Alignment charts started out as a feature of the game Dungeons and Dragons which allowed players to customize their characters based on their moral beliefs. However, in the years since the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons, the format has evolved into something much stranger.

Meme culture loves nothing more than a chart or a grid. Whether it's Tumblr grids or Venn diagram parodies meme makers love to see complex social experience funneled into coherent graphical presentations. There's something oddly satisfying about sorting stuff, placing it in the proper categories and seeing the chaos of reality tamed by the right angles and clean labels of an infographic. You might connect that back to the work which algorithms do, arguably classifying users and culture according to rigid categories that place them in predetermined relationships with one another.

Although the visual form of the alignment chart does resemble a cage, it offers a certain freedom of thought. It makes things clean and clear, and it affords the user the ability to determine what matches what and how each term or face fits into the broader structure. On Reddit's /r/alignmentcharts, users indulge their classification urge. Here are some of the results.