Sick, Twisted Villains?

[Ryujin]

It’s also an extremely lazy way of saying ‘this guy is bad’.

Lazy is how they made Baron Harkonnen physically vile, instead of morally repugnant, in order to portray him as the Big Bad in Davin Lynch's version of "Dune."

 

[Ryujin]

My work is definitely not for little kids. I want to see college kids and older adults digging into it, not children. I am not even sure just what would be considered "sick" for a PG or G audience. What is the worst thing a villain in children's literature has done?

Modern, or Classic? In Classic children's literature you have cannibalism, torture, enslavement..... Basically all the usual Evils of Man.

I tend to find the most compelling villains to be the ones who are 90 degrees away from the hero, not opposed to them. Someone whose goals are almost reasonable, if they hadn't decided on methods that are... objectionable.

 

[Bohandas]

Lazy is how they made Baron Harkonnen physically vile, instead of morally repugnant, in order to portray him as the Big Bad in Davin Lynch's version of "Dune."

They also had the baron casually kill one of his slaves

 

[cmad1977]

Lazy is how they made Baron Harkonnen physically vile, instead of morally repugnant, in order to portray him as the Big Bad in Davin Lynch's version of "Dune."

He did a lot more than that. His corpulence has nothing to do with his being seen as morally repugnant. I mean... MAYBE the lying, murdering, native population squeezing, own family betraying had something to do with it too.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

Not to mention cruelty to alien mice.

 

[Eltab]

Lazy is how they made Baron Harkonnen physically vile, instead of morally repugnant, in order to portray him as the Big Bad in Davin Lynch's version of "Dune."

The Baron was both. In the book, too.

 

[Bohandas]

On MSPA's old forum there was a subforum that people were allowed to use to host their own webcomics. I briefly used that subforum to host a comic about a science lab that was run by a company that made horror movies, and whose mouse maze was therefore a combination of the Cube from "Cube" and the hell labyrinth from "Hellraiser 2", with elememts of "Saw" and "Cabin in the Woods" thrown in as well. The comic followed a bunch of cartoon mice trying to eacape the maze. In that comic I included stuff like casual decapitations and characters getting fed to snakes and probably would have included a lot of other stuff if it hadn't died from lack of interest

Spoiler

 

[Ryujin]

The Baron was both. In the book, too.

As I remember he was morbidly obese and used a gravity belt to get around. No comments about pustules, etc..