Shades of Conflict

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Main
  • Wikipedia
  • All Subpages
  • Create New
    /wiki/Shades of Conflictwork

    "Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"

    Colonel Corazon Santiago, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

    Conflict is the driving force of nearly any story. It provides suspense, action, adventure, conversation, contemplation, development and football hooligans.

    With that in mind, it's inevitable that the combinations of conflict will be well charted and mapped. A fight may be between a too-good-to-stand hero more wholesome than Mom and apple pie and a serial bank robber who uses a gun that turns things into gold, or a pair of teenaged brothers who like the same girl, but there is a certain tenor to the conflict that goes hand in hand with whether or not one of the participants is, in fact, a horrible person. Maybe there are actions that can be taken against Those Wacky Nazis that would be extreme against the Well-Intentioned Extremist. Maybe the Knight Templar goes about his war in a different way than the Dark Messiah. The stakes are certainly higher when The Hero is up against an Omnicidal Maniac rather than an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, and so the tension is heightened.

    In any case, morality is a big part of conflict and with morality, the shades of black, white and grey that a story carries with it. Remember, though, just as Light Is Not Good and Dark Is Not Evil, it is the actions of the people involved rather than their image that determines whether they are Good People, Bad People or Guess It Doesn't Matter People.

    Compare Good and Evil For Your Convenience.

    Not to be confused with Cool Shades, though those may be involved somewhere.

    Zapp Brannigan: Prepare to continue the epic struggle between Good and Neutral!

    Also not to be confused with Red vs. Blue (which technically falls under Grey vs. Grey, since the characters are all Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists); or for that matter with Green Versus Purple (which is generally Grey vs Gray or even White Vs White - the point is there's no good reason for the conflict). The names of the kinds of conflicts listed above probably comes from the convention that Light Is Good and Dark Is Evil. Contrast No Antagonist. See also Alike and Antithetical Adversaries.