"Goodies" and "baddies."

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I've been watching TV shows / movies with my relatives again and am really sick of this simplistic judgement.
Once I was aware of its example in one area, I was very surprised to find that people actually think in this simple dualistic fashion in other instances in real life, too.
To me even in light fictional examples like movies it is not this simple. Characters often have competing ideologies - they behave in a certain way in accordance with their own problems, desires, beliefs and goals. If well written, the reason behind the characters motivations are understandable to the audience, and we can watch the drama that arises out of this situation of conflicting ideals. A character in any movie rarely behaves "badly" just to be "bad" and screw everyone else up, no other reasoning behind it. If they did, it wouldn't be very compelling.
I may not personally believe these actions are correct or they reflect what I would do, but that's not the point. It's just a movie. I often don't agree with the "goodies" methodology either. Again, irrelevant.
But watching TV with a relative who was trying to follow the storyline, I was asked "so he's a baddie, right?"
I had no idea what they meant. The character seemed to be acting out of clearly defined motivations with an understandable backstory. "Baddie" as compares to what? What criteria is being used to judge this?
TV is one thing, but incredibly this is used to refer to real people. Commonly among the rednecks here, "bad Muslims." This is to deferentiate between terrorists using Islam to wage war, and those "normal" Muslim people who wish to practice peacefully. This is the criteria. I don't even bother trying to point out that even terrorists have reasons.
They also apply this absolute "goodie / baddie" attitude to people as a whole, because they have perceived one action taken by that person as "bad" without bothering to consider the person's basis for this action, and it therefore makes that person "bad" themselves, even when not undertaking bad actions. They apply it to whole countries, relying on their heavily biased media to judge whole swaths of this planet and its people as "bad places." Their own countries or more narrowly their situations and themselves are judged "good."
I just don't get it. I may personally judge an action to be incorrect or unethical, but blanket "good" and "bad" rarely come into it, which is odd considering people accuse autistics of "black and white thinking." It seems to me that they are thinking in simplistic absolutes, not me.
Just another part of neurotypical thinking I just don't understand.

I don't think a lot of people think that way. "Bad Muslims" I think would simply be another way of saying hostile or enemy or dangerous Muslims. Regardless of whether they are "bad" or not, they still need to be dealt with in the same way.

The thing about who's the "goodie" and who's the "baddie" I think comes from the older generation being brought up on films and TV being made with that simple clear cut design. Entertainment seems to be increasingly moving away from that today.

Drake... who are the 'bad Americans', again? It's all relative.

C2V, it seems that people think the first-person could possibly be the font of 'good'... not anorexics or cutters or people who commit suicide, presumably, but the average person not in any altered state has this weird drive that is sourced straight from the amygdala. In movies watchers spend most of their time following a certain cast, so typically the 'villains' have less screen time, and as they usually have opposing goals people think simplistically. This is probably why I find Western movies boring, as they tend to be the most dichotomous despite violence being omnipresent, and probably prefer anime due to none of this being obvious, although shounen tends to veer towards simplicity. Natsume e.g. (my avatar) encounters ayakashi (monsters), but that doesn't lead to any typical battle or another, as often conversation solves a conflict and a compromise is reached.