.
  • In the second season of Buffy, Spike and Drusilla unleash the Judge, a demon sent to destroy everyone who isn't pure evil. It's a pretty demanding requirement — Spike and Drusilla themselves are vulnerable because of their love for each other, and their minion Dalton dies because of his love for learning. The only one confirmed to be immune is the newly released Angelus.
    The Judge: This one cannot be burned. He is clean.
    Spike: "Clean"? You mean, he's...
    The Judge: There's no humanity in him.
    Angelus: I couldn't have said it better myself.
  • The demonic types that make the most of being pure are the Scourge (who want to exterminate both humanity and impure demons, though their own purity is dubious by other canon) and the Old Ones, the monstrous original demons.
• Edmund's Puritan Auntie Whiteadder from season 2 of Blackadder, believes that everything from mashed turnips to sitting in chairs is the work of Satan, and slaps anyone who dares to use them.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Daleks are, as a species, obsessed with genetic purity — and exterminating everything else. Any member of the species who does or thinks something against this is seen as wrong, impure, and thusly exterminated too.
  • The Seventh Doctor says this about the Rani in "Time and the Rani": "She's a brilliant but sterile mind. There isn't a spark of decency about her."
• The Horseman of Pestilence in Supernatural argues that disease itself is very pure. Pathogens don't have any purpose beyond infiltrating and replicating, and they do it very effectively, unlike those messy, disgusting humans.
• Kamen Rider Outsiders: Zein is a supposedly Benevolent A.I. that seeks to create a world free of human malice. However, its sense of justice borderlines on Black-and-White Insanity making no exceptions on redeemed villains to full-on Beware the Superman as shown when the Kamen Rider named after it beats Tenjuro Banno within an inch of his life before turning him into a human pincushion, making Zein no less malevolent than its Evil Counterpart, Satellite Ark. By episode 4, all of Zein's benevolent pretenses are all but superficial as it plans to use a certain Deadly Game to push humanity down into their own self-destruction.

Music

• "Puritania" by Dimmu Borgir:
  I am pure, I am true
  I am all over you
  I am laugh, I am smile
  I am the Earth defiled
  
  I am the cosmic storms
  I am the tiny worms
  I am fear in the night
  I am bringereth of light
  
  Earth successfully erased
• "Zero" by The Smashing Pumpkins:
  Emptiness is loneliness
  And loneliness is cleanliness
  And cleanliness is godliness
  And God is empty, just like me

Myths & Religion

• The original Unicorn was said to be the purest form of nature, which made it so fierce that nobody could tame it — except an innocent virgin girl, and so it was a classic example of Nature Is Not Nice. Whether it liked virgins, couldn't fight one, or just figured out that a quiet, unarmed girl is much less threatening than a man actively trying to kill it is anyone's guess.
• To religious scholars, the concept of Sacred vs. Profane. The sacred or spiritual world is considered to be a pure world, free of triviality and corruption, and is generally considered superior to the profane or material world. Despite this, the sacred world does include places of evil like Hell as well as being home to evil spirits.

Tabletop Games

• In any given game of Dungeons & Dragons, as the Trope Namer for the Character Alignment, there's Neutral Evil, sometimes known colloquially as "the Asshole Alignment": not caring about law or chaos, not having any real compulsion for or against any one religion, the gods, devils or demons, monsters (and occasional player characters) that fall under this alignment are in it for pure evil. This manifests as a pure devotion either to evil itself, or simply to their own self-interest, seeing the structures of Law and the freedoms of Chaos as simple tools to be used and discarded as convenient to their goals.
  • Lawful and Chaotic Neutral also fall here, albeit in a downplayed manner — at their extremes, they are pure Law or Chaos, and hence Pure but Not Good or Evil.
  • One might even argue that the only truly "pure" alignment would be "True Neutral". A True Neutral character doesn't care about right or wrong, good or evil, chaos or order. They just do what they want, without worrying about how others might see them. They don't strive to be evil, yet they don't actively try to be good either. They don't fight to restore or protect order, yet they aren't actively trying to spread chaos either. They just act and accept the consequences. Stoicism, anyone?
• Exalted: The Primordials are so pure, they are the embodiment of their concept. So Malfeas is pure RRRAAAGGGEEE, She Who Lives In Her Name is pure Order, and the Ebon Dragon is pure Betrayal (let that last one sink in for a bit). This turned out to be their downfall because they absolutely can't understand why anyone would think differently than how they think.
  • While the Primordials may not understand why people think differently, they do comprehend that people do think differently. In the mind of She Who Lives In Her Name, the Primordials' decision to allow free will in the world they created was a bad idea, especially since it got her and hers thrown into Hell. Should she ever be released, she fully intends to put that right.
  • Possibly the most tragic part of the Primordials' example is that they were the purest essence of their concept including the good parts... until the Exalts killed parts of them and forced surrender oaths on the rest that pretty much eliminated the good parts. Malfeas was once the purest expression of rulership, including the guarding steward as well as the tyrannical lord. When the Exalts were done with him he became the deposed tyrant, who rages because he (in his mind) should be king but cannot be. The Ebon Dragon was always a pure asshole, though.
• The Architects of the Flesh from the Feng Shui RPG seem to take this idea to heart in many ways. In their world intra-racial (within one's own race) relationships are socially unacceptable, their primary technology (arcanowave) is demoniacally imbued cybernetics and, when their program to enhance apes with cybernetic implants turned against them, they took up capturing monsters and replacing some of their innate abilities with arcanowave technologies (possibly to hide the fact that most of the human users had turned into monsters as well).
• In Nomine: Uriel was the Archangel of Purity. His commitment to his ideal of a pure, unblemished world was such that he led a crusade of genocide against the world's pagan gods and myths, driving many of them into the arms of Hell. His Choir, the Malakim, often behave similarly — they are the most absolutely pure of the angels of Heaven, but this same purity of purpose often makes them dogmatic, intolerant, and very dangerous for everyone who doesn't meet their lofty standards of morality.
• Mythender: Jörmungandr the world-serpent embodies the cosmic principle of purity. He's so pure that his blood is poison to regular, impure people.
• New World of Darkness: The ephemeral spirits operate this way. Each of them is an embodiment of a thing or concept that humans experience, with a Blue-and-Orange Morality mindset. If left unchecked, even a supposedly benign "joy-spirit" can cause a person to go from focused achiever to immoral hedonist — not for malicious reasons, but because the spirits use humans for sustenance.
• Nobilis: Deceivers whose lifepath includes Water Lily, the Key of Something Spiritual, are pure and innocent Omnicidal Maniacs.
  If you should meet her walking in the world bow before her for she is sacred; bring her oil and fine cloth; bow before her, three times bow; but she is Iolithae Septimian, and you must not let her speak. I do not know how you can prevent it but you must not let her speak.
• Warhammer:
  • The Chaos Gods represent different emotions distilled to their purest form, spelling trouble for everyone. Tzeentch, for example, is meant to represent Hope and Ambition, but this often leads to a sense of It's All About Me in his followers as their ambition becomes all-consuming. Nurgle likewise represents Love, but to the point his followers see no reason to change since they're worthy of love exactly how they are, this leads to Stagnancy.
  • Also, while normal creatures exposed to Chaos become Corrupted, entities native to Chaos do not, largely because of this trope.
• Warhammer 40,000: A supplement for the Inquisitor subgame called Inquisitor: Conspiracies - Death of an Angel mentions a proto-Primarch the Emperor created only known as "The Angel". Apparently this very, very powerful being was both pure in his loyalty to his father and pure in his dedication to exterminating all traces of Chaos— which to him was "all living beings except myself and the Emperor." He had to be put in stasis by the Emperor himself... and then post-Horus Heresy the Inquisition decides to unleash him against a very nasty daemon prince...

Video Games

• Conviction (SRPG): Downplayed. In route A, Emperor Abyss tries to grant the Dark Elf's power to Grace, but the latter has no desire for personal power, so he unwittingly rejects the Dark Elf and doesn't even know the entity tried to possess him. Even Leed, the chosen of the Light Elf, struggled to resist the Dark Elf's influence. Unfortunately, Grace is still an antagonist because he's blindly loyal to the emperor. However, if Grace is killed, he'll admit that he did harbor jealousy towards Yuri, but not enough to be corrupted by the Dark Elf.
• Corruption of Laetitia: Celeste starts out as a pure-hearted half-angel who fights for the Elysian Order, allowing her to wield the holy spear Gungnir. However, she's an Unwitting Pawn to the corrupt Cardian Alfredus Marian and doesn't realize that her power and purity are being used for his anti-demon and environmentally destructive agenda. Later, she loses her purity due to the shock of being betrayed and because she accepted Malayna's deal to convert her into a demon in order to survive. If the player sticks to morally just actions, Celeste will regain her purity while having a better perspective of the conflict between the Elysian Order and the demons.
• Maiden Astraea from Demon's Souls, The church dislikes her and says her kindness was so pure that it led her to evil, consuming the soul of a demon in her arrogant desire to save more people than humanly possible. But this is not the case: she took a demon's soul and lives in the swamp, where she cares for the undead aborted fetuses abandoned there, and tries to live in peace. She only attacks in self-defense, and she's also the least hypocritical boss in the game. Unfortunately, her Incorruptible Pure Pureness has deluded her followers into believing they are worshipping a goddess, and now they maul any adventurers who travel to her domain in order to feed her soul sacrifices, while her purity prevents her from taking action against her charges.
• Disgaea:
  • Played for laughs in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, shortly after Jennifer meets "Prince" Laharl for the first time:
    Jennifer: I believe you because your eyes are pure. I don't know if it's pure good or pure evil, though. [chuckles]
  • Inverted in Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, in which inherently violent demons corrupting themselves with virtue results in a Yin-Yang Bomb of heroes of justice.
• Done to interesting effect in Doki Doki Literature Club!. After Sayori's suicide and the corruption of the game that comes afterwards, the game slowly devolves into madness with your surviving love interests becoming more unstable, their sprites glitching, their text suddenly changing fonts, and their personalities warping to become unappealing and even disgusting and terrifying. The only one who seems unaffected is Monika, who at worst will appear in front of the interface on occasion or experience a minor sprite glitch for a second. Basically, as everything slowly goes insane, Monika begins looking more and more like a pure, untouched beacon of sanity. Naturally, this is because she's the one who's corrupting the game in the first place because she has Medium Awareness, and her frustration with being the only Not Love Interest in the game turns her into a jealous Yandere and drives her to start crudely re-writing the game so that she can create a route for herself and drive the player away from the other love interests, even if she has to kill or delete them.
• In Fable II, there is both a Karma Meter for Good/Evil and Purity/Corruption. It is theoretically possible to be both Evil and Pure. Evil and Pure characters will resemble vampires with pale skin and red eyes. Their character type is the Fanatic. Specifically, townspeople will be afraid but attracted to you if you are evil/pure, and do fun things such as spout off a line about how 'you should just die', then immediately follow it up by asking you to marry them. In contrast, a good/corrupt character is liked by everyone, but has a harder time causing townsfolk to fall in love with them or take them seriously. The meter for Purity/Corruption thereof could be seen as a sliding scale of Lawful/Chaotic at the same time meaning an Evil/Pure alignment would be Lawful Evil
• Fate Series:
  • In Fate/stay night, Gilgamesh reveals that the Grail spilled on him in the last grail war. The Grail contains the incarnation of all human evils in the world, and its contents tend to hideously corrupt and/or dissolve whatever it touches — But it failed to affect him at all because he was so pure. Because he's simply that purely self-centred.
    Gilgamesh: "All the evils in the world"? Bring three times as much if you want to stain me!
  • When the scene is revealed in its entirety in Fate/Zero it turns out Gilgamesh's ego is so great and his existence so absolute, the Made of Evil entity that exists inside the Grail can't shake his resolve. Gilgamesh is basically able to tell it off by taking responsibility for all of humanity's sins, an act he is able to do because of his titanic ego.
  • Fate/Grand Order: Sir Galahad cannot be summoned as a Servant nor can he be convinced to help under normal circumstances if he is contacted because he is so pure he has no desires. Well, maybe one: he hates his father, Lancelot, for being a deadbeat dad and wants to beat him black and blue if they ever meet again. Having accomplished everything when he was alive, he thinks nobody else needs his help. He made an exception by granting Mash Kyrielight his powers to save her life, but after the threat of Goetia is defeated, he washes his hands of the heroes and revokes the powers he gave to Mash just as they have to face new threats. It is telling that in Fate/Requiem, an Alter version of Galahad who has vices is summoned and proves much more useful.
  • The faeries in the series are said to be "innocent and pure" in the same way children can be. However, the way this manifests is a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality — anything that makes their lives better is good, and anything that makes their lives worse or threatens their existence is bad and needs to go away as quickly and violently as possible. They act on their desires more than anything, and will think nothing of stabbing the people they had been friendly with moments ago in the back if it helps them move further to their goals. This comes to a head in the sixth Lostbelt, set in a version of Britain where faeries, rather than humans, are the dominant species. Their pure nature ends up not only affecting their history and how the current queen rules over them, but is also responsible both for their own extinction in the original, unaltered timeline of the Lostbelt (before Morgan from Proper Human History intervened), and is responsible for the very Point of Divergence that caused it in the first place.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Celes Chere of Final Fantasy VI, who, in the first translation, is described as having "a spirit as pure as snow." While she does make a Heel–Face Turn, she is a former general who is infamous for torching a city.
  • Weiss of Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus was created from a pure lifestream, with no traces of the tainted lifestream.
• Flower Knight Girl: Lily Of The Valley has her language of flowers as "Pure", which she cites as the reason her love for the Commander is straightforward and clear. And if by that she means "obsessed to the point of willing to murder anyone in her way", then she's definitely hit the mark.
• Vanitas from Kingdom Hearts is Ventus's darkness given form. The former is, of course, pure evil...but the latter's pure light makes him frail and easy to manipulate.
• The Big Bad of Luminous Arc 2, Elicia, is actually a Messianic Archetype who saved many children's lives, but the grief that she cannot save everyone causes her to go to the dark side and tap into forbidden magic.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite: Jedah Dohma is a ruthless demon who unhesitatingly sacrifices millions of human souls to stop the threat of Ultron-Sigma by any means necessary, but his soul is apparently noble enough that he can use the Soul Stone.
• In Octopath Traveler II, Trousseau was originally the kindest and most dedicated member of Eir's Apothecaries. However, his sensitivity also made him extremely easy to manipulate; he goes into a downward spiral after failing to cure his sister's disease, which then makes him an easy target for Claude and the Book of Night. Trousseau then becomes convinced that the best way to "save" everyone is by essentially committing a mass Mercy Kill. Malaya lampshades this in a flashback, saying that Trousseau's innocence made him easy to corrupt.
• OFF: The Batter, the protagonist, is on his quest to purify the world from creatures called Spectres, which are terrorizing everything inside. What's actually happening in the game becomes unnerving when you revisit the Zones after you beat it. All trace of life is absent in the "purified" Zone, not just the Spectres but everyone who lived there. This is the first clue that what the Batter is doing might not be not for the best. The last chapter reveals that the Batter is an Omnicidal Maniac who wants to destroy the world if that's the way to purify it. When he's about to purify one last place to end the world, you're given a Last-Second Ending Choice to side with or against him, although the results aren't too different because at this point only a few places are left untouched, with the rest having turned to uninhabitable, lifeless lands.
• After the player learns N's backstory from one of the "goddesses" at the end of Pokémon Black and White, she even lampshades this. N's innocence, purity, and goodwill are what make him dangerous in the wrong hands since he doesn't think to question his own cause.
• RealityMinds: Pure positive or negative essence isn't good, since positive essences increase people's motivation to act and negative essences increase their doubts. There are times when having too much motivation is bad, such as when Kvena uses positive essences to exploit Silvana's desire to kill herself. Likewise, having too much doubt prevents one from taking initiative in their life. Ridgefern originally created positive essences to motivate the lethargic people of his era, but when their motivation ran out of control and caused them to hurt each other, he had to create negative essences to balance it out.
• The "Death of Chivalry" quest in RuneScape revolves around the Wand of Resurrection, an artifact which in the hands of a purely good person can raise the dead, but produces uncontrollable zombies in the hands of the impure. When the Wand is stolen by a villain, they reveal that their evil is so pure they can control the zombies they raise with the Wand.
  • To even get to the Wand, a barrier must be broken by the blood of one who is pure of heart. Both the player character and Sir Owen can break the barrier. Sir Owen is a paranoid, brutally pragmatic Knight Templar with a kill count to match, and the player character could have any number of crimes under their belt for all the plot cares.
• Ishida Mitsunari from Sengoku Basara 3 is described as 'disconcertingly pure' during his brief cameo in the game's anime. This is also implied in Ieyasu's blue path. His personality in-game can charitably be described as 'focused' and 'uncompromising'.
• In Sengoku Rance, Natori eventually reveals to Rance that the reason he kept losing the Miko lottery (you get to have sex with a miko, nearly everyone wins) is because he has no negative emotions for them to absorb. No dishonesty, jealousy, or hate. Yep, Rance is very open about his desire to have sex with absolutely anything female and cute whether they like it or not.
• Skullgirls:
  • There's a tentative example in Cerebella's story mode. It's noted that despite working for the Medici Mafia, Cerebella has a pure and innocent heart, which would potentially allow her to wish on the Skull Heart without ending up becoming the next Skullgirl. That doesn't stop her from killing Ms. Fortune by crushing her to death. Sadly, Cerebella seems to realize her folly only after she presented her mobster father figure Vitale Medici with the Life Gem she retrieved from a mangled catgirl's corpse.
  • Played very straight in Black Dahlia's story mode, however. When she makes her wish on the Skull Heart, it deems her heart pure enough to do so without becoming the next Skullgirl and so vanishes forever upon granting her desire. The problem is that Black Dahlia is an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight, and her "wish" involves ultimately being whisked to a Death World where she can fight, maim, and kill with her life on the line for the rest of her existence. This is because the Skull Heart runs on a Blue-and-Orange Morality interpretation of "purity", viewing any benevolent wish as inherently ruining the outcome since such unnatural intervention can't be truly "good", and wishing for your own personal gain is already "impure". Dahlia's single-minded lust for violence and bloodshed, and her desire to be put on a world that knows only bloodshed with no inherent advantage for herself to survive, thus doesn't count for personal gain or benevolent assistance to anyone. For its part, the Skull Heart sounds overjoyed to grant her wish.
• The Xel'naga of StarCraft proved this to be true in both of the races they personally nurtured. The Protoss were molded in pursuit of "Purity of Form" and the Zerg in an attempt to maintain a "Purity of Essence". Both ultimately turned on their creators. Turns out this was by design since both races were artificially uplifted by a rogue faction of Xel'naga who wanted to end the cycle forever. Amon and his fellow rogues are themselves examples, being the result of the previous joining of races with the purity of form and essence.
• In Star Fox Adventures, an Earthwalker tells Krystal that only the pure of heart can take the tests. Later, a Krazoa tells Fox that only the pure of heart can enter the shrines. So we take and pass the tests, and go to the last shrine, and...cue Scales.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Zestiria really runs circles around this trope. In this world, malevolence acts like a physical disease. People who carry malevolence in their hearts eventually become hellions and have to be purified by the Shepherd (the other option is to kill them). Seraphim have it far worse. Even Sorey and his party are susceptible if they feel burdened or build up frustrations or regrets about the choices they make. However, just like the Japanese definition of purity, what prevents Sorey and his party from corrupting is the zeal he has that carries him forward towards his goals and purposes, even though Rose is an assassin for hire and Sorey and Mikleo were forced to kill Zenrus. Likewise for the villainous side, Symmone is a seraph and yet hasn't turned into a dragon from malevolence, simply because she agreed with Heldalf's beliefs and followed them with the same kind of zeal.
  • Tales of Berseria, the prequel to Zestiria, has Melchior Mayvin, who is similarly immune to malevolence because of his zeal in creating an orderly, sinless, and emotionless world based solely on reason. This allows him to take on the dirtiest tasks of the Abbey without any risk of becoming a daemon. Berseria also shows what it would take to solve the problem of Malevolence, and the results are not pretty.
  • Along with Melchior, Berseria also has three other plot-crucial examples of "purity": Oscar and Theresa, who are pure in their blind devotion to each other, and Shigure, who's just so at ease with his Blood Knight lifestyle he carries no negative emotion.
• Terraria: According to the official lore, the Hallow (a bright and vivid biome of light with fairies and unicorns) represents purity taken to its utmost extreme. In addition to infesting natural blocks and attacking intruders with extreme prejudice, the end goal of the Hallow is to purge anything impure, and its sparkly, shiny minions will murder you and your NPCs for getting in the way of its Corruption/Crimson purge, treating them as part of the infestation.
• Touhou Project:
  • In the Silent Sinner in Blue manga and its associated material, it's revealed that Impurity is the cause of death and death is the source of Impurity. It's also revealed that the reason behind the Lunarians' vast lifespans is that they, and the Moon, are Pure due to never having been touched by death... But for all their Purity the Lunarians are also generally elitist jerks and simply being mortal is a crime punishable by exile in their society. Or in other words:
    Watatsuki no Toyohime: Simply living and dying here on Earth is sin enough. Your punishment will be decided after we bring you to the Moon... and the punishment for the creatures here on Earth... is to spend their entire lives creeping about the Earth, and finally die.
  • In the side material for Subterranean Animism, the description for Parsee's "Grandfather Cherry Blossom" spell cards mentions that neither Reimu nor Marisa is pure-hearted enough to make the ashes turn into flowers. The implication is that Parsee's own pure envy did so, unlike the fairy tale the attack is based on.
  • Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom gives us another example in the final boss, Junko, a being with the ability to purify others. She used her powers on herself to turn into a being of pure resentment and grudge, and now devotes the entirety of her existence to getting revenge on her mortal enemy Chang'e, who was responsible for getting her son killed. She also tries to attack the Lunar Capital by purifying an army of fairies into creatures of pure lifeforce which in return would cause the Moon to turn impure.
• Roa of Tsukihime was an incredibly pure person in life. Also a good person, from what we hear during Ciel's route. Unfortunately, this gave him absolutely no understanding of his emotions so, lacking understanding of his love towards Arcueid, he turned into a Big Bad whose purpose was to continually torment her because he didn't know how else to express said feelings.
• In What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?, Pure is good, but it's no good for you. Monsters that are under a lot of stress may tend to give birth to "Pure" versions of monsters that are weaker and do not reproduce and are so nice that they're terrible at fighting the heroes. The third game also introduces holy water, which can purify your monsters into the lame versions.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater implies this is the case with Black Mage in the Castle of Ordeals arc. The only metaphysical depiction of Black Mage's character flaws that the castle can conjure for him is himself. Then Black Mage starts talking and actually makes it worse.
• In The Adventures of Wiglaf and Mordred, there is a sword that gives third-degree burns to anyone not pure of heart. The Canon Sue and the Big Bad are the only people who can use it.
• In Ansem Retort, Axel manages to achieve "Reverse Nirvana" because his heart is pure chaotic evil. It's mentioned that the only other person to achieve Reverse Nirvana is Black Mage.
• Though they're more Well Intentioned Extremists than anything, anytime the Kyorl'solenurn in Drowtales invoke the word "purity" it's generally a good idea to run since they're probably about to perform a "purge". Not helping matters is that they don't limit their purges to demon-possessed or demon-infested lands, and may perform ethnic cleansing to sustain their dogmatic indoctrination of the clan. Their hatred of demon summoning is to the point they'll kill anyone even associated with the practice. And yet, due to their constant encounters with demonic hordes and a need for sealers, almost all elite Kyorls are required to learn demon summoning and practice it on a regular basis to learn how to undo their enemies' gates and summons. Their Holy Crusades hat makes them the most experienced demon-summoning clan in the Drowtales universe, even more than the Vloz'ress.
• Goblins: Kore is probably the most determined Evil Paladin in the world — mostly because he's the only Evil-Aligned Holy Paladin, something that would normally be metaphysically impossible for even the most bloodthirsty, hypocritical Knight Templar.^note A demon overlord found a way to turn him into what he is. The purity of his insanity is quite apparent; he will ignore power, loot, and glory for the sake of murdering anyone related to the guilty, regardless of official alignment, and then send them to his own personal Hell. In irony, his body has been turned into an impure abomination; anyone he murders is sent to a metaphysical Hell linked to his body, which has turned him into a living mass of screaming, sentient organs. None of this self-inflicted and self-propagated torture has instilled in him any slightest doubt concerning his belief in the goodness of his cause — even as he uses the souls he has devoured to switch his character sheet alignment at will.
• I'm the Grim Reaper:
  • Each of the Reapers, arch-demons of Satan meant to murder people to stave off their own sentences, represents purity taken to a sinful extreme. Scarlet represents the purity of Loyalty, as she is willing to screw anyone over to save the one person she's dedicated to; first it was her mother, where she murdered millions (including herself) with a virus just to get the funds she'd need to save her mother from an illness, then she risked humanity's total extinction to save Chase. Brook represents the purity of Obedience; while he technically doesn't have a sinner's mark, he sent himself to hell just so he'd have something to do after his sister murdered him for being loved by their father (for, again, blindly following orders better than her). Then Satan updated Brook's Rap sheet with the many crimes he committed under Satan's orders and he doesn't object. Ashe represents the purity of Acceptance; he wants all of mankind to die because they've already doomed themselves, but he's also inconsistent about his motives and hasn't truly thought about the reason why everyone he has to brutally murder is still clinging to life.
  • Their counterparts, the Archangels, are also flawed by their purity to dedication. Celeste is purely dedicated to God and God's Plan, which means she never questions or tests the system she administrates until it's too late to fix it. Bernadette is dedicated to Guarding Virtue by protecting Heaven, so she ignores the damage she does whenever she visits Earth and causes multiple damnations of people who were on the fence. And Azrael is dedicated to honor; he doesn't care about whether people live or die as long as they die with honor and grace, even though it meant betraying the very people who trusted him with everything. Together, they accidentally cause mass death and destruction for the mortal world from ignorance and negligence unfitting of paragons of wisdom and dedication.
• Pibgorn: "A discharge of focused evil... so young, and yet... so pure."
• Sluggy Freelance plays around with this in the "That Which Redeems" arcs. The inhabitants of the Dimension of Lame are all incredibly innocent and pure, to the point of being annoying, but as a whole, most of them aren't exactly good. They're perfectly willing to let demons from the Dimension of Pain enslave them, they try to hand Torg over to them multiple times on the flimsiest promises of lesser suffering from the demons, and their Riff ends up being the sole demon in the world after victory — fitting, due to his causing all of the problems by kidnapping Torgs from various dimensions after accidentally blowing up his own.
• To Prevent World Peace as a whole is a "light" Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction. In this setting, magical girls can only receive their powers if they have a "purity of being" (they completely believe in and represent an ideal), thereby gaining magical power that is used to hunt down the magical predators that plague society. Unfortunately, the forces of good are not one big happy family; politicians, businessmen, and even some muggles manipulate their children into doing dangerous/socially unacceptable things for profit, and there is little to no oversight over the magical girls due to their apparent Omniscient Morality License, which can backfire greatly if the magical girl in question does not realize the consequences of her 'pure' actions or the morality of her supervisors. This is especially dangerous when it comes to killing 'evil' mages, due to Fantastic Racism and the magical mafia. The plot happens because most of the magical girls in the world think that the world is screwed up and they received their powers by being pure of heart, and by that logic (remember, they're still children) they are the most fit to protect/rule the world — even if it means accidentally destroying it.

Web Originals

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged has the "Vegeta going Super Saiyan" example above, except instead of pure evil, he claims it's because he's "pure unadulterated badass."
  Tien: More like pure unadulterated ego.
  Vegeta: I heard that, triclops!
• In Sailor Nothing, the Yamiko created from a person has a power and evil level proportional to their host's purity. Or rather, how much they've repressed their impurity; nobody in this 'verse is pure in standard sense. Because good people are better at resisting bad urges, there's more repressed bad urges to make into a yamiko. A bad person doesn't hold much back, leaving little to make a yamiko with.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Princess Bubblegum is sweet, kind, friendly, and has a strong sense of justice. Precisely, that is the reason why her methods of justice are morally questionable or dictatorial.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: Darwin's innocent nature usually makes him fairly kind, but if exposed to certain events that Gumball is up to, Darwin can cause more chaos than Gumball. Even in the first season, it's implied that he has a lot of pent-up rage that he's too innocent to express properly: Darwin's attempt to yell out his stress in "The Painting" produces a nuclear explosion, during which he continues smiling. Then there's "The Safety", in which Darwin, out of an honest desire to keep his family safe, turns Elmore into a surveillance police state.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: To bend lightning, one must have no internal conflicts whether emotional or idealistic. Purity of focus is required. You can do that by being calm, cool, and collected like the well-adjusted Iroh, being an emotionally repressed psychopath like Azula, or being ruthless and supremely arrogant like Ozai. Anti-Hero Zuko, however, can't manage it because he's too conflicted and generally emotional.
• An ongoing theme in Blue Eye Samurai, whose title character is subject to Half-Breed Discrimination so that even she believes that I Am a Monster. Mizu's Parental Substitute Swordfather, a blacksmith, tries to get her to understand the drawbacks of their metal being too pure. Metal that is too pure becomes brittle and easily broken, so they need to use multiple different purities to get an effective sword. He is blatantly trying to get Mizu to understand how this applies to her and her revenge as well, but she never seems to have gotten the message during her childhood. After her sword is broken in battle and she returns to him to recuperate and reforge it, she finally seems to understand what he is saying about how dedicating herself solely to her revenge is not a good way to live her life.
• Played with in the Gravity Falls episode "The Last Mabelcorn": Mabel Pines is told by a unicorn that if she wants her badly needed hair, she must be pure of heart. Mabel is already a good person, so being told repeatedly she is not completely good even after doing lots of good deeds sets her over the edge. Wendy eventually decides to take the hair by force. As it turns out, the "pure of heart" things was a scam by the unicorn. Mabel, incensed, attacks the unicorn by force, and learns that the greater good is more important than being perfect.
• In The Legend of Korra, we learn that Flight is a technique that can be learned by airbenders, at the expense of any worldly attachments. The only person we see achieve this triggers it after the death of his girlfriend, leaving him a callous, apathetic void, though still well-intentioned.
• ReBoot: The virus Daemon is a Jeanne d'Archétype, pure in her pursuit of uniting everyone across the net in perfect harmony through brainwashing and total deletion.^note This is mildly subverted because she does exhibit exclusionist Fantastic Racism towards the former Virus, now sprite, Hexadecimal. That being said, after Hexadecimal goes to the core of Mainframe and becomes her viral self once more, Daemon immediately forgives her and extends an offer of friendship to Hex.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Dormammu and his minion Mordo discuss the workings of the Symbiote. Dormammu notes that it can be bonded with any human host, who will then develop minor superpowers, but to obtain a powerful hybrid, one of powerful, single-minded, and even fanatical devotion is needed. This was how Eddie Brock could become Venom: his all-consuming pure hatred of Peter Parker allowed him to make full use of its potential.
• Deconstructed in Young Justice (2010): Harm became pure evil by murdering his own sister, the only person he ever loved, so he could wield the Sword of Beowulf, which only the pure of heart can draw. The Sword rejects him when he feels a shred of remorse after seeing his sister's ghost, becoming impure. The point is, of course, that while Pure Is Not Good, pure is also not easy.

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