Help making Lawful / Chaotic Stupid into indexes

The rest of the Character Alignment tropes are indexes, but what ideas do you have for listing tropes under each of these two "stupid" alignments? Mine are:

Lawful

• Category Traitor (when they are not neutral aligned)
• Control Freak
• Crime of Self-Defense
• Honor Before Reason
• Made Out to Be a Jerkass
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
• Pacifism Backfire (especially when done by the Principles Zealot)
• Principles Zealot (when they are not neutral aligned)

Chaotic

• The Caligula
• Guns in Church
• I Fought the Law and the Law Won
• Leeroy Jenkins
• Certain cases of Off the Rails
• The Pig-Pen (when they are not neutral aligned)

I had some ideas for more, but I consider them to be neutral instead of lawful or chaotic.

edited 11th Aug '17 7:50:14 AM by MitchellProductions

Would [1] be considered as being Lawful, though? They earned their position through law and are born into positions of authority, but the page is clear when it says that a Caligula is inherently irrational, if not psychopathic.

Lawful would generally be associated with authority figures. Control Freak is a lot like The Caligula, and it is widely regarded on this wiki as a lawful identity.

Control Freak - "Someone who is obsessed with doing everything rigid, proper, and by the book — even (or especially) if it interferes with doing it right."

Someone obsessed with following a law code even when it impedes doing something right. Lawful Stupid, that is true.

The Caligula - "wildly irrational, violently moody, extremely debauched, will never tolerate being told anything he doesn't want to hear, and probably afflicted with a god complex."

No governing law code - be it personal honor, civic order, or otherwise. Irrationality and moodiness are hallmarks of being Chaotic, not Lawful.

Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat isn't necessarily chaotic. Just to pick the man himself, he cheats as a personal rule, which would make it a lawful application of the trope.

No, no, no. "I always cheat" as a personal code is not Lawful behavior. A Lawful character believes in following a system of structured rules because of the perceived value of social order, regardless of whether their ultimate purpose is to advance social well-being (Lawful Good), to promote order for order's sake alone (Lawful Neutral), or to pervert that order to their own self-interest (Lawful Evil).

Let's not get carried away with these indexes. Lawful Stupid and Chaotic Stupid have very specific definitions and it's not always necessary to make such things into supertropes — or, at least, it's not necessary to cast a really broad net when doing so.

Lawful Stupid is when someone is so committed to following the rules that they see any deviation from the absolute letter of the law as a crime punishable by death (or the equivalent). Chaotic Stupid, conversely, is when someone is so committed to breaking any/all rules that they perform utterly insane or irrational actions that would earn them a Dope Slap even from the most committed anarchist. These are extremes, not broad categories.

Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat may be seen as a sign of a Card-Carrying Villain or other stereotypically self-defeating villain trope, but unless it advances to "I whiz on the king" levels of insanity, it doesn't automatically fall under Chaotic Stupid. Rather, the latter would be more like, "Dick Dastardly dresses in a bathing suit in winter, steals diapers from babies, speaks backwards, and decorates his house with spray cheese."

Edited to add: Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat is already on the Stupid Evil index, which is way more appropriate.

edited 26th Jul '17 1:13:52 PM by Fighteer

I removed Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, and should I move The Caligula to the chaotic section or copy it onto there?

It makes no real sense to have The Caligula referenced in Lawful Stupid. It's closer to Chaotic Stupid, but such a character doesn't do crazy things out of defiance or whimsy, but rather because they are actually clinically insane. They could obsess on trivialities of the law or they could decide that the law doesn't matter and immerse themselves in debauchery, but the point is that, when a Caligula comes along, a previously functional (more or less) power structure devolves into chaos as everyone bends to satisfy the whims of a complete loon.

Another way to put it is that Lawful Stupid, Stupid Evil, and Chaotic Stupid can all be aspects of The Caligula's behavior, but there's no exclusive association of that trope with any of the alignment extremes.

edited 26th Jul '17 1:17:35 PM by Fighteer

Before starting this thread, I had the trope under chaotic without noticing it, and I now moved it back. I may have been right the first time. And yes, it does sound more chaotic than lawful. It also think of it as Stupid Evil even though it is not listed there.

My point is that it is not a subtrope of any of those.

Okay.

This also gives me the idea for "Neutral Stupid", but the name sounds similar to Stupid Neutral, which is a stupid-moral alignment instead of a social-stupid one.

I suggested I Fought the Law and the Law Won under the chaotic section.