Stupid Evil

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"No Muttley we can't win fairly. We are villains, ergo we have to cheat!"

--Dick Dastardly while the finish line is right behind him.

Yes, Lawful Stupid has its Evil counterpart. A general trait of Stupid Evil is doing evil things for the sake of being evil, rather than because they are (morality aside) easy or viable paths towards wealth, power, revenge, or whatever the villain's goal is. Especially when a non evil, or less evil way of doing things would work better.

A villain who is truly insane can get away with this sort of thing since what compels them to act in an evil manner is the fact that they have some screws loose, but "serious" nemeses and long-term, high-threat villains are usually expected to have a goal and some capacity for rational planning; a villain who takes time out of a busy day to kick a puppy or eat a kitten just to establish evil credibility will probably be treated with derision by players.

Examples of Stupid Evil

Sicks, a pretty stupid evil dude, also a neckbeard. His face should remind you someone who should not be named.

• Joffrey Baratheon
  • He sends an assassin armed with a Valyrian Blade (one of only a few hundred such weapons in all of Westeros, an unusual weapon for a common hitman when a common dirk would have sufficed) to kill Bran Stark. And when that fails, it causes the Starks to suspect the Lannisters.
  • He kills Eddard Stark, therefore sparking an unnecessary and very costly civil war (and this was against what his family had planned). Despite that, they still came out on top since they are still standing while the Starks are scattered, due mainly to Tywin and Tyrion being tactical geniuses and strategic masterminds.
  • He chooses to ignore his duties and the welfare of his people in favor of satiating his sadistic behavior.
  • He regularly abuses Sansa and threatens to have her killed despite the fact it will reduce her value as a political hostage and (in their eyes) could cause the Starks to kill their political hostage, Jamie Lannister.
  • He has one of his Kingsguard try to murder his uncle Tyrion in the middle of the Battle of Blackwater instead of just simply poisoning him (as Tyrion pointed out).
  • He calls Tywin a coward. Luckily for him, they were related. Because if he wasn't, he would have been struck down.
  • As a final hurrah at his wedding, he insults his in-laws in front of his bride.
• Cersei Lannister
  • While not as dumb as her son Joffrey (hardly something to be proud of) she is paranoid and if she, for any reason thinks you might threaten her or her children you're in trouble; even for something as minor as telling her her latest idea is a bad one. At best she will view you as an enemy and will at best be a passive aggressive bitch to you, at worst have you brutally tortured to death. Even when the "offender" is House Lannister's allies to whom good relations are vital.
  • Responds to a puppet show which says (in short) that House Lannister are a bunch of evil tyrants by having anyone who saw it either sharply fined or mutilated and ordering the puppeteers killed; first by decapitation then changes her mind and hands them to her resident mad scientist for deadly experiments.
  • Encourages the worst aspects of her kids, in the case of Joffrey this is like attempting to put out a forest fire with napalm.
    • On that note, her atrocious parenting combined with conceiving Joffrey with her brother Jamie is likely the reason Joffrey's such a repulsive asshole.
  • She ignores the numerous acts of cruelty and stupidity of her eldest son and brushes off any criticism of him as being a personal attack.
  • She kills the high septon because he was her brother's cats paw which he put into power to keep the faith in House Lannister's pocket, being a decent but easily manipulated man. This leads to a more competent and devout high septon getting into power with ambitions of his own, letting him raise his own army and creating another particularly erratic player to threaten House Lannister's precarious position.
• Gregor Clegane
  • It's heavily implied that Gregor is a serial killer, having gone through three wives who died under suspicious circumstances and at his keep there's a high turnover rate among the servants.
  • Before the story starts it's an open secret that he raped and murdered Rheagar's wife Elia Martell, even though he hadn't been ordered to do so. This will bite him and the Lannisters in the ass BIG TIME later on, though he deserves it.
  • After losing a jousting match Gregor decapitates his own horse then tries to kill his opponent, Loras Tyrell, and his own brother when the latter intervenes. Had Gregor succeeded, it's likely the Lannisters could kiss any hope of an alliance with the Tyrells goodbye.
  • The men who Gregor recruits as his hand-picked warriors aren't chosen for their intelligence, just their fighting skills and sadism (not even loyalty as they serve Gregor out of fear).
  • After taking Harrenhal Gregor and his men torture the prisoners to death, including ones who are nobility and could be used as leverage in the war.
  • Arugably when, before killing Oberyn, Gregor shouts his crime of murdering and raping Elia in front of all of the nobles in King's Landing, arguably he had been poisoned and goaded by Oberyn before then.
• Ramsay Bolton
  • Even though his father, Roose, is a cunning general who manipulated and back-stabbed his way into rulership of the North, Ramsey lacks any of the strategic foresight and critical thinking that Roose possesses.
  • He is totally fearless and reckless with his actions, which Roose points out will most likely be his downfall if they are not curbed. However he is shown as peak physically fit and has made Sansa as his bitch and crushed the Baratheons in battle as insult to injury. We're talking about the books, not the long format porno version. Book version he is described as portly and ugly and an iffy fighter.
  • His savage exploits are known across Westeros, and continuously pisses off the other Northern lords by hunting down their subjects like deer. This is part of the reason why half of the Northern Houses rebel against Bolton overlordship.
  • He chooses to flay alive Ironborn captives, despite promising them clemency if they surrendered, along with turning Theon Greyjoy into his personal eunuch slave. This has ensured that the Ironborn will now fight to the death rather than sue for peace, and contemplate a full invasion of the North instead of merely raiding its settlements.
  • After marrying the fake-Arya Stark (who everyone else thinks is the real one) he tortures, threatens her and tries to make her do certain things to his hunting dogs. This sets off the Northerners Powder Keg of Justice, causing an uprising against the Boltons that will likely end with Ramsay's and Roose's heads on spikes.
    • Despite all of the stupid evil committed by them, they are still winning (Though this is more due to the good guys being either Lawful Stupid or Stupid Good, than anything else). Mind you Joffrey got offed and Cersei got publicly shamed. But compared to what happened to the good guys in the story, it was a slap on the wrist.
• Any given Captain Planet villain. They deliberately destroy their own world, not for political or financial gain, but simply because they're assholes.
• Strawman villains in bad political fiction in general, such as ones in the above example.
• Some followers of Chaos such as Firaeveus Carron can prove to be this most of the time.
• Sicks (yep, that's his name) from Demonic Detective Neuro.
  • Causing unnecessary murder or tragedy on other family for his own satisfaction(he is a sadist btw).
  • Randomly pissing off Neuro, a real demon and starting the most gory and violent arc that Jump had ever published.
  • Claiming his own ideal of evil is the "true evil" but rather just a cheap, rotten flavor of a puzzle in Neuro's tongue.
    • Also, his family has done the same thing as he did for many generations and claiming that this "evil" has evolve them into more human than anyone else.
• Grimdark as a whole often offs into this, in that things are crappy for the sake of being crappy.
• Lolth actually enforces Stupid Evil in her worshipers. Because of her the Drow spend 3 quarters of their energy fighting each other instead of defending themselves, which is a really bad idea since they live in an underground city under constant threat of being raped by Illithids and Beholders. In fact, when things get really bad she literally has to tell them to stop for a short period of time.
• The Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy, who's rival clans always plan on backstabbing each other even if they're all fighting a mutual (and far worse) enemy. A perfect plan for them involves getting their own enemies and allies to kill each other, until they are the only one left to face the next enemy (keep in mind that "they" doesn't just mean rival clans either, in an apocalyptic scenario even their personal secretary is only barely less of an enemy than the hordes of the undead). As above, it takes the Horned Rat, their god, as well as the invention of instant communication via the Farsqueaker to get their fuzzy little asses united.
• The Joker. Once merely a criminal mastermind with a chaotic, unpredictable bent, he's devolved as time goes on into a murder-happy rabid dog who kills for the jollies and because he gets off on being punched in the face by Batman.
• Edgelord characters by pre/teens on DeviantArt.
• Starscream from Transformers. He's too ambitious and egotistical to realize how good his position as Megatron's second-in-command is, and so spends much of his time trying to usurp his leader with predictable failure. He also tends to do things on the spur of the moment to satisfy his own ego, as demonstrated in Prime where he angrily takes credit for killing Arcee's best friend Cliffjumper while in handcuffs in front of Arcee, simply because he doesn't want Airachnid stealing the credit for things he did.
• The Sith in the Star Wars universe suffer from this greatly, and it's a major reason they keep losing to the Jedi and failed to keep any of their empires intact long-term. In fact, one could argue that they're a perfect case study on why Stupid Evil is a bad idea:
  • Firstly, whereas the Jedi code encourages understanding yet controlling your emotions (that way you take them into account, but they don't prevent you from doing what is necessary), the Sith code encourages embracing your emotions and indeed, many of the most powerful Sith like Darth Vader are incredibly emotionally damaged. Thus Sith tend to do things in the heat of the moment and often lack the patience needed to be truly effective. Darth Malak can't find Revan and the Ebon Hawk crew on a planet he has control of? Oh well better just level his own planet with Star Destroyers, costing himself thousands of workers and soldiers in his psychotic and desperate rush to defeat his old master.
  • Secondly, the Sith code is built on a hyper-Darwinist, "survival-of-the-fittest" structure. While this sounds decent enough on paper, in practice it meant that the Sith constantly backstabbed each other in idiotic power plays, often leading to Sith killing each other more often than they killed Jedi. Crossing with the "overly emotional" thing above, their lack of patience often led to them betraying each other way before it was beneficial to do so. Darth Bane was the first major Sith Lord to realize how stupid and unsustainable this lifestyle was and did something about it. His "rule of two" may have led to the Sith population being lower than ever before or after, but at least it kept the Sith order alive and prevented most of them from slaughtering each other in pathetic attempts to gobble up more power.
  • Thirdly and finally, Sith who engage in too much evil and envelope themselves too deeply in the Dark Side often suffer from an inability to properly sense the Light Side. This alienation of the Light is what lead to the otherwise brilliant Palpatine's death. He alienated altruism and good so utterly that he was not only unable to sense Luke Skywalker's presence during a critical moment, but he was also unable to sense that his apprentice Darth Vader still had some morality in him. Thus he attempts to tortuously kill Luke and is killed himself when he fails to expect Vader to attack him out of paternal feelings.
• Dick Dastardly from the 'Wacky Racers Forever' TV show. He has the best car in the whole contest that's so far above everyone else's that he can win the competition with a damaged vehicle but pisses that away because as a villain he refuses to win through good or even neutral (such as racing fairly) means. The formula of the show is that Dick will pull ahead of everyone else, stop to cheat, have his plans backfire against him and he then does it again multiple times per race without learning anything. The crowning moment of this is in the pilot for the (failed) 21st century reboot: he arrives at the finish line about an hour ahead of time but refuses to cross it, declaring that he has to cheat because he's a villain.