Is Rick Chaotic Evil "done right"?

He only cares about them once they start really facing the consequences of his reckless actions. If he doesn't see them get hurt or think that their pain matters, he doesn't care.

He's so pragmatic and has a large-picture view, that he doesn't see his actions as evil compared to what would happen if he didn't do what he did. But he is CE.

Yeah, by a lot of definitions Rick is extremely evil and selfish/self-centered. Do you guys remember when Rick destroyed two entire universes (mini-verses, whatever) just so that a third one would effectively function as a car battery for his spaceship.

It may not be causing pain and suffering for no other purpose than that he enjoys the pain of suffering, but it is callousness and a complete disregard for other sentient life on a scale that (at least in gaming terms) would be very hard to describe as anything other than evil.

D&D alignments only "work" within the game.
They are not for general application to all media.
Fuck they don't even work in D&D...
Oh well.

He shows why alignments are retarded, he is chaotic good half the time and chaotic evil the other half.

hes not chaotic neutral because that implies something totally different.

just stop using alignments all together and your good

>I don't understand alignment.

That's nice. Why don't you go run off, and leave the actual discussion to the big boys, hmm?

Rick isn't exactly evil though.

He's more like Chaotic Neutral with an extreme bend to dickish.

Also, giving an antimatter gun to a hitman for arcade money.

He's a mass murderer who's enslaved multiple civilizations and literally out-deviled Satan.

He is, literally, worse than Hitler.

See
Rick is by all standards but his own evil. Him having friends and caring for his family do not absolve him of his evil actions, it only makes him a three dimensional character.

Even by Rick's own standards he's a bad guy. He admits it when he sacrificed himself to save Morty from the time paradox. Just most of the time he tries to avoid responsibility for his actions by drinking or through glib responses.

Wasn't his own justification that the hitman would get the gun anyway, no matter if he did anything or not? That sounds neutral to me - he's not against or for the consequences of his actions. He doesn't want the target's death per se, but he doesnt' care to stop it.

His drinking is less avoiding facing what he's done and more to forget all his lost. His just past the point of giving a fuck about the mayhem he causes, and that's what makes him interesting to me.

We're talking DnD metrics here, so no, that's pretty squarely evil.

Still say cn, mainly because he purposefully chooses not to be one of the herd, he chooses the actions available to him that will look after himself and companions. He doesn't look at the situation and go what is the worst thing o can do to these people ever, or how can I help these people, he's all riles are for the dumb, I don't subscribe to either I'm going to just live and do it my way as fuck it you only get one consciousness, fuck all those true neutral rickshaw trying to just exist and be all Ricky; I'm motherfucking Rick!

So basically the only way to be evil is to have literally no other desires but the pain and suffering of other people?

Can't wait till season 3 jumps the shark, Rick ends up like House, moral compass everyone, voices the writers petty frustrations and mewling fucknuts on the internet make dank memes about how much they love him because he gets it.

>>I don't understand alignment.
lol

In D&D there are "planes" of good , law, chaos, whatever.

In other cartoons obviously they don't have those planes, so they can't be "aligned" to them.

Fucking served.

Rick is still evil. Just because a genocidal maniac shrugs instead of laughing at his deeds, doesn't make him less evil.

He's killed an entire universe as a temporary distraction so he can escape. Doesnt get much more "dnd version of evil" than that.

No being neutral would be more that he doesn't call the authorities on the hitman when he knows he wants to assassinate someone.

Supplying the murder weapon (especially when the murder weapon is quite rare) is definitely an evil act

He does encourage the wanton murder of sentient things for purely personal gain. The very first episode he gets into a shootout with security guards in order to smuggle crystals up Morty's ass.

This.

I would say so, most of his actions are in response to other people/organizations actions. Take selling the gun to Micheal, he knows Michael is going to get a gun some how so he may as well posit on it, he has no moral compunctions about it, he's not going to go assassinate anyone though.
He doesn't care about the world's problems, hence the neutrality of it; he used to be chaotic good most likely, but since the galatic wars just doesn't give a fuck anymore.

Just because he kills things, or by encountering them causes massive death and suffering doesn't make him evil; he doesn't mean to fuck shit up it just happens as a consequence of escape/survival/saving the day.

>The very first episode he gets into a shootout with security guards in order to smuggle crystals up Morty's ass.
Which turned out to be entirely pointless because the seeds dissolved in Morty's ass before he could get them out and presumably make some sort of mind enhancing superscience potion with them.

>I didn't mean to kill all those people, I just needed to in order to get away with hurting people without facing any consequences. It isn't evil!

Caring for no one but your own is classic evil, according to this guy.

...Though I suppose it still might not fit D&D demon cartoon classic evil.

You are running on a model of evil and good in which intention matters more than consequences. The Taliban is lawful good then.

The only problem I have with that argument is that Rick really makes it sound as if the hitman will manage to get an antimatter gun, whether he makes it for him or not. I know the antimatter gun is rare, but it doesn't sound impossible to get if Rick can sell it for only enough for an arcade splurge.

If it were a more common item, like a knife or a regular gun, it wouldn't even be a question: knives can be found or bought just about anywhere.

Can't hold humans up to demon's standards of evil. They got all that instinctual empathy baggage and families and such.

Near everyone justifies their actions, few are evil in their own eyes. Evil lies almost exclusively in the eyes of others.

Melvin Just saw himself as the pimp of all pimps.

He's still providing a professional murderer with a rare weapon so he can take his grandson to an arcade, and it was kind of implied that they'd done business on other occasions as well.

Reminder that Gygax had some kinda fucked up ideas about morality and his system is not remotely a good idea for anything beyond D&D.

/nofunallowed

Gygax had so many shit ideas that just ruined the genre.

Man at first glance I thought that was Ming the Merciless. Was Disappointed it wasn't.

He's not wrong though. As useful as the alignment system can be for identifying a character's tendencies, it is not without its flaws. Gygax was sort of a moral absolutist.

Common mistake. Ming the Merciless would never have been so evil as to turn Ayn Rand into a religion.

judging by the breakdowns the writers have had on social media, i wouldnt be surprised. they're fucking insane

Not saying he's wrong - but Gygax was not a moral absolutist, so much as he was making a game in which good and evil were real, physical forces, rather than human judgements. Makes for a very different world, and a very different set of scales.

After all, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Oh dear, what were they getting up to?

Fuck, what happened?

I tried to watch Rick and/or Morty but it was too misanthropic. It's liek tehw riter voice actor dude's personal magical realm where he is the cool smart guy and everyone else is a stupid fuck for him to make fun of.
Plus the infinite universes thing removes all value from life.
I don't want to deal with anyone who takes such a grim view on things. But fuck me since it's a super popular show so now a generation of shitheads are going to mimic it and be edgy sociopaths.

It's just a mirror to the human condition bring programmed into people via capitalism.

It's not slavery, they work for each other...

Eh, I'm pretty sure he's neutral evil.

>doesn't give a shit about rules
>out for himself
>doesn't actively go out of his way to cause harm, but if its in his benefit he will

I dunno, I've always read neutral on the chaotic-law axis as being more of a not giving a damn about social constructs like rules propriieties and such while chaotic is more actively subverting them (like the stereotypical "problem with authority" guy whereas neutral is the "eh, whatever, sure thing" until it starts affecting them negatively and then they're like "fuck that").

But that's likely my idiosyncratic read.

Yeah the pilot turned me off forever.

Then I got a second recommendation and watched episode 2, and actually enjoyed it.

It's like the tone between the two episodes shifted from "suffering is funny" to "suffering is unavoidable and you might as well laugh".

And yeah. CE Rick for sure. Character development might drop him down to CN, but his actions are inexcusably CE.

The thing is, he's one of an exclusive club that can INTERACT with an infinite multiverse. You know how people in sandbox RPGs often go berserk for a bit and then load a quick save? He can do that in Real Life.

Plus, infinite multiverse means something particularly nasty.

>EVERY TIME RICK DOES SOMETHING GOOD, IT CREATES A REALITY WHERE HE FAILS AT IT.

Meaning that every "good" act actually dooms countless universes by creating the possibility of his "good" act failing or backfiring.

When you know that every action you make brings suffering to untold billions, how do you motivate yourself to do anything?

>Take selling the gun to Micheal, he knows Michael is going to get a gun some how so he may as well posit on it, he has no moral compunctions about it, he's not going to go assassinate anyone though.

If no-one sold guns or weapons to assassins the costs of assassinations would go up and therefore the number of people willing to use assassins would go down, and assassinations would therefore drop to a lower rate than before.

If only a few people sold arms to assassins the price increase is less still but it's still better than actively helping.

"Someone's going to profit from this act of evil so it might as well be me" is an evil act itself. Selling the bug guy the gun is one step from hiring services as a spotter to murder someone and two steps from pulling the trigger yourself.

It's an evil act.

He was an anti-government terrorist for quite a while though.

I second this.

"One less person doing this evil thing would make the evil thing marginally less straightforward" is the Neutral response.

"I'm not going to do this evil thing and I'll try and prevent you from doing it too" is the Good response. Where you actively go out of your way to prevent harm from coming to innocents.

Which is what Morty did.

ITT people with a very planetary mindset

Doesn't necessarily imply chaotic though, especially if he were working within the framework of a larger organization. Also it's one of those deals where you have to weigh the body of behavior.

That said, I'm not super familiar with the show so I could well be off base.

Anton LaVey is a hack

>If no-one sold guns or weapons to assassins the costs of assassinations would go up and therefore the number of people willing to use assassins would go down, and assassinations would therefore drop to a lower rate than before.
non sequitur

So...Rick, selling the gun to insect guy, and profiting from the murder of others, is an evil act, right?

Michael's target was an omnicidal energy being though, kind of legitimate to kill.

but rick didn't know that when selling him the gun, so it's necessarily not a moral choice he made

Rick has proof that there are infinite alternate universes, and therefore proof that all life is equally worthless.

So? Just because there's no intrinsic meaning to existence, doesn't mean you can't make your own.

this guy gets it

I like that Rick is very much a D&D PC and day to day life is exasperating for him because most people are the equivalent of NPCs.

It would be soul crushing.

>Rick destroyed two entire universes (mini-verses, whatever)

Teenyverses.

Only one of them was a teenyverse.

chaotic neutral

chaotic evil would be if he did all those things for the fun of it. rick only kills people that have wronged him or if he is in danger and he only steals from people if they could survive without it.

>chaotic good is an angel

That doesn't seem right.

His justification was that he would kill his target anyway, but that's all it was, a justification.

At the very least, he didn't need to profit and aid the assassination.

It's not like he knew Fart wanted to destroy the universe, he just wanted pocket change for Blitz and Chitz and most likely had other avenues for that money, but Rick simply doesn't care or even see what Crombopulous Michael was doing as wrong. In his mind, it doesn't matter in the longer run, because nothing really does, and probably just liked the idea that this action might have fucked with the Federation is all.

Also, he literally manipulated and corrupted a hivemind for basically his own pleasure.

That said, while he's not afraid to shed blood and kill (Even his own clones), he's not bloodthirsty either, as shown in the purge episode where he at first wanted to watch the purge for entertainment, but quickly realized that it wasn't something a person watches for entertainment.

Let's also not forget that he doomed the earth of his actual home universe, and rather than fix it, he jumped to reality where another version of him fixed it, and immediately died, then replaced him.

He also IS definitively on the evil end of the spectrum, as we saw in the episode where an even Evil-er version of him who was actually a Morty showed him that he was basically a step away from him on the spectrum of good to evil (The guy between them? SUPER weird).

He's not the MOST evil Rick, but he's pretty damn Evil by the standards of Ricks.

i thought that lawful only meant you follow the laws of men. an angel would do the right thing no matter what the law says

Except that's bullshit.

He didn't need to kill the teenyverse at all. It hadn't wronged him.

but like, what if man has chaotic evil laws dude

>I thought lawful only meant you follow the laws of man

Good lord, no. Lawful means that you adhere to a strict sense of Order. Angels are literally Law incarnate. They were created as a functional hierarchy and cannot deviate from it because God's word is Absolute.

They are literally flying bags of Law.

Then they are lawful evil.

God and angels don't follow laws, they do what is objectively good.

Would that not make them Lawful Neutral?

He's neutral. Chaotic neutral at best.

Good and evil are just for children's stories.

Lawful means that you follow a code of some kind, but which code you follow is less important. Paladins can follow the laws of their god without caring about the laws of man and still be lawful, for instance. Or a person can make their own personal rules and, as long as they remain consistent and stick to them, they can be lawful without necessarily caring about or following anyone else's laws.

That said, not following the laws of man can lead to unnecessary complications and a lot of personal codes can include those laws. So a lot of lawful characters will just follow them out of convenience until the laws conflict.

counterpoint: Quantity doesn't determine worth

>God and angels don't follow laws, they do what is objectively good.

that depends on the setting.

worth is always subjective. There's no such thing as value in the universe.

In that same episode he also drunkenly puled Morty out of bed and was planning to get Morty's crush with them so he could drop a bomb he mae on earth and start humanity fresh with Morty and Jessica as a new Adam and Eve, while also over explaining how he would never make a move on Morty's girl.

hah your so wrong wow, hes so lawful good its funny.

Dan and Justin? Dan has Depression/Anxiety, so he has a kinda of breakdown every once in a while (Happened around the time he was fired from Community as well).

Justin is just a drunken weirdo.

Damned if they don't know how to make an extremely violent and hilarious show with lots of heart.

So? There's a nearly infinite amount of parallel earths.

>There are virtually infinite amounts of people on earth, its okay to just kill one if you feel like it

Which was summed up really neatly with Morty's speech to Summer. The main thrust of which "No one has worth, or purpose, the universe is meaningless, cold, merciless, and miserable, and all you can do is try to impose what meaning you can on it. Come watch TV with your family." Which is either the most or least nihilistic thing I've ever heard, but it's beautiful regardless.

It actually gets better as it goes on. As the show goes on, people keep calling Rick out on his shit and the show takes pains to show that he's a total dick, but the only reason his family keeps him around is because his daughter is super traumatized from being abandoned by him and doesn't want him to leave again.

Many times throughout the show, it's shown that Jerry actually brings up some good points, but he's not very smart, and a complete Jackass, so he gets dismissed out of turn.

Morty is also becoming a dick over time.

But it's a great show, and everyone is very human. Even the aliens.

Yes, basically. Why is life valuable? Find me an answer that doesn't hinge on the notion of a life being unique.

Clearly Egoism done right

It's existentialist, not nihilist.

Only if you assume God isn't good.

...Which is why we have Archons.

Reminder that Gygax's ideas about morality were completely appropriate for the setting in a way that people living in an advanced, safe, prosperous, modern era can't appreciate.

Right. He destroyed the Mini-Verse the Mini-Verse was in.

But not the microverse, because he needs that to run his car.

Because we, as sapient beings, value ourselves by our own selfish desire to remain alive and fear of death. We share that value with other species based on common courtesy from similarity and proximity.

I don't see anything wrong with how he replaced himself in another universe is evil. He was going to die in that universe at that exact time he just did nothing to prevent it, knowing that the universe provides infinite answers to his problems and dilemmas.