An Arguably Bad Dragon

If the cliche doesn't immediately trigger your gag reflex, allow me to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but so is what's good and what's evil. I'm of the group that believes that there is no true good or evil, only a subjective middle ground, a group that seems painfully partial to using the trite descriptor of 'grey' to describe said middle ground. Seriously, people, get more creative with that sort of thing. Who says good is white and evil is black? Why can't good be orange and evil green? Then you would have a putrid brown instead of grey. Let's not be inclusive or afraid to venture out into the big, wide world of color options, folks. There's a whole color wheel out there just waiting for us to assign virtues to them. Personally, I think good should be purple, but that's all beside the point.

Good and evil are subjective in that it's subjective as to whether or not a certain action is either good or bad. As stated earlier, what's good and what's evil is in the eye of the beholder. Now, unless the villain of a particular work is of the type to do bad things just for the sake of being bad, it's all a matter of perspective. Let's use the generic example of a knight saving a princess from a dragon to elaborate on this. The dragon has kidnapped the princess and plans on eating her and the knight has to go save her. We as the audience are meant to be able to relate to and therefore side with the knight, the 'good guy', on his quest to rescue the princess from the 'bad guy', the dragon. If we look at things from the dragon's point of view, however, who is presumably not chortling about how evil he is like so many cliche villains do, all he wants is something to eat, and princesses, as we all know, are good eatin'. Who can blame him? From the dragon's perspective, he's not doing anything wrong - it's the knight who's the evildoer here, coming to slay him just for wanting to eat a snack. So, it's all just a matter of whose side you're looking at.

Another example is that a crime can be seen as either good or evil. Say two people got into an argument and one of them stabbed the other. One onlooker might say the action of stabbing was 'evil', due to it being uncalled for and over the top violence, while someone else (the stabber included) might believe the attack to be completely justified. After all, the person they stabbed was arguing and disagreeing with them. It's all just really a matter of opinion and perspective.

So, no, there is no 'true' good or evil. Some actions may be considered truly evil or truly good by some people, but they can just as easily be seen as the opposite or somewhere in between by another person - or, in some cases, dragon.