This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Ununnilium: Hnn. I added "Serial killers" and "Rapists", but do they actually fall under this trope? Something feels slightly off, and I'm not sure what.
Roland: I don't believe so. Serial killers and rapists are both people who have -done- something wrong to establish their evil. A Villain by Default may be engaged in immoral activity, but it's just kind of assumed that they are because of organizational or ideological membership to an evil group or class.
Ununnilium: Yeah, I'm taking 'em off. Leaving on drug dealers, though.
Wolviepris: I didn't know where to put this, but Dungeons and Dragons subverts the "all witch hunters are bad", almost uncomfortably so. There's an Inquisitor prestige class for good guys, a holy weapon of legacy called the Hammer of Witches (named after the arguably evil real-life book Malleus Maleficarum) and the recent Magic Item Compendium has Inquisitor Bracers for worshippers of the Christlike Pelor that tie into healing powers of all things.
Gemmifer: I removed a few of the standard villains from the list because I thought what they do is pretty evil. Witch hunters and inquisitors for example endanger harmless people because of their paranoia. I removed terrorists because, while the term gets used inflationary to villify anyone, the definition of terrorist would implicate that someone truly harms innocent bystanders. At least as I understand it.
Air Of Mystery: I'm rather curious about the 'lawyers' side of things. I was thinking about how many lawyers, in older times at least, were Jewish. I wonder: does the hatred of lawyers and the depiction of them as being sneaky and underhanded come from anti-semitism, which eventually spread to this stereotype of all lawyers? Is there any basis for this theory?
The Nifty: Cut this: The TV series MASH demonized the American military so thoroughly I can imagine recruiters breathing a sigh of relief when it finally went off the air. With a couple of exceptional characters who acted "non-military", like the grandfatherly Colonel Potter, regular American army officers were always a mixture of stupid, callous, careerist, bigoted, and/or corrupt. The South Koreans, the nominal allies of the American army, were even more one-dimensional, pretty much universally portrayed as corrupt, cowardly brutes. The only military men accorded any positive traits were the UN Allies (Europeans) and the North Koreans, generally portrayed as victims of the war who were just doing their jobs.
As anyone whose ever seen the show will note, it's utter bullshit. While the war is portrayed as a waste, the individual American and South Korean soldiers are portrayed very sympathetically, as are most of the officers, with the only major recurring exception being Frank.
