http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodColorsEvilColors

Guess who's the bad guy.

Brainstorm: Color-coded lasers. Red if you're an Autobot, purple if you're a Decepticon. And the best bit is this: the color would change depending on who's firing the gun.

Nautica: So the gun would-

Brainstorm: Know if you were bad or good! Yes! What do you think? Good idea? AMAZING idea? Be honest. Transformers: More than Meets the Eye : Color-coded lasers. Red if you're an Autobot, purple if you're a Decepticon. And the best bit is this: the color would change depending on who's firing the gun.: So the gun would-: Know if you were bad or good! Yes! What do you think? Good idea? AMAZING idea? Be honest.

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In an age where every other hero is an Anti-Hero, how do you tell who to root for? Why, you look at what color the character wears, of course! In visual entertainment, who's good and who's evil is usually distinguished by the colors, and woe be to those who are colorblind.

In this trope, different factions will have competing color schemes that makes it instantly clear who the good guys and bad guys are. This can be in the form of clothing, hair or eyes, auras, Energy Weapons, magic powers or a general Color Motif for factions. This has some basis in real life, as during the musket era (i.e. the American Revolution) armies wore contrasting colors to avoid friendly fire. Nevertheless, No Real Life Examples, Please!

Tropes like Shades of Conflict and The Dark Side take their names from this idea, but are about moral differences rather than actual colors.

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Subtrope of Color-Coded Characters. See also Color Character, Color-Coded Multiplayer, Chromatic Arrangement, Dress-Coded for Your Convenience, Evil Costume Switch, Good Hair, Evil Hair, Law of Chromatic Superiority, Light Feminine and Dark Feminine, Rainbow Motif.

If you're looking for the Trope Pantheon page regarding the deities of these tropes, see here.

Please only add examples that don't clearly fit any of the subtropes, or combine multiple subtropes in an unusual way. To fit, a work must have both good colors and evil colors, and a color contrast between the two.

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Good Colors

Evil Colors

Examples

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Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Fan Works

Futari Wa Pretty Cure Blue Moon has the Etherium, a group of villains who wear white and those who turn good get black uniforms (Anti-Hero). Smug Snake Kainatrol has a dark red colour scheme setting off her white uniform, while more sympathetic villain Mekuramast (her opponent in the Enemy Civil War) has light blue. Dark Magical Girl Millusion has dark blue-green, and the other villains wear bright green, purple, and gold (though the last one, wearing a Good Colour, gets considerably less pagetime). Asa and Yoko themselves are symbolized by pink/orange and blue/black, though these choices came from the design sheet the story was based upon and the inversion of black and white has already been stated. Dawn and Mia are both symbolized by pink and bright red.

In My Immortal, black is good and pink is bad. What? It's true.

Films — Animation

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Myths & Religion

In The Bible, scarlet is often associated with sin, while white is almost always holiness. This is especially significant in the sacrifices, where the innocent substitutes for the guilty and (literally with lambs, symbolically with Jesus) white becomes covered in scarlet.

Dennis Wheatley, student of Western occult and ritual magick traditions, and author of atmospheric horror stories such as The Devil Rides Out, asserted that purple or magenta light heralded the manifestation of spirits of evil. As he was an associate of Aleister Crowley, it can be assumed he learnt this from the Master.

Egyptians associated the color red with the god Set, who represented chaos, desert storms, and general disorder, generally not "good" things. Osiris was associated with green (the color of healthy, growing, living things) and sometimes black (the color of moist soil those things need to grow in). White wasn't really associated with either.

Pinballs

In F-14 Tomcat, the player protagonist, "Hitman", is dressed entirely in a white flight suit. The protagonist, the Russian General Ripper Yagov, wears a dark green suit with a black helmet.

Pro Wrestling

When Hulk Hogan did a FaceHeel Turn and started the nWo, he traded in his traditional red and yellow gear for black and white (which soon became the official colors of the nWo). Sting also traded in his colorful neon garb for black and white during this angle, though in his case, it was to symbolize his transformation into a brooding Anti-Hero.

When Sin Cara debuted in WWE, he was a Face dressed in blue and gold. The Costume Copycat Heel who took his place while he was on suspension dressed in these colors too, until the genuine article came back and revealed the ruse, at which point he switched to black and silver.

Puppet Shows

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is an obvious example. Not only are all Spectrum agents specifically color-coded, the leader of the good guys is one Colonel White and the main agent of the baddies is Captain Black.

'Ik Mik Loreland', a Dutch educational series made to help teach reading to kids, has played with it: in the beginning of the series, the reading-loving, letter-crazy village Loria is very colourful while the illiterate antagonist Karbonkel (English: Carbuncle) wears brown and lives in a brown cave with brown stuff. The moment Karbonkel magics all the letters away from the village (up to and including the brains of the villagers) everything, including the clothes of the villagers, turns into shades of brown. As soon as the protagonist Mik learns the letters 'I' and 'K' (forming the Dutch word for 'I') she gets her colourful clothes back, but the village itself doesn't get restored until she comes back from her travels with all the letters from the alphabet. So the colourlessness doesn't stand necessarily for evil but for illiteracy. Most good creatures in the show are somewhat literate though, and the more literate the people in a place are, the nicer it is with more kind creatures to meet. 'Being able to read makes you a better person' has some unfortunate implications about illiterate adults but as noted, children shows tend to have simplistic morality. Here, even the villain wants to read, he just doesn't want anybody else to be good at it while he can't!

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons Metallic dragons (gold, silver, copper, brass and bronze) are good and chromatic dragons (red, green, black, white and blue) are evil. Some settings also include gem dragons (amethyst, crystal, emerald, sapphire and topaz), who are neutral. The idea of color-coded dragons was probably lifted from the Dragonriders of Pern novels, particularly given that metal-colored dragons are physically larger than their non-metallic counterparts in both Pern and D&D. The Eberron campaign setting plays with this. Whereas dragons all have "Always [Character Alignment]" in the core books, in Eberron this is changed to "usually" or "often". Surprise your party with a principled revolutionary red dragon fighting against a charming but tyrannical gold dragon!

Exalted: Green is considered unfortuitous, due to association with the Green Sun of Hell. Gold and Silver are considered good, due to their association with Unconquered Sun and Luna. Red is considered good within the Realm and bad anywhere else, since it's the color of Scarlet Empress.

This is actively averted in Magic: The Gathering. Each of the five colors (white, black, blue, red and green) have equal amounts of heroes and villains.

In Avalon Hill's Rise and Decline of the Third Reich the German counters are black with bone-white markings, evoking the colors of death. Their minor allies are a dull, lifeless-looking gray, while the Italians are a sickly light green. The Western allies are much more colorful, while the Soviets are a neutral-looking brown.

Talislanta: Everyone in Aaman wears pure white, because it's a repressive theocracy. Green is the favored color of Cymril, although it hasn't been mandatory since the game's first edition.

Toys

Nexo Knights: The knights all have primary colours (blue, white, green, red and yellow), and their vehicles are blue, silver and neon orange (with side-details related to who's vehicle it is). Meanwhile, the monsters tend to stick to red, orange, black and brown, with a small dash of yellow on occasion. Later on, the stone monsters use pale blue, purple and grey.

Video Games

Web Animation

Red vs. Blue. It's in the name, it's lampshaded, averted, subverted, and generally thrown out the window starting with the first episode. However, when they wrote the first episode, it was merely making fun of that aspect of Halo's multiplayer, so it was entirely justified. Generally ignored or lampshaded with the BG crew — they're more or less team colored. Even Donut. Doc wears purple because he's on loan to both Red and Blue teams, but becomes the villain when O'malley possesses him. He returns to being a pacifist when O'Malley leaves. The Freelancers take this trope and throw it through a meatgrinder. To whit: Agents North and South Dakota both wear green/purple. One is the nicest, friendliest, team-centric, most heroic mercenary you've ever met, and the other is a jealous, competitive, backstabbing, second-stringer. Agents Wyoming and Maine wear white armor. For Maine it could be argued that he fits the crazy mold. Wyoming, however, is merely a coward. York wears tan. While Carolina starts as a hero... Tex actually fits this, being the distilled anti-heroine badass that she is. Wash wears black armor; though he was introduced as a relatively-light anti-hero, he was adorkable in the backstory and an actual effective villain later, though never even remotely as effective an Agent as Tex, Maine, York, or Carolina. There's the anonymous blue guy though Played Straight in that he turns out to be the very laidback Butch Flowers... and evil as PHUCK CT wears brown. She's the least down-to-earth person there is. The Director and Councilor actually play this one straight, wearing all black and often remaining in shadows.



Web Comics

The Order of the Stick on at least four occasions character's clothes have changed to indicate alignment shift: Belkar's clothes turn white when a Wisdom boost gives him empathy and briefly makes him intend to become Good. Miko Miyazaki 's murdering Shojo . Word of God is that this represents alignment-restricted magic items powering down. When Vaarsuvius makes a Deal with the Devil black and their speech bubbles switch to a black background. Lampshaded when Haley notices the color change and starts panicking over the implications. Belkar calls her on being prejudiced and overreacting which calms Haley down. Belkar being Belkar, he then whispers a congratulations to them for coming over to the "deep end" of the alignment pool. When Durkon is turned into a vampire by Malack , which forces an alignment shift to Evil, his armour becomes dark grey and black.

Used in Looking for Group as to why Richard needs his "red fwoosh" back by having Cale describe fire and the sky. Richard: What do you see? Cale: Fire. Richard: Describe it. Cale: Hot. Richard: Look closer. Cale: Mysterious. Consuming. Intimidating. Powerful. Richard: Now look up and tell me what you see. Cale: Beauty. Endless possibility. Hope... Oh. We need to get rid of your blue fwoosh.

Web Original

Cobra Kai: Downplayed in "Mercy." Miyagi-do member Robby, in white gi, and Cobra Kai member Miguel, in their signature black gi, are the finalists at the All-Valley tournament. Robby emerges as a Martial Pacifist while Miguel falls into serious He Who Fights Monsters territory.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has this in spades. Both inverted and played straight in that Dr. Horrible (the villain/protagonist) wears white while Captain Hammer (the hero/antagonist) wears black. Dr. Horrible's white outfit also represents his innocence and kindness, which is sharply contrasted when he switches to a blood red lab coat to represent the blood on his hands, and as a standard villain color to demonstrate that he's taking his villainy more seriously.

The MMORPG in which Noob is set has different colored cursors for the members of each player faction (yellow for the Empire, red for the Coalition, green for the Order). The cursor turns grey if a player get kicked out of their faction, which means they can be attacked by all three. Early Installment Weirdness from the webseries gave Game Masters blue ones.

Hero Lab is an educational contest for kids to design "scientific" superheroes. Not surprisingly, the "hosts" presenting the challenge fit all hero (blue, white)/villain (red, black) tropes (not only the color ones) to a T. It will be interesting whether the kids entries also do that.

is an educational contest for kids to design "scientific" superheroes. Not surprisingly, the "hosts" presenting the challenge fit all hero (blue, white)/villain (red, black) tropes (not only the color ones) to a T. It will be interesting whether the kids entries also do that. A Practical Guide To Evil enforces this trope because its world runs on heroic fantasy tropes. Heroes, Villains and Anti-Heroes are conveniently color-coded and dressing out of element has been known to make people feel uncomfortable: Dont mind me, I grunted. It just suddenly hit home that Im leading a Legion of Terror while wearing a black cape and plotting nefarious things in the dark.

Western Animation