Basic Trope: A Lawful character carries the Idiot Ball because that is the Lawful thing to do.
- Straight: Jason, a self-declared Knight in Shining Armor, tends to go a bit overboard when it comes to enforcing the law, to the point where it supersedes other considerations like common sense.
- Exaggerated: Jason the paladin insists that he is a paragon of saintly virtue destined to purify the hopelessly corrupt world and overreacts to anything he deems sinful, to the point of dragging people to jail for jaywalking.
- Downplayed:
- Jason is a Knight in Shining Armor who constantly adheres to the spirit of the law, rather than the letter. He won't arrest Emperor Evulz for crimes he committed in other cities because no laws allow that, but when Evulz opens a shop, Jason performs a thorough inspection and, on finding what looks like a setup for importing illegal items through the shop that is being built, arrests Evulz at once.
- Most of the time, Jason balances his duty to uphold the law with understanding of when to let minor infractions slide. But there are particular illegal acts that will turn off Jason's brain and make him do dumb things to avenge them.
- Justified:
- Jason is a naïve idiot.
- Jason knows he's not the sharpest tool in the shed and lacks any form of natural intuition, so he lets the law do the thinking for him.
- Jason is either a robot or was raised in a way that programmed the law into his head. He believes the law is the highest morality there is and that listening to it is the only way to keep order, which leads to some issues.
- Jason is an outlaw turned knight who feels he Must Make Amends for his history and goes overboard for that reason.
- Inverted:
- Chaotic Stupid
- Jason is lawful and is The Spock or The Smart Guy in the cast.
- Subverted:
- While Jason is a stickler for rules, he isn't so stringent about enforcing them that he loses sight of common sense.
- Jason is Lawful Evil, and his pettiness is deliberate.
- Double Subverted:
- After seeing his allies snatch a purse, Jason catches them and calmly makes them return the money and apologize, and seems to empathize with their plight and let them go... but then clubs them upside the back of the head when they turn to leave and drags their bleeding bodies to jail.
- Jason becomes so obsessed with punishing the Anti-Hero Bob by lawful means that he does things placing him in the categories of Evil Is Petty and Stupid Evil.
- Parodied:
- Jason realizes that he is jaywalking, in the middle of the forest, and promptly deploys his sword to kill himself in a holy fire of justice.
- The only people who are lawful are the ones who were stupid. No stupid person would think to act outside the law in any way.
- In this universe, the numbers of scofflaws and criminals each exceed the number of law-abiders, so being lawful is stupid.
- This society persecutes intellectuals and people with common sense to a degree that makes it so only being stupid is lawful.
- Zig-Zagged: Mason starts out as a Reasonable Authority Figure, though he has a few persnickety issues that act as his Berserk Buttons. These are well-explained, though, and he knows they cloud his judgment and relies on others to help him keep a grip on his common sense. Unfortunately, his protégé Jason is a full-fledged Knight Templar, and while Mason keeps Jason's Lawful Stupidity in check for a time, he succumbs to the Mentor Occupational Hazard, after which Jason takes over the organization. Naturally, it gets worse.
- Averted:
- Jason is a Lawful paladin who has common sense.
- All the characters are smart, outlaws, or both.
- Enforced: "We need a rival for our Loveable Rogue to butt heads with! Let's create a paladin with little common sense."
- Lampshaded: A Street Urchin caught stealing bread sarcastically asks Jason upon being caught if he'll torture him for such a small crime.
- Invoked: ...And Jason does just that to the Street Urchin.
- Exploited: The Big Bad intentionally lures Jason's attention towards relatively minor infractions, serving to distract Jason from his true intentions as well as make him a Hero with Bad Publicity to make his life more difficult.
- Defied:
- Jason became a paladin because he was sick of Lawful Stupid paladins and wanted to show them how they should be acting.
- Jason yells "Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!" when he encounters a choice between breaking the law to save hundreds of innocent people or following the law and letting them die.
- Jason's superiors or deity make clear that this is not the kind of enforcer they want on their payroll.
- Discussed: "Jason is a real stickler for the rules! Why can't he just have any common sense?"
- Conversed: "But his actions are morally questionable, as he doesn't seem to know how to be lawful without being unintelligent!"
- Deconstructed: The Knight Templar, which presents zeal at the price of compassion as a villainous trait.
- Reconstructed: As a result of something he did, something bad happens, causing Jason to have a My God, What Have I Done? moment. He learns that having common sense is important and stops being Lawful Stupid.
- Played for Laughs: Jason knows full well how many times he has exceeded the speed limit, gotten a parking ticket, jaywalked, or committed every kind of minor violation of the law in the book, but he is still determined to punish himself no matter how many times everyone he knows tells him that he should really just relax.
- Played for Drama: After the urchin grows up, he proceeds to frame everyone Jason loves and respects for equally small crimes, and he makes Jason aware of it so he's forced to torture them too. After Jason is left alone and confused, the urchin plays one final head game on Jason by crafting a scenario with such a terrible Logic Bomb that Jason is finally forced to make a Zeroth Law Rebellion or go insane. Once he's finally free of his Lawful Stupid way of thinking, the urchin wraps up the Tragedy by revealing the manipulation and how Jason could have saved his friends if he'd just been willing to think for himself.
- Played for Horror: Jason's bumbling and inflexible enforcement of the law has a strange way of ending with many people dead, not all of them by his hand, but all definitely by his fault.
- Plotted a Good Waste: Jason is the Deliberately Bad Example Decoy Protagonist in The Wandering Paladin series, so the actual hero Peter doesn't need to waste x words explaining how "good" Paladins are supposed to act.
- Implied:
- Jason is The Ghost, but his superior officer describes him as this.
- Jason hesitates whenever somebody asks him whether he's late because he pursued personal revenge against some irrelevant person.
Back to Lawful Stupid. And don't even THINK about making even a single misspell, or putting in a single meme, if you don't want to get a perma-ban!
