Is this too grisly for a Villain Protagonist?

The Disposing of a Body pages lists several subtropes. In particularly, I find Fed to Pigs to be the most gruesome way to deal with a corpse. Especially if those pigs are then slaughtered for meat to be consumed by humans.

This apparently intersected with the Organ Theft trope to produce this idea that I am about describe which is really really squicky.

The result is that the bodies of dead enemies (or enemies that are alive but slowly dying) who fought against my protagonist's gang are swiftly hauled away to a secret location to be "processed".

If the bodies still have any blood left in them, the blood would be tested for type and diseases. If the blood passes inspection, the body is drained of a large portion of blood to be stored in a private blood bank.

Organs that haven't been been damaged by bullets, fire, or chemicals are then extracted. These organs are kept in cold storage, until someone wishes to pay for a back alley organ transplant (or if a member of the crew got shot in the kidneys).

The rest of the body is then fed to pigs. Pigs are then slaughtered and sold for meat. End of the squick.

The idea is that simply disposing of a body isn't enough. It must be done in a way that so that the result also provides a form of revenue or resources to aid the gang.

Personally, I'm heavily considering leaving out the pigs part and stopping at organ theft. The pigs thing just seems too squicky to be used in black comedy bantering.

edited 2nd Feb '15 6:27:19 PM by Worlder

I don't know if it's too "grisly" for a Villain Protagonist, since depending on the writer's whims the story be centered on anyone from a cartoonish supervillain to a monstrous serial killer. However in this case, I would say that it's a little gratuitous and gives off a vibe of "overkill". From what I've read, we—the readers/viewers—already know that your protagonist's gang hauls off the bodies of their slain or wounded enemies to be mined for their organs.

It can be left to the imagination what is exactly done to the bodies afterwards—and trust me, sometimes leaving it to be imagined is even worse than graphic description. If you really want some finality, I would suggest burning the corpses. It seems far more businesslike and cold rather than feeding them to pigs. That just seems...out of place and somewhat there for shock value alone.

Just my two cents.

edited 2nd Feb '15 8:09:52 PM by Swordofknowledge

If you do want to keep the pig part have the humanized pig meat play a role in the story, even a minor one. Like at the beginning, a character getting sick from a weird steak they ordered, or an important character feeding on a steak without knowing where it's origins came from.

Maybe have a certain person being disposed to the pigs doesn't even get touched by them, and have a character mention "He's so dirty/evil/whatever the pigs won't touch him".

It's fine. And really, there's nothing "too grisly" for a villain protagonist, as long as it fits the tone of the story and doesn't cause too much Mood Whiplash. Just think of Walter White dissolving a child in acid on the show that was probably the biggest breakout hit of the last decade.

...And if you want to feel even better about your protagonist, remember that in real life, The Mafia has fed people to pigs alive.

edited 2nd Feb '15 9:22:34 PM by Wheezy

I'd cut out the middleman, or middlepig, mind you, and go for The Secret of Long Pork Pies .

Although, actual pig-involvement would make more sense given a gang being businesslike. I would frame it as being the pig-farm isn't exclusively for disposal, it's just a pig-farm / meat processing facility that is run as a legitimate business with grain-fed swine until they happen to need to do a body-dump. That's when the organ harvesting happens and the "leftovers" go into the slop-grinder. (You can probably even find a machine suitable for the purpose on an episode of "Dirty Jobs" with Mike Rowe in which he was interviewing pig farmers who take Las Vegas restaurant waste, sort it, put it in a hopper and cooker for their animals). There's also an episode of The X Files - "Our Town" that explored similar happenings in a chicken processing plant (although the residents of the town were actual, knowing ritualistic cannibals).

If it's businesslike, keep it businesslike... as in, yes, horrible things happen to your protagonist's enemies, but he doesn't have a set up SPECIFICALLY for those horrible things, he just happens to own a meat-processing facility that makes it really convenient.

Personally, while I like the idea of starting such a story with some hapless person eating a pork chop from this place (that's implied to have come from a human-eating pig), I don't think it would taste different than regular pork. Human is supposed to taste porky, anyway, according to serial killers' accounts and whatnot, and for an animal to taste like what it eats, that typically is found in animals that gravitate toward a specific, steady diet (bear meat that's sweet from the bear eating a lot of berries, beef that's grass-fed).

As far as the organ harvesting aspect of it, I'd say if you want to linger on that at all, to do your research into transplants, research as if you or a loved one are dying and you want to know how long particular parts are viable, how well they survive a chilling or freezing process.... unless this story takes place in the future and there is some yet unknown, superior technology.

Of course, by then, scientists could be growing human organs right inside pigs... so there's another angle (though that cuts out the murder).

Just watch Breaking Bad.

The main character, a Villain Protagonist, does things far more horrific than that.

Alternatively, instead of avoiding the squick, you could just go all out - into Crosses The Line Twice territory, essentially.

In short - shot, stabbed, drained of blood, organs removed, meat fed to pigs, skeleton ground up for bone powder (or some such). To me, at least, that goes from 'kill' to 'overkill' to 'amusingly overdone'. Provided it's played more for laughs than seriously, it could be rather amusing.

Or you could just cut back on it a touch.

If it's for comedy, you could do what was done to the executives of Fox in the first Futurama movie. I forget the exact chain of events, but they eventually wound up as Torgo's Powder, which was useful for everything from crotch-itch to salad-topping.

Unless it's a comedy, then yeah, definitely leave the pig part out. At that point, it's more comically over the top than being a threat. Especially since it's not really plausible like organ theft. Organ theft is making a buck off the dead. However, there's no way he kills enough humans a day to feed an entire farm of pigs solely on human flesh, so he logically must have alternative food sources for the pigs. Which means he'd be doing for no other reason than sick amusement.

Edit: if it is a comedy, then just roll with it.

edited 3rd Feb '15 5:17:47 PM by washington213

It will mentioned in order squick a VIP prisoner.

Shadsie's post was the best summary of how this could reasonably work, in my opinion.

...Except for one thing: The Secret of Long Pork Pies just doesn't work in a modern setting where we have CSI: it leaves DNA evidence all over the cutting boards, knives, dishes, pots, pans, counters, discarded gloves, etc. And no matter how thorough they were in sanitizing those surfaces, something's going to slip through the cracks.

Then there's the biggest problem: pigs can eat human bones. We can't. So, in order to feed human to human, you have to cut all the meat off the skeleton first. And unlike with pigs, it you have to hide it from them. That's a pain in the ass that I don't think a busy gangster would want to be bothered with.

edited 21st Feb '15 3:29:57 PM by Wheezy

I was think at some point my protagonist's gang will come into conflict with an Islamic terrorist cell.

After wiping out most of the cell, the cell leader is given a much particularly cruel punishment.

That punishment, of course, is being fed to pigs. Alive.

Alternatively, I could have the punishment follow a particular joke about punishing Osama bin Laden. Specifically, a forced sex change followed by a deportation to Afghanistan.

edited 21st Feb '15 6:50:07 PM by Worlder

Since I live in an area where raising the beasts is rather common, I'll chime in and add that you don't really even need some sort of organized facility for something of the nature you're describing; just someone's backyard farm and maybe a few hours at most. The trope is very much Truth in Television as far as accidental deaths go, I hate to say. Small rural places often keep the animals fed on table scraps so they're always hungry (enough so that if given the chance they'll chow down on the hand that feeds them if care is not taken).

A friend from Missouri once told me about a shady coworker who described the lynching of some missing black college students saying that they had said the wrong things and upset the townsfolk and ended the story with "as it turns out, pigs'll eat anything".

So if it happens in real life, it would probably work well in fiction.