Chaotic Stupid

"I drop my trousers and wizz on the king!"

There is a subtle distinction between Stupid Evil and Chaotic Stupid. Sure, the Chaotic Stupid character is also likely to Kick the Dog. But he's just as likely to Pet the Dog, Shave The Dog, Paint The Dog Purple, or even Ignore The Dog Entirely To Run Off Chasing Butterflies. In short, the 'true' Chaotic Stupid character is the one who thinks that being Chaotic Neutral means being batshit insane. And by "insane", we mean more Gogo Dodo than Hannibal Lecter.

This guy is willing to prove his madness at any time he feels it needs proving, which is all the time. Expect all sorts of "wacky hijinks" from talking in Word Salad to annoying important NPCs (as well as the other players) with stupid jokes. While a little comic relief can be refreshing once in a while, the Chaotic Stupid character takes it to a level which threatens to turn the entire game into a farce, or even gets the other party members killed. Suffice to say, the Chaotic Stupid should never be let within ten feet of any sort of magic, especially the type that can be exploded in the middle of the party for multiple d6s of damage. He's also at a risk of suffering from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, but it might not be lethal to whoever he betrayed, since he's as likely to kill them as he is to pull down their pants.

Often overlaps with The Loonie, a player archetype from the famed Munchkin Files. Needless to say, several player's handbooks have attempted to disabuse clueless players of the notion that chaos is a blank check to loosen their screws. Though the Second Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook described Chaotic Neutral as the alignment of "lunatics and madmen", even this was not intended to be Chaotic Stupid (although the example Chaotic Neutral party member in the party of all alignments was most definitely Chaotic Stupid, randomly yelling at the top of his lungs and doing a suicidal charge at the dragon and getting roasted). The various incarnations of the Third Edition rules said of the Chaotic Neutral alignment, "Remember that the chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it." Some people just didn't get the memo, though.

Often an underlying reason to Attack! Attack! Attack! and Leeroy Jenkins. Compare Too Dumb to Live, It Amused Me. For what happens when other alignments are played to a degree it becomes stupid, see Stupid Good, Lawful Stupid, Stupid Evil and Stupid Neutral.

No real life examples, please; Calling somebody "stupid" is not a compliment.

Examples of Chaotic Stupid include:

Anime and Manga

  • Wrath from the 2003 anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist is this due to his utter lack of impulse control or thinking things through. To illustrate, he fused with Trisha Elric's remains to prevent them from being used on his mother surrogate Sloth. After he got done killing Lust, he fuses with Sloth while both her and Ed know what that would do, merging her with the remains and leaving her paralyzed, allowing Ed to finish her off.
  • While not an Adventure example, Tomo Takino of Azumanga Daioh qualifies as this. For example, the time that she threw the keys to Chiyo's Summer Home into the forest just as Chiyo was about to unlock the door. And thought that it would be funny if she did it a second time.


Comics

  • Deadpool is the face of Chaotic Stupid in modern comics Depending on the Writer. He beat the Taskmaster (whose power is an almost supernatural ability to "read" and understand the fighting styles of his opponent) in hand-to-hand combat by taking a break in their fight to dance and otherwise make himself unpredictable. He even begins his gambit by pushing a female X-men member through a skylight into a indoor pool entirely filled with pancakes. Which were only there in the first place because he just suddenly decided to make a few thousand pancakes when he woke up that day. Then again this from the guy who knows he's in a comic book. Maybe he's onto something.
    • It gets taken to 11 when he fights Evil Deadpool.


Film

  • Francis Begbie of Trainspotting strays into this territory frequently, given that he insists not only on being a violent and often sadistic brawler, but often doing it within plain sight of people who are liable to call the police or remember his face. At one point, after kicking in a man's head and accidentally slicing open Spud's hand, he stands right in front of the bar and various shocked witnesses and demands that Renton take at least a minute to "bring me doon a fukken ciggareh" before even considering leaving- or taking his injured friend to a hospital. He's also been known to attack bystanders for eating chips too loudly.
  • In the first Highlander film, The Kurgan's joyride-rampage through New York, wherein he drives down the wrong side of the road, singing "New York New York" while playing chicken and running over pedestrians, served no purpose other than a hilarious classic moment in comedy history. (But of course his antics won't result in his death, so he has somewhat more of an excuse than most.)
    • People have been decapitated in car accidents before...
  • Alan in The Hangover, Cloudcuckoolander extraordinaire.
  • Mark Whitacre in The Informant, who becomes a whistleblower/FBI informant under the guise of doing the right thing when he's actually scheming to take over his company. And he's fails in spectacular fashion at both due to his increasingly stupid mistakes.


Literature

  • Discworld: Although most of the time she's merely a more aggressive force for good if for no other reason than sheer contrariness against people who just so happen to be the antagonists of the book, Agnes Nitt's alternate personality Perdita can occasionally be a little bit Chaotic Stupid. In one book it mentions that Perdita believes rules, by virtue of being rules, are oppressive and stupid and have no place in a perfect world, and table manners, for example, are merely there to stop interesting and smart people (read: her) from having fun, while Agnes takes the view that rules are often there for a reason and is, to continue the example, philosophically against being hit by other peoples' cabbage.
    • Discworld gnomes and Nac Mac Feegle can also be a bit like this. "[Gnomes] had an inbuilt resistance to rules. This didn't just apply to the law, but to all the invisible rules that most people obeyed unthinkingly like 'Do not attempt to eat this giraffe' or 'Do not headbutt people in the ankle just because they won't give you a chip'."
    • And Nac Mac Feegle believe that this world is their Warrior Heaven and take a Blood Knight attitude towards everything.
  • The Helmacrons from the Animorphs series. They are extremely tiny, almost microscopic aliens, whose ships are about the size of a hot wheels car, but what they lack in size, they make up for in sheer crazy. They execute all of their leaders, under the premise that if they were alive, they would make mistakes. They still follow their leader's orders though, despite the fact that they are dead. They are also notoriously stupid, and extremely gullible, at one point, allowing Marco to repeatedly mock and insult them to their faces, because he told them in Earth culture, it's considered a form of submission.


Live Action TV

  • Sam's mother on iCarly: The woman drove her car after getting eye surgery, causing her to crash through a wall at the school. Sam and Melanie were born on a bus because she took one while having labor pains instead of calling a cab.
  • Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer half the time. He's always holding the Villain Ball, and sometimes the Idiot Ball. "I had a plan, a good one, but I got bored".
    • He had a good teacher. Angelus once led Faith into a trap, had her nearly beaten to death by a demon that blocked out the sun, then betrays and kills said demon and unblocks the sun and ruins his entire plan. Partially justified in that Angelus didn't believe killing the demon would actually undo the spell.
  • Ziggy Sobotka from The Wire. Lighting hundred dollar bills on fire, buying a pet duck and giving it beer, repeatedly picking fights with bigger and tougher people, whipping out his member in a crowded bar - it it's stupid, and he thinks there's a laugh in it, he'll do it. Although he finally wises up when it's too late to do any good.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Upon being declared the gang's "Wild Card," Charlie takes it as an excuse to go absolutely insane, including cutting the brakes of the van Mac is driving and jumping out.
  • Nathan from "Misfits" is a pretty good example of this on a British show. Doesn't help that he's immortal.
  • Reese from Malcolm in the Middle is a clear distinction between Chaotic Stupid and Stupid Evil. Reese himself is Chaotic Stupid and sees no problem in doing something For the Evulz, but he's morally against something that 's just unamusingly cruel. For example, an ice cream truck refusing to sell anything during a heat wave traffic jam.

Reese: This is just wrong! You can make money and please children! This is a senseless act! You are evil! Pure evil!

Tabletop Games

  • The Dragonlance setting of D&D had the Kender, who were halflings with an unique blend of fearlessness and a habit of kleptomania "borrowing things", which made them the perfect excuse for Chaotic Stupid behavior in the wrong hands (so much that they were frequently considered The Scrappy of the setting).
  • Planescape basically had an entire faction based around this trope. The Xaositects believed that the universe had no inherent order to it, and that truth could be found only in chaos. Naturally, this meant speaking in Word Salad and genrally acting like lunatics as much as possible. This is how they're described in the sourcebooks, so it's NOT just players taking things too far in this case.
    • And the Slaadi, who are literally Chaotic Neutral (and consequently Chaotic Stupid) personified.

"He said he was looking for the Happy Hunting Grounds. I didn't know what he was talking about... so I ate him."

      • In fact, 4th edition gave Slaadi the official alignment of Chaotic Evil (they were traditionally Chaotic Neutral) because they are so Chaotic Stupid that they want to tear down all of the rules everywhere... Including the rules that keep the very fabric of existence functioning. For the Lulz.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade GMs sometimes have to deal with "fishmalks", Malkavian characters who think madness and extreme loopiness are synonymous (the name comes from being the sort of people who would presumably slap the Prince across the face with a fish for the lulz). That's bad enough, but during the second edition White Wolf produced a downloadable sample adventure that took this to an extreme, replacing the usual Malkavian derangement with something vaguely resembling a seizure played for laughs.
  • A good part of why Chaos hasn't yet conquered the galaxy in Warhammer 40,000 is because of this, the four main gods simply hate one another too much to allow alliances to continue very long.
    • It's not that they hate each other. Well, they actually do, but it's more that they cannot EVER be organised. It's called Chaos for a reason, ya know?
    • Tzeentche may or may not be actively preventing a solid Chaos victory with his plots, because Victory Is Boring.


Toys


Video Games

  • Sheogorath, of the Elder Scrolls video game series, and his antics fall pretty squarely in Chaotic Stupid territory. He's not called the Mad-god for nothing. In one of the expansions it's revealed that he even moonlights as his own Lawful Stupid archnemesis -- or, more accurately, that Jyggalag, Daedric Prince of Order, was cursed back in the day to become the relatively ineffectual Sheogorath, Prince of Madness.
    • In Morrowind, he had rather less of this, giving the impression not that he himself was mad (at least not to Cloudcuckoolander levels, though he may have been slightly cracked), but that it amused him to drive mortals crazy and observe the results. His voice acting is the most "normal" of all the Daedra lords in the game, his image simply a distinguished gentleman. From Oblivion onwards, Chaotic Stupid is in full force.
      • Fridge Brilliance: bipolar is also a form of insanity. Morrowind was just him during a calmer period.
  • The Umgah from Star Control are an entire ALIEN RACE of this trope, having genetically engineered themselves to the point of insanity. Their idea of 'funny pranks' involve invoking wars between evil spiders and hippy bird people, making a powerful psychic lifeform sentient once more so they can see if it will do tricks for them, dropping planetoids into the oceans of inhabited planets, and scaring the crap out of an easily scared race of mollusk things. Over the course of one conversation, you liberate them from the aforementioned powerful psychic lifeform and get named their "Great Hero," they give you ships, and then they decide that "Great Hero" is boring, name you "Great Enemy" instead, and declare war on you.
    • They then attack you with an infinite wave of ships, which you can attempt to combat with the identical ships they just gave you. They probably think this is hilarious.
    • The Thraddash might qualify as this, too. They are a parody of typical warrior races who revel in combat so much that they have nuked themselves back to the stone-age eighteen times. They are on their nineteenth attempt at having a civilization by the time you meet them, and can still be easily goaded into attacking more powerful races simply because you suggest it to them. Alternately, they can be goaded into emulating The Three Stooges.
      • Their greatest invention to date appears to be the Reeunk Afterburner, named after its accidental creator. Reeunk was a mechanic who thought it was a fine idea to put a lit cigar into a starship's aft fuel valve. And yes, he was burned to a crisp.
  • While nearly every Touhou character is Chaotic Neutral, they tend to avoid this trope (or at least Reimu reminds them to behave). Fairies however are both dirt stupid (Cirno is actually the smartest fairy yet encountered) and highly unpredictable, due to both their incredibly short lifespans (at least in comparison to other types of Youkai) and ability to immediately ressurect after death or serious injury, creating decidedly warped views of mortality. As noted in Perfect Memento in Strictest Sense their most reliable behaviour is playing pranks, but even then they range between getting people lost or stealing their food to pushing them off of a cliff or setting them on fire, and tend not to differentiate between a powerless human and a centuries-old being with enough power to effortlessly disintegrate them.
  • In the Roguelike Linley's Dungeon Crawl, there's the god Xom. Whereas other gods have a piety level based on your actions (good gods appreciate destroying undead, for example, and evil gods killing living beings), Xom's piety level is entirely random. As a worshipper of Xom, you are considered his "plaything" (if piety level is low) or "toy" (if high), and he grants you gifts such as teleporting you randomly at will, summoning dozens of butterflies, or gifts of anything; anything from powerful items (especially ones that your character isn't any good at using) to plain rocks.
  • Neverwinter Nights Has a Dummied Out "evil option" that would let you sell a baby into slavery. Instead, you just... keep the baby. In your Grid Inventory. You can use it as a key in Hordes Of The Underdark.
  • The Raving Rabbids from Rayman are an entire race of Chaotic Stupid ditzes
  • Mortal Kombat: Deception introduced an entire race and realm of chaos, filled with people who sometimes speak backwards, play games like Everybody Runs Around, and, when asked a yes or no question, respond with "Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes." The only named member of the Chaosrelmers is Havik, the Cleric of Chaos, who will fight for anyone regardless of alignment if they will bring chaos. He even gets a Lawful Stupid nemesis in Hotaru.

Web Comics

  • Elan from Order of the Stick sometimes veers off into a rare example of Chaotic Good Stupid, with actions such as trying to persuade the gods to add a hand puppet to their pantheon. Although it's hard to tell if this is overplaying the chaotic part of his alignment, or just being a Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Sonic from inSONICia. He's the kind of guy who will push a Big Red Button that will bring about The End of the World as We Know It, then yell at you to stop criticizing him. It gets to the point where Sonic becomes so annoying and useless that it's a wonder nobody just offs him to save themselves a headache.
  • Rayne from Least I Could Do has been drifting into this alignment since 2004, and is now merrily swimming within it, his actions are almost totally random and utterly incomprehensible to the outside observer, so much so that people barely notice anymore unless his zany antics directly impact on them, which they usually do
  • In a Knights of the Dinner Table strip, the characters run afoul of the god Thor; when Thor appears to avenge the insults to his name (guess who insulted him), Bob and Dave and Brian immediately start attacking him despite BA (the Game Master) pointing out that Thor is impervious to all mortal weapons, has infinite hitpoints, etc. Sara immediately has her character run away, and convinces Brian to have his character do the same. Bob's and Dave's character die shortly afterwards, with Bob and Dave bitterly complaining that they don't understand why.
  • Ben, of the KOTD spin-off/homage Fuzzy Knights, lives and breathes Chaotic Stupid (and is even called that in-strip once), not just in the characters he plays but to a large degree outside the game. When Target and Violet try his impulsive play style for a night or when Target switches his character to Chaotic Neutral, stuff gets interesting.
  • Chaos, appropriately enough, the Big Bad of Eight Bit Theater, recently took a hard right into this trope. Let's face it, he took an idea from Fighter.
    • And planned on acting on another one that Black Mage suggested, for the sole reason that it's crazy and random enough that it's the type of thing that people should expect of him, but don't anyway.
  • Invoked in Home on the Strange: I told you I'd play Chaotic Neutral if this didn't stop!
  • In Miscellaneous Error, Jack lives his entire life according to this trope. His activities include catapulting himself across his backyard for vaguely scientific purposes.
  • In The Zombie Hunters, two characters (who thankfully are not actual examples) are at one point described by a Snarky Gas-Mas Guy as "chaotic shortbus aligned".


Web Original

122. The paladin's alignment is not Lawful Anal.
651. My alignment is not Sarcastic Good.
742. Apparently Chaotic Angry and Neutral Hungry aren't real alignments either.
863. Even if there is no alignment in Traveller, giving feuding TL1 tribes TL12 weapons and putting the results on PPV is just wrong.
1059. Even if the villain is Lawful Evil, slapping a cease and desist order on him isn't going to work.
1949. Can't free the hostage with a surprise game of Red Rover.

  • Also known as "Psychotic Neutral".
  • Everyone in The Binder of Shame. "We're Chaotic Neutral, that's practically a get-out-of-plot-developments-free card!" Blobert Smith has a particular tendency to this, his roleplaying described as being like a cross between regular gaming and performance art. Some of the other players come across this way in their real-life personae.
  • Tednugent, the long-suffering protagonist of Interactive Fiction Fanfic Parody You Awaken In Razor Hill is repeatedly forced into this trope and this sort of behavior, as a character whose actions were controlled by the whims of the readers of the story. Many of them - MANY of them - chose to Command Ted to do outright moronic things regardless of the severity of any given situation he was in - such as Commanding him to challenge the story's Big Bad,Pyramid Hogger to a 'yo momma' contest, or licking things that ought not to be licked. This led to a small Writer Revolt when the 'Narrator' (the author of the story) began to respond to the more ridiculously self-destructive commands with some fairly brutal consequences.
  • MS Paint Adventures is known to feature shenanigans of this sort. They were quite prevalent during Problem Sleuth, when the comment boxes were open and everything was explicitly coming from player suggestions; sometimes, if the characters really insisted on being engaged in something productive, the players would bid the character continue with what they were doing, but in a sillier manner. Homestuck had a few really good ones early on, before Hussie locked the suggestion boxes, but here and there you still get someone being a bit of a dipshit.
  • God help us for saying this, but 4Chan and the Hive Mind Anonymous have this sort of reputation when it comes to official authority... except for the times when they demonstrate that they aren't ALL bad. This can be considered A Crowning Moment of Heartwarming/ Crowning Moment of Awesome, if you weren't entirely convinced.


Western Animation

  • Transformers Animated's Wreck-Gar is highly suggestible, which makes him very insane and utterly hilarious to watch. "I DARE to be stupid!" indeed.
    • Blitzwing's Random face usually falls in this category as well.
  • The eponymous character of Invader Zim has repeatedly shown himself to be determined enough to not only easily conquer Earth but the entire galaxy, yet his impetuous nature and his COMPLETE lack of consideration for the consequences of his actions results in utter failure and/or the deaths of people he WASN'T trying to kill. Perhaps the best example of this is in the incomplete episode "The Trial", showing that Zim invented an Infinite Energy Absorbing Monster solely to impress his superiors which does exactly what it would be expected to do, killing Zim's fellow scientists and even one of the Irken leaders.
  • And in another, and even more outrageous Richard Horvitz-voiced case of random stupidity: Billy.
  • Beavis and Butthead epitomize this trope.
  • IR Baboon from I Am Weasel.
  • The Penguins of Madagascar has Rico. He's incredibly chaotic, and he's not all that bright... but he's Comic Relief... as are most of the cast. He's also insane...
  • My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: Pinkie Pie. While she does occasionally prove that she's actually intelligent behind the resolve, she's just as likely to try and defeat a sleeping dragon by dressing up as a birthday present with sunglasses and swimming flippers, as she is to handle a depression by throwing a party with a bucket of turnips and a pile of rocks. Basically, she's Western Animation's answer to Sheogorath as seen above.
  • Metalocalypse: Dr. Rockzo the Rock n' Roll Clown (he does cocaine) will scream about his drug usage to people on the street, potential employers and police officers.
  • Dr. Doofenhmirtz of Phineas and Ferb thinks he's evil, but he's really just Chaotic Stupid.
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