Character Allignment (explained via The Wire)

I played Dungeons and Dragons once, in high school, and I haven't had the desire to replay it since. I was too fat to be beat up over playing the game, so that wasn't it. Some have suggested I had a bad dungeon-master, which is possible (I don't even remember who the dungeon-master was, even though I remember most everyone involved). But for me, D&D is too much like writing on the fly in a group, which is never ideal for producing stories. Teamwork and imaginative problem solving, sure, but not so great for a narrative, which I somehow came to assume was the point of the game (it's not). And then there's characterization. While many imaginative players can and will create interesting characters, it's all too easy to wind up with characters who are dull, single-dimensional, and monomaniacally focused on a quest or a single, vague character trait, like being greedy or noble or drunk. I blame the D&D alignment chart.

As fun as the chart can be for we nerds to play with, it's a seriously flawed tool for character building. No real, live human being can fit into one square perfectly. Abstractly, one's personality might be most at home in a particular cell, say Lawful Neutral, but will tend bleed out into adjacent cells (Lawful Good, True Neutral) as the pressures of the world force different, non-dice controlled reactions out of them. Be honest with yourself: do you fit into one of those nine paradigms every day of your life? Do your friends?
 
And if a real person has no comfortable home on the chart, what chance does a compelling, realistic character have? Or at least a character that a writer wants to be compelling and realistic. Batman, for example, after seven decades of different creators and continuities, can be made to fit into all of the alignments at once. Superman can do it, too, but you have to stretch a bit more.

Then you have something like The Wire, one of the most compelling dramatic narratives ever allowed by the powers that be to grace our television screens, with characters based on real world drug dealers, cops, and politicians. Those who have seen the show (otherwise known as The People Who Should Be Allowed to Vote) know that many of the characters contain staggering shades of complexity, shifting back and forth as the crushing reality of the Baltimore drug wars impinge upon them, playing off of each other like characters in a really good novel. It shouldn't be possible to do an alignment chart of The Wire characters, right? Probably not, but here it is:

That's... actually not bad. I wonder about McNulty, though--Chaotic Neutral seems to fit him just as well, but as much as a self-destructive fuck-up as he is, he does typically work to benefit others.

Also, if Avon is Chaotic Neutral, I'm tempted to slide Stringer into Lawful Neutral; but then I get to thinking about D'Angelo and suddenly Stringer's placement here works a bit better. For balance, you could drop Avon into Chaotic Evil, since he's just as much a part of Baltimore's rot as Stringer, but no one beats Marlo Stanfield for that title (except maybe Snoop).

And Omar is about as True Neutral as they come ("It's all in the game."), but seems to me to slide across the middle, into Lawful ("A man's gotta have a code.") and Chaotic ("Well, you see Mike-Mike thought he should keep that cocaine he was slinging, and the money he was makin' from slingin' it. I thought otherwise."). Recall season two's "All Prologue," in which Omar casually obliterates Maurice Levy.

Real people, and realistic characters, have no true alignment. Fans are welcome to have fun guessing, but writers and creators must note that, for the same reasons that their creations can never be their own, dynamic character relationships will always be too messy to fit into the alignment chart. And that to try is to needlessly diminish a character's potential.

By the way, I did run Nos Populus characters through the alignments, after finishing the book. James Reso is generally Chaotic Neutral, with forays up and down the Chaotic wing. I'll let readers decide where they think the rest of the characters fall.