Hate Sink cleanup

I say we can Have her listed until definitive proof of her Being redeemed.

Central Command

Any more votes on Sheriff Payden from last page?

Payden and Central Command.

I have one from the original Battlestar Galactica (1978).

What is the Work?

Battlestar Galactica (1978) is a one-season TV series that tells the story of the Twelve Colonies of Man, who, after suffering near-annihilation at the hands of the Cylons, their enemies with whom the Twelve Colonies (all with planets named for constellations of the Zodiac) have fought a thousand-year war. Lured into a Trap by a traitor named Baltar, the fleet is slaughtered with the exception of a single Battlestar, the Galactica. Led by its commander Adama, the Galactica leads an exodus across the galaxy in search of a 13th lost colony... Earth.

Who is the Candidate?

Sire Uri (Ray Milland), appearing exclusively in the pilot episodes, is a member of the Quorom, the Colonies' ruling council. According to Adama, Uri had once been an honorable man with good intentions, but had let his fame and authority go to his head, corrupting his morals and ethics. Unlike most of the other refugees who are starving, Sire Uri is shown living in luxury aboard the starliner ''Rising Star'' with a party of guests, unbothered by the food shortages taking place on other ships. Adama's son Apollo, a high-ranking officer, noting the absence of Uri's wife, asks about her. Uri replies that she "was not in time to make the voyage", indicating that she was either killed in the Cylon attack or left behind. In any case, Uri seems unbothered by her absence as he enjoys the company of two young women on either side of him. Seeing this, Apollo remarks on Uri's lack of mourning and confiscates the food that Uri has with the intention of distributing it as far as it can go.

Later, the Council of Twelve debates how to handle the supply problems. Uri suggests stopping, but Adama thinks they should press on, since any stop will draw the Cylons' attention. Uri then backs a proposal by Apollo to brave a blindingly bright starfield littered with mines to reach the planet Carillon, which has the necessary supplies, just to spite and undermine Adama. After the fleet reaches Carillon, Uri, convinced that the Cylons only threaten humanity because of their weapons, proposes disarmament to show they are no threat, glossing over the fact that the Cylons tried to enslave other worlds (which is why humanity intervened) and would more than likely enslave humans as well, as free will and choice are things that are alien to Cylons. After Adama leaves the meeting, Uri speaks disparagingly of soldiers, then suggests that when Apollo and his comrades Lt. Starbuck and Lt. Boomer receive commendations for wiping out the mines, he will propose to the civilians that they disband their armed forces now that the Ovions (the inhabitants of Carillon) are providing them with what they need. Uri is proven wrong when it's revealed that the Ovions are a) in league with the Cylons and b) feeding on unlucky humans who wind up in the lowest chambers. Cylons pursuing Apollo and Starbuck attack the announcement, and Uri is forced to state that Apollo is in charge. That's the last we see of him in the entire series.

What makes him personally despicable?

He's a greedy, unempathic Obstructive Bureaucrat who's also Too Dumb to Live; it's pretty clear the Cylons want nothing more than genocide against mankind considering they went and bombed the civilian populations. Adama is one of the biggest reasons why humanity is still around and even voted for Uri's election to the new council since the old one was destroyed, so he's an Ungrateful Bastard as well.

Evil Is Cool? Complexity? Freudian Excuse?

Not really. He used to be a good man and Adama voted for him because of who he had been, but we see nothing of that onscreen.

Verdict?

Keeper. He's uncaring, stupid, and obstructive. The Cylons are an impersonal foe and it’s unlikely to encounter one of them, but it’s quite likely to encounter someone like Sire Uri.

Edited by k410ren on Aug 30th 2019 at 10:00:15 AM

Uri

uri

Uri.

Uri.

Yes to Uri.

Okay, so here goes ...

What's the work?

A Nightmare on Elm Street (eerily enough enough, when I started typing this, the ad to my right showed a woman in a sweater reminiscent of Freddy's) is a popular slasher movie series focusing around a dream-haunting serial killer as he stalks the teenagers of the town of Springwood.

Who is Freddy Krueger? What has he done?

Frederick "Freddy" Charles Krueger. The bastard son of a hundred maniacs. The Springwood Slasher. An undead serial killer who murdered over 20 children in his lifetime before eventually being caught, but let off on a technicality when someone forgot to sign the warrant to search his place. The parents of Springwood were, to say the least, unhappy with this miscarriage of justice, and decided to take the law into their own hands by torching his place (boiler room?) while he was in it. But this was not the end of Freddy. He made a pact with the Dream Demons (which appears to have been retconned in Freddy vs. Jason, but not in the Freddy vs Jason vs Ash comics), who granted him the power to invade other peoples' dreams, where he would stalk and kill them, and they would die in real life, as well.

In the first movie, he torments a group of friends, the children of some of the parents who killed him. He starts off with Tina, who he hacks up in her dream while her boyfriend Rod is Forced to Watch as his claws tear into her. Rod is blamed for her murder, and once he's hauled off to jail, Freddy chases Nancy when she falls asleep in school, giggling like a lunatic as he does so. Then, as Nancy and her friend Glen try to break Rod out of jail, he hangs Rod with his own bedsheet in front of them and chases Nancy back to her house, and takes a moment to taunt her by wearing Tina's face before she wakes up.

Later on, Nancy pulls his hat out of a dream, and confronts her mother about it, who reveals Freddy's history. Nancy asks for Glen's help, and Glen — while still skeptical about Freddy — obliges, but he falls asleep and Freddy pulls him into his own bed, and an immense tide of blood sprays out. Glen's exact fate is left unknown, but it's implied to be especially gruesome. Nancy gets her father to help, falls asleep on her own after setting a series of traps, and pulls Freddy out of her dream. Freddy catches on fire by one of the traps, and while it doesn't kill him, he jumps on top of Nancy's sleeping mother, burning her alive. Eventually, Nancy realizes the past few days have all been one long dream, and wishes him out of existence. Then we get a happy ending where everything is all back to normal ... until Nancy gets in a car with her friends and the roof of the car — which has the same pattern as Freddy's sweater — comes up and the windows go up, and she screams as they drive away. And Freddy breaks the window on the front door and pulls her mother in.

I ... admit that I skipped the second movie this time around. Really don't care for it much in general, and the Values Dissonance that compares homosexuality to a (implied) pedophiliac serial killer is a little tasteless even for me. But from what I recall, it boils down to this: a new kid — Jesse — is living in Nancy's house, and Freddy takes an interest in him, slowly possessing him. Here, he creeps on Jesse's young sister, kills a Depraved Homosexual coach who wants to rape Jesse, and eventually breaks free of the vessel that was Jesse's body and murders a bunch of teens at a party. It takes Jesse's love interest, Lisa, to kiss Freddy to free Jesse from his grasp. Happy ending ... until Lisa and Jesse take the bus to school, and Freddy is revealed to be the driver, just like in the dream.

The third movie sees a girl named Kristen being haunted by nightmares and trying desperately to stay awake, until Freddy attacks her and slashes her wrists via the bathroom sink, and makes it look like she tried to kill herself. Kristen is confined to the hospital, and Freddy starts knocking off everyone there, using their talents and fears against them. He later kills Nancy's father, Don, and then appears in a shared dream between her, Kristen, Joey, and Kincaid, ambushes Nancy and stabs her. He's finished off when the Skeptic No Longer doctor from the institution consecrates his bones with holy water.

He's brought back in part four, where he kills off Kincaid, Joey, and Kristen, and when Kristen's friend Alice inherits the former's ability to pull people into dreams, he starts using this against her and begins knocking off her friends, and continues to do this in the fifth movie through Alice's unborn child, even after he was seemingly defeated (again) in the previous one. Meanwhile, he tries to corrupt said child in the dream world, until his mother, Amanda Krueger, returns and he merges with her womb.

In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, he has turned Springwood into a Childless Dystopia, having successfully murdered the remaining children and driven the adults insane. He uses the amnesiac last teenager in Springwood to bring his daughter back to him, and takes his time to kill a few teenagers from the shelter she works at in ... incredibly amusing ways, and erasing them from existence in the process. Flashbacks reveal that he hammered a class pet hamster to death, killed his abusive foster father (played by none other than Alice Cooper), and murders his wife when she discovers his secret life. He later reveals his plan to his estranged daughter, Katherine, to keep on killing children across the country until there's none left. Katherine pulls him out of her dream and into the real world, where he appears to be human again, and tries to plead for her sympathy before attacking her with his glove. Katherine uses the confiscated weapons from the shelter to impale him, and sticks a pipe bomb in him, seemingly killing him for good.

Freddy vs Jason, again, retcons his whole Dream Demon backstory, and he reveals that he was kept alive through peoples' fear of him. While in Hell, he finds the infamous Psychopathic Manchild Jason Voorhees, disguises himself as his mother, and helps him escape from Hell to go to Springwood so he can terrorize the teenagers and make himself feared once again. Everyone is dreading the return of Freddy and things seem to be going swimmingly until Jason steals one of his kills and hacks his way through a cornfield rave. While on fire. Freddy, needless to say, is enraged now that everyone knows it's Jason and not him that's been killing people. But he has just enough strength to torture one of the hospital escapees and leave a message for Jason.

While the teens try to find hypnocil at the hospital, he possesses the stoner, disposes of the hypnocil, and knocks Jason unconscious with a heavy dose of tranquilizers. He torments Jason in his dreams — partly in the disguise of his mother — and eventually reduces him to a scared child. Then he forces him to relive his near-drowning at Camp Crystal Lake, where he was bullied by children for his appearance. Lori, one of the teens, sees two counselors having sex while Jason is being chased into the lake. The male counselor turns into Freddy, and the counselor he's banging turns out to be a corpse. Lori rescues Jason, but ends up in her own personal nightmare, where it's revealed that Freddy killed her mother and let her father take the blame for it. Then he tries to rape Lori before she pulls him out of her dream and into the real world, where he'll be powerless against Jason. The two of them fight, and he comes out on top, casting Jason into the water ... before Jason rises up again and impales him with his glove-arm, and Lori chops his head off. At the end, both are revealed to be Not Quite Dead, and Freddy's severed head winks at the audience and laughs.

What makes him personally despicable?

Freddy ... is a bully. Besides being a child killer and implied to be a pedophile, he loves to torment his victims with whatever he can think of. Wearing a previous victim's severed face, shapeshifting into a loved one or family member, presenting the severed head of his intended victim's mother, intentionally giving out hope spots ... he also seems to be quite misogynistic in the sequels, having a fondness for killing little girls especially and calling women bitches. But honestly? Through all of it, he manages to be fun to watch in many of the sequels. His one-liners are intentionally hilarious, which makes him a little too hard to hate.

Freudian Excuse? Evil Is Cool traits? Complexity?

His mother was a nun, raped by a hundred mental patients in an asylum she worked at. That's a traumatic backstory as is, but with another look, he was clearly an unwanted child and never really knew his father growing up. And, if FvJ is anything to go by, his foster dad was quite abusive throughout his life until his self-harm taught him to enjoy the abuse and eventually lash out and kill him. At first, he was just killing for revenge against the parents who killed him, but he was murdered exactly because he murdered their children. Besides that, he later throws that justification away once all the original Springwood children are dead, and decides to just keep killing. Even then, nothing that happened in his childhood is even a remotely good justification to murder children.

He does certainly have a lot of cool traits. His glove, for starters, is a unique weapon, and Robert Englund's charismatic performance helps. The sequels give him some impressive powers, as well. Add to that, he's really entertaining to watch. Of course, you could argue that a lot of these cool and funny traits are undermined by just how petty he is. But in real life, there's widely sold and (as far as I know) officially-licensed Halloween costumes of him, so it seems kinda doubtful that hate was an intended reaction. At least not in the sequels. Wes Craven's New Nightmare might have been Wes Craven's attempt to undo all that love he got, though. He was, after all, named after a bully from Wes's childhood, much like another villain he made who's definitely a keeper for this trope.

Verdict?

Abstain on the first movie, no for the sequels and FvJ.

Edited by Stellarvore on Aug 31st 2019 at 3:25:23 AM

I'm saying no to Freddy.

Freddy

• American Justice: Sheriff Payden is a racist thug who treats his police department like a protection racket, forcing the local drug dealers to give him a cut under pain of death and browbeating the mayor by threatening his dog. When his men kill one of the dealers, and he personally guns down one for complaining about the corpse not having money, Payden decodes to frame Jack Justice, a black cop passing through tpwn, for the crime and then kill him for "escaping." When he captures Jack, he explains all this to him while also spputing off racist jokes. After Jack escapes, Payden tries to coax him back by threatening to have his men gang rape a woman he befriended before trying to shoot him In the Back.

freddy

Probably helps that he more or less became the face of the franchise so...

I'm not sure what to say about Krueger. On one hand, he can be a pretty amusing villain and he definitely helped elevate Elm Street beyond just another Slasher with the bizarre battles he wages with the protagonists. On the other hand, he is legitimately one of the most depraved and personally vile horror villains i've ever seen. He's heavily misogynistic and even racist, his victims are consistently sympathetic, he's a child predator, and while Michael and Jason are usually characterized as unswavering supernatural forces, Freddy has a very human and sadistic personality.

Abstain on Freddy. He's got a tragic backstory that I think humanizes him enough for the most part. If we're just going by the first two movies maybe but not if we count all of them. Think I'll do Grubba's effortpost soon then write up the hateable Sinister Minister Lekain.

Isn't Freddy a Complete Monster though? Or did his tragic backstory remove him from that trope.

Edited by Klavice on Aug 31st 2019 at 5:59:10 AM

I'm also abstaining on Freddy, due to the fact that while his tragic backstory is probably weighed down by how evil he is, the trope page gives the impression that his screen presence is emphasized over his loathsome traits and Klavice has an avatar now?

I guess we need to heard what Wes Craven's intent was with Freddy Krueger (at least with the original film). Here's what he had to say about Freddy on pg. 74-75:

In that same magazine, it was noted how different the people who helmed the sequels treated Freddy compared to Craven.

Intent is always key. Craven envisioned Freddy to be an absolute monster, the worst of his kind. And that Nancy was supposed to indisputably kill him off and have a happy ending, no strings attached. The reason it didn't panned out was due to the fact the executives loved Freddy and wanted to have either a Cruel Twist Ending for one last scare or simply open the door for more sequels where Freddy can creatively kill more people in ways that neither Michael Myers nor Jason Voorhees could do.

Since Craven had most of the creative power in the first movie, I say that Freddy Kruger counts as a Hate Sink in that movie. The sequels, however, fall out of Craven's jurisdiction (for the most part) and thus the executives are free to remove Freddy's Hate Sink status in order to sell more merchandise of his costume and iconic glove.

Edited by Shadao on Sep 1st 2019 at 10:25:00 AM

Come to think of it, Shadao brings up some good points. I'm switching to a yes for the first film, but abstaining on the next films. He may make the cut in the reboot as well and seriously, who is Klavice's avatar?

Edited by SkyCat32 on Sep 3rd 2019 at 8:40:49 AM

Way I read that? It sounds like Craven intended him to be feared more than hated.

Chris Cleek of The Woman.

What is the work?

The Woman is a novel written by the late Jack Ketchum about a country lawyer who discovers a feral woman while hunting in the woods. He then decides to take her home and locks her in a fruit cellar under the guise of civilizing her so she could better integrate into society. But, of course, this is further from the truth.

What has he done?

He frequently rapes and tortures the woman whenever she doesn't comply to his demands such as when he dosed her with buckets of boiling hot water and then hosing her down with a high-pressure power washer. If that wasn't enough for you, the novel then reveals that Chris had also raped his older daughter Peggy every night, until eventually, she became pregnant with his child. When her teacher Miss Raton pays a visit to the Cleek residence to discuss her suspicions, Chris knocks her out and feeds her to his pet dogs, and also his eyeless daughter (named Socket in the film adaptation) whom he kept locked up in the barn.

Oh, and he is also an uber He-Man Woman Hater who believed that all women were made to service men no matter if they agreed with it or not. Best exemplified with him gut punching his wife and calling his daughters fools. He only seems to value his son, Brian, but it's really only because he views being a man in a high regard such as when he did not punish Brian for trying to have his way with the woman citing it as being because of masculine urges.

Eventually, the woman is released and she goes to work on Chris' wife and Brian killing them quickly. Facing Chris, the woman extends his suffering as he slowly died. The book then ends with Peggy and her sister joining the feral woman in the woods.

Freudian Excuse? Evil Is Cool? Complexity?

No. He is a glaring example of a misogynistic Domestic Abuser who takes pride in his manhood, believing that because of it, he is exempt from receiving any repercussions for his many, many actions. And like I said with his son, he valued him because of his gender, not because he genuinely loved him. He treated him more as a servant and when he watches the feral woman kill him in front of his eyes, he doesn't show an ounce of anger towards it.

Personally despicable.

Ha.

My avatar is Peter Parker from the panned Spider Man and his Amazing Friends. I remember it's intro really sticking out for how... out there it was.

Anyway, pretty sure Freddy could count in just the first movie.

Yes to Chris Cleek by the way!

Edited by Klavice on Aug 31st 2019 at 10:15:00 AM

Chris Creep.

That means your avatar is my avatar unmasked.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Aug 31st 2019 at 1:39:03 PM

@Demon Duckof Doom

Craven originally intended Freddy Kruger to be a child molester but changed it to child murderer because he wanted to "avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestation cases that occurred in California around the time of production of the film." Nevertheless, some of the implications to the original idea were still present considering who he usually targets as this nightmare demon. This isn't something to be feared. This is something to be loathed. Then there's the fact he's one of the few slashers to have an actual face and talk.

Freddy is no ordinary killer. He's the killer that will make words into weapons. To taunt you and threaten you before the kill. That makes him more defined than say Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. The latter two don't speak and they hide their faces with masks, making their motivations and humanity completely undefined for the audience, leaving it all up to the imagination. Freddy has humanity and it's the kind of humanity you want to punch out of disgust.

And once again, we must remember what Craven wanted the ending of the film to be:

The kids are the people you root for to win, and Freddy is to be defeated for good with no The Bad Guy Wins strings attached.

It's only the sequels and spin-offs that came after that Freddy stops being a Hate Sink and starts being a fun villain to watch.

Oh, and to Chris Cleek.

Edited by Shadao on Aug 31st 2019 at 11:11:27 AM

Chris.

Okay, with those quotes? Sure, Freddy, but only in the first film. Remake!Freddy might count too.

Chris as well.