Protagonist-Centered Morality as seen in Anime and Manga series.
- Code Geass: This trope was explicitly discussed and exploited in-universe by a minor character: Luciano Bradley, the Knight of Ten. Before his climactic fight with Kallen Kozuki, he mentions that acts which might normally brand one as a mass murderer will instead be treated as those of a hero if they are done for the sake of one's country. When Kallen presses that Luciano wants to be a "hero", Luciano flat out says that he doesn't give a damn about being seen as heroic; he simply enjoys killing people, and the good reputation he receives for taking lives in war is just a bonus.
- Nobody ever considers the Dirty Pair to be evil in their own reality (and their constant claim that "It's not our fault!" is readily believed) despite the fact that they've committed planet-wide genocide multiple times. (A combination of this Trope and Crosses the Line Twice is needed here.)
- Dr. STONE: During the tournament to determine the Ishigami Village's next chief, Magma's henchman Mantle attempts to throw rocks at Kinro from the sidelines during his fight with Magma. Chrome calls him out on attempting to cheat, and clearly the audience is supposed to view him as being a dirty cheat since he's an unpleasant Card-Carrying Villain who kidnapped Suika to get her out of the way. However, Senku and friends cheat their asses off to beat Magma: Kinro uses Suika's mask to fix his vision problems and get the advantage, and later on, Chrome uses the lenses on the very same mask to light Magma's clothing on fire while Gen uses a mind trick to keep Magma in place long enough for Chrome to do it. Even though none of the things that the protagonists do are illegal thanks to the village's very narrow rule on what constitutes interference, they're very clearly fighting dirty. Similarly, Magma's Wounded Gazelle Gambit that he uses to beat Kinro is viewed as stooping to lows and clearly dirty—even though he was only put in the position to do that thanks to Senku and company playing dirty in the first place.
- Dragon Ball:
- In Dragon Ball Super, Vegeta is able to ultimately defeat Toppo (who had gone undergone a transformation to fully exploit his power as a God of Destruction), who decided to focus on the survival of his home universe rather than sticking to the ideals of justice that led him to hold back through the tournament. Jiren praises Vegeta for holding true to his pride and becoming victorious, while his ally Toppo earns his contempt by abandoning his ideals and still losing. This is meant to show Vegeta in a good light for sticking to his principles, but not only did Jiren do nothing to help his ally and increase the survival chances of his universe, Toppo would have lost without tapping into his full powers, and he's not a protagonist with the ability to increase his power on a whim; his already-gained power is all that he has available.
- The protagonists revive a planet-conquering, mass-murdering tyrant for a tournament Goku put numerous universes on the line for. They keep their word and let Frieza live afterwords...with no attempts to stop him. This is perfectly okay though, because he's not going after their planet.
- Defied in Fairy Tail. Jellal, while Brainwashed and Crazy, utterly destroys the lives of hundreds of people, but, as soon as he comes out of it he makes an effort to atone by helping the heroes with their current enemies. When the dust settles, the authorities arrive to arrest him alongside the villains he helped defeat for his previous crimes. Natsu, Lucy, and the others fight against the law enforcement agents, seeing Jellal as redeemed because he helped them, but for his part Jellal accepts being imprisoned as a fair punishment for his crimes. The conflict is resolved when Erza, though it pains her dearly, calls her friends off and lets Jellal be taken away.
- Hypnosis Mic has an early scene where Ichiro lectures the Villain of the Week (a robber who has taken hostages) about the error of his ways, finishing up by telling him that Mics aren't made for hurting people. This is immediately followed by Ichiro and his brothers using their Mics to hurt the robber so badly that the police have to take his unconscious body out on a stretcher.
- Inuyasha:
- The entire narrative seems to very solidly take Kagome's side in the entire love triangle with herself, Inuyasha, and Kikyo, even in ways that don't really make any sense. One recurring theme is that other characters will reprimand Inuyasha for "cheating" on Kagome and hurting her feelings for speaking to or about Kikyo or what happened between them, despite the fact that the Big Bad turning them against each other and having Inuyasha sealed to a tree for 50 years would logically be the kind of thing you would understand trying to sort out to some extent. This attitude toward Inuyasha and Kikyo's relationship is present long before he and Kagome officially get together at the very end of the story and even before their relationship is anything remotely serious, so logically, talking to Kikyo wouldn't be cheating on Kagome anymore than talking to Kagome would be cheating on Kikyo.
- To say nothing of the fact that Kagome frequently beats Inuyasha via the rosary around his neck whenever he annoys her in the slightest. While played for comedy, he is shown to both actively fear being "sat" and screams in pain whenever it happens. No one ever says a word in his defense over a protective measure being so abused like it is. As a matter of fact, his so called "friends" often chide him, either openly or to themselves, about how stupid he is for causing the beating in the first place. Forget being a beaten spouse, Inuyasha is more like an enslaved dog who is forced to act as muscle for a group that only values him when he acts in the manner in which they approve. A particularly horrifying example happens early on. To wit, Inuyasha was badly wounded in a battle with a Nigh-Immortal Yura of the hair. As he recuperates up in a tree all by himself, Kagome appears with a first aid kit. Now, despite knowing next to nothing about medical care at this point, Kagome demands that he come down so that she can care for him. When Inuyasha chooses to grumpily demand to be left alone, Kagome sits him. This yanks him out of the tree, and sends him plummeting ten, fifteen feet, before smashing him face first into the ground hard enough to leave an imprint. Think on this. Kagome slams a person who she believes to be seriously wounded into the earth with the force of a giant. Then she has the utter gall to LECTURE Inuyasha about how stupid and stubborn he is. To make matters worse, she is never, EVER called out on this.
- The story seems to decide the morality of eating other people's souls to keep one's self alive based on whether the one doing the soul-eating knows the main characters. In Kikyo's second appearance, Inuyasha and Co. are trying to figure out who or what is stealing the souls of dying women and stop them. Once they find out it's Kikyo stealing the souls to keep herself alive though, the group and the story immediately stop caring and shift to focusing on the drama of the love triangle. Kikyo spends the rest of the series stealing and eating souls regularly and it doesn't raise a peep from anyone after this point. To further compound this, a filler episode had a young man and woman raised from the dead in a similar manner. The man was evil and killed but the woman had met Kagome who insisted she "give living a try" despite knowing the undead woman would have to eat souls in order to survive.
- At the start of the second half of Magic Knight Rayearth, Umi comments on how the events of the end of the first half have left her unable to enjoy playing RPGs anymore. To paraphrase, "I'm the hero, but the antagonist sees me as the bad guy."
- In the New Year's special episode of Lord El-Melloi II Case Files, Camus, the mastermind behind trapping Waver and his former classmates in a Lotus-Eater Machine, is let Off on a Technicality from punishment because she didn't actually cast the spell that did it; her accomplice who actually cast the spell takes all the punishment even though he was just an Unwitting Pawn in her and Touko Aozaki's scheme. While she didn't intend to harm any of them, Camus is still guilty of multiple counts of kidnapping at the very least. The only thing separating those two is how they behaved toward Waver in the past—he was implied to be The Bully, so it's treated as karmic justice when he's punished for Camus's actions, but since she was one of the only students who was kind to Waver, she gets away with her scheme.
- Justified in One Piece. The protagonists are pirates, so they don't care if someone does bad things unless It's Personal, the villain’s plans conflict with their own, or they just don’t like them. If someone makes their friend cry, he's a bad guy (Arlong, Crocodile etc.) but if a bad guy helps them (Buggy) they are grateful and no one mentions their evil deeds. On the other hand, they do understand that the marines are the good guys as often as the other way around, but they get hostile treatment because of their opposing standpoints. Essentially, Luffy and the Strawhats do not consider themselves heroes, they don't do things for the greater good. Luffy only cares about his friends, it just so happens that most of the time when he's helping a friend or one of his crew members, he's doing the greater good. And Luffy makes friends quite easily, so odds are very good that any villain he encounters will be a threat to one of Luffy's friends.
- Humorously lampshaded when Luffy tells a civilian friend of theirs that he can't trust Aokiji because Aokiji is a Marine. After getting a confused look in response he remembers that Marines are the good guys (in theory, at least).
- Surprisingly subverted with Crocodile. Luffy flat-out initially rejects breaking Crocodile out of prison, showing even he has his limits. He only does so because one of Luffy's new friends points out that they need his strength (and is able to blackmail Crocodile into compliance with a secret not yet known.)
- One-Punch Man: Deconstructed as this is practically a plot point of being one of Garou's motivations of becoming an all-powerful monster, since he perceives the so-called "justice" that heroes are known to dispense against evil are no more than them committing the same evil actions, but is instead praised and glorified by others In-Universe since they're popular and therefore in the right. In his own words:The popular will win, the hated will lose, it's such a tragedy. Then I won't lose to anyone. I will become the strongest monster ever and change this scenario.
- Early on in Pokémon: The Series Ash calls out Team Rocket for using a sludge attack that blinds Pikachu as fighting dirty. In only a few more episodes he'd fight a Cubone and find that electricity is ineffective, then tells Pikachu to bite, claw, and blind the Cubone to win and it's treated as thinking on his feet.
- In Reign: The Conqueror, everything that Alexander and his allies do, no matter how cruel or unethical, is excused on the basis that Alexander is a "god" who will usher in a new era.
- In Wave, Listen to Me!, main character Minare spends the first few chapters wanting to kill her ex-boyfriend Mitsuo for allegedly running off with her money, but when they meet again she's shocked to see that he's apparently turned over a new leaf after being nearly killed by a crazy stalker, and attempts to pay her back. She doesn't know how to reconcile her anger with him and his apparent change of heart—until she finds a cookbook and the remains of his favorite food in the garbage can, which is all the evidence she needs to conclude that the stalker was another girlfriend he stole from and whose money he was trying to give to her, declare him irredeemable and beat the crap out of him. Even though much later, after having time to cool down, she comes to the entirely sensible conclusion that he was learning how to cook, got frustrated when it wasn't going well, and threw the cookbook out, the reader is still supposed to view her beatdown as something that Mitsuo had coming for what he did to Minare...which the reader only knows about from her account of things, and Minare isn't exactly an objective beacon of truth herself.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Antagonists who use manipulative mind-games are called dishonorable, ones who keep secrets are called liars, ones that go on the defensive are called cowards exposing their own weakness, and ones that use cheap tactics are called cheaters. When main characters do these things, they're simply said to be using intelligent strategy. This is actually noted and defied in the duel between Jonouchi and Rishid with the former calling Rishid's Trap Master strategy cowardly, only for Rishid to call Jonouchi out on insulting him for being unable to counter his strategy since he still plays according to the rules something that Jonouchi acknowledges when Rishid's is inches away from victory. For bonus points, Rishid is even one of the few opponents, Jonouchi faced in Battle City that didn't cheat at allnote .
- A particular example of this is characters "disrespecting their cards/deck." The definition of what this means can vary, but one of the most common manifestations is the character tributing or discarding cards en masse and expressing a We Have Reserves attitude. Examples include Ryo getting rid of most of his deck to block one attack in GX, or Rebecca destroying her own hand to power up Shadow Ghoul in a filler episode of Duel Monsters. The thing is, sacrificing cards to enable strategies or protect yourself is a hugely important part of the game, and the good guys can be seen doing it in almost every duel. This is especially prevalent after Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, where blowing through four of your own monsters to play one card becomes not a moment of callousness, but a clever execution of complex strategy. Really, the only difference seems to be that the "disrespect the deck" strategies tend to be fairly bad, with the sacrifices seemingly being rarely worth the resources spent. The ultimate problem is that "disrespect the deck" strategies are reckless, and as pointed out disrespectful; later strategies that involve sacrifice emphasize each card playing a role rather than only being good to support a singular card.
- In GX, after Ryo reinvented himself as "Hell Kaiser", he switched to using a Cyberdark deck, and in the process of said reinvention, began using just about every classic "heel" strategy in the franchise. His Cyberdarks are basically depicted as creepy Mechanical Abomination parasites that latch onto Dragons (a stereotypical "noble and dignified" type) and use them as batteries, and many of his strategies are classically "disrespectful", such as blowing through most of his own deck with Power Wall or shoving a Cyberdark onto his once-beloved Cyber End Dragon. All well and good so far, and it's ultimately revealed that his "disrespect" for the deck was so severe that the cards actively fought back against him and harmed his body. Then his brother Sho takes the deck and declares he's going to more or less redeem the deck by playing with it respectfully, playing a duel with it where he beats an opponent Ryo couldn't. The thing is, for the purposes of showing he would have won where his brother couldn't, he spends the first few turns of said duel playing identically to his brother, using every single card and strategy that was called out as bad when his brother used them, which is never remarked upon.
