Evil Counterpart Race

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Pictured: The general Drow (Dark Elf) greeting reserved for Surface Elves in The Forgotten Realms.

Two races, one Always Lawful Good and one Exclusively Evil, which are specifically counterparts of each other. Essentially an Evil Counterpart on a species wide scale, and related to Cain and Abel and other sibling rivalry tropes.

While Elves vs. Dwarves is about Harmony Versus Discipline, this is about good and evil, at least from the elves' point of view. Often subverted by a Defector From Decadence or deconstructed when it's discovered that the 'good' race is Not So Harmless, or the evil one has a case of My Species Doth Protest Too Much (or is merely dark and not evil).

Examples of Evil Counterpart Race include:

Comic Books

  • Green Martians like the Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onnz are wise, peaceful, and obscenely powerful(with one exception: Omnicidal Maniac and Evil Cripple Malefic). White Martians have all the powers of their green cousins, but are monstrously evil (with, to date, a single exception).
  • Daxamites are descended from Kryptonian colonists, and gain the same powers at the same levels when exposed to the light of a yellow sun (though they're vulnerable to lead instead of kryptonite). Unlike Superman, Supergirl, Power Girl and other Kryptonian heroes, though, Daxamites are rabidly xenophobic, to the point of murdering an alien who accidentally crashed on their planet, When a Korugarian Green Lantern helped liberate them from an alien conqueror, they merely demanded she leave the planet rather than killing her, as a show of gratitude. This really bites them in ass when the Sinestro Corps invaded.

Film

  • The urRu and the Skeksis of The Dark Crystal. They're actually the good and evil halves of the same species.

Literature

  • In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the pilot of a prototype time machine discovers himself in AD 802,701, where humans have apparently evolved into two species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi are childlike, harmless people preyed upon by the Morlocks.
    • In the original novel this was depicted as necessary symbiosis, since the Eloi can't live without the Morlocks running the machinery that keeps their home so idyllic. It's a major Take That at the late Victorian society where few aristocrats could enjoy luxuries of "natural" lifestyle at the cost of thousands of workers living in squalid, artifical conditions for all their lives. Today, similar comparisons could be drawn between the developed countries and the Third World.
    • The Eloi incidentally aren't "good", but useless and childish, beautiful but meaningless. This has been heavily Flanderized in the subsequent adaptions that omit the Downer Ending.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, many monster species were evil counterparts literally created from good races:
    • Elves -> Orcs
    • Men -> Uruk-hai
    • Ents -> Trolls
  • Not a race but rather a religion, the Honor Harrington series has the two worlds which follow "The Church of Humanity Unchained:" Grayson, which is mostly just "heavily conservative", and Masada, which is violently misogynistic to the point of Complete Monsterdom. It was an ugly schism.

Live-Action TV

  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is an extreme case where Bele acts as if Lokai is a member of an Exclusively Evil race, despite it clearly being a case of Grey and Gray Morality from the crew's point of view.
    • Also in Star Trek, the Romulans to the Vulcans.
    • In the Original Series, the Klingons to Humans.
    • Within The Federation's Evil Counterpart, The Dominion.
      • The Changelings to The Prophets
      • The Vorta to Bajorans
      • The Jem'hadar to the Klingons.
      • The Dominion arc also introduced two profit driven races, the Dosi, evil counterparts to the ferengi, and the Karemma, who are good counterparts!
    • Not forgetting the Pah-wraiths to the Prophets.
  • Stargate SG-1 had the Goa'uld vs. Tok'ra and the Ori vs. Ancients. In both cases the good race operated behind the scenes (the Tok'ra worked as spies and saboteurs since they lacked the numbers and the means to replenish them, and only a couple Ancients even tried to circumvent their self-imposed non-interference laws) while the bad race went around shouting "Worship me!"

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • Angels and fallen angels/demons in a lot of Works, though in the The Bible they're the same species, just on different sides.
  • Subverted in Islam. The Devil (called 'Iblis') and humankind are fated to be enemies, but the descendants of the Devil—the Djinns—have free will just like humans, they can choose to be good or to be evil, thus they aren't human's Evil Counterpart Race. Of note is that they aren't counterpart to angels either, because Iblis was never an angel to begin with.

Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons has a habit of doing this for everyone, creating evil (and occasionally good) counterpart races for just about everything:
    • Elves vs. Drow.
    • Dwarves vs. Derro and Duergar.
    • Aasimar and Tieflings in the 3rd edition.
    • Chromatic (evil) and metallic (good) dragons in many D&D settings—especially Dragonlance, where the chromatic dragons were corrupted versions of the original good dragons.
    • Subverted with the Svirfneblin, the Deep Gnomes from the Underdark, the home of the drow. They aren't evil (generally neutral, actually), but certainly can be considered 'dark gnomes'.
    • "The Book of Vile Darkness" gives us Jerren for Halflings and Vashar, who are a race of purely evil humans.
  • Warhammer Fantasy has both High Elves vs. Dark Elves (with both being highly magical naval oriented empires who hate each others guts...) Oh, and incidentally humans usually can't tell them apart... And the dwarfish counterpart Chaos Dwarves (who are even more greedy than the regular variant) arguably the Vampire Counts also serve as a twisted reflection of Empire society, and the Beastmen serve a similar role for the Wood Elves.
    • The bit about humans' difficulty in telling High and Dark Elves apart is odd, because their visual designs pretty much scream good guys and bad guys respectively.
  • Dark Eldar in Warhammer 40,000. Although the Craftworld Eldar aren't exactly nice guys either.
    • The Eldar and the Necrons.

Video Games

  • In the Warcraft games, Night Elves are not especially fond of High Elves, and are downright hostile to Blood Elves. In addition, Gnomes vs. Goblins, and Humans vs. Orcs. The Gnomes vs. Goblins is more of a rivalry than outright hostility, though. And indeed, orcs are not as evil as they look. And while blood elves are part of the horde, they actually look more like humans than the night elves themselves.
    • Forsaken of course can be considered a dark counterpart to humans, since they’re undead, The human group Scarlet Crusade (the nemesis of the Forsaken) are the true villains, however, basically. Though they aren’t wrong to oppose the Scourge. The Minotaurs (or rather Tauren) can be considered less frosty versions of the dwarves.
    • There are also specific subraces like the Dark Iron Dwarves (generally same look but black skin) or the several kinds of trolls opposing the Darkspear tribe that belongs to the Horde. And in Northrend there are several races heavily implied or outright stated to be the original of the player races, which developed on their own over time.
    • Way back in Warcraft II trolls served as the Evil Counterpart Race for the Elves (before the High Elf/Blood Elf split and before we knew of the Night Elves), both races providing the main ranged unit and light naval craft for their respective factions.
  • The Warlords games, as well as having High Elves and Dark Elves, has Dwarves and Dark Dwarves, the former being the typical ale-swilling axe-bearers, the latter being industrial Mad Scientists.
  • In Dragon Age, The Darkspawn are created when a female of a race -- Human, Elf, Qunari or Dwarf -- is captured and turned into a Broodmother and spawns them. Each race has a Darkspawn equivalent that is born of the Broodmother of that race- Human Broodmothers produce Hurlocks, Dwarves produce Genlocks, Elves produce Shrieks, and Qunari produce Ogres. Darkspawn, indeed.
  • A lot of Digimon species are Evil Counterparts to other species:
    • Devimon to Angemon.
    • Deathmon and Demon to Seraphimon
    • Lilithmon to Ophanimon
    • Kuwagamon to Kabuterimon.
    • Tsukaimon to Patamon
  • Goombas to Toads in the Super Mario franchise.

Web Comics

  • Averted/Subverted/Deconstructed in Drowtales, as explained in the no-longer-canon guide here.

Western Animation

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