Good Victims, Bad Victims

A morality trope about the arbitrary distinctions writers make between certain sorts of victims. If a character in fiction has a problem or ailment or social situation, and the creators intend him to be sympathetic, the character will have acquired the problem in the most socially acceptable way. If the character isn't sympathetic, then he will have contracted the illness through "your own damn fault".

Situation	Good	Bad
Rape	chaste woman, young child	promiscuous woman, male
Unemployment	Laid off, displaced	never hired, fired regardless of circumstances
AIDS	in-utero, transfusion	sex, shared drug needles
Cancer	hazardous worker, accidental toxin exposure	smoker
Abortion	response to rape, something seriously wrong with the baby (as in, it could die within its first year of life)	response to casual sex, pregnancy could harm the mother but not the baby
Disaster	Absolutely unforeseen, at least by the general populace, new, not result of victim action	Foreseen by everyone but willingly ignored, known hazard, victims caused or contributed
Homelessness	Sudden and absolutely unforeseeable disaster, Domestic Abuse, war	Personal financial problems/unemployment, mental illness, drug addiction
Drug Addiction	as a result of prescribed medication	as a result of illegal drugs
Becoming a social outcast	Society itself is a Dystopia, one can prove extreme talent	Disagreement with anything short of a Dystopia, being a loner, Values Dissonance
Vampirism	in-utero, transfusion	bitten, voluntary
Lyncanthropy	bitten	inherited, voluntary
Superpowers	accident, experiment	inherited, voluntary
Murder	innocent child, Token Wholesome	Asshole Victim, Disposable Sex Worker

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Note that, to an extent, this trope can be justified. A person who gets carpal tunnel syndrome from writing a Nobel prize winning novel is a bit different from someone who gets it playing World of Warcraft is a bit different from someone who gets it by spending too much time whipping slaves. Where the Unfortunate Implications crop up is that most of the time, the moral gulf between the good victim and the bad victim is nowhere near that extreme.

See also Good Flaws, Bad Flaws. Compare the varying media standards between Hitmen and Assassins (both in Career Killers). Also see the difference between High Class Call Girl and Disposable Sex Worker.

No Real Life examples, please, as they are just an invitation to an Edit War.

Examples of Good Victims, Bad Victims include:

Comic Books

• Blade: The main character is a heroic half-vampire who contracted it not in the normal way (being bitten) but in-utero when his pregnant mother was bitten. Victims of bites are uniformly evil.
• Mutants in the X-Men mythos are feared and despised by having natural powers, yet people like Spider-Man and Mr. Fantastic are loved by the public, even though the only difference is that they got their powers in accidents.
  • This is a bit of an oversimplification — nearly all heroes in the Marvel Universe have been hunted by the authorities at one point or another, though admittedly, only mutants are (nearly) always despised simply for being mutants.
  • Mostly because newer writers keep forcing thinly-veiled social allegory into the X-Men series, whereas writers from other superhero comics are more preoccupied with creating entertaining storylines.

Literature

• This article discusses this trope as related to AIDS in the 1990s.
• Anita Blake: Most of the shapeshifters contracted lycanthropy from an attack by a were-whatever, making them the survivors of a vicious attack. Only a very few chose the life voluntarily.
• Wild Cards has Aces and Jokers — they have the same virus, but their reception by the public varies based on which manifestation of it they got. And they're not written necessarily sympathetically if they're pretty aces, or hatefully if they're deformed jokers either.
• In the James Bond novel Goldfinger, Bond dislikes Pussy Galore's lesbianism until she tells him she was abused by her Creepy Uncle. So apparently (in the 1950s at least), lesbianism by choice was bad but lesbianism because of previous abuse by men was OK.
• Two Weeks With the Queen is surprisingly tolerant in this regard--even the gay man with AIDs is treated sympathetically.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of Brass Eye invokes this when the host of a chat show completely changes his attitude toward a guest when he discovers the guest has "Bad AIDS" (caught from homosexual sex) rather than "Good AIDS" (caught from a blood transfusion) as the host had previously thought. Seen here.
• Sesame Street: Kami is a Muppet character from the South African version of the show who has AIDS, which she caught from a blood transfusion, despite this in reality consisting of only 2.5% of transmissions in sub-Saharan Africa. She, evidently, has "Good AIDS".
  • More like: "The only kind of AIDS you could get away with talking to small children about"
  • Actually, Kami contracted AIDS in-utero. Her mother died of AIDS and now she lives with a human foster mother. One sketch had Kami telling her friends that she missed her mother sometimes and how she deals with grief.

Video Games

• The demon-allied orcs of Warcraft 1 and 2 are revealed to be a peaceful shamanistic race in the backstory to Warcraft 3, as after the Horde's defeat, they lost their permanent rage. Thrall, seeking to reunite them with their roots, allies with Grom Hellscream (one of the original chieftains of their homeworld). Grom ends up being repossesed by the demons, but reveals that (most of) the chieftains gave themselves to the corruption willingly. Thrall, who is understandably more than a little pissed to hear this, brings Grom back and kicks the ass of the Pit Lord responsible for the corruption.

Fandom

• In the Ace Attorney fandom, Miles Edgeworth and Nahyuta Sadmahdi are both prosecutors who behave coldly and sometimes cruelly towards the leading defense attorney, but their behavior is the result of conditioning by a toxic mentor who wrecked their life: Edgeworth was taken in and raised by Manfred von Karma, while Nahuyta was tutored by Ga'ran Sigatar Khura'in, both of whom served as the Big Bad for their respective games. However, von Karma is the one who killed a young Edgeworth's father, while an adult Nahyuta chose to be The Mole for the Defiant Dragons and was caught by Ga'ran. Therefore, fandom sees Edgeworth as a victim of circumstance while calling Nahyuta "stupid" for "walking into the lions' den".
• Both Edelgard von Hresvelg and Lady Rhea in Fire Emblem: Three Houses suffered the traumatizing losses of their families and walk extremist paths because of it: Edelgard watched all of her siblings die as they were experimented on by those who slither in the dark, and Rhea is the only surviving child of the murdered Sothis. But Edelgard refuses to weep for her losses and chooses to walk a bloody path to changing the toxic status quo that caused them in the first place, while Rhea rode the waves of her grief and obsessively tried to keep Fodlan's peace to soothe her broken heart. Edelgard is called a bitch and a nazi, while Rhea is treated as The Woobie.
  • Similarly, Dimitri is the sole survivor of a massacre that killed his father and is unstable as a result, clinging to his grief and refusing to let go of the past. Fandom coddles him as a victim, while bashing Edelgard for "not acting the way a victim should."
  • Of course, this goes both ways. Some Edelgard fans do see her as a poor little victim who nobly hides her suffering, and is therefore always correct in what she does. Rhea, on the other hand, is bashed as "crazy" and "a two-faced bitch who held back society" and Dimitri is derided as a memetic psychopath or called a hypocrite for trying to right his wrongs once he comes to his senses.
  • Annette Fantine Dominic and Bernadetta von Varley both have massive issues with their fathers: the former's abandoned her due to his perceived failure as a knight and not wanting to tarnish her and her mother's reputations, while the latter's mentally abused her to make her behave the way he wanted her to. Because Annette is cheerful and her sad moments are outwardly woobie-ish and don't cause problems for others, fans coddle her and heap all the blame on Gilbert, demonizing him as the worst father ever. Because Bernadetta displays the ugly side of victimhood and her issues do cause problems for others that need to be addressed, fandom hates her and refuses to acknowledge her as an abuse victim, or accuses her of "overreacting because it wasn't that bad." Worse? Annette can make up with her father and mitigate their problems, while Bernadetta's father never changes or tries to mend things with her.