ALIGNMENT CHART! Deadwood

“Cocksucker” is the epithet of choice for the lawful apparently.

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Interesting that Hearst is not on the chart. His evil cannot be contained by such petty measurements.

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I showed this to a friend.

He said it was stupid to pigeonhole the main cast of every series into every possible alignment.

Then he asked if there was a Brady Bunch one yet.

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Swearengen is totally lawful- he has a rough and brutal set of laws and rules to which he adheres and he ensures his men and those around him stick to it. It may or may not boil down to ‘don’t fuck with me’, but it’s there.

Remember that he carved the little slice of civilisation that is Deadwood out of rocks and forest. It’s not pretty and it’s not nice, but it works, and he does everything in his power to make sure it works.

And that he stays on top.

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B, what “laws and rules” does he adhere to? Every action of his is governed by his own self-interest, and the rare deviations from that extend toward acts of compassion. Good rather than Law.

This is a man who said, “we’ll have laws and every other fucking thing,” who openly laments the telegraph wires coming into town (“when has a letter ever brought good news?”), who fears outside attention or interference from the cocksuckers in Yankton to the Pinkertons, who wistfully tells Tolliver, “sometimes I wish we could just hit ‘em over the head, rob ‘em and throw their bodies in the creek.” He broke the law to come into Deadwood, was driven out by the army, and broke the law again to do it again. Al thrives in the early chaos of Deadwood, when he was the only game in town. His arc over the three seasons was his struggle against the advent of civilization, as control of the town gets away from him. Don’t take my word for it, Milch has said pretty much the same thing, both on the DVD extras and the companion book.

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I’m not talking about other people’s laws- I’m talking about *his*. You seem to think Lawful means following the law of the state.

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B, by that argument, the Joker is Lawful because he follows his own set of laws.

Or, as a more reasonable example, Batman. His laws are: no killing, be prepared for everything, defend the defenseless, etc. However, I don’t think anyone would argue that Batman is Lawful.

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Lawful here mostly means preferring a certain order in life. The Joker does not work withing a frame of “order”.

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I’d say Hearst is chaotic evil, he’d gladly burn the world and everyone in it to get his way.

Cyrus is probably Neutral Evil, he’ll acknowledge someone else’s authority if he sees gain in it for himself, although IDK if alignments are really built to account for his sort of fundamentally diseased soul.

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His equivocating about people’s justifications for violence notwithstanding, I can’t see the Doc as anything but a Neutral Good. He consistently tries to relieve suffering, no matter the identity of the afflicted or the cause of their affliction.

Now on to the important question: Where does Ellsworth fit into the alignment scheme?

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