How Disturbing Is This?

Indeed. TV Tropes is known for its disproportionately large and detailed anime and manga example categories in general. It's hardly endemic to a single trope.

As an example, Narm's anime page is well over twice the size of its literature page, even if one excludes the multiple series-specific subpages. Does this mean that unintentionally hilarious attempts at serious drama are primarily a Japanese thing?

Wait... don't answer that.

What's precedent ever done for us?

From my experience with anime, yes.

In any case, attempting to force a villain to be creepy via stuffing lots of stereotypically "creepy" things in is just going to make it come across as top-heavy and irritating. If you want something to be scary or disturbing, it must be organically so and gel with the rest of the story properly.

"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."

Considering there are significant cultural differences between Japan and the US, I would be rather surprised if their attempts at drama did not appear to fall flat to us more often than our own.

Nous restons ici.

Looking back at the posts, I wonder what was I thinking when I came up with this. I must've been very pissy those days.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

The trouble you might have here is that "disturbing-ness"*

is, even more so than scariness and hilariousness, something highly audience-determined as well as medium-determined. At least, that's the case with me. When it comes to things that most people consider "disturbing content", in live-action I can't stand it (I'm what you'd call the "hide-behind-the-sofa" variety of horror movie spectator) but in literature, anime or manga I have basically no reaction. It's very difficult to create a really disturbing character in prose. Trust me, I have more failed attempts than I care to recover from my Recycle Bin.

Something I think you could try which might work is impulsiveness. Impulsiveness is a recognised symptom of antisocial personality disorder (Honest! Check the DSM.) which is often absent or not significantly present in fictional depictions of sociopaths. The principle is that sociopaths are by nature egocentric and lack an empathic response, which causes them to fail to recognise that their actions could have consequences. I think this would work pretty well in creating a disturbing or at the very least unnerving character. Let's suppose that your protagonist and this character are, for whatever reason, walking along the sidewalk together. (A very bizarre moment for them both, I'm sure) They're just talking, with your sociopathic villain being very affable and charming, discussing this and that, talking about the weather, Jungian psychoanalysis, randomly knifing someone as he walks past, the state of the economy, all without breaking the flow of the conversation. You could do a lot with impulsiveness. Make it something like the non-verbal equivalent of a Breathless Non Sequitur, just pointless, cruel, incongruous, unpredictable and sometimes plain bizarre behavior all while being seemingly normal. I guess it would be a lot like Comedic Sociopathy, but Played for Drama instead of humour. Trouble is, some of it would probably still be pretty funny in a very Black Comedy sort of way.

edited 2nd Jan '12 7:29:11 AM by RiotousRascal