Hate Sink cleanup

Sounds good enough.

Cut frollo, added the note, sent a notifier

Fargo (Series): Other Criminals Looking at this page, I'm pretty sure Lorne Malvo was meant to be portrayed as an intimidating and manipulative villain who had a lot of cool moments for the audience and not someone who was meant to be hated so should his Hate Sink entry go? Here it is for reference.

• Hate Sink: Malvo is a manipulative, sadistic, treacherous murderer who ruins people's lives for shits and giggles while murdering anyone who get in his way. His icy demeanor and professionalism only masks a heartless bastard who you'll be rooting to get his comeuppance.

If the fact that being intimidating and eliciting a Love to Hate response was the main point, then I'm going for cutting out Lorne Malvo.

Here's another HS entry I've found, namely Mecha Sonic from Super Mario Bros. Z...

• Hate Sink: The atrocities he commits throughout the course of the series in the name of acquiring the ultimate power for himself, everything else in the world be damned, strips him of any redeemable qualities.

Yeah, this is honestly an easy cut. It's yet another (incredibly condensed) Complete Monster-lite (which is pointless as MS is already a CM) paragraph. Even with that aside, Mecha Sonic has too much of an Evil Is Cool factor going for him, and the audience (as far as I can tell) likes him for how frightening and effective he is as an uber-evil villain.

Definitely cut that entry

Cut Mecha-Sonic.

Greetings, first post in this thread, here to bring up this.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Characters.ScreamJillRoberts&page=2#edit39566089

Checking here I didn't see any discussion on her so.

Also agree with cutting Mecha Sonic.

Edited by Lucariobot on Feb 2nd 2024 at 1:36:06 AM

We agreed she didn't count. The person ignored the note and removed it so we might wanna start an ATT.

I think Mitch from Cobra Kai should be cut. He's definitely a jerk and he betrays the good guys for selfish reasons, but he spends 2 full seasons on the side of good, gets a couple of Pet the Dog moments, all of the bad things he did the first time he was in Cobra Kai were following Hawk's orders, and most of the time he's treated as a pathetic loser comic relief Butt-Monkey who exists to get beaten up or picked on regardless of which side he's on. Even his big Face–Heel Turn is immediately undercut and played for laughs when he makes a big speech about how he ditched the good guys because they wouldn't stop calling him Penis Breath, only for his new teammates to tell him to shut up and start calling him that themselves.

If we're going to talk about Cobra Kai, I would also suggest removing Hector Salazar. While he is taken seriously by the narrative and there is an emphasis on him being ruthless and uncaring as a person he... doesn't really do anything that's either overtly mean-spirited, disproportionate, or dickish in the screen-time he's got. It's a little like Dark Riku in retrospect; he's clearly a bad guy without anything good, but he doesn't do enough for someone who's supposed to be a Hate Sink IMO.

About Hate Sinks, I'm curious, why do we consider the intent to Love to Hate disqualifying? Isn't that the point of Hate Sinks? Because otherwise, the creator would be deliberately creating a Scrappy, which would sour audience's view.

Scrappies cant be on purpose. It's an audience reaction to characters meant to be liked.

Making a character to be hated, on purpose, is what Hate Sink is for.

Love to Hate characters are similar but different.

It's simple. Love to Hate and genuine hatred are different emotions. You can enjoy wanting a villain to lose, but you probably don't genuinely hate them. A creator wanting you to specifically hate a character is notable.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 1st 2024 at 8:07:16 AM

I hope it's not too soon to ask, but I still need feedback on this post about the entry for Auntie Ethel from Baldur's Gate III, can I get some thoughts on it?

Edited by PhoenixFalcon on Feb 1st 2024 at 9:31:19 AM

Does Donnie Azoff from The Wolf of Wall Street really count? He's way too funny a character so maybe the point of his character is to be laughed at, not despised.

Edited by MaxyGregoryyyy on Feb 5th 2024 at 2:45:55 AM

This was just added to Mr. Digger aka the Bad Ol' Badger's section in Characters.The Fox And The Hound:

• Hate Sink: He is introduced right after the Widow Tweed has to leave Tod at the preserve in the rain. Heartlessly, the old badger turns Tod away during the fox's darkest and neediest moment. The next day, Mr. Digger is even more cruel. He angrily tells Tod to "go back where [he] came from." (Maybe the badger is more of a clueless grouch than a sadist, but the timing of everything he does makes him anything but endearing.)

Does the above example fit?

Edited by gjjones on Feb 10th 2024 at 8:20:56 AM

EDIT: Nevermind, just remember who Mr. Digger is.

Mr. Digger is a jerkass, but a Hate Sink? The problem is that he's in the movie so briefly and the real antagonists are Amos and Copper by this point. There's not enough of him to know if the film wants you to hate him and see his comeuppance.

Edited by Shadao on Feb 10th 2024 at 5:20:59 AM

I have a Hate Sink example that might need to be cut. And that is the Big Bad of both films of Chicken Run: Mrs. Tweedy

• Hate Sink: She is characterized as a vile and greedy "warden" responsible for all the misery on Tweedy's Chicken Farm. She runs the coop like a concentration camp, forcing the chickens to constantly lay eggs to fill her profit margins and sadistically killing any that fails to deliver the quota. When she becomes unsatisfied with their egg production, she decides to turn them all into chicken pies for short-term profits. She is also extremely abusive to her husband, dismissing his concerns about the chickens plotting an escape as mere delusions and forcing him to build (and eventually repair) the pie machine alone. She even kicks him hard enough to leave an imprint when he fails at mending the machine the first time.

It's no dispute that Mrs. Tweedy is a horrible person, but Hate Sink may be too much. Yes, she's a sadistic killer of chickens and a domestic abuser of her husband and is played frighteningly serious, but I felt like there was some coolness in the first film: She has some humorous moments (like her sarcasm when Mr. Tweedy asks what kind of pies will come out when chickens go in, her "woman's touch" line, and especially her defeat), is great at using an axe, is Made of Iron, and Miranda Richardson gives her an awesome yet intimidating vocal performance.

Even if she counted based on just the first movie alone (which the above seems to have done), then comes the sequel where I think she has even more Evil Is Cool factors. Yes, she is deservedly made a Complete Monster now that she knows full well that chickens are sapient and her treatment of her second husband Dr. Fry isn't any better. However, she acts and looks more like a bond-esque supervillain who will "have her revenge" more than just a mere detestable character. She actually becomes more Laughably Evil, even if it doesn't detract from her even darker villainy, her security systems and the Fun Land Farms playland are both effective and cool to look at, she is confirmed to have Joker Immunity, still is a skilled axe wielder and fighter, and retains her durability. Not to mention Miranda has still got it when it comes to bringing the character to life.

So CM? Yes! Jerkass beyond redemption? Definite yes! HS? Not really, at least not after her return in the sequel.

Edited by sethtropes on Feb 27th 2024 at 11:20:32 AM

I was the one who wrote that entry. That was written before the sequel was announced... and that Mrs. Tweedy was returning as a genuine, cackling supervillain. I remember that Mrs. Tweedy was known for two things... being a cruel chicken killer and an abusive husband to Mr. Tweedy. Keep in mind, Mrs. Tweedy mainly stayed out of the action until literally the climax. Prior to that, she was Dolores Umbridge. Someone you want to see get their comeuppance at the end after all the shit she put through the chickens and her husband.

But the sequel did considerably change Tweedy from someone who was mainly hands off to a very active and calculating villain and a personal enemy of Ginger, moreso than Mr. Tweedy.

Edited by Shadao on Feb 12th 2024 at 4:55:12 AM

So should Mrs. Tweedy be cut or should there be a paragraph with a subversion?

Edited by sethtropes on Feb 15th 2024 at 5:26:12 AM

So, it's been a while since I brought up this entry this One Piece entry getting cut, and I honestly still think it can count. Any thoughts?

I found this example on MCU: Earth-838 for Baron Mordo:

• Hate Sink: While the rest of the Illuminati aren't exactly saints themselves, they at least have good reason to be wary of Doctor Strange and are still willing to hear him out. Mordo on the other hand is biased against Strange from the get-go and it is more out of petty jealousy that Supreme Strange was better than him than it is out of concern for his universe. Even when his comrades are out there getting slaughtered by the Scarlet Witch, Mordo still prioritises executing a defenseless Doctor Strange over helping them.

I don't think he counts, does he?

He is pretty affable through most of his appearances and has some ambiguous Well-Intentioned Extremist to him. Plus, even if we assume the worst about him, he's not even close to being the most detestable character in the film and only has some really generic "let's kill the hero"

Yeah pull Mordo he’s not really despicable. At worst, he’s only a nuisance.

I dunno where else to ask this, but I believe someone else asked about this, and I agree; are all the tropes under the sub-tropes folder really sub-tropes? I have seen cases of Abusive Parents, for example, portrayed sympathetically, and most of the tropes describe characters who are likely to be Hate Sinks rather than characters for whom hating them is intrinsic to the definition. I believe someone proposed splitting them into two folders, one for sub-tropes and another for “characters likely to be Hate Sinks”, but it never got anywhere. I can help with that if need be.

Here is how I would organize it:

Edited by MasterN on Feb 17th 2024 at 2:42:41 AM

The Subtropes list has been discussed multiple times, but we've had no consensus on what to do since the topic never sticks.