Random Questions Thread

Designated Villain is a YMMV trope, and as such, different people are likely to assign it differently.

For some, such a character might well be seen as heroic; for others, such a character might be seen as just another sort of evil; and others still might have other perspectives besides!

(Of course, it also depends on the way in which the work presents the character: if the work doesn't present them as a villain, then they're logically not "designated as a villain".)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 17th 2024 at 10:31:35 AM

Hello, well, the characters consider him that way, but I use that as an indication of injustice in relation to the fight against evil and Defied and Deconstructed version of The Punishment Is the Crime and Revenge Is Not Justice.

Edited by Kuprin on Mar 17th 2024 at 2:17:07 AM

So the characters describe him as being presented as a villain, but not being one?

If so, then, well, that's the perspective of the characters. Whether or not they're accurate in that seems somewhat irrelevant.

I'm not clear on what you're saying here, I'm afraid.

Are you then asking whether we think that the characters are right in believing that it's morally incorrect for another character to be presented as a villain for such acts?

Because if so, then, well, again you're likely to get a variety of responses from a variety of people here.

Could you re-edit your question so it is a little easier to understand?

It is a bit too unclear right now to be understood properly and therefor, difficult to answer at the moment.

How many pillow hits do you think would logically break a normal bedroom window?

In my timeloop, one of the recurring events is a character hitting their window with a pillow to get rid of a bird. I want the window to be broken as the slow buildup of damage doesn't reset (each loop has consequences, some of which are a slow burn), I'm just not sure how early it would logically happen.

Or I guess a better way to phrase it is, how easily would this break it, and is there a certain threshold that seems to make sense as the literal "breaking point"? The character in question is noted for being very strong, if it helps, and the pillow is always thrown pretty aggressively.

If the pillow hits the glass hard enough to create a microscopic crack, or worsen an existing crack, then yes, but I don't know how long it would take, or whether being hit by a pillow is enough to cause/worsen a crack.

What is the material of the pillow? If it is relatively hard, like bean bags, or stiff, like certain types of memory foam, I don't think it would take that much.

This study hit a 5mm diameter rod of glass with a hammer until it broke, and the number of times they had to hit the glass ranged from 1 to 10000.

If you want a number, maybe ask an engineering student to run a simulation on ANSYS.

Edited by minseok42 on Mar 19th 2024 at 1:37:28 AM

Would this be a good comeback/Pre-Mortem One-Liner/something like that?

The context is that Character A did a really bad thing, and is now tripping over himself to excuse, justify, and minimize it but Character B is furious and A is starting to get scared or something.

Character A: But.... You know... To err is human, to forgive is divine....^note  (It's an Alexander Pope quote, but Character A doesn't know where it's from)

Character B: Well, i'm only human. (whips out gun, puts it right in A's face, tries to shoot him)

Could be, especially if Character B is divine or has a divine affiliation.

One thing I've noticed in a few pieces of media is the twisting of a method of funeral rites to kill someone in a particularly painful manner. Besides the classic Buried Alive situation, there's these two that spring to mind:

• In the Children of Dune tv miniseries, one guy is placed in a Deathstill — a Fremen device used to extract water from dead bodies as part of their funeral rites — while he's still alive. Judging by the way he's kicking and screaming as he's lowered into it, having the water extracted from you while you're alive is a very painful way to die.

• In The Mummy (1999), Imhotep's priests are punished for their part in the treachery by being mummified alive. Which is particularly grisly since mummification involves disembowelment and having your brains ripped out through your nose.

Can anyone else think of other examples of this in media? And if so, I'm wondering if a trope could be named for it.

Edited by M84 on Mar 19th 2024 at 7:33:06 PM

@ M84

While it's not exactly funeral rites, I can certainly think of something that fits your criteria. The embalming process could be performed on a victim while they are still alive; although part of the process would obviously kill a person, there are aspects of it (such as the pumping of certain chemicals into the body) that would be quite painful and it would take them quite some time to die.

Another obvious one is cremation; it is basically burning someone alive while keeping them strapped to a large tray and immobile as they are consumed by flames.

Funeral Wrongs?

One hypothetical case I was thinking of was applying sky burial to someone alive. Sky burial boils down to exposing a corpse on a mountain to be eaten by vultures.

Edited by M84 on Mar 19th 2024 at 8:18:40 PM

Would it make sense for a character to bitterly resist (at least initially) helping the very people who are kind of trying to save his loved ones?

To explain...the husband of one of the villains is pretty much at rock bottom once the apocalypse starts. His wife is being used as a "battery" for the Big Bad's powers, his terrified son transformed into a lycanthropic monstrosity and is now somewhere among the millions of these things now rampaging across the world. Oh, and he knows that all of his friends and family are soon going to die or be absorbed into a Hive Mind.

Yet when the heroes who want to stop all of this approach him, he refuses to help them due to the fact that they are composed of people he hates. He particularly despises two of them since they are the parents of the character responsible for unleashing this nightmare on the world and on him personally. However, their desperate plan quite literally revolves around extracting his wife to prevent the villain from using his powers anymore, which could theoretically save his son and definitely save people the horde hasn't killed/consumed yet which might include his friends and family.

My point is whether or not his initial hostility and insistence on just wallowing in his misery makes sense as opposed to him jumping on the bandwagon. To be clear, he does eventually get on board and fight at their side, I just wonder if it makes sense for him to put up any resistance at first.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 19th 2024 at 12:26:59 PM

I could see that work if the character had reached his Despair Event Horizon, and would interpret his enemies coming to ask for his help as twisting the knife further (especially if he has no powers on his own and does not see why they would need him).

@ C105:

Thanks for the answer. It's definitely supposed to be his Despair Event Horizon; he's lost everything, and he knows that this is only the beginning. And worst of all, he is at least partially responsible for allowing things to get to this point.

Interestingly enough, his powers are vital to the mission—-as in, the plan to stop this all from happening has zero chance of working without his participation, which is why they came to him in the first place.

What should I mind wgen writing a "Lovers to Enemies" set-up?

Also, I wasn't exactly asking how it could be done. I was asking if there were any actual examples of it happening in media aside from the ones I mentioned and all of the cases of Buried Alive.

But since cremation was mentioned:

• It almost happened to James Bond in Diamonds are Forever. He was posing as a diamond smuggler and was almost killed this way due to the bad guys invoking You Have Outlived Your Usefulness just like they had with other cronies. Bond was shoved into an actual crematorium and was nearly turned to ashes. They only spare him because he hadn't really outlived his usefulness (as the smuggler) yet.

And as for embalming:

• In one episode of Friday the 13th: the Series, the cursed object is an embalming device that can drain the lifeforce of people and revive the dead with said lifeforce. The bad guy at one point uses it to murder someone.

Edited by M84 on Mar 19th 2024 at 11:48:24 PM

In one of the WIRED interviews with Jonna Mendez, former CIA Chief of Disguise during the Cold War, she said that allegedly, the Russians threatened that any spies who got caught would be fed feet first into a crematorium, alive. So that's a real-life example, even if only alleged.

I'm wondering if something one of my characters does makes sense of if it's just too dramatic and overwrought to the point of coming off as Wangst.

Early in Part 1 of my story, the main character's vampire girlfriend makes a speech to him essentially outlining how wonderful and full of mysteries the supernatural world is. She uses a lot of Purple Prose to describe the various inhabitants of the hidden supernatural communities. Finally, she says that even though discovering that hidden world would cost any human their life, that human would be privileged, because they got to see the world in its complete form instead of the limited version presented to most of humanity. It's intended to be inspiring and upbeat...and incredibly manipulative to further push him deeper into being her daylight servant.

Much later on when the main character is now the Big Bad and controlling millions of werewolves, there is a moment where he repeats this same speech to himself as he sees the mass-slaughter and destruction his minions are inflicting on both worlds. Except that as he repeats the speech it's in a dead, sorrowful tone completely the opposite of what his girlfriend used so long ago.

I just wonder if that is over-the-top or if I should just have him do something a little different as he "surveys" the devastation he's causing. It's kind of supposed to show just how out-of-it and deeply sad he is over what he's doing even if he has zero intention of stopping.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 20th 2024 at 2:13:36 PM

If you want this scene to be more subtle, he could be doing the abridged version of her speech. Where she used Purple Prose he would be using a very dry, short, clinical style to repeat her speech. Another alternative would be for him to do the speech silently, only by focusing on some scenes that illustrate her points. For instance, where she spoke of a human discovering the supernatural world, he instead focuses on a human being ambushed and slaughtered by some abomination.

@ C105:

I think the "clinical" aspect works well with what I'm trying to do. Rather than use the fancy and extensive wording she did, he'd just call the various supernaturals their given names as he lists what lies within the world. It would go a long way to show just how done he is with everything at this point along with his other considerable emotions.

I'm not sure if this follows what you are talking about, but my intention was to "show" scenes of his werewolves doing various awful things (killing/eating people, forcibly transforming them into more of their number, etc) and people fleeing or begging for mercy and overall society breaking into chaos. All while he lists the part about how "beautiful" the supernatural world is.

Of course, that runs into the "visual medium vs written" issue I have with some of the things I want to portray, but that's a whole other issue.

Does he have a television in his mental world?

If so, he could watch the footage (maybe even in black and white) and do a voice-over on it with his speech like how Alexander Scourby did it with National Geographic Documentaries.

Might add a bit of a familiar yet disturbing combo for the speech in question.

And if you haven't seen any of these earlier, then I highly recommend this one. Just to get a feel of what I'm talking about.

...

Or alternatively, making it into a solo-ballad, dripping with sadness and sorrow while he makes a headless set of musicians in his mental world to provide the music for him as he sings it.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Mar 20th 2024 at 7:40:28 PM

That sounds like an idea that would work easier in a movie with visual and audio clues. In a book you can let your reader know the inside thoughts of your characters. My suggestion is take advantage of the medium that you are using.

Who is he making a speech to? Is he just remembering it? Is it supposed to be sincere on his part?

Edited by ry4n on Mar 20th 2024 at 11:58:37 AM

@ Trainbarrel:

He doesn't have a television there (when he's making the speech, he's sitting on a log watching the character he's using as a "battery" play with her family in the Happy Place he created for her so she won't fight his parasitism). But that could change at any moment, especially since there are many, many locations he goes to and that is just one of them. So, I could employ a television at any time. That along with the ballet idea brings to mind the Surreal Horror of Puella Magi Magica Madoka and I like it.

@ ry4n:

He's overall talking to himself (well, thinking really) due to the irony of the situation. He is remembering too, and at one point actually "manifests" the time when his girlfriend made the speech, which translates into him watching her and his past self sitting on his roof talking about it. He's definitely sincere; he hates himself for causing such mass death, destruction and worse-than-death, but he feels he can't afford to stop, so he's kind of "zoning out" for a few moments until he puts his full focus back on the job.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 20th 2024 at 3:27:17 PM

I dunno, doing something like that comes across as trying to make readers feel sorry for the character even though he's enacting genocide across two worlds.

It reminds of Redcloak, a character from the webcomic The Order of the Stick. He's similiarly engaging in an evil plan that has gotten a lot of his own people killed, a lot of other people killed, and will likely lead to the end of the world. Oh, and he also murdered his own brother rather than give up the evil plan. He convinces himself to keep going due to falling deep into the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

What makes it work is that he's repeatedly confronted by others with how this is total bullshit, making it absolutely clear that we're not supposed to sympathize with him over this.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 12:29:46 AM