Balance Between Good and Evil

"You destroyed the demon! Yin and yang! Now the world is out of balance, nobody told you to destroy the demon!"
—Uncle, Jackie Chan Adventures

This is a very common Fantasy-genre trope. It's a way of explaining away various others, such as Joker Immunity, Failure Is the Only Option, etc.

Basically, Good and Evil are unionized, and have rules they must follow. These rules are usually towards overall self-preservation; no one side is allowed to "win" too much, and the Big Good and Big Bad restrict their fighting to a Divine Chessboard rather than going at it in person.

At times, this can get silly, with there being no reason behind why the absence of evil would be a bad thing.[1] Sometimes this is explained with the universe becoming boring, society stagnating or collapsing from within in the absence of something to struggle against or giving people a chance to show real nobility and virtue by risking their lives to defend each other. Other times, its enforced by depicting ultimate good as repressive (often Lawful Stupid), or by declaring positive or neutral concepts such as free will or ambition as evil. This can confuse people who equate Good (the opposite of Evil) with good (the opposite of bad), as preserving the Balance of Good and Bad eventually means that you have to, for example, defend a murderous rapist's right to murder and rape. In those cases, "Good" and "Evil" become something more similar to physical forces like "Hot" and "Cold" and don't seem to have much to do with morality at all anymore.

Further, only Good seems to ever care about actually respecting the balance, while Evil almost never holds back. This can be especially problematic if Evil Only Has to Win Once to badly upset the balance. However, the penalty for this is usually permission for the hero to finally kill the villain. Occasionally it's reversed with a "Good" Well-Intentioned Extremist and "Bad" Anti-Villain or Villain Protagonist, invoking Light Is Not Good. In extreme cases, both the Good and Evil sides are bad and the protagonists form a third party trying to stop either side from taking over. The irony though is that the writers don't seem to recognize that "good" guys who don't do good things aren't good any more, but rather villains with good publicity.

Good may be portrayed as being intrinsically weaker than the "unbalancing" forces of Evil, implying that maintaining the Balance is the best outcome it can even hope for. Which makes the struggle not functionally different from standard Good Vs Evil fare, just with the word "balance" mentioned a lot.

It may also be motivated by the belief, right or not, that the universe always spawns a new, bigger evil every time the good guys win. Occasionally, this is used as justification as to why the Big Bad needs to be sealed away instead of killed, because killing him would create an inbalance resulting in a Bigger Bad stepping up to fill the void. By sealing away the Big Bad, they neutralize his threat (he can't cause death and destruction anymore) but he's still technically in the world (just imprisoned), so balance is maintained.

Sometimes, this refers directly to the heroes and villains in the story, instead of Good and Evil as a whole. In this case, the villain doesn't need to actually be DOING evil at the time, they're just evil, so good must balance them out. Likewise, the hero doesn't have to perform acts of heroism all the time, merely just being good provides balance for the villains evil.

Also sometimes this can be done by an ancient organization which have carried the duty for hundreds of years. they can be presented as neutral or in some case help the hero cause the villain is breaking the balance.

Often relies on Good Is Boring. See also Good Is Dumb, Good Is Impotent and Evil Is Cool. The heroic and villainous versions of the Idiot Ball also usually play a part in allowing this trope to function. Lawful Stupid might also rear its head, as might Stupid Neutral if an outside force enforces the balance.

You can substitute Light and Darkness, Heaven and Hell, Order and Chaos, or any Yin and Yang for Good and Evil with the added bonus of making more sense linguistically—a balance between Order and Chaos probably is better than either extreme.

Examples of Balance Between Good and Evil include:

Anime and Manga

  • Slayers runs on this heavily. The ultimate balancing deity is The Lord of Nightmares, and she made four worlds, each ruled and balanced by one Shinzoku ("godly race") lord and one Mazoku ("evil race") lord. Each group has its own set of generals and henchmen. The Shinzoku don't give a flying fuck about humanity as long as their omnipotent source of knowledge, the Clair Bible, is protected, and balance is maintained. The Mazoku will act and upset the balance of power when they can. In protagonist Lina Inverse's world (named the "Red World" according to Word of God), the Mazoku lord is Ruby-Eye Shabranigdo, who was split into seven pieces long ago; Lina and her ragtag group destroys one, and they also kill off two of his five highest-ranking generals by the third season. Further more, they also destroy another Mazoku lord from another world! So far, this has had no real effect on the world, but certain magic spells that draw power from the Mazoku generals no longer exist.
  • Magical Project S basically had re-establishing the Balance as its main goal, represented by a giant set of scales that adjusted themselves after every Sammy victory. Convenient! [2]
    • And the scales only really started to tip the other way after she found a problem that was preexisting; Misao's sad life, and fixed it. Hmm...
  • Ah! My Goddess has the Doublet System, which prevents gods and demons from slaughtering each other by imposing a Mutually Assured Destruction scheme on both sides. Small conflicts are allowed, even encouraged, but outright celestial warfare is forbidden.
    • Hild, the leader of the demons, has tried to subvert the Doublet System and shift the balance in her favor by inducing Face Heel Turns among the gods. Thus far she's been unsuccessful, and given the nature of the series it'll probably remain that way.
      • It's later revealed that what Hild does care about is the balance, the reason she antagonizes the goddesses is that their presence in the Morisato home actually causes an imbalance that she needs to rectify. Off course, the reason she does is because of her daughter, the goddess Urd.
      • Meanwile, Hagall and her crew don't care about the balance and just want to increase the demons "market share" This quickly causes the world to erupt into hilarious chaos.
  • The final plot arc of Dragon Ball GT hinged on the notion that all the good wishes our heroes had made over the years had created a massive imbalance between good and evil energies, prompting the creation of seven evil dragons.
    • Actually, that had nothing to do with what kinds of wishes were being made, so much as the fact that wishes were being made at all and at an alarmingly high rate, too fast for the dragonballs to keep up. So it was more a lesson about overusing magical wish-granting trinkets to solve one's problems.
      • No, it was stated outright that the good (or neutral) wishes caused a build-up of negative energy, which is why the dragons were evil. One of the dragons is more noble because he was born out of an evil wish (Piccolo Daimaoh restoring his youth) so there was still good in the Dragonball from which he was born.
  • Transformers Cybertron. Taking Unicron out of the equation resulted in an imbalance that caused a black hole that threatened to do in the whole universe (the Multiverse in the comics.)
  • The setting of Mobile Suit Gundam 00's first season, with three global superpowers squaring off against each other. The opening narration even uses the phrase "zero sum game" (in Gratuitous English for the original Japanese version).

Comic Books

  • In most superhero universes, a kind of balance applies, in that while superheroes rarely lose, villains keep coming back (or are replaced by new ones.) One would think that villains would just ally to bring down the heroes with sheer numbers, but this rarely works because villains can't trust each other for long, while heroes can.
  • In the Marvel Universe, Adam Warlock got a hold of the Infinity Gauntlet, a MacGuffin that literally granted the user control over all of existence. His desire to become the "perfect" God caused him to subconsciously expunge both good and evil from himself completely. This backfired, as both became anthropomorphized and tried to take over the universe (after, of course, he had been stripped of the Gauntlet).
    • The evil side tried to take over the Universe. The good side merely tried to destroy it. In fact, she tried to destroy the whole multiverse.
    • Warlock also refused to kill Thanos, on the account that the Universe would be incomplete without him. This paid off later, when Thanos helped him deal with said good and evil sides, and eventually sacrificed himself to fix the Universe.
  • Galactus, the big guy without fashion sense who eats a few billion people a month, was also rationalised as "necessary for the cosmic balance" by the sentience of the Marvel Universe, for very trippy and flimsy reasons in John Byrne's "Trial of Galactus". The character has been rationalised as anything from a Mussolini-esque "storm to test the worth of civilisations, so those who don't survive deserve to die", to "the balancing force between life and death" (as if overpopulation didn't take care of itself), to keeping an even greater threat in check through Thugee-style continual blood sacrifice/absorbed life force, to "a force of nature Beyond Good and Evil... that nonetheless is fully able to frequently hold conversation with his food, or enlists its aid, is completely sentient, has a personality etc", despite being stated as perfectly able to feed on various non-sentient energy such as stars. The writer Jim Starlin has later portrayed Galactus as an absolutely entitled, conceited, and ruthless egomaniac in complete violation of his automatic social contract, which is much easier to accept given the circumstances.
    • The "keeping a greater threat in check" thing is actually correct. They once destroyed Galactus, and the greater threat (known as Abraxas) promptly started destroying the multiverse.
      • Exactly, in the end Abraxas is the greater evil, since he seeks to destroy all reality. Galactus is a necessary evil. To Galactus credit, he's learned to warn inhabited worlds when he's coming to feed.
    • Another explanation for Galactus (which may have been retconned away by now) explains that when the current universe ends, he will jumpstart the next Big Bang which will begin the next universe. So his existence is justified, though it's cold comfort to anyone whose planet he eats.
  • In the DC comics Universe, The Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos fight an eternal war, with the winning side decided by repeating cycles. They use most of the magic-using heroes and villains as their pawns, and most people believed that Order was good and Chaos was evil, until both sides showed their True Colors. (Actually Chaos was overall pretty dangerous while Order was uncaring, making the DCU a Crapsack World.)
  • John Constantine spends a lot of time fighting off demons, but he is nevertheless careful to prevent Heaven from striking any decisive blow against Hell. The idea seems to be that while Heaven and Hell are locked in eternal war, humankind have a certain amount of freedom from either side - but if one side ever won, the humans would be its slaves.
  • Subverted in a storyline in The Spectre: the godlike ghost had almost lost faith in humanity because of the manipulations of his Evil Counterpart Azmodus, and almost seemed ready to fall under his sway. Then Spectre's friend, a preacher, told him to find out the truth by himself by looking into the collective souls of humanity. Even his other allies feared that this would only confirm the accusations... but The Spectre found that there was more light (good) than darkness (evil) in the human race- MUCH more. Cue Heroic Resolve and demonic asskicking. A Crowning Moment of Awesome for the series.
    • Speaking about the Spectre, he once tried taking out Darkseid. Well, it was succesful, he he killed Darkseid dead. Only for the latter to rise in a skeletal form and begin reforming, stating that he couldn't be killed by the Spectre in this manner because he was a neccesary evil in this universe.
  • This is Mr. Negative's philosophy and the basic premise of his Split Personality.

Fan Works

Film

  • This is the main plot of the Russian film Night Watch. The eponymous group are the forces of good who stop the forces of evil (The Day Watch, to be the title of the sequel) from becoming too strong. The Day Watch does likewise, all because of a treaty between the two sides. The book series the film is based on makes it clearer; neither side directly acts on the Muggles, out of fear of giving power to the other side to maintain the balance. For instance, a Night Watch member has to get approval to cure a loved one's cancer, because doing so might give the Day Watch cause to go out and give someone AIDS.
    • In reality, both the Day Watch and the Night Watch are one and the same; the power struggle between them is carefully monitored on the part of the Inquisition, which has all the real power. The Watches only exist to satisfy young Others' desire to satisfy their primordial alignment, the goal being to unite all Others, light or dark.
    • In the novels, it's shown that the war between Light and Dark is more of an Enforced Cold War than anything: all parties, including the Inquisitors, are afraid of the likely alternative. This results in combat by Gambit Roulette, seeing as how the heads of both the Night and Day Watches are incredibly old and cunning. Another point to note is that the Twilight, the source of magic in the series, is capable of taking its own steps to restore equilibrium, should one side hold too much of an advantage.
  • The Star Wars prequel trilogy has a Jedi prophecy about Anakin Skywalker bringing "Balance to the Force". In a subversion, balance means inbalance here, the lines from the movies which make the viewer think that the Jedi misunderstand the prophecy are set as true by Word of God. Anakin fulfills the prophecy at the end of the original trilogy, when he as a Sith finally turns on his treacherous master and proves the death of them both.
    • Still, one has to wonder what the Jedi Council was thinking. "We've had a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Now what we need is some balance!" And then they were surprised when Anakin was evil.
      • Except they didn't, the Council had noticed that the Force had gone out of balance some 200 years before hand, and by that point the Galactic Republic was mired in corruption.
    • The expanded universe shows that the prophecy was just a bunch of noodles, as there are tons of dark jedi and sith and other users of the dark side left.
    • A great explanation is available in Fridge Brilliance by Liliedhe:

Without Sith, they don't need a Chosen One who is a potential loose cannon. But, when Yoda makes states the Council's decision in the end, he also explains that Darth Maul was indeed a Sith, they are sure of that now. And that is why the Council changed their minds. And, since there will be a second Sith, they will actually need The Chosen One.

  • In The Dark Crystal, balance is enforced de facto: The good urRu and the evil Skeksis are actually the separated good and evil halves of the same creatures, the UrSkeks. Whenever a good one dies, an evil one of equal stature instantly dies somewhere else in the world, and vice-versa. The UrSkeks' original plan was to rid themselves of moral imperfections using the Crystal, but instead they got split into two races, no doubt because of the balance between good and evil.
  • Parodied in the amateur film College Saga. The antagonists in the movie are vegetarians who plot to kill off all meat-eaters. At the end, the hero says "I have found my healthy balance" and bites into a hamburger with salad.
  • Mentioned in Little Nicky, although that movie dealt with the balance tipping to evil.
    • And in a neat twist, Satan was just as interested in maintaining the balance as God was. It was Satan's kids who were upsetting the apple cart.
  • A variant occurs in Avatar when Neytiri tells a praying Jake, "Our great mother does not take sides, Jake; she protects the balance of life." Fortunately for our heroes, she does choose.

Literature

  • The entire plot of the Book of Swords trilogy by Michael Moorcock was the balance between the good (or at least sane) Forces of Law and the depraved Forces of Chaos, both of whom were under the domination of the Cosmic Balance. Of course that war ended when the hero Prince Corum, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion who had spent his existence fighting to preserve the balance, unleashed two gods from outside the rules of the Cosmic Balance who went on to kill off both sides, freeing their subject worlds to grow and evolve without a pack of selfish gods interfering.
  • Stephen King's novel Insomnia reveals that his Multiverse is ruled by four theoretically-equal forces: Life, Death, the Purpose and the Random. The Random is responsible for much suffering and chaos, and is the closest equivalent to Evil.
    • Earthquakes that kill a hundred thousand people can be part of the the Purpose, but the higher beings of the purpose are good and want to mantain balance. The highest being of the Random is the Crimson King, who was described as the embodiment of evil until he was nerfed in the Dark Tower. He wanted to destroy everthing and rule the hellscape that remained forever.
  • Roger Zelazny's works
    • In Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming there is an organized competition between the forces of heaven and hell who will control fate for the next thousand years. However, this book is almost a parody. Played with in A Night in the Lonesome October by the same author involved semi-regular contests between 'Openers' and 'Closers' over opening a portal to ancient gods of wonder and terror. If a contest was a draw, or won by Closers, the world remained the same, maintaining the current balance. Much of the month of the contest was filled with players carefully feeling out each other's allegiance and angling for advantage without sending the contest up into premature fireworks - maintaining another balance, if a pragmatic one.
    • The Amber series of stories. The Pattern and the Logrus contest with each other over control of the Shadows between Amber and the Courts of Chaos. In the novel Prince of Chaos the Primal Pattern says that it and the Logrus are fundamental principles by which the universe is organized. The Pattern represents order, reason and sanity, and the Logrus represent chaos, feeling and madness. However, neither seeks the other's extinction, because they know that if either existed without the other it would lead to a dead end.
  • This is the entire basis of Eve Forward's Villains by Necessity - similar to the Dragonlance example, Good has thoroughly dominated evil, obligating the protagonists to restore the balance to prevent catastrophe. Also similar to the Dragonlance example, the premise is rather undermined by the fact that most of the "Good" antagonists are Lawful Stupid Knights Templar who have been brainwashing captured villains in order to force them to voluntarily obey the law at the expense of their personalities, and their leader raped the main protagonist's mother and wants to have light consume the world, which just happens to destroy it in the process. And he is fully aware of this.
  • In The Saga of Recluce the Balance of Order and Chaos is a quantifiable phenomena. Order and Chaos are the basic components of the world, tightly bound together to create matter. Mages who use only Order or Chaos release an equal amount of the other component into the world. As such, the more an Order-mage creates, the more Chaos will be available for a Chaos-mage to wield. This poses the largest problem for Order-mages as Ordered creations are enduring while Chaos is fleeting; there is almost always a surplus of the latter.
    • Absolute Order is death, as living things need to change, evolve and grow (a form of Chaos) but also need structure (a form of Order) or they will collapse. Usually only the central character is really conscious of it and strives to maintain the Balance, while the wizards on either side try to have * more* Order or Chaos, which usually backfires. Both Fairhaven and Recluce are destroyed, at different times, by Gray wizards.
    • It should be noted that Chaos and Order are not Good and Evil, as illustrated by heroes throughout the series who wield one or the other, or even, in rare cases, both in equal measure.
      • Additionally, there is a slight subversion of Color Coded for Your Convenience though it plays Gang of Hats pretty much straight: The Chaos Wizards wear white and their city is Fairhaven, Order Mages wear black and Nylan is the 'Black City.'
  • Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series explains that God created evil, because without it people were complacent and couldn't become truly good.
  • Andre Norton's Witch World novel Horn Crown features good and evil prototypes of the gods. The evil ones declare, at the end, that they will win; the good ones merely observe that they know that the battle is unending. (The good ones are unquestionably right.)
  • In Good Omens, the forces of Good and Evil are in fact trying to destroy each other, but Aziraphale and Crowley (an angel and a demon, both very low-ranking) have been working opposite each other for so long that they've become friends. They work to maintain the balance because it allows both of them to report successes to their superiors without anything really changing over time, which coincidentally allows them to keep working together on Earth. It's suggested that this may be the underlying idea behind the conflict in the first place, so that neither side ever wins permanently, but God's plan is so ineffable that none of the lesser angels or demons know this for certain.
    • It's implied that halfway between good and evil lie humans, who in turn are capable of the better acts than angels and worse acts than demons. For either side to win would destroy humanity, free will, and the whole world. The free will part of this is what makes Adam realize that doing whatever he wants with the world isn't the right way to go about it, cause whats the point of having friends if you can make them do whatever you want?
  • The Night Watch trilogy features a balance between the Light and the Dark, enforced by the Night Watch and Day Watch respectively, though it seems to be more of a ceasefire than an actual cosmic law. There's an amusing scene in the first book where Anton, the protagonist and agent of the Night Watch, uses his magic to force an annoying street hawker to become more moral and is immediately called out on it by a pair of Day Watch agents. Anton tries, unsuccessfully, to persuade them that the hawker's quality of life will decrease as his morality improves, and thus he has not violated the balance.
    • It should be noted that as the series continues, it becomes more and more obvious that Light versus Dark isn't good versus evil so much as Utopia for everyone versus Utopia for few, among other things, Hitler was the Light Others' fault. And as it turns out, higher ranking and/or older Others don't see a great difference between the two, the dark siders just place themselves higher than everyone else.
  • Louise Cooper's Time Master Trilogy subverts this. The trilogy opens thousands of years after the Gods of Order have banished the Gods of Chaos from the universe. At the end, the Gods of Order don't care at all about their followers, and the Gods of Chaos decide to establish a balance rather than banish the Gods of Order in revenge.
  • An interesting case comes up in the Fighting Fantasy book Creature of Havoc: A trio of evil(ish) witches want the eponymous creature to defeat the Big Bad in order to prevent too much evil from entering the world and thus upsetting the balance.
  • This is actually justified in Animorphs. The conflict between the mostly good Ellimist and the utterly batshit and evil Crayak is less of a traditional balance and more of a Cold War. Both sides would be happy to wipe out the other given the chance, and actually tried in the Backstory. The consequences for both were catastrophic: their battle caused massive loss to the lives the Ellimist wanted to protect, and Crayak lost what little progress he had made in controlling the threads of reality. This led to the Ellimist and Crayak's current arrangement of fighting through proxies, with any final victory only taking place after eons of "playing."
  • Taken to an almost ridiculous extreme in the poorly known (only recently translated to english) series Amos Daragon, in which a person (the "mask wearer") is chosen to keep a balance on good and evil. Needless to say that, since all the evil gods are trying to ensure the extinction of mankind, this seems remarkably stupid - unless the author actually meant a "balance between light and dark" instead of actual good and evil, because I really don't think that its necessary to ensure that dragons and other reptilish monster go around killing off mankind just because some fairies and a goddess told you to "keep a balance"
    • Actually, the series is filled with Light Is Not Good and Dark Is Not Evil. There are plenty of "Dark" creatures which don't want to massacre humans, yet get hunted down for no other reason than they exist. In fact, the last couple books involve stopping a crusade to wipe out the creatures of the night. The protagonist's job is to Stop the war between the gods, not kill all evil creatures.
  • This is literally built into the laws of reality in the Death Gate Cycle- good existing unchallenged long enough causes evil and vice versa, meaning that (by the standards of the cosmos as a whole) a rough equilibrium will always be maintained. The bad guys want to fix everything towards the evil end, as they feed off of mortal suffering.
  • The Dresden Files: In Changes, Harry crosses over into the Nevernever to find himself in an idyllic flower garden and immediately starts telling Bob that he suspects that it is a darker and more dangerous place than it appears to be. Bob chides Harry for his cynicism and tells him that every time the universe creates a place of darkness, it creates an equal place of light, so not everything can be bad. Then the centipede the size of a freight train that multiplies into more centipedes when it gets hacked up attacks.
    • This theme repeats in the Dresden series: In Small Favor, the Nickelheads' plot to kidnap Marcone as a ruse to kidnap The Archive is implied to have direct assistance from Ol' Scratch himself, so an angel is allowed to intervene by granting Dresden the ability to use Soulfire.
    • And in Ghost Story, the revelation that Harry's choices towards the end of Changes were partially influenced by a lie, e.g. seven words whispered by a fallen angel means that the other side gets to whisper seven words of truth at a time of their choosing.
  • The High House series by James Stoddard uses this, but substitutes good and evil with order and chaos (most likely because the author doesn't seem to have any problem with the presence of good overwhelming the presence of evil). Too much order is portrayed as tyranny and a lack of free will; too much chaos is portrayed as anarchy and a lack of personal safety. Arguably, this makes the books the perfect fantasy series for libertarians.

Live Action TV

  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow's resurrection of Buffy at the beginning of season six allegedly caused an imbalance that created an opportunity for the First Evil to become the Big Bad for season seven (now that there's an army of Slayers, the balance must have snapped like an elastic band). Whistler from "Becoming" Parts 1 and 2 identifies himself as an agent of the Balance, although some fans argue that he was actually an agent of Good who identified himself as Balance because he worked to counteract other "demons" who were apparently predominantly evil.
  • Often occurs on Charmed so they can have conflict with the Powers That Be who act like their bosses. One example that really stands out is a multi-part episode in which it was revealed that the Balance Between Good and Evil is preserved by a Mirror Universe - if good wins in one universe, evil wins in the other and balances it out. Traveling between them disrupted the balance and made the normal universe "too good" - the sun never sets, everyone is freakishly happy all the time, and minor crimes like leaving your cell phone on in a library are punished by mutilation (instead of the suddenly-too-good people just leaving their cellphones turned off). A more reasonable person would consider mutilation to be evil.
    • Somewhat tangential, but one shouldn't forget that in the similarly-disrupted evil balance, the same sort of mutilation was enacted for such trivial niceties as saying "Gesundheit" when someone sneezed.
      • Essentially, the point being made was that Good and Evil cannot tolerate the others' existence, and therefore in a world dominated by one, any act (no matter how minor) that runs contrary to the ideals of either is punished harshly. It is the mix of the two that provides tolerance and temperance.
    • Comes up in Paige's introductory episode. Apparently, there is a 48-hour window after a witch receives her powers during which she can be swayed to good or evil. When Piper demands to know who would make up such a stupid rule, Leo looks upward and Cole looks down, indicating that this is another of those balancing things The Powers That Be on both sides have agreed on.
  • Part of the Prime Directive in the Star Trek franchise actually has a stipulation that prevents Federation members from interfering with the balance of power on pre-contact planets. In fact, many episodes of the later series deal with moral dilemmas of getting involved with civil wars and other power conflicts.
    • The Prime Directive also significantly restricts interference with post-contact planets as well. Exactly what constitutes "interference" varies depending on how advanced the society is. For primitive worlds, even revealing the Federation's existence (and by extension, the existence of life beyond their world) is prohibited, while for a society just as advanced as the Federation the prohibition is limited to meddling with their internal politics. When somebody else is already meddling, though, it's usually permissible for the Federation to get involved in order to balance the scales.
  • One episode of Seven Days has, as a villain, an inmate who has converted his asylum into a cult dedicated to preserving the balance with astrology. He thinks that this are tipped in favor of Good, so naturally he has guys committing random crimes to even things out.
  • Invoked in the Smallville episode Quest. A deluded religious fanatic thought that if he managed to kill Clark Kent, the most powerful force of good in the world, then all the evil in the world would just disappear.
  • Lost invokes the trope with a balance scale holding black and white rocks. After arranging for Jacob's death, the Man in Black throws the white rock into the ocean.
  • In the original run of Doctor Who, the Black and White Guardians are embodiments of this principle.

Real Life

  • Game theory, used in fields as diverse as economics and evolutionary biology, is concerned with quantitative evaluation of competing strategies for success. Except under extreme, usually-temporary circumstances, most game theory analyses of alternative strategies (cooperation vs. conflict, high vs. low investment, fair dealing vs. deception, etc) find that it's the moderate and/or mixed strategies which "win" in the long term, providing the most gain for the least cost. Balance prevails, either due to moderate strategies' success, or rival strategies' persisting side by side at stable frequencies.
    • There is a fair amount of selection bias here, however. Situations where a single simple strategy is obviously superior (hence no balance between different ones) are so boring, from a game-theoretic viewpoint, that nobody wastes time doing a formal analysis that would count in this statistic.
    • Also mind that many situations in game theory are not zero sum (gain on one side means loss on the other) like the Balance Between Good and Evil is, so a different set of strategies is required. In zero sum games, cooperation is a bad idea, since any one player can only gain at the cost of any or all the other players. In such a case, cooperation can only lead to complete equality, with no one ever acting to gain or lose anything.
  • Taken less literally, there's Le Chatelier's principle of equilibria, where any equilibrium will act to rebalance itself after any disturbances.
  • While not a balance of Good and Evil, persay, Newtons third law of motion states that our universe works on this principal, at least on some level.

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Religions

  • Zoroastrianism is among the best example of this trope. Unlike Abrahamic religions in which God is omnipotent and Devil is much weaker, in Zoroastrianism there are two equal Gods of good and evil.

Tabletop RPG

  • This trope is a core element of the ur-Role-Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, one part of the Druid's job description in the early editions of the game is "Keeper of the Balance", a reference to both the balance between Good and Evil, and the one between Law (Order) and Chaos. To facilitate this, Druids had to be Neutral in alignment in the original basic set.
    • In the later editions, they only need to be partially neutral; the alignments there are the nine combinations of [good, neutral, evil] and [law, neutral, chaos]. In the basic game, neutral was one of the three alignments, along with law and chaos, which were originally just euphemisms for good and evil, respectively.
    • It's also stated on occasion that the gods won't interfere directly much, because doing so will inspire opposing gods to step in and add their own influence.
    • The Dragonlance campaign setting's backstory shows us why this whole balance business is necessary. In brief, after a hero wielding the eponymous weapon defeated and banished the evil goddess Takhisis, things improved quickly. But with no real bad guys to fight, the Church of Paladine began persecuting anyone who wasn't good enough. Then, their Pope-analog decided that to purge evil from the world completely, he needed to become a god. The Dragonlance campaign setting takes place After the End.
      • Basically in Dragonlance, if there's no Evil, some of the Good becomes Evil to compensate. And if there's too much Evil, then the Evil turns on itself and kills itself off. It's a kind of self-maintaining balance.
    • Any show influenced by D&D, such as Record of Lodoss War, will almost certainly use this.
    • In the D&D 4th edition core setting, the balance between good and evil is maintained by the primordials, a group of god-like eldritch abominations who are at war with the gods. The war's mostly cooled off at the moment, but could flare again at any moment. Because of this, the good gods and evil gods are loath to battle each other; the evil gods know that if they were to slay their good counterparts and take over the cosmos, they'd rule for about five minutes before the primordials swarmed them. Likewise, the good gods know the villian they slay today could be the ally that would have saved them from a primordial tomorrow. Not all the gods play by these rules, and some are even likely to come down on the side of the primordials when the fight starts up again, but for the most part the looming threat keeps the peace between them.
  • The characters in Legend of the Five Rings tend to frame themselves as good and the forces of Fu Leng as evil, and The Powers That Be seem to want a balance between the two, however this seems to be a case of Unreliable Narrator or Values Dissonance. The Samurai clearly represent the extreme of Order, while the Oni represent Chaos. Interestingly, a being called the Lying Darkness wants to destroy all reality, and it has been overtly stated that this is NOT good or evil. Based on this it's not unreasonable to assume that their definitions of Good and Evil are actually just Order and Chaos from the POV of Knights Templar.
    • Definitely Values Dissonance. In brief, D&D assigned most of the samurai the alignment of "Lawful Evil" in their conversion of the game system. Long version: the samurai recognize superstitions encouraging them to kill any peasants that cross their path or even look at them, and The Powers That Be enforce a Celestial Order that requires the samurai to make most of society into property, or at best half-human tools, while not valuing life at all - their own, or anyone else's. In a world where "compassion" means "killing your enemy as swiftly and brutally as possible so that he need not live with the shame of defeat, which would most likely just cause him to commit ritual suicide," one can bet that the good guys are by no means good. Of course, the formerly Chaotic Shadowlands faction is now an organized, strictly hierarchical Clan, so all of that's a bit muddled...
      • To be fair to the poor Rokugani, that description of their culture is incredibly simplistic and very biased. Which makes sense when you're trying to force them into the more rigidly-defined and somewhat Eurocentric morality slots present in D&D alignment systems, but which is ridiculously ethnocentric and borders on Values Dissonance from a real-world perspective, or even Fantastic Racism.
  • In the mythology of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the major source of conflict both in the game and throughout all of reality was the corruption of the force of balance known as the Wyrm. The Wyld (chaos) and the Weaver (order) would simultaneously work to conceive new things and give them form, respectively, and the Wyrm (entropy) would destroy those things whose time had passed in order to provide raw materials (and space) for new things to be created. Eventually, sick of having everything it made torn apart and destroyed, the Weaver entangled the Wyrm in its web, driving the Wyrm insane and turning it into the force of evil and corruption instead of balance and natural decay.
    • Apropos of that, the Kitsune (werefoxes) had actually appeared in a book before the release of Hengeyokai, in which they took on a considerably different role; they were cast as the agents of the Balance Wyrm, and were purported to take that responsibility very seriously. Aside from the short write-up in the back of an unrelated sourcebook, though, they never appeared in other material in that form before being retconned into the tricksters of the Beast Court.

Video Games

  • La Pucelle Tactics has a goddess of light (Poitreene), goddess of dark (the fallen angel Calamity), and another supernatural being in charge of keeping things in balance (Hermes).
  • Played with in Secret of Evermore, where, after defeating the Big Bad, the hero learns that he's destroyed the balance between good and evil and that he needs to get himself and the others that came from his home universe out of the world of Evermore before it collapses.
  • The Keepers of Thief give "the balance" as the reason they try not to interfere. This turns out to be more than just talk: after a major blow is dealt to a force of Chaos in the first game, a force of Order gets uppity and becomes the major villain in the second.
  • In Jade Empire, the bad guys stole a goddess' power to end a major drought. But because of the need for balance, while the Empire has water in abundance, another land goes thirsty.
    • One of your followers is a good demon named Chai Ka who exists in the mortal realm by inhabiting the body of a little girl. He's been charged by the heavens with aiding you in your quest. An evil demon named Ya Zhen also inhabits her body, put there intentionally by the Celestial Bureaucracy, and the reason always given is the need to "preserve the balance" (although, at least one more cynical observer claims that nothing gives the heavens more pleasure than watching mortals deal with just these sorts of problems).
  • In The Longest Journey, the worlds of Stark and Arcadia are the order and chaos halves of what was once one world. They are kept from remerging destructively by the Guardian of the Balance; said guardian's absence triggers the events of the game.
    • In addition, one of the villains had his chaotic essence separated from him, turning him into a cold-hearted and purely rational being while the swirling chaos was released to terrorise Arcadia. It also turns out that he's the next Guardian , whom the villains caught and separated in an attempt to control him, and before you can have him take up his proper job you have to reintegrate both sides. Once you do that, he becomes a surprisingly nice guy.
  • The Ultimate Evil in Drakengard actually embodies the Balance Between Good and Evil. It follows that the only person capable of defeating it also embodies the Balance Between Good and Evil. Luckily, the protagonist is just Anti-Hero enough to do that.
  • Primal features a balance between Order and Chaos, in which Order mostly functions as Good and Chaos functions as Evil; the game's plot involves the balance being tipped towards Chaos, requiring the protagonist to even things back out.
  • Supposedly in Castlevania, Dracula's very existence fills up the "evil" side of the Balance. In the Sorrow games, a cult of "good" believes that his previous final defeat was going to mess everything up. Whether this is true isn't known; but in the good ending one character speculates that if a Dark King is needed, then the Universe will provide; no one person has to be evil.
  • In Final Fantasy III, the Light Warriors learn about an event that happened years ago, affectionately called the Flood of Light, when the essential forces of good became too powerful. At this point, the Dark Warriors emerged, powered by the dark crystals, to beat back the Flood of Light and restore the balance. As it turns out, the Light Warriors in the game need to call on the old Dark Warriors to defeat the Big Bad by depowering it. Otherwise they get wiped out in a blink.
  • The necromancers of the Diablo franchise base their actions on the notion of a Balance. The novels attempt to (not always successfully) play with this. In one book, the villain is a necromancer who points out that all the necromancers do is fight evil, which doesn't adhere to the concept of a Balance. The hero of the book, another necromancer, continues to fight him, but doesn't bother to explain why he's wrong. In another book, the Balance is interestingly defined not as Good and Evil, but Good and the absence of Evil. It's explained that light and dark are not necessarily good and evil, and while the balance tipping to evil would mean torment, the absence of evil would lead to stagnation. One additional point to consider that the Balance is sometimes portrayed (though not described as) not as being between good and evil, but making sure that neither the angels or the demons of the series gain too much of a foothold in the world, as both are jerks. It just so happens that at the time of the second game, the "evil" forces are much more overt in screwing with mortal reality, and only one angel is bothering to do something.
    • Apparently the books make it more confusing than the game. In-game materials and the guidebook make it clear that necromancers are True Neutral or even Chaotic Neutral. It's just that when the world is completely full of Exclusively Evil demons, and there are not one but three Satan Expys running loose, True or Chaotic Neutral is right there side by side with Lawful Good.
      • This a running theme with Neutral alignments in pretty much everything, and even mentioned in more than one flavor text description of the Neutral alignments in D&D. In general, even characters utterly devoted toward neutrality and balance will almost always side with Good in the end, especially if the forces of Evil are strong enough. Rarely is there an instance of the opposite occurring, unless the good guys are going the Well-Intentioned Extremist route or the Neutral characters lean more towards Evil themselves. It's often stated that Neutral characters begrudgingly admit that Good-aligned characters make slightly more manageable neighbors, as opposed to their much more unpleasant cousins.
  • In Overlord II, Rose, the Overlord's mother states that when one force gets too powerful another must rise to stop it, meaning that Darkness is occasionally needed to triumph when heroes eventually fall from grace. And that Darkness is You.
  • Darksiders: The Charred Council is charged with doing this and are granted significant freedom on how to do so.
  • Master Xehanort of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep tried to do something about the balance between light and darkness, as light was waay too powerful for universal safety. In doing so, he jumped off the slippery slope, and ended up causing mass suffering to millions, as the darkness grew in strength. Success!
    • Also in the same game, The Fairy Godmother, in a conversation with Aqua seems to be a believer in this, in that one creates the other (Cinderella's "light" creating Lady Tremaine and the stepsisters' "darkness") and you can't have one without the other.
  • According to Word of God, the first Crash Bandicoot game was filled with symbolism about this.
  • In the late 80's rpg Dungeon Master, the backstory is that a magical experiment gone awry separated The Grey Wizard into Lord Chaos and Lord Librasulus (obviously an order counterpart). The protagonist, the Wizard's now ethereal apprentice, has to guide a group of heroes to obtain the Firestaff (which caused the incident) for Lord Librasulus. However, on the way you find several scrolls about how dangerous the staff is in the wrong hands, how neither order nor chaos is truly balanced, and so on. If you take the staff back to Lord Librasulus, he rewards you... with death. Instead you have to complete the original experiment, then use the staff to trap Lord Chaos and fuse the two sides together into a balanced whole again.
  • In RuneScape, there are three major gods. One of law, one of chaos, and one of balance. This is a partial subversion in that law and chaos aren't necessarily good, and a different partial subversion in that neither is balance.
  • In MARDEK, this (in the variant of Balance Between Light and Dark) is the argument of Clavis and Qualna make against Rohoph, who is more on the side of bringing good to his homeworld. It is also a recurring theme in that chapter, as balance in general seems to be crucial to the peace between reptoids and Sun Temple priest, the Elemental Crystals to Belfan (the planet you're on), and the governments of both Belfan and Anshar (where Rohoph and Qualna are from). The irony is that though the Governance de Magi is villainous, Rohoph's Knight Templar tendencies are not much better. Indeed, Qualna comes off as an Only Sane Man, killed by a light-obsessed fanatic.
  • Deconstructed in the Rance Series. The balance is maintained by the Jerkass God, Ludo-Rathowm, to ensure that the eternal conflict between the two forces will cause pain and suffering. Why? For the Evulz.
    • Oh, and if either the forces of good or the forces of evil manage to defeat their enemy and Take Over the World, Ludo-Rathowm uses his angels to destroy all life and start anew. This actually happened when Dragons were the dominant race.
  • In the Myth series, the balance between good and evil is maintained by alternating which side rules the world as part of a great cycle. As of the events in Myth II: Soulblighter, the good guys seem to have finally broken the cycle.


Webcomics

  • In Dominic Deegan, early on, the viewers are made to believe that Order equates to good and Chaos to evil (the main character even believes he is supposed to be the "Champion" of law for awhile). We find out later, though, that neither is more inherently good than the other and both can be used for good or evil deeds; the main character, of course, is tasked with protecting the balance between them.
  • Parodied in Terror Island with the Unity.

Blue Unity: Imagine that the two halves of the universe rest on a giant seesaw.
First Folio: OK.
Yellow Unity: We hope that has made everything clear to you.

  • Subverted in Darths and Droids. It was prophesied that the chosen one would bring balance to the force. That is not a good thing.
    • This is a reference the the fan theory that Anakin brought balance to the Force by equalizing the number of Sith and Jedi, thus bringing it into numerical balance, as opposed to the "order instead of chaos" balance George Lucas says the prophecy refers to.

Web Original

  • In the Whateley Universe, Bladedancer has been given the mythical sword Destiny's Wave and is expected to be the "Handmaid of Balance". Even if that means she has to kill whoever or whatever is causing the imbalance between order and chaos.
    • Actually, it's not verified as 'order and chaos'. About all that's known is that previous Handmaidens have killed good men and bad. (A king who was making a Utopia, someone creating an army of demons.) Chou has, at least once, been assigned to kill an innocent person.
    • In the Merry stories, meanwhile, it's explicitly stated that the forces of Heaven and Hell are in fact careful to maintain a stalemate instead of engaging in an all-out war that might allow other interested parties to take advantage of any resulting moments of weakness. Or at least that's Satan's side of the story (God seems to be mostly ignoring Merry despite her technically being one of His knights, quite possibly because her soul already belongs to Sara/Kellith), but he does come across as reasonably honest in their conversations, if still not exactly nice.
  • The That Guy With The Glasses Top 9 Videogame music composers review (part 2) shows at the end a Light Paw in balance with a Dark (evil) Paw.
  • How to Write Badly Well recommends using this trope in the article Base Your Plot on Unsupported Assertions.
  • Ferret mythology in Tasakeru always ends badly if someone kills Death because of this trope.

Western Animation

  • In Jackie Chan Adventures, stronger enemies appeared after the first season because the heroes destroyed (instead of "sealing away") the villain of the first season. This kept happening until that first villain was revived and consequently sealed.
  • A more mundane example: in The Venture Brothers, evil is quite literally unionized, in the form of the Guild of Calamitous Intent; they have arrangements with the various law-enforcement agencies in order to secure non-interference, with the price of accepting certain restrictions on their activities, thus creating a sort of ersatz balance. When one side violates the agreements, retaliation by the other side is swift and brutal.
  • Aladdin: The Series had Al help out the weak, fearful Good half of a pair of supernatural brothers in the Far East (they're named Yin and Yang, obviously). Once the good brother actually stands up to evil, competent brother, they... merge into a white dragon that starts helping everybody and fixing everything.
  • The Fairly OddParents: It has recently been confirmed that there is one evil anti-fairy for every good fairy that exists. Why it took a full season from Poof's birth for Foop to be born is unknown.
  • Yin Yang Yo played this trope straight and surprisingly well: early on season 1, Yin and Yang got rid of their worst traits, Yin's bossiness and Yang's agression. Master Yo then said that everybody needs their good and bad traits to be complete, much to everybody's (viewers included) confusion. However, this action aslo led to the birth of Yuck, and Yin and Yang found that their bad traits helped them into being better warriors (Yin's bossiness helped her to come up with plans and strategies, and Yang's aggression gave him the motivation to fight).
  1. ↑ arguably, the definition of "evil" is "that which would better the world by its absence"
  2. ↑ Course, you could argue that since every Sammy victory was just her vanquishing the Evil introduced specifically to fight her in the first place by Pixy Misa, there should be no net gain in Good over Evil. But this is an Affectionate Parody of Magical Girl shows, so you really should relax.
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