Strangely enough, no, this is not a rant. At least, it’s not starting off as one. You see, for reasons I prefer not to admit, I found myself over at TVTropes the other day… er… it was rather longer than that, because it was some time before I was able to pull myself from the black hole effect of so much genre and trope goodness. In the process, though, I wound up at what has to be the ultimate library of fates worse than death. And yes, everything listed definitely qualifies.
I’ll admit, I’ve written one or two myself, given my ongoing fascination with the dark side (and no, I don’t mean the Star Wars version). Besides, there’s a certain cathartic satisfaction to be had in doing this to someone who richly deserves it. Like, oh… about half my characters on a good day. This is part of why Pratchett says that the good man is the one to fear. He’ll just kill you. The evil man will torture you first. Or simply torture you, period.
Um. I think I may have revealed a teensy bit too much there.
Anyway, it’s a psychological thing. We’re trained from early on by the stories we’re told to expect the bad guys to get what they deserve – and if they’re particularly horrible bad guys that does mean they deserve particularly horrible fates. Real life is endlessly frustrating because this doesn’t happen, so we turn to fiction that gives us that lovely visceral satisfaction of seeing the villain get theirs (and how). It takes a really good author to kill the villain mercifully and still make it satisfying (Vimes and the werewolf in Fifth Elephant comes to mind). Another option is to have the villain do it to himself (usually inadvertently), as Sarah did with Good Man Sinistra in DarkShip Thieves. Despite the temptation wallowing in giving the bad guy his really isn’t couth.
Ah well. I’ll get there some day. And in the meantime, I’d better bloody close the TV Tropes window before it sucks me in again. If I fail you’ll find me drooling and twitching in front of the computer while my mind sails through trope after trope. Which means the damn site qualifies. Bugger.
Mad Genius Club 
43 responses to “And I must scream”
Ever notice how most Disney Villains buy it by falling from a great height, usually after the hero tries to save them, and they make one last effort to pull him down (because they’re too stupid to wait for the hero to pull them up and THEN push him off the cliff.)
For your edification:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisneyVillainDeath
Not to be confused with: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisneyDeath
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 7:28 AM, madgeniusclub
Are you trying to suck me back in?
Funny that, yes.
My favorite variation of this was on Stargate Atlantis. One of the villains was dangling from a ledge, and one of the good guys, who had suffered quite a bit from his actions, stepped on his hands. 🙂
(Applause)
I’ve long thought that one of the worst things possible to happen to a true immortal was to be thrown into the pour of a large ingot of metal and buried.
Ooh, I just thought – what if, instead of being primarily the tombs of Pharoahs, as we understand now, the REAL purpose of the Pyramids is to keep something immortal trapped beneath the earth, by their sheer weight?
Grr, forgot to check Notify box.
I’ve always thought of mummification as a way of imprisoning a big nasty that was brought down but can’t be killed. Then, when the big nasties were all mostly dealt with, they started doing it to local tyrants just to make sure he stayed dead, then it worked it’s way into regular practice because people just kinda forgot why they did it in the first place…
Ooh, that’s an interesting take on it.
You’ve seen The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, right? They did something sort of similar there.
Yep, and I actually liked what they did with it.
Me too. Those are cracking good movies in the “silly adventure” category – fun to watch, just don’t expect too much sense out of them. They still work well enough not to kick me out while I’m watching, which is my basic “movie is okay” criteria.
That would make an interesting book.
Of course there’s also the possibilities inherent in dropping said immortal into an active volcano. Or better yet, shot down into the magma chamber under one.
Or dropping said villain into a star. Blue giant, neutron star, pulsar, black hole… on till the heat death of the universe. Nothing but constant heat and pressure…
Of course this idea probably came up when I was working in the kitchen as a line cook. Over 100 degree heat, all day long, orders going non-stop…
That would do it, yes. Pity that to employ a villain in those circumstances you’d have to not care about the quality of the food.
Ah, but it is possible with some sorts of villains. After all, as one vile evildoer once said,
“A reputation for honesty is a wonderful thing for those rare moments when you absolutely must lie. And when you do, never leave witnesses.”
*grin*
Of course, not every villain is a jack-of-all-evils. He could be a consummate professional of the kitchen, able to produce most tasteful and mouthwatering dishes for days without repetition… And yet be absolutely dedicated to the destruction of our plucky hero. He could come to villainy through circumstance, cast out, abandoned and shunned by those he trusted, now willing to plumb every depth in his quest for vengeance upon the culinary council that deposed him. He could have a secret addiction, one that he fights with all his will, yet sometimes he loses the battle and succumbs to the call of the blood, the blades themselves incite unto acts of wickedness… He could be the most baleful of the bane, utterly depraved and delighting in every corruption and betrayal, yet fanatically devoted to his kitchen, he tortures his victims with the smell of fine meals they will never again taste. Perhaps even an under-villain, with only a modicum of nastiness, but a taste for homemade custard. *grin*
Complex villains make for delightfully devious difficulties for our heroes to challenge. Then, of course, you’d have to devise an appropriate denouement for the calamitous cook. Boiling in oil is traditional, but forcing a perfectionist to perform under substandard conditions is its own special hell.
Now where’s my fondue pot. I can’t make a proper chocolate fondue without a fondue pot! *grin*
I seem to recall a Vincent Price movie along those lines….
Damn it all, now I’m hungry!
Didn’t someone once say around here that one of the three Eff’s was missing? We did fighting the other day, foreplay’s a function of the romance genre, so I just figured we needed food for balance purposes.
*grin*
Point 🙂
I like the villain LOSING and having to live with it. And have people know or suspect why.
And I love that Harlan Ellison story – don’t know why, but it is stuck in my psyche since I read it. Eternity is a long time, even if the villain deserves it.
Stay away from TVtropes – it is almost impossible to stop clicking on the links, there are so many tempting links…
It sort of depends on the villain, I think. Are we talking “bad but useful,” “too bad to be left roaming loose,” or “earrrgh burn-it-with-fire!” evil? (And do you want to leave the door open to a sequel, or do you get rid of the villain once and for all, no deposit, no return, worlds without end, amen?)
True, dat. And unless you actually make the mistake of killing them, you can always find a way to bring your villain back.
Oh, I know. Any time I so much as OPEN that site I lose hours.
And yes, eternity is a very, very long time, and being stuck in it and living with having lost would be thoroughly unpleasant for any villain. Possibly explains why Hell is so much more popular than Heaven…
The last Conan movie got accused of being torture porn (and wasn’t that a lovely passive sentence… Ace of Spades accused Conan of being torture porn… so there!) Anyway, the bad guys repeatedly got what they deserved, which was usually completely horrific, and you found yourself cheering the most awful stuff. Also, they got what they deserved even after they’d been captured and were entirely in Conan’s power… no heat of the moment required.
I liked it and I think that I liked it very much for the same reason I liked the Rorschach character in Watchmen. There seemed to be an essential honesty where neither ever had the illusion that they were a good person. And of course villains always should get what they deserve… poetically whenever possible.
If the bad guys do sufficiently horrific things, our internal sense of justice wants them to suffer accordingly.
Poetic justice can be fun… I just wish they’d let me dole it out in real life now and then.
*chuckle* Poetic justice does happen sometimes in real life, even.
When I was a lot younger, my father worked two jobs- one for the local dairy plant just outside of town, the other with the national guard. He worked a lot of second and third shift, a lot of overtime, because he was our only income for about fifteen years until I started working. Coming home after a arse-kicker of a twelve hour shift five nights a week, this one prick with a badge would follow him for about a mile, stop him, make him take a breathalyzer and walk the line.
Every. Freaking. Night.
Note that this would be about 3:30am, and us kids, quiet as we could be, probably woke him up about an hour into his sleep cycle. He got into the habit of sleeping light in Germany, where there were some “creative” pranksters I’m given to understand. Getting the runaround every night for weeks would wear the patience of a saint, and Staff Sgt. Dad wasn’t that religious. He cussed. He fussed. He followed the law, because you respect the badge even if the man proves he’s not got the sense God gave a baby duck.
One Christmas, Father Lane was with the family at the Pater Familias (my paternal grandfather) house, all us little hoodlums there too eating enough to feed a small army and practicing our “yes sir, no sir, right away sir,” because that’s what you do when the eldest in the family tells you something ought to be done. The P.F.’s house is just over a bump in the road on a street crossways between two heavy traffic areas, right near the middle of town.
Suddenly we hear the “whumpcrunch-skree!” that means there’s been an accident. Moments later there’s a knock, knock, knock at the door.
Badgeprick is there, literally hat-in-hand. He looks a bit disheveled. Spilled something sticky on his starchy uniform shirt.
“I’m sorry sir, but I seem to have hit your car.” Father Lane’s eyebrow’s raise.
“Seems like you did more than hit it, son.” Father Lane’s car is about fifteen feet up into the yard, crumpled like a beer can and sitting on top of Grandma Lane’s begonias.
“Well, yes.” Badgeprick is turning an interesting shade of beety red.
“Think we might better have some law around here.” Father Lane has a wicked sense of the ironic.
See, Badgeprick’s a county officer. This happened in town. So *both* county and city departments got involved, seeing as he was using police resources while not on duty, speeding, out of his area of enforcement… Oh, he was not well liked by his brother officers, we could tell. Big brouhaha on the Pater Familias’ lawn.
Father Lane pulls one of the city cops aside. Big, bald fellow, looks a bit like Mister Clean. But nice guy, one of those who takes “serve and protect” serious. Dad whispers to him a second, and Mister Clean’s eyes light up like Christmas time, come early. He goes back to his cruiser, and I just have to ask.
“What did you say to him, Dad?” Father Lane gets as wide a smile as I’ve ever seen, and says,
“I told him, maybe he might want to have that young man take a breathalyzer test. ”
Badgeprick was never seen around Speck, Appalachia, again. I think Father Lane slept well for at least a week after, just thinking about it.
Oh what a lovely affirming story that is.
I’d note that one should think when one does this. One’s standards of evil may differ from those of others, especially those one is sharing a story with.
This can be significant.
The other day a fellow was complaining to me about something he’d heard, about how government was taking druggie mothers away from their children. (I later heard his source was a book by a Muslim women that was trying to advance the argument that the west’s treatment of women was worse than Islam’s.)
I have an extremely strong dislike of recreational drug use. I have found this makes a significant difference in what fates I rate as just for a character.
I stopped short of telling him that I’d think it’d be more of a kindness to the children to feed the ‘mothers’ into a plastic shredder than to free them. Also more just. That said, neither of those are the strongest reason for arranging a legal system in real life.
I particularly like the ‘people suffer for getting exactly what they request’. A favorite is in Kratman’s A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex. At the start, a fellow prays to God, requesting to live just long enough to see God’s victory. At the end, he dies after seeing his own cause finally defeated.
Very poetic, there.
On the druggie mothers… Since I have a fundamental disagreement with the idea of “illegal” drugs in the first place, my response to that one would be probably guaranteed to piss of everyone. (And for the record I wouldn’t touch recreational drugs myself. I have enough issues with the prescribed drugs without that).
This reminds me of something that went through my head in Art class… we’re skimming through the history of China as we look at ancient cultures and the art they made. In Neolithic China, they made these lovely big urns, and buried the ashes of someone in them. Only they buried the person first, then dug certain bodies up, burned them to ash, and then reinterred them in these pots with protective spirit motifs painted on them. Our teacher said no-one knew why the bodies that were cremated were chosen to be burnt… and I’m sitting there thinking, “vampires?”
You all make me crazy, you know? In a good way!
I believe that John Wycliffe was dug up and his bones burned for being a heretic … yes, in 1428. I’m not sure what burning his bones was supposed to do, keep him from being resurrected I suppose.
I think I knew that and had forgotten it. It’s a very interesting parallel.
That would likely be part of it, I think, since the belief was that you got resurrected as you actually were.
Which could be really awkward for all those saints whose bits were scattered across any number of reliquaries.
IIRC, the opposition to cremation and spreading the ashes is that it’s a big, symbolic “no, you can’t resurrect me!”
From Catholic Encyclopedia, the important part is that he was found a heretic and thus couldn’t be buried on holy ground.
Probably to stop Wycliffe’s followers from venerating his remains after death in the manner of many other Mediaeval saints.
A while ago, there were… at least two movies in Japan, about Chinese Hopping Vampires? Very strong, seemingly unstoppable, but they could be restrained by putting a scroll with mystic characters on their foreheads. Kid’s movies, I think, but everyone talked about them.
You may be more right than you think.
Think about how some of the big witch scares happened, a combination of low active disbelief, a pliable legal system, and a fad for thinking certain mechanisms worked and were being used.
It seems likely that the historic vampire scares were likewise caused by a poor understanding of the mechanics of death, and those emotional issues that make it difficult to process that someone is really gone.
It seems possible that the burial practice you mention, and ,maybe even all stories of undead, have similar origins.
In eastern European (Romanian and Bulgarian, IIRC) legend, vampires brought plague and disease, so if people start dying, you dig up a suspect and lo, the body seems fresh, well of course it must be your vampire. Interestingly, a number of Orthodox priests opposed the practice of staking/burning/desecrating bodies, and tried to intervene, if they learned about the exhumation in time. Folk belief trumped the church, in this case.
Folk belief usually does. Eventually there’s typically an uneasy compromise sorted out.
Very likely, particularly when you add in a complete lack of understanding of things like disease vectors and nutrition (some of which are still not completely understood)
Well, like pretty much everyone else, the Chinese do have vampire myths. So… Why not?