Editing Edgy (section)

==How Can I Tell If My Character Is An Edgelord?==

Every edgelord has at least four qualities; skilled at violence, moody, has easy access to weapons and are aggressively contrarian.   While alone or even together these traits don't make an edgelord, each "Yes" answer from the list below ''edges'' your character  toward edgelorddom:

* Are they either a power fantasy against and/or deliberately written to offend "The Man™" or "the establishment™"?  (NOTE: With one exception below, and even if not targeting "the establishment™" by instead going after, for example, criminals<ref>Vigilantes are a ''deep'' well of Edge, after all.</ref>, '''a "yes" answer here automatically grants the character edgelord status.''')	
** Bonus points if their target is something or someone from real-life that has been so repeatedly made into villains - [[Skub|putting aside questions of whether they deserve it or don't]] - that it's a cliché (most notably: oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the Catholic Church, God).  Again, only counts if it's already a full cliché.
** The one exception are characters who '''start out''' as merely mildly edgy (particularly antagonists of the "right target, wrong methods" variety), and only graduate to full edgelord status if other writers are allowed access to them or the current writer gets carried away.
* Do they openly mock altruistic traits (like hope and love)?  Compromise? faith or the Powers-That-Be?  Bonus points if they do so without suffering negative consequences for it.  
* Have they been abused by an authority figure in the backstory (often trotted out as an excuse for their violent contrarianism) and bring this up in every moment they are questioned as an excuse? 
* Are forgiveness and redemption things the character disregards, if not actively despises? 
** Partial credit if they're seeking redemption... but only changing their targets instead of their approach or methods.  
* Do they not care if they live or die?  Or do they want to die?
* Do they have problems with authority?  As in a negative attitude towards anyone else telling them what to do?
** Bonus points if it manifests when the authority figure's giving sound advice or their orders are sensible.
* Are they heavily scarred individuals?  (physical, emotional, whatever...)
* Do they regularly quote-mine philosophers or works of fiction and spout these quotes to validate their worldview? Bonus points if said quotes are taken out of context or made to say the exact opposite of what they were intended to say. 
* Do they share any of the same beliefs as the work's creator and openly express them? (for example, the protagonists of stories by [[Ayn Rand]] or [[Jack Chick]]).  This often overlaps with the first point on the list.  <ref>This item is more a [[Mary Sue]] trope, but there is significant overlap between edgelords and Mary Sues.</ref>
** Bonus points if they're nihilistic, double bonus if it's in an extremely shallow way.
** Are these views never challenged or refuted in the story?  Or are the challengers clearly strawmen?
** The [[Star Trek]] Captain Exception: If said belief is cleanly confined to one speech towards the end of the story/episode, and the author seems to be legitimately trying to just sum up the message of the story, it usually doesn't count. (Normally not an issue for edgelords, but it has happened occasionally.)
* Do they always wear sinister-looking attire?  Bonus points if the outfit;
** Includes a cloak or a long trenchcoat (think Neo's from the Matrix films).
** Has [[Chaos|built-in blades or spikes]]
** Includes a fedora.  Any other excessively Cool Hat counts for half-credit--and yes, this does include Judge Dredd's Helmet.
*** Period Exception: if the story was written in a time period when men routinely wear hats of this sort (1920s to early 1960s), it probably doesn't count (modern works set in this time period may go either way). The same goes for fully fictional setting with the same fashion sense.
** Is covered in insults, profanities, curses or threats
** Has a color scheme primarily consisting of red and black
** Has tailored-on violent, anarchic or sacrilegious imagery
** Incorporates or is made of others' body parts
** Includes warpaint.
*** Bonus points if the warpaint is bodily fluids and/or poisonous.
** Is alive (especially if it's a monster in clothing form or possessed)
** It also counts if the edgelord dresses in clothing that is wholesome/associated with non-edgelord things. Partial credit if it's done for "irony", full edgelord point if it's done to offend people (such as children's style clothes, a doctor's uniform or peaceful religious attire - so Taliban insignia doesn't count, but the Roman/clerical collar and Buddhist monk robes do count).
* Do they have body modification, ranging from minor such as tattoos to extreme examples such as horns or wings?  Bonus points if the modifications can be weaponized.
* Do they swear like a drunk pirate with stereotypical Tourette's Syndrome?
* Does their design aesthetic have more than a dash of fascist iconography?
* Do they have religious iconography and a fondness for quoting gruesome parts of scriptures?  
* Do they have an "adult" vice such as drinking or smoking (fantastical ones count).  Bonus points if its an addiction.
** This one may also be subject to exemption if the work was written in a time period when it was basically assumed adults drank and smoked.
* Do they have plot armor? (such as the Punisher being able to go toe-to-toe against superpowered beings, ones who’d mop the floor with him otherwise, like Wolverine)  
* Are they a protagonist or antagonist written by [[Gav Thorpe]], Garth Ennis, Mark Millar, [[A Song of Ice and Fire|George RR Martin]], Todd Macfarlane, Garth Ennis or Alan Moore?<ref>Yes, we did mention Garth Ennis twice on purpose; man is so edgy he probably belongs in the list ''three times''. In short: Ennis is a fucking edgelord even compared to other edgy authors and some edgelords, so any character he creates will likely be an edgelord, a punching bag for one or both.  And the arguments in his original works fall apart because he often attacks strawmen; deliberately making his settings and characters the way they are to try and justify his personal feelings about superheroes/God/religion/armchair survivalists/whatever he wants to rage against.</ref>  Honorable mentions: [[Judge Dredd|Pat Mills]] and Frank Miller (Note, an edgelord can be written by someone who's none of these people. And Moore and Martin, at least, are capable of writing protagonists and antagonists who aren't Edgelords despite lots of their characters being unnecessarily edgy).
** Partial credit if they're instead written by an author who's trying (usually too hard) to be one of the above.
* Are they a misanthrope? Is that a major character trait that is brought up often in the form of speeches about "human nature", "society" and similar ilk? 
** Bonus points if the writing goes out of its way to frame the character's misanthropic worldview and belief that "Humans are Bastards" as ''objectively right'', like the later writers of [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]].
* Do they tend toward being a HARD MAN making HARD DECISIONS <ref>A character commits horrific but completely ineffectual if not outright harmful decisions [[Tau|"for the Greater Good"]] (typically disregarding their alternatives and collateral damage), which the narrative presents them as a difficult moral choice where the MC doing the "right thing" that all the other characters are too soft to do. This is often ''despite'' a little thought being able to come up with better alternatives, and often goes hand in hand with the author [[railroading|fiating these alternatives into failure.]]</ref> (while hard)?
** A word of advice: this can actually work without being edgy. It's just that the decision needs to ''be hard''. It needs to have narrative and emotional weight, and it should have problems in either solution, as opposed to being used as an excuse to wank about how it's a hard world and it's a good thing hard men like the MC exist to make things work. <ref>A good example of this is [[Crimson_Fists#Overview|Pedro Kantor's decision to carry a civilian mother and her children to safety ''despite'' knowing they'll slow the Crimson Fists down and put their few survivors at greater risk]] - rather than take the "hard" decision of listening to his tactical senses and abandoning them to die, he makes the ''difficult'' decision to do the morally right thing because his ''moral'' senses are going "Your duty is to defend the Emperor's people, including this family. And if it's difficult, so fucking what? You're an Astartes - you were created for this kind of thing." This does indeed cause him problems later on, but that is exactly the point - most "hard decisions" are too easy and consequence-free, with no evidence that the "hard decision" was even all that necessary in the first place.</ref>
* Do they have a tendency toward "makes gratuitously violent choice because pragmatic hurr durr" behaviour?

Divide your points in half if the character is clearly either a villain or wrong as far as the narrative is concerned.

When you have enough of these points in a character, congratulations (or not), the character is an edgelord. (One or two is fine)