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WarriorsFight In reply to Bulk101 [2015-10-05 14:33:30 +0000 UTC]

haha, thought the same xD

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Shadow-Messenger [2013-07-09 23:05:44 +0000 UTC]

Part of the decision that came into play there was the capacity to do evil. Ramsay is merely the son of a lord, whereas Joffrey is a king. Joffrey inflicts his evil on a much wider scale, doing more harm to more people. The argument could also be made that Joffrey is younger and does some terrible deeds. Imagine what a Ramsay-aged Joffrey would be like. I could go into more detail about the decision, but yeah, it's a close competition.

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Shadow-Messenger In reply to FrostedHarbor [2013-07-10 17:01:42 +0000 UTC]

Well, I suppose that Joffrey does have a wider capability for causing disaster. But Ramsay is more creative, though. One shudders at the idea of an adult Joffrey.
Also, a question: Shouldn't Vargo Hoat be more Chaotic Evil than Lawful Evil? Considering the characters, he and Amory Lorch should be in each other's position.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Shadow-Messenger [2013-07-10 22:48:26 +0000 UTC]

Someone else made that exact same point about Lorch and Hoat, and I think I will make that switch on the next update.

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Shadow-Messenger In reply to FrostedHarbor [2013-07-11 00:19:51 +0000 UTC]

Oh, okay then. Great spectrum, though!

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Shadow-Messenger [2013-07-11 04:10:04 +0000 UTC]

I appreciate it!

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FrostedHarbor In reply to tobias93 [2013-07-09 23:07:51 +0000 UTC]

I have Jaqen as chaotic at this point because of his unclear motives and the chaotic repercussions of his past and potential actions. Definitely open for change in the future, though.

And your point is well-taken about Lorch and Vargo Hoat. I'll take it into consideration next time I update this for season three, which should be fairly soon.

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tobias93 In reply to FrostedHarbor [2013-07-11 01:58:34 +0000 UTC]

I believe tha face Jaqen shows in aCoK is very CN so you are right

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Gemfyre [2013-07-09 23:15:56 +0000 UTC]

Thank you!

Part of the difficulty with a chart like this is that the characters are all relative to each other. There aren't x and y axes with the characters on a scatter plot. So while I do agree with you to a certain extent, you also have to look at the characters around Victarion. Victarion has a very chaotic personality, despite his adherence to the Ironborn way. More chaotic than Renly and less chaotic than Robert. I'm assuming you've read the books, since you're discussing these characters in particular, so you know that Victarion intends to betray Euron if he gets the chance and has a large fleet to help him do it. Pretty chaotic, in my opinion.

And relative to some of the characters around Euron, he fits pretty neatly where he is. So, this kind of chart does have its faults, for sure, but I tried to match them where I felt best.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Exalmus [2013-07-09 23:44:48 +0000 UTC]

Thank you very much. Tyrion is my favorite character. With that said, I'll keep my response a little vague in case you haven't read the books. Here are 9 examples that I feel balance him right in the middle.

Lawful Good: Encouraging and providing Night's Watch manpower
Lawful Neutral: Defense of King's Landing
Lawful Evil: Using a deceitful gambit to imprison Pycelle, a political enemy
Neutral Good: Convincing a slaver to purchase a certain comrade
Neutral Neutral: Advice/strategy given freely to Young Griff.
Neutral Evil: Rough words spoken to Jaime after Jaime helps Tyrion out of an impossible spot
Chaotic Good: Not following through with the bedding ceremony.
Chaotic Neutral: Promising the Vale to the Hill Tribes
Chaotic Evil: Double homicide

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Carmalain7 In reply to FrostedHarbor [2013-11-10 01:42:54 +0000 UTC]

Oh snap, too real!

Also, btw, I love this whole thing so much - the next book couldn't come out sooner.

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Exalmus In reply to FrostedHarbor [2013-07-10 03:32:55 +0000 UTC]

Very good analysis there

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FrostedHarbor In reply to lazer50 [2013-07-09 23:46:20 +0000 UTC]

Fair enough. Still had fun making it.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to robotideologist [2012-07-09 17:10:38 +0000 UTC]

Brilliantly analyzed, so I'll attempt to spar with you a bit and see if I can convince you as to why certain characters are where. As for me, you've opened my eyes to certain aspects and made me question various assignments. I'll try to defend most, though my next iteration most likely will see some shifts due to your assessment.

I'll address the obvious part of the alignment chart first. Relativity is the largest constraint of the piece, and as such can skew some of the placement. Drogo, for instance, is a great example. Is he the most stand-up guy? No. He's pretty okay with raping and murdering. However, many of Drogo's characteristics are the result of cultural expectations. In order to be an effective Dothraki leader, certain acts of violence must be condoned. If we look outside of those cultural expectations, we find a man who honors his wife and child, shows mercy, and protects the people he leads. These are positive traits, which edge him up a bit. This is why he's above Robert (and the others below him). Robert would do things, like assassinate Dany, when it's not even expected of him. Not to mention, Robert's not a great king. So, Drogo is not morally ideal, but since he's better than those in relation to him, he ends up edging into the good territory.

Melisandre, Melisandre. Just about everyone feels uncomfortably about her position. Some say she's too high, others say not high enough, etc. Here's where I stand on her and any of the other characters who follow the Red God, or in Jaqen's case the Many-Faced God: We don't know what their god(s) want. Melisandre's intentions may be pure in the sense that she zealously follows her religious alignment, but we do not know at this point if her deity plans to use her to bring destruction or order. When the intentions of something as influential as god-like intervention cannot be known, that creates a high level of chaos. Is the Red God truly attempting to end the tyranny of the Others, or is the Red God's rule merely a hotter alternative to what the Others will bring to Westeros? Uncertainty on that magnitude can be difficult to track until it has been revealed, and thus, chaotic. Bringing it back to Melisandre, if the Red God is using Melisandre as its foremost agent, she is an extension of that chaos, which is why we find her chaotically neutral.

Jaqen is much the same in the sense that he is an agent of subterfuge and individualism. We don't know what he wants, and yet he carries great skill. Again, that current of uncertainty brings him over to the chaotic side. We don't know what he's trying to unleash or gain in his story arc, and none of the other characters do either, which makes him unpredictable.

I'll quickly compare Melisandre's religious fanaticism to that of the Greyjoys, who find themselves more lawful. Piggy-backing from my earlier conclusion, we know what the Drowned God wants, making someone like Damphair predictable. We know which set of laws he follows and can therefore judge him according to those laws. (What does this say about Drogo, then? Should he be considered more lawful than where I have him? I'll think on it.) In any case, the Greyjoys' laws and religion have a consistent and predictable quality about them, making them players who can easily be factored into the overall Westerosi alignment, which cannot be said for the Red Woman from Asshai.

Re: Catelyn. I'm including a bit of the Lady Stoneheart arc here.

Re: Dany. Many seem chaotic during war time. As a ruler, I have a hard time seeing her as anything but fair and just. Right now she's young and impulsive, but she has exhibited qualities that foreshadow a future in which she can put aside feelings for the sake of her people. Her re-marriage speaks of duty, not chaos. I think she has extreme streaks of both lawfulness and chaos, which balance out.

Re: Littlefinger. Like the rest of Westeros, I have no idea what his intentions are. To me, he seems worse than he probably is. Varys probably seems better than he is. I'll have to wait until they play their hands and adjust them accordingly.

If you have any other specific characters you'd like to discuss, I'm certainly open to it. I'll just conclude with a reiteration of what I said before. Shifting one character's position affects the whole chart, so some characters get stuck somewhere because there's nowhere else for them to go. With that said, I tried to give justifications for each character's spot as I made it. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

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robotideologist In reply to FrostedHarbor [2012-07-10 17:58:56 +0000 UTC]

A well-thought-out reply. Rather than spar over the position of individual characters, except obliquely, I'd like to think aloud a bit as to the organizing schema. The standard alignment plane has always been somewhat ambiguous, and if the axes aren't irreducibly vague in people's minds, they're at least reducible eigenvectors - so that the vertical axis sometimes groups together "altruistic/selfish" and "won't cross certain lines/will cross them" and the horizontal axis "disciplined/impulsive" and "obeys authority/seeks change." But for instance the disciplined, altruistic revolutionary who will cross any line for the cause isn't a morally complex character (though of course individual ones can be) but a fairly basic archetype. You can plausibly place Lenin in any corner you like, and even do so without (necessarily) making a political statement, but you can't do so without making a statement about what the axes mean.

(I remember someone once saying something to the effect of: "Everybody makes alignment way too complicated. Isn't/is a dickwad. Plays by the rules/doesn't play by the rules." This would be wonderfully helpful advice if those phrases weren't as fully complex as the ones they were supposed to simplify.)

Your intuitions (as you've said) are more based around consequences, while mine follow more from intentions. This isn't to say that I don't think ends can't justify means, or that the consequences of our actions aren't what we should ultimately be concerned with (because what else *would* having good or bad intentions mean?,) but that the only way you can make an inference from the consequences of someone's actions to facts about their character is that they could have reasonably expected it. Of course people can lie to themselves about their motivations, and this entails some judgment calls on the reader's part - for instance, as above, my seeing Melisandre as sincere in her convictions and Victarion as not.

I think if you do want to make the choice that consequences matter in such a way that, if e.g. the effects of Melisandre's actions are unpredictable and destabilizing, she's Chaotic, then that choice of yours has some unpredictable and destabilizing consequences itself! Ned plays a rather destablizing role in the world. Tywin will stabilize and destabilize the situation exactly as much as the situation demands of him - and his actions have probably had more positive consequences than any single character in the series. I wouldn't say that Stannis is exactly making things more stable either. The effects of his actions and of Melisandre's are... pretty much the exact same events. But they're on opposite ends of the square. In this particular case I don't think they should be so very far apart, but it's not hard to find other consequentially-entangled pairs who are very far apart, and, I feel, should be. Everything Gregor does, or nearly, is owned by Twyin, and while I think it's fair (and obvious) to say that impacts Twyin's vertical position, it still seems right to see them on opposite ends horizontally. Ramsay certainly stirs things up more than his father, but far more dramatic than the differences between their effects on the world is the style with which they do so. And I feel that this disentangling is necessary from the perspective of thematic loyalty to the series, which denies that everyone on the same team is going to be morally grouped together. Roose Bolton was Lawful Evil and Barristan Selmy Lawful Good regardless of whom they served at the time.

Honor - you know, the stuff that men who kill other men say to themselves, as Sandor (I paraphrase) says. Some honorable - or maybe potentially honorable - characters whose place is perhaps worthy of mention: Ned, Jon, Brienne, Balon, Drogo, Loras, Catelyn, Roose. Most of these people are following a set of explicit external guidelines specific to their class and gender, much of those guidelines being rules about how and when and whom to murder. Balon, the Damphair, Victarion, and Drogo are all following their ~*~RUGGED BARBARIAN MAN CODE~*~, so what makes for the horizontal difference between the former and latter two? Catelyn follows a code of female honor for basically the same reasons as they follow their code of male honor, and like theirs, her external code sometimes paradoxically demands that she sometimes "follow her heart" (albeit according to internalized, prescripted forms) in defiance of expected rules. You can see the same paradox with Loras, whose chivalry demands that he be a hothead (although to be fair, he's like 16 and one of the best fighters in the world so of course he is.) Brienne embraces the chivalric code wholeheartedly, but unlike the others she's bucking social convention to do so; like the Maesters and (some of the) Watch, hers is a code of choice. And there's also the distinction to be had, seeming to line up with chosen/unchosen, between codes that are basically reputation management (as sympathetic as Ned is, I think that's what his honor is) and the ones that demand you throw your pride away and be an instrument (what Jon struggles to learn, after having grown up with Ned and envying the social position his honor was associated with.) I'm not saying all these things need to matter, just that it's worth thinking about.

Justice. If Dany slides towards Law for trying to be fair and just, what do Chaotic Good rulers try to be? She's initiating mass social revolution out of anger and compassion. At the same time, of course, she's enacting a social script - albeit one she's improvising as she goes along - and maybe this is an extraordinarily weak claim, since everyone is acting out one of those. I agree she's made sacrifices of her instincts in favor of a safer course several times, but it's always been at the behest of her handlers - I can't think of any instances where she's being advised to take more risk than she naturally wants to. (But now I'm talking about individual characters again.) I'd mostly identify forms of "justice" that take the form of universalist ideological commitments, like Dany's or Melisandre's or Varys', with Good. Roose and Lysa and Hizdahr care about justice too, and entirely sincerely, but they mean something different by it.

Is your methodology more to get an idea of where the axes lie, and fill it in with appropriate characters, or to get an idea of what characters you'd like to include, and arrange them relatively? (The second method may end up making more direct statements about how the characters cluster, how the series' moral universe is organized, while the first may say more about specific judgments about the characters themselves.) Obviously it's probably bound to be a mix, but especially inasmuch as crowding is going to occur anyway it's probably worth thinking about whom to include, and also what kind of method people are going to read into it. (Looking at the Stark children, and assuming the first method, I might conclude you were saying that they're all super virtuous except Sansa who's kinda meh; assuming the second, that you read Goodness and Lawfulness as covarying, so that Robb and Bran and Arya are inexplicably on the same rung as Jon rather than Sansa.)

Specifically, and especially if you want to move a bit towards the first method (because crowding is more of a problem for it), you may want to consider using characters as metonymies. The lower-right corner is so overflowing with stupid psychopaths that Vargo Hoat gets pushed over to the Lawful end! Using the second method, that can be used to say a lot. But Gregor also can serve as a metonymy for his crew. There are probably other opportunities for metonymy that I'm not seeing. And just looking at it there do seem to be a good deal of iconic characters who fit in, especially in sectors like CG that appear a bit stretched anyway: Oberyn, Ygritte... I don't know if there's a number to include that you consider ideal, but there seem to be easy drops as well (Rickon??? Hotah???) Of course situational factors are going to force a lot of your choices.

What other traits you choose to let covary (and this applies using either method, I think) are important, and may play into how you conceptualize the axes. If Lawful Evil is predominantly intelligent and Chaotic Evil is predominantly dumb, that says something. If you place a good number of unsympathetic or villain-trope-fulfilling characters as Good (possibilities: Melisandre, Varys) and a good number of sympathetic or hero-trope-fulfilling characters (possibilities: Jaime, Tyrion) as Evil, that says something, not just about your opinion of those particular characters (if not many, it can be read as saying *you* found them unsympathetic) but about your interpretation of the thematics. Being able to say something about the characters, the thematics, and your personal views on morality are going to, to an extent, crowd each other out.

There may be an aesthetic advantage, which you seem to lean towards sometimes and away at others, towards placing especially iconic characters in iconic positions. Is Joffrey as out there as Ramsay and Gregor? No, but he feels right sitting in his little throne of a corner there. (Can't you imagine him yelling proudly about having won the Chaotic Evil tournament? I can.) Likewise I'm not sure Ned really fairly wins his corner, but it feels right to have him there, because he's a sort of mascot for the corner, even if I feel there are others who are Gooder. (A Gooder character wouldn't have become known to the others as an emblem of that; Ned is just vain enough to have acquired the reputation.) But you dodge when placing Stannis just below LN and Tywin just above LE, for whom they have served as mascots. These read as very deliberate choices: you could have (say) removed Hotah, moved Jeor-Doran-Stannis on up, and placed Illyn Payne where Stannis was, but you didn't, because you wanted to say something very loud and clear about Stannis. If that's what you're going for, great! If not, it's not so much that I mention it as a specific suggestion, but that it's the sort of very subtle choice that can convey a lot of information.

Anyway, that's, uh, more nerd words about fanfictional wizard game graph aesthetics than I can possibly justify having written today. I hope you'll interpret my having done so as one of the sincerer forms of flattery.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Merin593 [2012-06-14 19:35:24 +0000 UTC]

You know, it's funny that you bring that up. If you read some of the above comments, you'll see that I had the reverse debate with another member. Ultimately, I decided that Melisandre needed to be moved down a notch below Victarion. I can't tell whether or not you've read all the books, so I won't get into specifics as to why I shifted Melisandre more toward neutral-evil than good or even just neutral (which is where she was in a previous incarnation of this chart). I will simply say that for someone's motives to be "constantly good," there would have to be a level of consistency and authenticity to her actions -- which, as the books show, there is not. I'd also like to add that very little good has arisen from her influence. Some has, certainly, but one cannot deny a certain sinister level inside someone who is willing to sacrifice children and do other things that I shan't spoil. I do not doubt that Melisandre truly believes that she is fighting for the ultimate good, but to say that Melisandre does not work for her own self-interest would be to give her too much credit.

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Merin593 In reply to FrostedHarbor [2012-06-14 21:00:57 +0000 UTC]

I really appreciate the well thought out reply. I have read the books, but skipping spoilers is always good, if someone else is to read comments. I am not sure she would really be "good" but I don't think she is ever evil. Her actions, as she always says, are for the greater good, and while what she does may be detestable, I think in her mind she is doing it for the good of people. I think the phrase "The ends justify the means" applies to her more than almost any other character.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Merin593 [2012-06-14 21:27:01 +0000 UTC]

Right, I think Melisandre is almost purely utilitarian. I say "almost" because the "ends" that she seeks will most certainly include herself at the top of that mountain of power, whispering in a man's ear. I may be proven wrong in the end, but for now I think the phrase, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" directly applies to Melisandre. It would seem that, up to this point, what she believes to be positive actions have turned out poorly for the realm. Keep in mind that I'm not saying she is bereft of positive attributes. Notice how close she is to that neutral line -- much closer than to the deeply evil section. In fact, our good buddy Jaqen H'ghar is right next to her, and he's someone I don't particularly consider evil. I just don't think he -- or Melisandre, for that matter -- are above performing some suspect deeds to get what they want.

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FrostedHarbor In reply to Kraeten [2012-05-17 17:49:03 +0000 UTC]

There's definitely a lot to be said against Jaime. Since I'm not sure whether or not you've read all the books, I'll be as vague as I can with my argument for nudging him a tad towards the good. One of the things I tried to do is take each character's journey into account. Jaime has certainly done some questionable and outright evil deeds, but to say that he is beyond redemption, in my opinion, is to take away the man's humanity. He has made mistakes, and he is trying to right them in a world where righting wrongs is scoffed at. I say look no further than Ser Jorah Mormont, who sold people into slavery for money. Some would consider such an act unforgivable, and yet look at all the good he has done since. I see a redemptive nobility in Ser Jorah, and I think that exists in Jaime, as well.

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Kraeten In reply to FrostedHarbor [2012-05-18 01:31:35 +0000 UTC]

Firstly, let me say thank you for taking the time to write up a thoughtful response. I would have to say in answer to it however, that you're comparing apples to oranges in comparing Jorah to Jaime. Robbing others of freedom, and actually murdering someone fall in two very different categories of crime by my reckoning. I guess the real question is, does Jaime come to truly regret his past crimes later in his character arc?

If so, then I could understand how you could rank in the good area. Thanks for your time, and for not including spoilers.

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Bek359 In reply to Kraeten [2012-12-01 03:21:39 +0000 UTC]

The third book evolves Jaime a HELL of a lot as a character. By book 4 he's essentially a completely different person than he was in book 1. I will not go into spoileriffic specifics.

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