Grey Zone

The"Grey Zone" is for morally-ambiguous orTrue Neutral individuals, partners in crime, families, teams, cults, gangs, imperialists, hostile species, corporations and organizations. They can beOn & Off villains,Anti-Villains,Protagonists,Villains by Proxy,scapegoats,Anti-Heroes, or a combination of all these. The main characteristic of a person or group in the "Grey Zone" is that some will consider them dangerous, criminal or "evil" while others may see them as good, or fighting for the right thing (even if their methods are wrong).Some characters in fiction are deliberately designed to be in theTrue Neutral and it is up to the reader, viewer or audience in total to decide if they are a "hero" or a "villain". As a result, each reader or viewer will probably have a different view of the character.Joel Miller andV are two classic examples.

Many Grey Zone characters are such because they areenigmatic, as their moral standing is difficult to evaluate for one reason or another. The enigmatic element can range fromLovecraftian horrors who possess alien morality (e.g.SCP-2521), characters whose personalities and motivations are either ambiguous or completely unknown (e.g.The Entity), to characters whose identity is unknown and open to interpretation (e.g.Third Killer).

The most unique case about Grey Zone characters is that they aren't beholden to good nor evil and they can also be responsible for keeping both moralities in balance, namely both good and evil. However, on the other side of the coin is that they can seek to redeem characters as much as benevolent characters do and they can also seek to put an end to ongoing conflicts and peacefully end them.

On very rare cases, characters who are truly neutral also do exist and, examples of that are personifications ofDeath,Truth fromFullmetal Alchemist, andZen-oh fromDragon Ball Super.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Villains that arePure Evil can NEVER be in this category, for they remain completely irredeemable, whereas the Grey Zone belongs to morally ambiguous characters. Neutral alignment Pure Evil villains should instead fall underNeutral Evil. Even if "grey villains" commit crimes heinous enough to cross the Moral Event Horizon, there is usually an understandable reason behind said act. For instance, inHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,Severus Snape murders Albus Dumbledore on the Astronomy Tower, but then it later turns out that Dumbledore was already dying from the Marvolo Gaunt's ring curse anyway and begged Snape to give him a mercy killing.Also do NOT include villains who have clear moral agencies and are irredeemable, EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT PURE EVIL.

Also, relatable villains such astragiccharacters can count unless they are simply evil anyway (Kaneki Ken,Reiner Braun). Furthermore,redeemedvillains do not necessarily count unless said character was morally ambiguous before their eventual redemption (e.g.Catwoman,Kuvira, andAjunta Pall).

See Also[]

• True Neutral on theHeroes Wiki