: Re: How to write a chaotic neutral protagonist and prevent my readers from thinking they are evil? I've come across a problem with one of the main characters in my book. The "heroine" of my story

@Carla500

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I found a very elegant reduction of alignments in a Tumblr post:

I figured out a simple guide to the alignment chart last night:
Lawful: Rules matter more to me than individuals.

Chaotic: Individuals matter more to me than rules.
Good: Other people’s well-being is more important than my own.

Evil: My own well-being is more important than other people’s.
Neutrals: My opinion of what is more important is determined on a case-by-case basis.
So a Lawful Good character’s guiding moral philosophy might be “I follow the rules because the rules keep people safe, even if they are sometimes inconvenient or harmful to me or other individuals.” A Chaotic Evil character’s guiding moral philosophy would be like “Screw the rules and screw you.”

If Joyce is Chaotic, she's concerned with individuals more than corporations (so she won't kill, because that would harm an individual). If she's Neutral, then sometimes she will decide that people are worth helping, and sometimes she won't.

If you want to show her as Neutral rather than Evil, then you need a Pet the Dog moment. (TV Tropes warning!) You need to show that she is in the middle of the Good-Evil spectrum, and that she is capable of doing good things if it interests her. Ignoring child labor shoves her towards Evil, so I see your beta's point. There's a difference between self-interest and self-absorption. "I don't have to do anything about child labor because I don't know the kids" is not Neutral, it's Asshole.

The journey from Neutral to Good is not a long one. But going from Chaotic Good (I will help other people, regardless of the rules) to Lawful Good (I will help other people as long as I can follow the rules to do so, and I won't break the rules to help people) is honestly the bigger challenge here. How do you get Joyce from "screw you, I do what I want" to "I can't stop GlobalMegaCorp from using child labor because it operates in Backwardsia, where there are no laws against it"?

If you want your Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins! protagonist to be appealing, you have to make her appealing. She has to do things we like, or find fun, or could sympathize with. A selfish character can still be "not a jerk" if the character is capable of not being selfish all the time.

Loki is a Chaotic Neutral who repeatedly swings from Evil to Good. Captain Jack Sparrow is a Chaotic Neutral who isn't as Evil as he pretends to be. Petyr Baelish is a Chaotic Evil who pretends to be Good. None of them could suffer to be Lawful.

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