On this blog, I strive to address many of the perennial obstacles to running tabletop roleplaying games. How do I keep my players from derailing my campaign? How do I plan for my sessions? How much should I control my players’ actions? In doing so, I have tried to write articles that are well-researched and easy to read, seeking a balance of scholarship and breeziness.

That was before fifteen days of quarantine.

Let’s talk about Tiger King.

If you’re unfamiliar, Tiger King is a docu-series on Netflix that follows some of the more colorful characters in the American exotic animal breeding community. Specifically, it follows Joe Exotic, the owner of a roadside zoo in rural Oklahoma staffed by a band of misfits and his two husbands. Other central characters include Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who runs a similar operation in South Carolina and is the center of his own personal yoga/sex cult, and Carole Baskin, the owner of Big Cat Rescue, who may or may not have killed her ex-husband and fed him to a tiger. It is perhaps the most American thing ever caught on film, and also the only thing keeping most of the US from going completely insane while we sit in our houses.

This club has everything: Drugs. Conspiracies. Murder-for-hire. Toxic polyamory. A woman who only wears cat-print to work. If it’s available in your area, I suggest that you watch it immediately.

But what kind of advice blogger would I be if I couldn’t turn my current obsession into a lesson about my great passion? For some time now, I’ve been planning a series of “case studies” in alignment, articles where I examine unorthodox characters who I think perfectly exemplify the traits of certain Dungeons and Dragons alignments. I had been planning on using some of the characters from HBO’s Succession, but I think that Tiger King is more fun, more out-of-the-box, and in its own twisted way, pretty much perfect.

Before we begin, I should mention that I still have two episodes left to watch, and I reserve the right to change my opinions here after I finish the series.

Now, without further ado, here’s a breakdown of the three main characters of the series.

Joe Exotic: Chaotic Neutral

Chaotic Neutral characters are manifestations of self-interest; that’s why so many players, particularly barbarians, tend to default to it. They don’t care about rules or social mores; they’re going to do what they want to do. They’re not going to hurt others to get what they want, unless those people are messing with their bottom line.

Enter Joe Exotic.

Joe is a tiger breeder, one of the most prolific in the United States. Breeding exotic cats is illegal, and he does it anyway. He owns an exotic animal park in rural Oklahoma that he walks around every day with a pistol strapped to his hip, bleach-blonde mullet flapping in the breeze. His employees are mostly people who are formerly incarcerated or struggling with addiction, and Joe himself freely admits to using a host of drugs including methamphetamine. If he’s not at the park, he’s down by the river shooting off guns and blowing things up with Tannerite. I haven’t even mentioned his Internet show, his run for President, or his country music albums.

He is, in short, an agent of chaos. But I don’t think that he’s evil.

Joe Exotic’s game is and always has been the promotion of Joe Exotic. His exotic animals are part of that, as is his need to film every second of every day. He wants, more than anything, to be famous. He has a singular need to destroy Carole Baskin, but only because she’s interfering with his business of himself. You get the sense after a while that he just wants to be left alone; if Carole wasn’t intent on closing him down, he probably wouldn’t care about her at all.

The people who he keeps at the park long-term are the people who have no problem taking orders from him no matter his whims. Their loyalty makes him trust them, which engenders more loyalty. Joe Exotic is not manipulating people like pieces on a chess board; he’s the King of his own Island of Misfit Toys. So long as you respect the hierarchy, he’ll keep you around for as long as you want to stay. If one of them falls of the wagon and disappears, or gets arrested, he’ll take them back when they show up again. He says at one point that he’s a big believer in second chances.

Is he an unhinged redneck living outside the law at a roadside zoo full of tigers? Absolutely. Does that make him Evil? Not necessarily.

“Doc” Antle: Lawful Evil

Lots of rules, severe social control, and a deep-seeded selfishness at the expense of others: these are the hallmarks of a Lawful Evil character. Tyrants and manipulative masterminds are the best archetypes of this alignment; there’s no better example of it in Tiger King than Bhagavan “Doc” Antle.

Doc Antle runs a similar operation to Joe Exotic in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but his is larger, more sophisticated, and seems to have a much higher budget.

According to the documentary, he also uses his business to foster an insular, cult-like atmosphere among employees focused on yoga, vegetarianism, and most importantly, intimate relations with Doc himself. Employees have essentially no time off, and Doc controls every aspect of their lives, from where they live to what they eat and whether they should get plastic surgery. He has no fewer than three partners at any given time, and he has made their lives entirely dependent on him. The allegations surrounding him are similar to those involving R. Kelly, albeit with more tigers. There’s nothing wrong with polyamory as a general practice, but the version that Doc Antle practices, as portrayed in the series, appears deeply toxic.

He seems controlling as a general principle. He is often shown bossing around the documentary film crew before throwing on a fake smile and saying something canned for the camera. The goal always seems to be portraying himself in the best light possible, making him look positive and passionate, but the camera always rolls about five seconds too long. It gives a look at the man behind the mask, and it’s not pretty.

If you want to sum up the man and his relationships, look no further than his name. He claims that Bhagavan means “friend of God.” The women who work for him and the children he’s had with them, however, say that it actually means “Lord.” That’s quite a difference in translation, and it doesn’t happen accidentally.

Carole Baskin: ???

The series doesn’t really seem to know what it thinks of Carole Baskin, and to be honest, neither do I. She says that she’s rescuing big cats from people like Joe and Doc, but the facilities and habitats in her sanctuary don’t seem that different from the places she despises—though she doesn’t bring the animals out for petting, which seems to be very important for the cats themselves, at least according to her. If the cats are being abused as badly as she says, then she is doing a good thing, but Carole herself is a strange figure that I really can’t categorize.

I know that it’s a bit of a cop-out to refuse to assign an alignment to Carole, but I think that it’s impossible to analyze her moral compass without the answer to one very important question:

Did Carole Baskin kill her ex-husband and feed him to a tiger?

The version of Carole who did kill her husband and the version who didn’t are completely incompatible human beings. Carole portrays herself as a kind of cat-loving archdruid bedecked in flower crowns and cat print, essentially good-hearted if deeply eccentric. Her late husband’s family, however, sees her as a manipulative murderer who is using the millions that she inherited to assuage her conscience and hide her own past as an exotic cat breeder.

If she did do it, that seems like a calculated, evil act, a bit beyond a good person having a bad day. If she didn’t, then she’s just a weird cat lady lady whose husband tragically vanished without a trace. It’s true that alignment is subjective to a point, but I think Carole Baskin is a good illustration of the fact that there are some acts that are incompatible with certain alignments no matter how you look at them. A person who feeds their husband to a tiger can’t be Good, but a person who devotes their life to running a sanctuary for abused animals probably isn’t Evil. I’m as unsure about her as the filmmakers are, and I think after a couple of episodes of Tiger King, you probably will be, too.

It’s worth mentioning that I don’t think that any of these people are particularly sterling examples of humanity, and I find the captive exotic animal world to be deeply disturbing. These people do, however, make for incredibly compelling television, and they have such strongly-defined personalities that it makes an exercise like this enjoyably, reductive though it may be.

Fitting anyone, particularly real-life individuals, into the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system is like pushing square pegs into round holes, but I can’t stop myself. I need to exorcise these tiger-shaped demons from my head somehow, and this is how I chose to do it. Some people have mindfulness and yoga; I have Dungeons and Dragons headcanon. It’s quarantine; we’re all just trying to cope.

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