Lucrezia Mongfish: Chaotic Evil
Klaus Wulfenbach: Lawful Evil
Gilgamesh Wulfenbach: Lawful Neutral
Barry & Bill Heterodyne: Chaotic Good
Agatha Clay: Neutral Good
Zeetha: Lawful Good
Discuss?
I would have said Klaus was Lawful Neutral — he makes a notable…
Hm. I saw that during the war (and certainly in the early volumes) Klaus was portrayed as a focused killer. Sparks which didn’t accept his rule? Killed if they resisted arrest, no exceptions. Monsters? Live by the Pax Transylvania, or die by it’s hand; again, laws. Revants? Killed because it’s easier. Purported vivisection of Othar? Sadistic pleasure and an effective method of execution for a persistent thorn in the side.
Not evil for evil’s sake (that’s Lucrezia) but order by force and oppression. While death isn’t what it used to be what with revivification technologies so well advanced… only the truly useful or rich can afford it. [Side note: I’m sure Klaus himself was brought back a couple of times while tanking for Barry and Bill, before Adam and Lillith were created].
Zeetha, on the other hand I still retain as LG because even though she doesn’t really play paladin games, she DOES have a VERY strong Code of honour to which she sticks, and which she beats herself up for breaking. However, since the code is from Skifander no one (save Klaus) recognises it as law, but she is teaching those laws to Agatha.
What little we’ve seen of Bill and Barry, they’re definitely sparks, so they’ve got that manic devil-may-care attitude of “Wouldn’t it be cool!?!” but they are generally looking out for the good of the world. None of their inventions were as gruesome as the rest of the family’s, and were generally designed as aids to their adventures.
(Whee! Fandom!)
Hm. I think I’m going to have to take the bit about Klaus bit by bit.
Sparks which didn’t accept his rule? Killed if they resisted arrest, no exceptions.
Not precisely. Beetle, for instance, isn’t under Klaus’s rule and isn’t brought under it until he hoards Other tech. It’s true that no one escapes having a few rules imposed on them by Klaus even if they’re not under his rule: don’t hoard Other tech; don’t attack people that are under his rule. But most rulers don’t take kindly to the attacking part.
It’s ambiguous because we’re given two accounts of how Klaus took over the Empire. One states that he simply conquered anyone who attacked him and then anyone who attacked them etc. The other that he drew concentric circles on the map and expanded to fill them. Obviously one of these is more of a problem than the other.
ETA: And most Sparks that resisted arrest are still alive and doing lab work for him — it’s only if they prove too dangerous even as prisoners that he moves on to killing them.
Monsters? Live by the Pax Transylvania, or die by it’s hand; again, laws
If you mean constructs then, no, I don’t think we have any evidence for that. Those that had been in armies belonging to Sparks tend to get taken in by Klaus because they were designed for war and won’t know what to do with themselves otherwise. Those living quietly on their own terms? He imposes a lot of laws on the humans around them to prevent them being killed or enslaved. Laws, certainly, but I would have said the monsters were the ones he was protecting — Klaus sometimes seems to sympathise with other constructs more than other Sparks.
Revants? Killed because it’s easier.
Killed because their minds have been destroyed. As soon as non-zombie revenants come up he stops killing them and switches to sedation with hope of finding a cure later.
Purported vivisection of Othar? Sadistic pleasure and an effective method of execution for a persistent thorn in the side.
That one I’ll grant you. I think he was playing up the pleasure, but the fact that he was playing while vivisecting someone at all is extremely disturbing. The braincoring of Sparks is definitely the worst thing we see him do.
Zeetha as Lawful I could see, but then I think the Jägers wind up lawful by the same lights, which is an odd thought. But not, perhaps, inaccurate.
Ooh, interesting. (Yeah, I’m coming in really late here.)
First the ones where I pretty much agree with the original post:
Lucrezia as Chaotic Evil — yeah. I doubt anybody’s interested in seriously disputing the Evil part at this point. *grin* And though tyranny is a common example given of Lawful Evil, and Lu’s endgame is in fact absolute control, I think in her case… it seems to be more about making people cater to her every whim than about setting rules; even when she governs (e.g., the Geisterdamen) she doesn’t seem very systematic about it.
Agatha as Neutral Good — Certainly she values and attempts to be Good. I can see arguments for both Lawful and Chaotic, but I think they balance out. She values law and order and tradition mostly to the extent to which they serve good and benefit the population; she ignores them when she wants to do something and doesn’t see the harm; she throws them over violently when they impinge unjustly on her personal autonomy, which she values highly enough to take her town up against the Empire, even though she never had any particular desire to overthrow it.
Zeetha as Lawful Good — I can see why people might pause over the idea of her being Lawful, but in fact she’s one of the characters who most clearly speaks of her own rules and traditions as things she seems to value for their own sake. She’s actually also relatively willing to go along with the ones surrounding her in a “When in Rome” sense — she doesn’t dress “normally” but nobody in the circus cares except to the degree it’s part of the show, and she’s the one who steps up to encourage Agatha (unfortunately not Agatha at the time) to accept the deal Klaus is offering.
(And, yes, similar reasoning can place Jägers somewhat unintuitively as Lawful, even though I am pretty sure most of Europa would have marked them down solidly, and with good reason, as Chaotic Evil.)
Bill and Barry as Chaotic Good — I’m not disputing Good, but I’m iffy about Chaotic. I can see a case for it. In Mechanicsburg alone, albeit acting as the rulers of the town according to local tradition, they basically declared by fiat that some of the local traditions were bad and nobody was allowed to do them. There were solid reasons for this — the traditions in question include raiding and are strongly implied to include human sacrifice — but they certainly changed things. And they did go off and make a major impression on Europa by changing things elsewhere, which included fighting people, sometimes overthrowing people who were actually established local rulers. It would certainly be consistent with the impression we’ve been given of them, I think, if individual freedom was a high priority (and not just for themselves).
However, context is important. There’s a significant difference between tackling someone spontaneously to beat them into the ground, tackling someone who was beating another person into the ground, tackling someone as part of a football game, and tackling someone out of the way of an oncoming truck.
And the context of Bill and Barry’s upheavals is indicated to be situations that are already chaotic in a bad way, both continentally and locally. The all-against-all “Long War” that Europe apparently fell into shortly after the Storm King’s reign ended. Clanks and monsters run amok, activated doomsday devices, Sparks who either actively sought to hurt people or simply didn’t care how much damage they did. Their preferred methods were negotiation and persuasion; they built defenses for established rulers; they, or at least their friends, seem to have routinely hung around to help set up new local governments if they did overthrow one. They may have leaned chaotic, and most likely a lot of people who got on the wrong side of them considered them chaotic in effect, but I think there’s also a decent case for neutral.
Klaus as Lawful Evil — I am inclined to agree with you here, Iztarshi. Lawful Neutral for at least a significant part of his career. It’s another less than intuitive one, I’ll grant, because he is introduced as a tyrant antagonist. He kidnaps Agatha. And the scene with Othar and the past treatment of Dr. Dim is distinctly an Evil moment, no argument there.
However, generally speaking, I actually disagree that he’s portrayed as a focused killer. Able and willing to kill, yes. He describes himself as ruthless. He describes himself as doing things “My way this time” in direct contrast to the Heterodyne Boys’ methods. “No more negotiating. No more promises. No more second chances.” People assume he will kill those who don’t comply, and past a certain point he will.
However… Mr. “My way this time” actually goes out of his way repeatedly not to kill people, innocent or not. His favorite weapon is apparently knockout gas.
He didn’t want Beetle killed. (Although his “Where do they get these ideas?” when Agatha begged him not to was a bit disingenuous. Seriously, Klaus, you’ve only been intimidating people for the past sixteen years; where do you THINK they get these ideas?) He seems to have hired a remarkable number of his enemies, both Sparks and soldiers. The latter (not having instigated the situation) have the option of being paid off to go home instead. At least one of the former is flabbergasted that Herr “No second chances” might actually try to kill him for attempting to take over the Empire in a vulnerable moment, although that guy could have just been more than usually out of touch with reality. And as was addressed already, he doesn’t kill revenants just because it’s easier — he kills the ones whose minds have been destroyed, and when he finds out there are revenants who are still people, he tries to avoid killing them: to the point of having his troops attempt to take a rebel town mostly with nonlethal weapons.
He’s more ruthless and less trusting and less patient than the Heterodyne Boys. Yes. But honestly, even with those factors already in play, I think he started off in the Lawful Good camp. Context, again — he basically came back to the zombie apocalypse, with a significant part of the uninfected population having had the heads of their government lopped off and the remaining ones apparently mostly at war. His initial popularity, cited by Carson, was probably precisely because in the area he defended, you could live your life with a far lower likelihood of being randomly killed. Because he was imposing a kind of order that people wanted, that didn’t leave them at the mercy of the next bully to come along and kick over your sandcastle — or rather, your entire home and livelihood. It does actually make a difference if you’re only beating people up because they started the fights or were pushing somebody else around.
And, of course, as was kind of noted with regard to the two versions of his takeover, and as we see with Mechanicsburg and Beetleburg that’s where we start getting into his slide away from… actually I would say away from both Good and Lawful at once.
The thing is, a lot of the laws Klaus makes seem to be overall fairly reasonable and to have been designed to serve or preserve Good: Don’t attack the people and places he’s defending, whether you’re a ruler or a new Spark or a pirate. Don’t mess around with the Zombie Apocalypse (i.e., slaver wasps). Don’t maltreat/discriminate against constructs. And he does include restrictions on himself in the laws he makes.
But then… he IS a dictator. There’s nobody with the authority to check him if he throws people in Castle Heterodyne for relatively trivial reasons, or takes a girl hostage against her supposed lover instead of following any kind of reasonable arrest and investigative procedure, or decides he has sufficient grounds for suspicion to barge into a vassal’s town looking for wasps.
He suggests to Bang that Gil might have the power, but 1. that’s questionable, 2. Gil may not believe it, 3. Gil loves him, and 4. Gil doesn’t want to put everybody else through the destruction that would result from basically going to war with his father. So that’s really, really a last resort. (I am also inclined to go with Gil probably being Lawful Good in part because while he is not without impulses in the other directions, both Goodness and Law seem to be things that are consciously important to him.) And nobody seems to have both the personal influence and the will to get Klaus to stop and think much, because most of the friends he might have listened to are dead or in hiding and he’s not used to thinking of Gil as an adult.
So when he goes the wrong direction, it’s really hard to stop him; if he bends or breaks his own rules, nobody can do anything about it. And yes, another significant part of his slide consists in sacrificing virtue for the sake of law and order, doing evil and breaking his own rules to maintain control… which I think he has largely convinced himself he must do to protect people, whether the Empire’s population or Gil as an individual. He is definitely too controlling toward Agatha. Even so, given the overall efforts to protect innocents (or at least non-aggressors) and the lesser but still significant efforts to get aggressors more or less on his side without leaving them in a position to do further damage to the less powerful, I think both motive and overall approach leave him probably at Lawful Neutral at least until things start fraying really badly.
Going off on a tangent here, I find it interesting that Klaus and Agatha share the rather unusual distinction in this comic of having been brought up by two pretty unambiguously good/positively presented parents. Klaus’s don’t get much detail, but what we do get is that they avoided most Spark warring (although they were enemies with the Old Heterodynes) and “ran their small holdings well” and managed to salvage one of their sons after something terrible happened to all three of them. And Agatha is — and I’m not complaining, this is nice to see — generally pretty confident about her decisions. She is not guilt-ridden. She does not, that we’ve seen, angst about killing people who were trying to kill her/attack her town. Nor does she seem morally troubled by having the Jägers beat people up for information, and that one… is understandable, but still gives me pause. Because strictly speaking, when Agatha’s in Mechanicsburg, in a lot of ways there isn’t anybody with the power or authority to make her stop either. So… I don’t think Agatha’s going evil at any point! But I think she needs to watch herself, and I think it’s a really good thing she does have people who can get her to stop and listen and reorient to what kind of person she wants to be.
This is fascinating, but I don’t have much to add. I’m glad you wrote it. (And amused by the parenthesis about the Jägers because yes.)
Klaus’s lack of checks is definitely a good point — he really needed equals or at least friends. Not that I’m absolving him of some of his really bad/stupid choices, but it’s definitely the case that when he does act pettily or out of panic it has a much bigger impact than anyone else doing so.
And I just had further thoughts on Jäger alignment. While Jägers as a whole are probably Lawful Neutral in their own view and Chaotic Evil in everyone else’s, the individual Jägers might have their own alignments.
Maxim is concerned with doing the right thing (by Jäger standards). Obeying the rules, getting the approval of his superiors. Oggie goes with what feels right. Dimo often goes with what’s pracitcal.
As seen best with the Sneaky Gate where Maxim is unsure about breaking the rules, Oggie likes Gil and wants to help him and Dimo weighs the pros and cons of both. Lawful, Chaotic and Neutral Jägers.
Discuss
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