Markup View

Author: Sligh

Jun 11th 2012 at 11:36:56 PM

My take on this trope would be something along these lines:

PIOUS VILLAIN (or Religious Villain)

"A character who is both extremely religious and extremely evil."

Generally religion is not central to characterization in most media, be it because it is SeriousBusiness, because the author wish to avoid a BrokenBase or just because most authors usually just use socio-political matters as background unless the work is specifically ment as social, religious or political comentary.

But sometimes authors WILL include religion as a very fundamental part of the characterization of a cast member. When this happens, this could be used to reinforce how moral and devoted to his faith a character really is or - specially in more contemporary works - as a way of showcasing and explaining the tenents of some specific religious background, without necessarily make a statement about it.

There is, however, an alternative to both of these. Sometimes, the religious character will be extremely imoral and do all kinds of nasty stuff. This trope is about when a character is depicted as both very religious and very willing to KickTheDog. This is not your regular TheEndJustifyTheMeans KnightTemplar. This is reserved only for the most vicious {{Hypocrite}}s.

This trope can be invoked for several reasons. It might be that this is just a character trait ment to showcase and enhance some villain's evil motivations and willingness to lie and deceive, but this could also be the author making political comentary, criticizing some specific (real or fictional) religion, religion as a whole or rather how religions are structured in a particular setting. If poorly executed, this could turn out to be just a StrawCharacter.

If you're wandering what might be the case for the use of this trope in some specific place you should probably look at how MOST religious people are portrayed instead of just the more vicious or pleasant examples displayed on the work.

This trope does not cover religious extremists. This trope is about people who do evil things and are religious but do not do evil things because of their religious beliefs.

For obvious reasons, NoRealLifeExamplesPlease for this trope. Also, remembering the RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment is never a bad thing.