It's also partly because stories in which everyone is generally good people and nothing really bad happens are boring. Not just in the dramatic sense of conflicts in such settings involving such characters being trivial, easily resolved, and temporary, but also in the critical sense -- it's difficult to impart meaning or convey deep emotion with stories about good people being decent to each other in a peaceful, ordinary setting.
A fluffy slice-of-life story can be a good palate cleanser in the same way that a glass of milk or a little bit of ginger can, but would you want to live your whole life eating nothing but ginger and drinking nothing but milk? That's not to say that there aren't places for genuinely good individuals in fiction, anything but. However, that is always going to be in the context of a generally good character playing off of less than good characters and situations or vice-versa.
On a somewhat related note, "good" cannot exist in a vacuum. It's a meaningless idea on its own in the same way that "cold" is meaningless without heat. Furthermore, there's the issue of nuance: stories about perfectly good, normal people in completely ordinary situations with no real conflict are just as jarring and unrealistic as the polar opposite, because real people and situations are nuanced; to use the old color metaphor nothing and no one is perfectly black and white, nor are they "grey"; everyone and everything is a rainbow, a panoply of different and often contradictory motivations, causes, emotions, and goals.
I know this is unfair to you but this is sort of the prime example of how people view anything that isn't dark and dismal.
As if white means fluffy clouds, and rainbows and no more traffic accidents.
Rather than... say...
The Liars Game Live Action Show
Where people are put into a game where they betray one another and put them into crippling lifelong debt.
It is a "Grey and White" show.
But really "Good" doesn't mean flawless... It means the person doesn't stoop. They are the beacon that chases away the darkness. 
A "Whole picture" isn't "shades of grey" a whole picture is when you have Black, White, and Grey together.
That's... pretty much half what I was saying, man. That good stories aren't homogeneous, and if they involve moral absolutes in characters, it's in the context of those characters interacting with people and situations which don't align with their own morality. The other half being that realistic characters and situations aren't "Good" or "Bad" or "X Parts Good, Y Parts Bad," which is what the use of 'grey' in reference to black and white morality tends to imply. People aren't perfectly consistent, they don't fit into a neat place on some morality slider bar in everything they do; likewise, the morality of a situation or decision is highly contextual and tends to vary based on the morality and ethics of the individual observing it.
I
will assert that any character who can be accurately described as always acting as if their actions really were pegged to a specific place on a sliding scale from capital-G Good to capital-E Evil, regardless of where they fall, is not a realistic person. They may function perfectly well as a character despite this, of course, but there's always going to be something off about them. The best characters, particularly
viewpoint characters, are ones with realistic -- which is to say varied and not necessarily consistent -- behavior. Batman is a more interesting and compelling character than Superman not because he is darker or less straightforwardly "good", but because he is more human. He has meaningful faults, virtues, turning points, and attempts to maintain an ethical code which makes sense to him as a person, rather than in the context of external judgements.
Characters who are uniformly heroic, well-intended, and good-for-the-sake-of-good are just as horribly boring as characters who are uniformly evil, malicious, and evil-for-the-sake-of-evil. The only thing worse than that is either a character who is evil or good because the plot demands it -- that is, because the person writing them is so lazy that they have to make their characters act in accordance with the actions necessary to advance the plot, rather than what their knowledge and personality would lead them to do. On a note related to superheroes, this is one of the central failings of Worm as a story: characters made stupid decisions because the plot needs to advance and the story needs to be grimderp, not because they're legitimately that stupid and socially inept, and the inconsistency tends to be handwaved as "Oh, it's just their shards fucking with their heads and driving them towards conflict."
It's also why so much of 40K fiction is utter dross, because so many people enjoy writing it exactly as it's generally portrayed, where every character in every faction is some shade of evil, stupid, and dogmatic (or shining pure good, if you buy the lines sold by various propaganda departments, but especially the one that gets certain people all hot and bothered over the smurfs and everyone's favorite Spiritual Liege). It's why Abnett's novels are among the most popular and Rogue Trader is as successful as it is: they're more nuanced and interesting both in terms of the overall setting used and the specific characters involved in the plots.
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14517423 times)