A Lighter Shade of Black

While Evil Versus Evil may be fun, it carries the risk of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. People just DO like having someone to cheer for. But if both sides are equally reprehensible, there's really no point to it.

So that's where this trope kicks in. It basically means that the author is clearly trying to portray one side of the conflict as the better or more symphathetic one, so the audience can root for them. Since both sides are supposed to be villains, this isn't that hard. You just need to give your Lighter Black a little edge on the sympathy meter. The idea is to have the audience say "Yeah, Alice may be evil, but at least she's not half as bad as Bob!"

This can be done in many ways. Give your villain the Sympathetic POV. Have them Pet the Dog, be a Noble Demon or invoke Even Evil Has Standards. Perhaps they're simply a smaller threat to the world. Maybe their goals are, or used to be, somewhat sympathetic. Maybe they have many Evil Virtues. Or, when compared to the opposition, their cause still seems a little more "right" or their character "pure" than that of the enemy. Since we want them to win, this may lead to a villainous version of Right Makes Might and Pure Is Not Good.

Or maybe the villain is such a Magnificent Bastard with many a Crowning Moment of Awesome (or generally just damn cool) that it's way easier to side with them. Especially when their enemy is an Eldritch Abomination, Complete Monster or somesuch.

If they shoot way over the line, the character in question may end up doing a Heel Face Turn.

See also A Lighter Shade of Grey, Nominal Hero, and Shades of Conflict.

Examples of A Lighter Shade of Black include:

Anime and Manga

• Black Lagoon: More often than not, the Lagoon Company's enemies are way worse than them. Among the worst are neo-Nazis and bloodthirsty cartels.
• Mirai Nikki: There's no denying that Yuno Gasai is an almost completely insane, violently protective Yandere who's perfectly willing to kill anyone who even goes near Yukiteru, but she's practically an Anti-Heroine when you consider her and Yuki's opponents; a masked serial killer who goes around stabbing people for the hell of it, a deranged Knight Templar vigilante who believes littering and murder deserve equal punishment, a nihilistic cult leader who planned to destroy the world when she became God and almost had Yuno gang-raped just to lure Yuki out of hiding, a psychotic child-assassin, a rich tyrant who cares more about dogs than his own daughter, a religion-hating terrorist who hijacked a school with explosives and killed dozens of students just to flush out one, a corrupt Chief of Police who allied himself with said terrorist and framed Yuki and Yuno for a murder he committed (he had a good reason for it, yeah, but still), a mayor who shut down an orphanage to achieve his goals with arguably the most sympathetic of the bunch being the street brawler and his knife-wielding girlfriend, the latter of whom had no qualms with allying herself with the cult leader despite knowing full-well what her intentions were. There's also the runner of the orphanage, but she wasn't really an opponent. And that's just the Diary Holders. We also have Deus Ex Machina, the Jerkass God who created the Survival Game who is pretty much the reason Yuno can't just be with Yuki and had to replay the game again. Not to mention he chose a bunch of psychopaths as the possibilities for his successors simply because he didn't want the game to be boring.

Comic Books

• In Transformers More Than Meets the Eye, Sentinel Prime was an aristocratic bastard who got his job by killing his predecessor. Though many Autobots speak of what a horrible leader he was, they do have some fondness for him given that the very last thing he did was lead a charge against Megatron.
• In Wanted, Wesley and his allies are ever so slightly better than their opponents, which makes it possible to root for them.

Live-Action TV

• As the Last Great Time War in Doctor Who dragged on and on and on, the Time Lords ultimately became no different than the Daleks. Though the War Doctor had to concede that, it was better for everyone if the Time Lords won the war.

Tabletop Games

• This is what Warhammer 40000 has instead of Good versus Evil, and is presumably what fans of the Lighter Black factions (Tau, Eldar, the Imperium) see in playing on the side of such horrible people; they're fighting against the very incarnations of death, savagery, consumption and, well, Chaos.

Theatre

• Sweeney Todd is a murderous barber who slashes his customers' throats and has them baked into pies. But in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, we root for him because he wants revenge against the corrupt judge who falsely transported him for life in order to get at his beautiful wife, as well as having some rather skeevy designs on his daughter when she comes of age.

Video Games

• Fate Stay Night: Part of Heaven's Feel seems to be solely dedicated to making the players like Kotomine more, with several Enemy Mine and Pet the Dog situations and most importantly, an utterly epic fight where he holds his own against Complete Monster Matou Zoken and his Servant quite well.
  • This is tied in to the point of that route and arguably to one of the overarching points of the entire game as well. FSN's three routes take different approaches to morality as seen through the eyes of the main character; in Fate, Kotomine is portrayed as a fairly simplistic Complete Monster with no motives beyond Evil Feels Good, and in Unlimited Blade Works he takes a backseat to the conflict between Shirou and Archer. Only Heaven's Feel fleshes him out at all, but in doing so it makes him into a much more complex character than when he was portrayed in simple black and white terms.
• Knights of the Old Republic 2: In the Darkside Ending, Kreia will say that the PC is not a Sith. Not really. Presumably, she considers them a Dark Jedi instead, i.e. someone who uses the Dark Side for their own advancement rather than submitting to the Sith Code and philosophies.
• This is the case in the first Disgaea game (Laharl the wannabe Evil Overlord vs. an Omnicidal Maniac). The second and fourth have more heroic protagonists while the third is mixed (Mao wants to slay his father, the Overlord, for trivial reasons and the rest of the cast have more heroic goals plus the real villain already made Mao do it and surpressed his memories)
• Blood has no good guys. On one hand you have a cult trying to summon a dark god, murdering anyone they want to and experimenting on the rest. On the other side you have one of their failed projects, a sadistic revenant named Caleb who was one of those cultists and also is murdering anyone he feels like. At least Caleb is fighting to avenge his wife and best friend and has a sense of humor.
• The Scarlet Crusade vs the Scourge in World of Warcraft. At least until Wrath of the Lich King.
• God of War is full of this. Yeah Zeus pulled a humungous dick move by trying to kill Kratos, but this was mostly because Kratos wouldn't stop being such a warmongering douche. He was pretty much causing as many wars, if not more, than the very asshole he killed because he was supposedly the lesser of 2 evils. Ares did manipulate Kratos into killing his own wife and daughter, so Ares is another example to Kratos. On top of that Kratos basically kills any innocent god who's trying to protect their king Zeus, even though he was going a bit crazy and probably ready to do the same, and he caused the entire fucking world to descend into chaos just so he can kill Zeus. You can even kill as many innocents as you like along the way, some even REQUIRED to be killed in torturous ways just to solve puzzles. But it's ok because, Kratos becomes a Blue Lantern and becomes A Hero, or not, to give mankind a more positive direction. Assuming any are still alive, that is.

Web Original

• Wolf 359: The crew's Token Evil Teammate Alexander Hilbert is a somewhat sociopathic, amoral Mad Scientist who killed multiple people in service of his research into the decima virus and is fully complicit in many of Goddard Futuristics' crimes, but unlike his megalomaniacal and pointlessly cruel superiors Hilbert is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who at least tries to minimize collateral damage when he can and can be relied upon at least some of the time by the crew.

Western Animation

• The First Ones in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power were A Nazi by Any Other Name, conquering other planets and strip-mining others to the point of rendering them lifeless. Despite all that, they weren't as bad as Horde Prime who forced them into a corner with the Final Solution being the only option they had left to them.