Lawful Stupid Chaotic Stupid - Television Tropes & Idioms

Always consider alignment as a tool, not a straitjacket that restricts the character.
— Oft-forgotten sentence from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition Player's Handbook

A character who does things that don't make any sense, just because it's a "good" or "evil" thing to do. It's not that they've lost their goal — they're actually true to their good or evil alignment, but at the cost of every survival mechanism developed by humanity.

This goes way beyond being a Slave To PR or Card Carrying Villain. Nor is any of these characters a Knight Templar. A Knight Templar is not Lawful Stupid, but rather Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil - with fanatical devotion to the word of law and absolutely no concern for the spirit.

For more on Lawful Stupid and Chaotic Stupid, check out the LJ post by The Ferrett

in which he introduced the terms. However, note that his definition of Chaotic Stupid is closer to our usage of Stupid Evil.

Alignments covered as sub-tropes include:

Note: this page is currently undergoing editing to split it into separate pages. Please put new examples on each alignment's page, and not here.

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Examples of Chaotic Stupid / Stupid Evil

Tabletop Games

The old World of Darkness games had at least one faction in every playable race that was frequently chosen by players of Stupid Evil or Chaotic Stupid characters. These groups had a tendency towards extreme violence, madness, and generally being Darker And Edgier than the other factions of that race. Whether or not these factions were inherently Stupid Evil or Chaotic Stupid is debatable, depending on how awesome you believe a given faction to be.
- Vampire: Any member of the Sabbat for Stupid Evil, especially the faux-transhumanist Tzimisce. The Malkavian Clan was pretty much only ever played as Chaotic Stupid, as players went out of their way to play "wacky" insane people. One of the most notorious, a character that would only say the word "fish", led to the term "fishmalk" for any such character.
- Werewolf: The Black Spiral Dancers, and Werewolf-related entities like the Fomori.
- Mage: The Nephandi for Stupid Evil, Marauders for Chaotic Stupid. Curiously, the more popular choice over both was the Lawful Stupid Technocracy.
  - They got better when they got their own sourcebook. The basic game is told from the Traditions' point of view; an Alternate Character Interpretation could be the silly Traditionalists are fighting a pointless rearguard battle against the rationalism that will liberate humanity from the dominion of superstition and unwholesome supernatural puppetmasters. Or this could be what the reader wants to believe about the Technocracy, thus proving the whole point about debateability related to perceived awesomeness.
- The fanmade gameline Genius The Transgression is about Mad Scientists, so obviously this trope crops up every once in a while.
Warhammer 40000 has examples of this one, too.
- The forces of Chaos (appropriately enough) make some pretty questionable tactical decisions from time to time, including sacrificing hundreds of their own cultists for purely symbolic reasons (as opposed to sacrificing hundreds of cultists for perfectly practical reasons, like summoning daemons, bigger daemons, and really really big daemons to attack their opponents). In addition, infighting between various Chaos factions has spelled the ruin of more than one attack on the Imperium.
  - They aren't united at all. The chaos gods find fighting each other more interesting than truly deswtroying the imperium.
  - Many of them also seem to have a tendency to kill, maim, rape and burn random people just for the hell of it. If you're very lucky, they'll do it in that order; of course, in the grim darkness of the far future, you are never that lucky.
  - A particular example: Kharn the Betrayer is such a bloodthirsty, frothing Ax Crazy that even his fellow Ax Crazies don't want to get anywhere near him. This is because he has a tendency to slaughter friend and foe alike when his blood is up. At one point, when the World Eaters (Kharn's legion of Chaos Space Marines) were attacking an enemy force of Emperor's Children (another Legion of Chaos Space Marines), a blizzard so terrible even the genetically-enhanced and daemonically-powered Super Soldiers couldn't take it descended and forced both sides to retreat into shelter. In a fit of rage, Kharn burned the World Eaters' shelters to the ground and proceeded to run around in a psychotic frenzy, slaughtering anyone that came within chainsaw-axe range. The World Eaters suffered such horrendous casualties (mostly self-inflicted) that they were never again able to take the field as a unified fighting force, and are now reduced to fighting alongside other Chaos warbands as shock troops. This is represented in the tabletop game by Kharn's special rules: if you roll poorly to hit in close combat, where any other character would simply miss, Kharn instead hits someone on his own side.
  - Despite this, by all accounts he's a pretty fun guy.
  - Don't forget diverting shock troops in extremely rare and strong armour, even by space marine standards, from a strategically important battle to take out an enemy propaganda station run by a dozen unarmed monks, then annihilating it from orbit while the shocktroops are still inside. Chaos commanders seem to have a collective inferiority complex or something.
- The Orks also tend to dip into Chaotic Stupid territory a lot, mostly due to their biological and psychological need to fight constantly and be generally belligerent. One particularly egregious example involved an Ork warlord with a burgeoning WAAAGH! behind him, whose fleet got caught in a temporal loop and arrived back where it started, before it actually left in the first place. The warlord proceeded to track down and kill his past self, "reasoning" that this would allow him to own two copies of his favorite gun. The time paradox and general chaos that resulted stopped the whole WAAAGH! dead in its tracks.
- Dark Eldar love torturing stuff. Technically, they do have a reason, as they do it so that an evil god their ancestors ended up creating won't eat their souls, but let's face it, they just love torturing people for fun (especially when you consider that doing stuff like that created the thing in the first place). So much so, in fact, that their vehicles are designed for swooping in, grabbing prisoners, and zooming off into the sunset at the expense of all else — including armor and crew & passenger protection, though not necessarily firepower.
- While the Monodominants are traditionally the Lawful Stupid faction of the Inquisition, the Recongregators and Istvaanians tend to find themselves in Chaotic Stupid territory from time to time. Recongregators believe that the Imperium has grown corrupt and ineffectual, and needs to be reorganized and revolutionized in order to survive. Istvaanians believe that the Imperium's greatest leaps forward have all stemmed from conflict, and actively seek to promote conflict and discord in the name of strengthening the Imperium. Both of them typically end up wreaking all sorts of havoc and generally destabilizing the Imperial system — which, bear in mind, is the only thing standing between humanity and a galaxy full of hostile aliens and daemons waiting to feast on its corpse. Needless to say, many other Inquisitors find the actions of the more extremist Recongregators and Istvaanians to be very disconcerting.

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Video Games

Lilarcor from Baldur's Gate II is evil stupid personified, seeking only to kill everything the party meets — and he's a sentient sword, with a personality apparently based on a fantastically stupid hick, which fortunately means he's incapable of doing anything on his own.
- But then, when all you are is a sword, all problems look like stab victims.
  Lilarcor: I don't know what you were expecting, but as a sword I'm pretty one-dimensional in what I want.
Mass Effect is a notable exception to the "evil or equivalent is always Chaotic Stupid" tendency in CRPGs. The evil-equivalent options tend more towards I Did What I Had To Do or even Lawful Stupid. Even things as subtle as taking a more aggressive or reckless tack in conversations can earn you a few points for it. You do tend to have to kill more people on this route, but you tend to kill them because it's the most expedient route or "lawful" option, while the good-equivalent emphasizes restraint, helping those in need, and finding a peaceful and equitable solution whenever possible.
- On the same key as KotOR II, however, the "evil bastard" actions just make you a complete bastard rather than Chaotic Stupid.
- It's also worth noting that very frequently the Renegade options will also result in a non-violent outcome to a potentially violent situation, but achieved through outright intimidation rather than more gentle persuasion.
- Mass Effect still has plenty of Lawful/Chaotic Stupidity. Sure, the renegade path is often taken because it's the most expedient. Renegade? Congratulation, you're a Cowboy Cop In Space with a license to kill, too bad you're a speciesist. A purely Paragon character is so strongly on the idealist side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism that it's jarring to the other player characters in the game.
  - However, since you can gain Paragon points without losing Renegade points and vice versa, you can be (and probably will end up being) a bit of both.
Neverwinter Nights (and its related expansions) works like this when it comes to the Good/Evil alignment axis. It's almost impossible to gain evil points unless you kill anyone who looks at you a little bit funny, regardless of the number of witnesses or your own personal credo. Meanwhile, performing any kind of altruistic act — even for nefarious or selfish purposes — will have you racking up the Good points.
- Unfortunately, this is one of the major weaknesses of alignment in NWN, in that most characters end up as dog-kicking evil, or good. Almost no subtle, selfish evil, and it's very hard to maintain a neutral character over a long (series) of modules.
  - Well, there is one way — set up a one-room module of your own with a lever that pulls you closer to neutral (it can be done with the right coding), load it up, pull the lever, and save your character. This is, however, cheating.
In Neverwinter Nights 2 original campaign, you find a sorceress named Qara as a companion. She's Chaotic Neutral according to her alignment, but she could fool you. All of her actions, every single one of her words and absolutely any dialog options you have with her that makes her like you better are outright Chaotic Stupid AND Stupid Evil. If you're True Neutral you'll learn to dread your conversations with her very quickly, as all options always gives a bunch of points towards any of the extremes or alignment, giving or taking also a bunch of influence with her. With no middle terms.
- Which is quite odd, considering that Sand, a wizards you can get to follow you and is the exact opposite of Qara for most things, is a much better character. He is Lawful Neutral, but understands the law is no absolute. He is a jerk most of the times, but devotes himself for your trial in order to take a few punches at bigger jerks. And his opinion is that it is better to be a coward and live than to be brave (or stupid, in his opinion) and die. Horribly, most likely. He only do follow you afterward to potential danger because he is already caught in the mess.
- In the Mask of the Betrayer expansion, the system is a bit better. You find more instances where being evil is not being brain-dead and it is a lot easier to keep a True Neutral alignment without looking like a turncoat psychotic. Even though the Spirit-Eater your character turns out to be is still a pain to the alignment (some powers give you points towards one way or another, without considering that you may simply want to use them for the convenience, if you're neutral), it was later fixed with patches. Not to mention that you receive much more chances to affect the influence of followers, so you can screw a bit during conversations without screwing the relationship itself.