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.

"If you acquire a reputation as a mad dog, you'll be treated as a mad dog; taken out back and slaughtered for pig feed.'

--Roose Bolton to his son, Ramsay, on why Stupid Evil is such a terrible idea

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. This is especially true 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.

Because of their cruel tendencies, sadists also tend to behave this way. However, while sadism can give villains a good reason to be Stupid Evil, this doesn't neccessarily mean they'll always get away with it. For example, a villain who takes time to torture a prisoner to death, as opposed to an expedient execution right then and there, will certainly enjoy it, but it also gives the heroes a better chance of getting there in time to save the day.

Compare to Chaotic Stupid. They're not quite the same, but there's often a lot of overlap due the tendency of bad players and writers to mistake "chaotic" with "act like as big of an obnoxious asshole as physically possible".

Examples of Stupid Evil

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

A Song of Ice and Fire

• Joffrey Baratheon. He sends an assassin armed with a Valyrian Blade (one of only a few hundred such weapons in all of Westeros, and 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 also kills Eddard Stark, therefore sparking an unnecessary and very costly civil war that went 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 genii and strategic masterminds.
  • He also chooses to ignore his duties and the welfare of his people in favor of satiating his sadistic behavior, even abusing his people when they're seeking his help. He regularly abuses Sansa in particular, 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.
  • Even his family isn't safe from his team-killing fuckery: 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 even calls Tywin a coward. Out loud. To his face. Luckily for Joffrey they were related, or he would have been struck down. And as what turns out to be a final hurrah at his wedding, he insults his in-laws and his bride at their wedding reception.
  • His only excuses (if even that) are the fact that he's like 12 or 13 in the books, providing a realistic excuse for his moronic, petty and short-sighted behavior. Also, his mother is Cersei. More on that in a moment.
• Cersei Lannister, while not as dumb as her son Joffrey (hardly something to be proud of) is egotistic and paranoid as fuck; if she, for any reason, thinks you might threaten her or her children, even for something as minor as telling her her latest idea is a bad one, you're in trouble. At best, she will view you as an enemy and will be a passive-aggressive bitch to you, and at worst she'll have you brutally tortured to death, even if you're one of House Lannister's allies to whom good relations are vital.
  • She invites Gregor Clegane (see below) to King's Landing at the same time Oberyn Martell is visiting, despite the fact that Gregor is the reason there's bad blood between house Lannister and House Martell, and the Martells know it.
  • She also responds to a satirical puppet show about House Lannister being evil tyrants by having anyone who saw it either sharply fined (up to half of all their money if they're rich) or mutilated (an eye cut out if they're too poor to pay) and ordering the puppeteers executed. Then, instead of the headsman, she does something worse and hands the puppeteers over to her resident mad scientist for deadly experiments at his request.
  • As seen above, Cersei encourages the worst aspects of her kids; in the case of Joffrey, this is like attempting to put out a forest fire with napalm. Her atrocious parenting, combined with conceiving Joffrey with her brother Jamie AND Robert's own negligence, is 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, AND also nearly turns her other actually half-decent person of a son into a gullible yes-man.
  • She kills the high septon because he was a cat's paw Jamie 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, which leads to her arrest when he proves to be smart (though that's a good thing for everyone not allied with the Lannisters).
  • As revenge for the High Sparrow imprisoning her and Margaery taking her place as Queen, she decides to blow them all the fuck up using magical napalm while nearly all her enemies were at church. This results in Tommen, who was now friends with the High Sparrow and loved Margaery dearly, to commit suicide via jumping out a window. This also results in a pissed off Olenna Tyrell withdrawing from the sovereignty of King's Landing and declares for the resurgent House Targaryen alongside Dorne, which means that Cersei and House Lannister literally have no major allies left in Westeros sans the Freys, who aren't at all reliable.
• Gregor Clegane
  • Gregor is a serial killer, having gone through three wives who died under suspicious circumstances. At his keep there's a high turnover rate among the servants, and even animals avoid his chambers. Before this, he's heavily implied to have murdered his sister and father, despite the father doting on him even when his evil started to become apparent.
  • 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 bites 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 a confession to his crime of murdering and raping Elia in front of all of the nobles in King's Landing. This would've put House Martell and House Lannister at open war if the Martells hadn't been already secretly plotting to destroy them, though this does push their schedule forward.
• 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. In the books he is described as portly, ugly and an iffy fighter.
  • His savage exploits are known across Westeros, and he 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 Ironborn captives alive 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 her, 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.
  • The TV version actually murders his father in the middle of the war, feeds his step-mother and half-brother to his dogs, and ultimately gets his own army wiped out through sheer team-killing fuckery before being beaten to near-death by Jon Snow before Sansa feeds him to his own dogs -- who were only hungry enough to turn on him because he'd starved them for a week beforehand in anticipation of feeding them the Starks.
  • Despite all of the stupid evil committed by them, they are still winning, even if only because the good guys are either Lawful Stupid or Stupid Good. Joffrey and Gregor got offed painfully, as did the Boltons in the soft-core porno version, while Cersei got publicly shamed, but compared to what happened to the good guys in the story, it's a slap on the wrist.
• Slaver's Bay
  • Of the four cities of Slaver's Bay, two of them (Meereen and Yunkai) believe that a bunch of slaves with spears and shields led by fops on horseback or in chariots wearing linen vests and helmets made to accommodate their stupid hairdos constitute a proper army. After Yunkai gets its butt kicked by Dany, they decide that it would be a good idea to raise new slave armies that are chained together and fight on stilts.
  • One of them (Astapor) trains Unsullied elite spear slaves who obey any order given to them without question, which they sell and use for defense. The Masters of Astapor agree to sell all the Unsullied they've got to Dany, who proceeds to have them sack their city and kill them.
  • For no particular tactical reason, the leadership of Meereen decided to taunt an oncoming army by having child slaves lashed up to die along the road - a decision which backfires on them rather spectacularly.

Others

• 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, whose 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 preteens/actual 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 off 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 Races' 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 where 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 (based on an episode in the original where he nearly won the race legitimately but stopped just before the finish line because he thought, as the villain, that it would be wrong to win without cheating).
• There's a tendency for moralizing science and fantasy fiction to depict humans as this in a poor attempt to allegorize bigotry. Specifically, humans are apparently overly-panicky and violent psychopaths itching for an excuse to murder the shit out of other species. See for instance, Avatar where the human army is portrayed as a bunch of jingoist lunatics wanting to slaughter the peaceful Na'vi for the resources they need rather than trying to reap far more long-term benefits by making peaceful contact.
• Frieza from Dragon Ball Z.
  • He regularly kills his own henchmen, sometimes just to prove a point. In addition, he and his men kill pretty much all the Namekians on planet Namek, which bites him in the ass when he discovers that the wish-granting dragon can only be summoned by someone who speaks Namekian. After being maimed and defeated by Goku, he is offered some healing energy so he can get away from the planet which is about to explode. Instead, Frieza tries to use this energy in one last attack against Goku, who promptly blasts him full-force.
  • Upon being revived as a cyborg, the first thing he does is resolve to attack Earth just to spite Goku. Of course, this gets him killed, but it doesn't stop him from trying again in Resurrection F! ...but to his credit, while he still remains a serial team-killer, he nearly succeeds due to actually learning from previous encounters and bothering to train for once in his life instead of relying on his massive-but-unrefined power. Even when the edge granted by his newly attained Golden form eventually gives out, he gets bailed out by the one henchman he DIDN'T waste for no reason (this is especially notable since Goku had been warned against letting down his guard), and actually stands to win for a change...
    • ...until SSB Vegeta steps in and utterly wrecks his shit to the point that he pulls the same 'sore loser' routine he did back on Namek (the phrase "five minutes" should come to mind). Except this time he actually pulls it off and wastes the Earth and everyone on it in one clean shot! It takes Whis shielding Goku and a few others from the blast and rewinding time a few minutes (distinct from time travel in that no AUs are created) for Goku to get it right and take him out for good.
• Harvest from The New 52.
• Cora from Once Upon a Time. She is hyped up to be more evil than Regina the Evil Queen, yet kills less major characters than her, and the only really evil thing she does is slaughter a village of innocents, which, while certainly evil, pales in comparison to what the other villains have done. Oh, and she leaves the people most likely to threaten her goals alive because...reasons?
• The 'villains' of fringe-conspiracy theories would be stupid evil if they existed since their plans undermine their own power bases, have little to no tangible gain or draw attention by plastering their logo on everything. It's also weird that despite how cartoonishly evil they are thought of, they don't bother to kill anyone exposing the conspiracies while making it look like an accident.