Do you think real life evil people are scarier than fictional villians

I think many can agree on that evil exists in this world.And in the real world and on television villians of many shapes galore.I am not talking about harmless villians but scary evil people who would want to do harm to others.

they can be i guess

lupinnnnnn~~

I'd have to say yes.

In fiction you know the villain will eventually be defeated by the forces of good before they can do serious damage. And usually all the damage will be fixed in the end.

In real life, the bad guy will probably get killed eventually (especially if they piss off enough people. Just look at what happened to Hitler). But there's a good chance that before then they'll cause real damage to real people (like the Holocaust).

So, in the U.S., randomly stripping is a signal that you want to sing the national anthem? - That Human

Yes, because, well, there isn't any risk of Kefka breaking into your house and murdering you, as creepy as he may be.

edited 29th Jul '11 1:48:12 AM by dmboogie

"The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go."

I think, apart from serial killers and similar criminals, and maybe some historical leaders, there's not really such a thing as "real life evil people". In the former case they're usually mentally ill, and in the latter those responsible for atrocities wouldn't really seem evil from the moral, cultural, etc. perspectives of their historical context.

Real world "evil" is usually more complicated than what we see in fiction, and in the rare case that it's not, it seems more sad and pathetic than genuinely scary...

But then, a fictional character can't exactly be scary either since they're a work of fiction and not ever going to be a threat to you in reality.

So real "evil" people are scarier than fictional evil people, even though they're not what I would tend to call evil, simply because there's a possibility of their "evil" being worked on me or people I care about.

edited 29th Jul '11 2:59:30 AM by ekuseruekuseru

@Topic- Only insofar as they actually exist. A fictional evil character could theoretically be scarier than a real life evil person, but only if they were suddenly made real. Even that's mostly because real life evil tends to be more subtle and localized. Sure, you've got your Hitlers and your Osamas, people who affect the entire world, but your everyday, run of the mill evil, your murderers, rapists, people who talk in the movie theater, most people will never know about or have to worry about most of them.

Put another way, if Villain!Bob of Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven suddenly became real and kept his powers and his "I want to Put Them All Out of My Misery", he could be scarier than a real person, but only because he'd then be real.

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

Well, thats the thing. Fictional villains only hurt us because we want them to. Like, we want to feel the pain they cause, because ultimately, we want the villain to lose.

Real-life villains are much more scary because we can't turn them off.

Average Jacks can't super-punch a mugger.

Says you. Get some self defense training.

Yes, real life nasties are scarier.

edited 29th Jul '11 5:51:46 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Well, not in the way that somehow TV average Jacks do.

I doubt an average guy could blast a toughened mugger 200 metres backward.

That makes sense. Although, what about the ideologies of real life bad guys versus fictional ones? Does having realistic ideology make fictional villains scarier?

something

I think it's a case of Reality Is Unrealistic. If you wrote a story wherein the villains were a banking consortiom who control the fate of two-thirds of the world, and intentionally create a depression to syphon all the planet's money into their coffers...readers would think it was too one-dimensional.

I'm a skeptical squirrel

I think real life dangerous people are scarier than fictional villains because the latter cannot directly hurt us.

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I'd say real "villains" are scaruer simply because their motivations are rarely simple and in most cases, i think the average person can empathize or see why they do what they do.

Its much more terrifying to realize the villain wasnt evil to start, and that you could have been them.

Agreed.

In the same way that Hitler is more disturbing when portrayed as a real human being than as a kind of secular Satan for the modern democratic world.

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Who*

^{other than Loni Jay}

doesn't want to do harm to others at some point or another? I'm not scared of "evil" people. "Evil" people are rare and exotic, and I only ever encounter them as words and images on a screen, just like their fictional counterparts. Like their fictional counterparts, they pretty much serve only as entertainment to me. What I'm scared of are people in general. The way I see it, we all have the capacity to do significant harm. Everyone around me is a potential threat under the right circumstances, and I can never know for sure which circumstances will turn a person, or a group of people, against me. I'm more scared of angry mobs of "good" people than of lone gunmen. I'm more scared by humanity's overall irrationality than I am of the bad apples.

But then there are those of us who root for the villains, which I suppose makes them even less scary, because they serve as Escapist Characters allowing us to vicariously hurt people in interesting ways. They're not hurting us, they're hurting a bunch of disposable fictional people.

No. I will be really honest here; because I never had anyone who live around me being dealth physical harm, to me, any kind of real serial murderer or gun-shooting might as well be fiction as well.

There's no one to FEAR in the world according to my view. However, there are MANY people I take caution against because people can do harm to each other, even if they are NOT "evil." I don't believe in evil people; it all boils down to whether consider people beyond your perception as something like you or not. If you are treating people like just something that's just there, you are going to do things that may harm others because you just don't think there is any consequence.

Bottom-line: I'm too immature to actually FEAR anyone who can't do any physical harm to me in real life, yet keep in mind that so called "evil" people can be anyone, anywhere, anytime. It's more of one big flaw of humanity that can be ranged from troublesome to downright tragic.

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

Villains are features of stories, not of the world. Real-life people don't have any "inherent villainness", but may feature as villains in some stories, and may also feature as villains in some other stories.

I think that stories about the world that present people or organizations as villains (in history, political writings etc.) tend to not be very accurate definitions of the world, whatever value they may have as stories. I'm more likely to trust depictions of the real world that try to represent the complex motives and difficult decisions of real life. But because of the usefulness of political propaganda, and of people's taste for simple stories in which "people like them" are on the good side, there tends to be an overproduction of stories with villains.

tldr/ there are few villains in reality, there are villains in simplistic depictions of reality.

Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.

Which makes it all the more creepier, IMO. In fiction, the good guys and the bad guys are clearly defined and, except for certain cases, not very ambigious. Not so in the real world, where the lines (that only really exist in ones own perception) are often blurred.

edited 29th Jul '11 9:06:52 AM by TheBatPencil

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

I don't believe in absolute good and evil, but I would say most real people are scarier than fictional villains. Why? Because fictional villains are, by definition, not real; therefore they cannot cause you real harm. Even if a villain is particularly horrifying, so much that being exposed to them might cause psychological damage, you can easily avoid it if you avoid the work of fiction where the character appears. Real people can really hurt you, ruin your life, or outright kill you, and it's practically impossible to totally prevent it.

Not necessarily because good and evil are rather subjective. I do find some human behaviors particularly appalling.

Who watches the watchmen?

It kind of depends whether by "scarier" you mean "causing a higher level of rational fear" or "more emotionally unnerving." If it's the former then, as people have said, fictional characters can't be scarier - they're not real. If it's the latter, then maybe - if, without knowing who he was, you had met Ted Bundy, you probably wouldn't have found him scary. That was the secret of his "success". Freddie Kruger is always going to be scary. Yet Freddie's a made-up guy played by an actor, and Bundy murdered a string of women.

"Well, it's a lifestyle"

In some ways, yes and no.

No: In real life, people can't have superpowers or transform into Eldritch Abominations. They also aren't looking to destroy the whole world and recreate it to suit their evil needs.

Yes: Villains in fiction are just that: fictional. They can't hurt us. But no matter the motivation and whatnot, a real life villain is inherently scarier because they are real. They can harm us. Terrorists, armed robbers, corrupt cops can cause very realistic physical and psychological harm to those around them.

(Of course, I assume by scarier you mean 'causing a higher level of rational fear').

Summary: From a neutral perspective, real life villains are way scarier. From my perspective, real life villains are kinda scary because I'm never scared of fictional villains in the first place.

edited 29th Jul '11 10:30:09 AM by ShadowBender

Sanity? Why would I need a useless thing like that? Now posting as Motor-Runner.

I think the threat can feel somewhat more real when you are reading a book about a realistic villain.

Also, yes, real villains scare me far more than fictional ones. True, they're much weaker, but then, so are the heroes.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

Well said!

Sanity? Why would I need a useless thing like that? Now posting as Motor-Runner.

I don't know, while there may be 'heroes' and villains' in real life those labels can apply to anyone at anytime. Everybody seems to beleive themselves to be the 'hero' of their own story. R Eal Life villains aren't protected by plot armor yet they can do more damage than even half of the comic book villains. Say what you want about Johan Liebert, Darkseid and SEELE but those are fictional characters and they cannot hurt you directly. There are way worse villains in our wolrd than eithe rof them.

"Thanos is a happy guy! Just look at the smile in his face!"