Straight Edge Evil: Difference between revisions

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A sister trope or sub-trope of [[Pure Is Not Good]], this is when a villain lives a temperate and orderly lifestyle, [[Straight Edge|free of drugs, tobacco, alcohol, illicit sex and other such vices]]. Such a villain will probably be [[Lawful Evil]] and keep to a schedule.
 
Often a trait of a [[Knight Templar]]. See also [[Villainous Valour]], [[Evil Virtues]] and [[Family Values Villain]]. Compare [[Smug Straight Edge]], [[Evil Vegetarian]], and [[Even Evil Has Standards]].
{{examples|Examples: }}
 
{{examples|Examples: }}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* Light from ''[[Death Note]]''. His disciple Mikami also leads a fairly healthy lifestyle, up to and including a gym membership.
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* Several [[Dean Koontz]] villains fit this to a T, the better to conceal their true monstrous nature and seem normal and orderly to the world. When darkness falls and the possibility of being caught is null, however, all bets are off for what they will do.
** The sadistic and arbitrary serial killer in Dean Koontz's ''Intensity'' always keeps his word, has a well-ordered and scrubbed clean house, and even paid for his purchases made at a gas-station after killing the attendant...because he is a killer, not a thief.
* Vorbis from ''[[Discworld/Small Gods|Small Gods]]''. An ascetic religious man who truly believes in his holy war. Vetinari may also be an example, though he's a benevolent dictator rather than a straight villain. (Benevolent in the sense of the Inquisition, mind.)
* [[Ian McDonald]]'s ''The Broken Land'' had a villain who drank lots of herbal tea.
* In [[Lois McMaster Bujold]]'s ''[[The Curse of Chalion]]'', libertine Dondo dy Jironal sets out to become influential with Teidez, the heir to the throne, via alcohol, carousing, and so on. When Dondo dies, his brother Martou, the [[Big Bad]], has some trouble dealing with Teidez, due in part to Martou's [[Straight Edge]] tendencies.
* Pinkie Brown in ''[[Brighton Rock]]''. He's revolted by sex and the idea of opening himself up to another person, and similarly scared of the loss of control involved with drugs and alcohol. Sharply contrasted with the drunken, [[Really Gets Around]] hedonist Ida Arnold.
* San Khay of [[Matthew Swift]] who lives a fiercely regimented lifestyle, exercises hard, always eats healthily, and never partakes in smoking or drugs.
* Karla from ''[[Tinker TaylorTailor Soldier Spy (film)|Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy]]'' (a less than mediocre story, admittedly) is said to have quite esceticaescetic tastes, the only pleasure he indulges excessively in being his fondness for [[Smoking Is Cool|camel cigarettes]].
 
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
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** While he makes his fortune distributing drugs, he has nothing but contempt for the users. Being dependable and professional are his primary values, and junkies are known for neither.
* Servalan from [[Blake's 7]] certainly has a taste for the finer things in life but has a horror of moral decadence and goes to great lengths to clean up the [[Wretched Hive]] of Freedom City.
 
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* [[Warhammer 40000]] has Lelith Hesperax, the head of the [[Evil Counterpart|Dark]] [[Our Elves Are Different|Eldar]] [[Blood Sport|Wych Cult of Strife]]. [[Dark Action Girl|Wyches]] are essentially the gladiators of the Dark Eldar, and their leaders (the Succubi / Archites) use the most advanced [[Phlebotinum Pills|combat drugs]], [[Poisoned Weapons|poison]] or [[Magic From Technology|arcane wargear]] in the setting to dart around and kill anything before it can as much as look at them. In contrast, Lelith comes with two knives, blades in hear hair, and just enough cloth on her so you can't really say she's naked. And not [[Chainsaw Good|chain]] or [[Energy Weapon|power]] knives, either - just regular mono-edged knives which she is so good with, she treats as power weapons. In short, she uses none of the "crutches" other wyches do, and yet is, by far, the fastest, most skilled, and, what wyches value almost as much as winning, the most [[Lady of War|stylish]] of them all.
** The Word Bearers worship all four Chaos Gods and support the other branches of the Chaos Space Marines on the principle that they all serve Chaos in their own way. The Word Bearers do have a problem with the way the Emperor's Children and other Slaanesh worshipers being too self-indulgent and decadent.
 
== [[Professional Wrestling]] ==
* Currently,{{when}} [[CM Punk]] in WWE. Notable for the fact that he won his third World Heavyweight Title this way (the first two were as a face), and has been announced, at his own insistence, as "[[Smug Straight Edge|The]] ''[[Smug Straight Edge|only]]'' [[Smug Straight Edge|straight-edged World Heavyweight Champion]]" in the WWE.
** This was his gimmick in [[Ring of Honor]] as well, complete with saying that Straight-Edge makes him drug-free, alcohol-free and better than you, even feuding with wrestlers over their past drug issues, and his breakout moment in ROH lore was a promo against Raven revolving around their... differences on intoxicants.
** And then there was his feud with [[Jeff Hardy]]; let's just say that ''those'' two guys live ''extremely'' contrasting lifestyles, and I'm not talking about Hardy's music band, either.
 
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* [[Warhammer 4000040,000]] has Lelith Hesperax, the head of the [[Evil Counterpart|Dark]] [[Our Elves Are Different|Eldar]] [[Blood Sport|Wych Cult of Strife]]. [[Dark Action Girl|Wyches]] are essentially the gladiators of the Dark Eldar, and their leaders (the Succubi / Archites) use the most advanced [[Phlebotinum Pills|combat drugs]], [[Poisoned Weapons|poison]] or [[Magic From Technology|arcane wargear]] in the setting to dart around and kill anything before it can as much as look at them. In contrast, Lelith comes with two knives, blades in hear hair, and just enough cloth on her so you can't really say she's naked. And not [[Chainsaw Good|chain]] or [[Energy Weapon|power]] knives, either - just regular mono-edged knives which she is so good with, she treats as power weapons. In short, she uses none of the "crutches" other wyches do, and yet is, by far, the fastest, most skilled, and, what wyches value almost as much as winning, the most [[Lady of War|stylish]] of them all.
** The Word Bearers worship all four Chaos Gods and support the other branches of the Chaos Space Marines on the principle that they all serve Chaos in their own way. The Word Bearers do have a problem with the way the Emperor's Children and other Slaanesh worshipers being too self-indulgent and decadent.
 
== [[Theater]] ==
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* This is the party line of Caesar's Legion in ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'', which officially forbids alcohol, chems, and general "profligacy." Subverted in the case of the high-ranking Aurelius of Phoenix, whose office contains items like beer, lingerie, and "[[I'm a Humanitarian|strange meat]]". (however, they might be confiscated goods).
* [[Big Bad|Bloody Mary]] from ''[[Infamous (video game series)|Infamous 2]]'' is rather upset to learn that a cocktail has been named after her, and even more upset about it being a breakfast cocktail. "When was it ever considered acceptable to drink before five in the afternoon?" she asks.
 
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* Rikki Kixx is a straight-edge rocker in ''[[Metalocalypse]]''. As it turns out, he is unable to indulge in alcohol or drugs for a variety of legal, professional and health reasons, and is promoting sobriety solely to deny people the joy that he himself can no longer feel.
* Judge Claude Frollo in ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney film)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]'' is a particularly brutal [[Deconstructed Trope|deconstruction]]
* In ''[[Codename: Kids Next Door]]'', the [[Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain| Toilenator]] avoids caffeine, claiming it's bad for your "regularity".
* ''[[G.I. Joe]]''. While the Dreadnaughts are known to have a thing for junk food (mostly chocolate donuts and grape soda) higher-ranking members of Cobra (including the Baroness, Destro, Tomax and Xamot) at least know enough to eat healthy, snacking on fruit and milk while watching Cobra Commander make a fool of himself with his mecha-sea-serpent plot. Unfortunately for them, in another episode (where Cobra's scheme involves manufacturing an [[Alien Invasion]]) this Straight Edge works against them; Snake-Eyes notices that the "alien" who makes extortion demands via video is holding a very human-made milk carton.
 
== Real Life ==
* [[Adolf Hitler]], sort of- he was known to despise smoking, disliked drunkenness and may have dabbled in vegetarianism. His regime also promoted healthy living, did some of the earliest research on the negative effects of smoking, built homes for unwed mothers, and introduced some early animal rights laws; [[Hitler Ate Sugar|not everything the man did was absolutely evil]], even if he was a horrible dictator, and despite the fact that a lot of this tied into his desire to [[Social Darwinist|forge a "master race"]]. However, he was rumoured to have [[Squick|had an affair with and/or sexually abused his niece]], although it has proven very difficult to piecespiece together an accurate picture of their relationship from amid the rumours and propaganda of contemporary society.
** Hitler LOVED''loved'' children and dogs, and in a pure way. Both children and dogs are obedient, which is what he likes the best.
** Although his late-life cocktail of drugs might seem to disqualify him, these were, as with [[Elvis Presley|Elvis]], prescribed to him by crappy doctors. Believe it or not, nobody at the time knew exactly what methamphetamine did or how nasty of a drug it was.
** The exact nature of Hitler's sexuality is heavily debated by historians. The US government compiled a psychological profile (the first of its kind) on Hitler during the war, which accurately predicted that he'd fight to the end and ultimately commit suicide rather than surrender. Even this profile, however, states that it is difficult to determine exactly what Hitler's sex life was like, as they just had unverifiable scraps of rumor to go on, often contradictory. During the early years of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany, several German newspapers ran exposes on his bizarre personal life, but Hitler had his goons kill them, then hunt down and destroy every copy they could find. Nonetheless based on these scattered reports, the psychological profile concluded that there was certainly ''something'' unusual about Hitler's sex life. Other parts of the report based on more public information concluded that Hitler met most of the medical criteria for some form of Psycopathy (utterly manipulative, incapable of remorse, unable to mentally accept personal fault for anything, etc.). One of the major hallmarks of Psychopathy is extreme sexual perversion and obsession, not so much the actual pleasure but in the transgressive nature of it. On the other hand, there were other reports that he was very squeamish about women. The psychological profile therefore offered the tentative conclusion that while Hitler was embarrassed about sex and maintained a public facade, there might be some substantiation to the rumors that when he was having sex with a woman, he'd engage in...er...various dominance-based "excrement play" type activities.
* Roman society considered a man who did not drink to be evil because he was unwilling to risk [[In Vino Veritas|revealing his motives when under the influence]]. [[Gaius Julius Caesar|Caesar]] got a lot of flak from his rivals, particularly [[Cicero]], for refusing to drink heavily even once in a while.
** Apparently it's considered rude in Japan to not go drinking with your coworkers after work. By not getting drunk, you're refusing to open a vulnerability to them, which is important to ensure loyalty to the group. If you can't be blackmailed, it's too easy for you to betray the company.
* There have been a few isolated (but generously publicized) incidents of violence and crime coming out of the [[Straight Edge]] movement itself (mostly from "[[wikipedia:Hardline (subculture)|hardliners]]," the [[Knight Templar|Knight Templars]]s of the scene).
 
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