Chaos Is Evil

The age-old battles of Good vs Evil and Order vs. Chaos are two very different things, but that doesn't mean certain kinds of people care about that distinction.

After all, Order is often associated with good things like peace, tolerance and cooperation. Which means if you stand for Chaos, you can also represent horrors like war, mass destruction and mindless killing.[1] And for this reason, you can often find bad guys trying to actively affiliate themselves with the word.

Chaos Is Evil is a very specific kind of Invoked Trope, where villains like speaking about chaos or including words synonymous with chaos as part of their title or name.

Compare with Chaotic Evil, where a bad guy just wants to create chaos instead of actively trying to reference it.

Examples of Chaos Is Evil include:

Anime and Manga

  • Inverted in most cases in Yu-Gi-Oh!!, where Chaos tends to denote the power of light and darkness combined. Yu-Gi-Oh ZEXAL also has the Chaos Numbers, upgraded forms of existing Number monsters.
    • In the anime, however, the true Big Bad of Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal and ruler of the Barian World is Don Thousand, a God of Chaos who plans genocide against the Astral World, which represents Law. Unfortunately, Eliphas, the ruler of the Astral World who represents Law, can hardly be considered a benign force in the conflict, but Don Thousand is obviously a greater evil.
  • In Digimon, the digimons with "Chaos" in their names generally are evil. ChaosDukemon is a corrupted Dukemon, ChaosDramon is a violent and destructive mechanical dragon, the three Chaos Generals(ChaosGreymon, ChaosSeadramon and ChaosPiemon) and the Chaos Lord are villains in Digimon World 2, and Lucemon's mode change was named "Chaos Mode" in the Digimon Frontier dub.

Comic Books

  • In PS238 the forces of Chaos and the forces of Order are portrayed as Demons and Angels, respectively. Though given both side's habit of driving mortals to conflict whenever they get the chance to access our dimension the forces of Order are portrayed as equally bad.
  • Marvel Comics examples:
    • In Doctor Strange, both Dormammu and Shuma-Gorath have Lord of Chaos as one of their titles, and Dormammu once represented the Anthropomorphic Personification of Chaos in a chess match with Odin, who represented Order. Both of these villains are actually Multiversal Conquerors and God-Tyrants of alternate dimensions, and while they may qualify as Chaotic Evil in terms of their personalities and behaviour, they don't otherwise seem to represent Chaos any more than any other really deplorable villain.
    • Chthon, the resident God of Chaos who has clashed with numerous heroes, who once again is Chaotic Evil by nature, but as no ideological devotion to Chaos. It's slightly more justified in his case, though, as he is also the creator and source of Chaos Magic, which here is a form of Black Magic that pulls off feats of reality warping and affects probability, though still usually towards a very specific end.
    • Venom's symbiotic "offspring", Carnage. His motive for being a serial killer — if he can even be said to have one — is that he thinks Law is an illusion, and that Chaos is the only reality. As a result, he tries to spread this sick philosophy by mass murder. It would be easy to label him Chaotic Stupid, but he can actually be rather smart in his methods sometimes. Which makes him a living oxymoron, really, being someone who plans out ways to spread Chaos.
    • Madcap, one of the few villains who can make Deadpool look lucid (and has the power to make others act crazy), was originally a deeply religious man, until the bus his family and congregation had chartered collided with a truck carrying Compound X07 (an experimental nerve agent developed by A.I.M.). He was the only survivor, landing in a puddle of the chemical, and gaining regenerative powers that would later prove to rival Deadpool's. Unable to understand why he alone survived and benefited from an accident that killed every friend he had, he was driven insane, and concluded that everything happens for no reason. Dressing like a harlequin, his only "goal" is sharing his demented philosophy with everyone else.

Film-Live Action

  • The Dark Knight has The Joker, who gives a speech about being an "agent of chaos".
  • In Star Wars continuity, "Chaos" is what Corellians call their concept of Hell, although it's sometimes also called the Void.

Literature

  • Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone stories. The forces of Chaos almost always acted in a Chaotic Evil manner, and the adherents of Law were portrayed as Lawful Good (especially when fighting Chaos). It wasn't absolutely stated as being this way - it was noted that absolute Law led to stasis and sterility and a certain amount of Chaos was necessary for creativity and change.
  • In The Kane Chronicles, the main conflict is Order vs. Chaos, first with Card-Carrying Villain Set representing chaos for The Red Pyramid, and then with Apophis, Ra's arch-nemesis and the God of Chaos, stepping in as the Bigger Bad for the rest of the trilogy.
  • L. E. Modesitt's Recluce series has order magic and chaos magic, with the good guys typically practicing black magic and the bad guys practicing white magic. The colors are based upon the complete absence of light (void, perfect order) or the presence of all kinds of light (making white, and chaos). The series recognized that chaos and order didn't necessarily line up with good and evil, recognizing either extreme was bad, but chaos magic causes lots of harm unless the practitioner is very careful. And being careful means being orderly.

Live Action TV

  • On Get Smart the bad guys are KAOS,
    • Also, the good guys are CONTROL... a synonym for law.
  • Inverted in the short-lived Chaos where the title is the nickname of the good guy's litte group in the CIA.

Music

  • In the Emerald Sword saga by the Rhapsody of Fire band, the hordes of the evil king Akron are costantly associated with chaos, while the heroes are associated with "wisdom".

Tabletop Games

  • One of the most glaring instances of this trope in fiction is Chaos from Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000.
  • The original version of Dungeons & Dragons had three major alignments: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. Since many bad guys (such as orcs, dragons, demons, undead etc.) were on the side of Chaos, it wasn't long before "Chaotic" was equated with "Evil." The nine alignment system that has become associated with D&D was an attempt to mitigate this, as not everyone who is Lawful is necessarily good, and not everyone who's Chaotic is necessarily evil. This of course, brought its own little host of problems.
    • 4e changes the nine-alignment grid system with a linear, five-alignment system. In order, the different alignments are Lawful Good, Good, Neutral, Evil, and Chaotic Evil, with the implication Chaotic Evil is more "Evil" than regular Evil (due more to its destructiveness), but Lawful Good gets the inverse given they mention inflexibility.
    • The Queen of Chaos, the villain of the epic module The Rod of Seven Parts is as cruel, malicious, and vile as the next Demon Lord, her origins possibly reflecting a corruption of the raw primordial Chaos that caused demons to come about in the first place.
    • The slaadi, residents of Limbo, are supposed to represent raw Chaos, and most are, indeed, Chaotic Neutral beings. Their leaders, however, are the Death Slaadi, which are indeed Chaotic Evil. Supposedly they represent a corruption of Evil, but then, their Lawful counterparts the Modrons don't have this problem.
  • In the Glorantha setting of RuneQuest Chaos itself is neutral (being the void outside the universe) but its manifestations within the universe tend strongly towards evil due to their twisting of reality's rules.
  • Subverted in the Palladium RPG system, where the "most evil" alignment is "Diabolic", which is similar to D&D's Chaotic Evil, but the "most chaotic" alignment, "Anarchist" is considered selfish in the sense of being a hedonist, but isn't considered evil.
  • Zig Zagged in The Battle for Wesnoth. The game has only one alignment axis (Lawful, Neutral, Liminal, and Chaotic); most of the evil creatures (undead, necromancers, orcs, bandits) are Chaotic. However, Chaotic creatures aren't necessarily bad—for example, you can recruit thieves while playing as the decidedly good Konrad, and the outlaw campaign (Liberty) features a band of freedom fighters which are all represented in-game as Chaotic units (specifically, Chaotic humans).

Video Games

Web Comics

I refuse to take part in an adventure that is metaphysically rooted in the destruction of an abstract and artificial concept like chaos simply because connotatively speaking it's less desirable than the equally artificial term 'order'.
When will you people learn that these are merely patterns that our temporal minds have made for us in a desperate attempt to make sense of an unimaginably immense and impersonal universe?
Order, chaos, these are words for things we don't even understand. Chaos is not something you fight against, order is not something you protect. They have no more power or importance than that which we give them.
And I, for one, will not perpetuate this asinine paradigm that there is something inherently wrong about chaos!

  • El Goonish Shive. The character Pandora Chaos Raven is an immortal with a highly chaotic nature (e.g.her cloud form constantly shifts and changes) who says she's going to destroy our world and replace it with another one. She has also tried to have several human beings killed.
    • Pandora merely punched Magus away; also, he's the only one who calls her "Chaos". She tried to get Abe killed—but it's not that she haven't an understandable reason to be very upset.
  • Inverted: Last Res0rt has the tagline "Embrace Cha0s", with the implication that the Celeste and the Church of the Endless represent a repressive version of Order.

Western Animation

  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: Discord, the spirit of chaos, a Reality Warper who ruled over a dark time in Equestria, and is feared by everypony including Princess Celestia. Though he's more often referred to as the Spirit of Disharmony than the Spirit of Chaos, which makes a bit more sense.
    • The notion that Chaos and Evil are synonyms is then fully subverted with Discord's reformation in the third season. He's still a troublemaker, but is merely selfish rather than outright malicious, and is shown to have a heart of gold under his impish nature.
  • South Park: Butters' evil alter-ego Professor Chaos.
  • Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls. He destroyed his own homeworld because he thought it was boring and wanted it to be more interesting. He wanted to "share" this "gift" with other worlds too. Clearly a demon (the show even calls him such), he's an embodiment of Chaos and Evil.
  1. ↑ Interestingly, chaos originally didn't mean "disorder" at all, but "void".
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