The most depraved work ever written: a self-imposed challenge

Being boring is healthy too. Still, let me sum up the concept. Take this combination of bleak, horrible works.

• Everything by the Marquis De Sade.
• Blood Diamond and everything to do with Child Soldiers. See also Another Place Another Time.
• Everything about Caligula and rulers that took after him, Idi Amin (see The Last King Of Scotland), the Lord's Resistance Army, Gaddafi.
• Also regimes with mass executions, rutheless repression: Vlad Tepes the Impaler. Elisabeth Bathory. Those Wacky Nazis (death camps) and Imperial Japan (rape camps), the Rwanda genocide (see Hotel Rwanda).
• A Serbian Film, Hobo With A Shotgun, Saw... heck, even Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings when it comes to the Evil Overlords.
• Nineteen Eighty Four.

Now take the Tropico games: you're the guy responsible for all that stuff.

Now, take the Lolita and American Psycho novels: we get first person POV, with lots of detail and inner monologue, of this deranged mind. We also get extremely high-quality writing that gets you interested and hooked, makes the book interesting and memorable, and, heck, might even fool you into feeling sympathy for the Villain Protagonist, before revealing that you've been had. Take The Dark Knight and Joker as guidelines on how to make your complete monster of a protagonist interesting and compelling. Take The Sandman's "The Doll's House" arc as a guideline for how to make them seem (even more) cheap, petty and pathetic. Your choice. But make it personal for the reader, involve them.

Now take the Virgin Roster approach to interactivity: But Thou Must! choose evil actions. And every time you are given the choice of doing something remotely nice, it turns out it was only part of the Player Character's ploy to do something even more horrible. Also, Karma Houdini is a very important element: the Villain Protagonist walks away scott free and unpunished.

Final note: make sure to avoid Narm. Suspension of disbelief must be maintained, atrocities must be introduced progressively, and make narrative sense, in their way. If you make your reader laugh, let it be The Joker type of laugh, where they're ashamed of having found that funny afterwards.

Here's a suggestion on how to work the sympathy angle. (Idea from The Interpreter and, of all places, Transformers Prime): make the protagonist an ex freedom fighter, one who was truly idealistic, and make them commence their reign as a savior, a Young Conqueror, The Messiah, brilliant, dashing, loving, The Paragon (again, within what's believable). Then make them fall to the corruption of absolute power (hedonism, dog-shooting, paranoia...), and betray everything they ever stood for, everyone who ever fought for them, and become worse than the tyrant they overthrew. Make it so that the reader finds out about this little by little, and comes to hate the protagonist even more for their betrayal, even as they better understand their fall.

Here's a suggestion on how to work the thrill angle: the villain's struggle to keep their place (could be a she, for all I know, why is it that men are always stuck with this role?) and escape retribution is genuinely interesting in its own right, and we're always curious on what they'll do next.

And that's the most horrible concept for a work of fiction that I can come up with. There's probably worse things in Idea Space, things I can't even fathom. Merely imagining a story like this makes me nauseous.

The worst part is, there's a setting where such a story would hardly raise an eyebrow. In fact, the setting would throw believability out the window in magically making sure everything gets much worse.

edited 29th Jan '12 10:43:24 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Well, I for one am not contributing to it anymore. Call it hit and run, but I don't even intend to check on it. As you can see from all the works I quoted as inspiration, it's just a matter of melding work that's already been done, and taking it one step further. Hardly revolutionary, very derivative, actually, and it's not that worse than Sade's Sodom And Gomorrah: you could say It's Been Done, for the most part.

I simply put it there because I thought "the idea for the most horrible work of fiction concievable" should exist somewhere. The challenge for me was to come up with something that couldn't be surpassed in horribleness. If anyone comes up with something worse, good for you, champ, but my imagination stops here.

Good luck, everyone.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

OH boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

How can this possibly go wrong?

Let's stop this right now.

edited 29th Jan '12 7:06:00 AM by blackcat