Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

Custom Search

"Peace through tyranny."

"To instill fear is to instill order. Our order."

Lawful Evil comes in two flavours. The first is an evil villain who either believes in keeping order at all costs, or that it's much easier to become ruler of the world by exploiting the existing system than by tearing it down and starting anew. If the villain is supreme ruler of their realm, then they are probably either Lawful Evil or The Caligula. This is the canonical alignment of devils in Dungeons And Dragons.

Lawful evil can be the most dangerous alignment because it represents methodical, intentional, and frequently successful evil.

The second type is a baddie with a code of honour that prevents them from doing truly heinous things. The second type tends to either perform a Heel Face Turn or suffer death by redemption. These tend to be reliable allies in an Enemy Mine situation where alignments would fizzle out.

A variety are evil characters who don't care if what they do is "heinous" or "horrible", but who will always follow certain rules. Such characters are, for example: A gangster who would kill anyone who crosses him—except, say, kids, and never forget a favour he owes; or a psycho who hunts people for fun but always gives a fair warning; or a villain whose word is absolutely binding; or any kind of evil character that might deliver a Hannibal Lecture that borders on Mind Rape but Will Not Tell A Lie. Or a character who does, without flinching, anything their master orders them to do, anything, because their one rule is absolute obedience.
Still, turning hero is the farthest thing from any of these characters' minds.

An Obstructive Bureaucrat may be Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil, depending on how much they enjoy what they do. A Lawful Evil bureaucrat will take perverse pleasure in strangling the heroes with red tape and burying them in as much paperwork as possible, while a Lawful Neutral version will simply insist that everything has to be done by the book.

The first type includes characters such as the:

Characters of the second type include:

Examples

When dealing with the examples of specific characters, remember that assigning an alignment to a character who doesn't come with one is pretty subjective. If you've got a problem with a character being listed here, it probably belongs on the discussion page.

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 

    Film 

    Folk Lore 

    Literature 

    Live Action TV 

    Professional Wrestling 

    Tabletop Games 

    Video Games 

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 

    Newspaper comics 

    Real Life