Fannish5: Scary Characters

[selenak]

List the five scariest characters ever.

As the question was about characters, not monsters, I shall try to avoid the obvious (i.e. an old reply of mine). (The Gentlemen from Hush or the Alien from Alien would fall under this category, as would Shelob from Lord of the Rings. That's the difference between monster and villain, too.)

1.) Caligula as

Comments

[nolivingman]

I agree about Umbridge; that sort of mundane evil is very scary. I imagine some number of people here in Muggle USA would think she's just a good disciplinarian, that the kids deserved what she gave them.

[selenak]

Lovely Neville icon. And yes, and not just in the US. *shivers* Her type is universal, and so is the self righteous approval from some quarters...

[counteragent]

Very cool writeup! The only one I'd read was HP but I enjoyed reading the rest verymuch as well. ITA about umbridge; I have a favorite "mind vid" for HP that uses the stab through the hand moment as a major emphasis point, because it was one of the single most affecting scenes to me in all the books. And the kittens...brrrr

[selenak]

I have a favorite "mind vid" for HP that uses the stab through the hand moment as a major emphasis point, because it was one of the single most affecting scenes to me in all the books.

For me, too. It had a horror to it that stays with you...

[honorh]

Agree totally on the ones I know. Umbridge was the most human villain--and, by no coincidence, the one most people seem to hate the most. It's because they know her. They've met her in a thousand pencil-pushers and rule-makers and petty tin gods who've made their lives miserable at times. Banal evil is, IMHO, the scariest evil of all.

And Dream? Damned frightening. The power he wields is almost unfathomable, and the fact that he can be vindictive as hell (literally) makes him a fearsome figure indeed. And he's not remotely human, so you can toss out everything you know about interacting with people and start thinking about reasoning with a hurricane if and when you raise his ire.

[selenak]

Banal evil is, IMHO, the scariest evil of all.

Definitely. And alive and thriving everywhere, unfortunately.

Re: Dream, that's one of the ways Gaiman really pulls off the anthromorphic personification concept. He's not a superpowered human with weird eyes. Another case in point is his reaction to the serial killers and the Corinthian I - he's not stopping them because murder is wrong and these guys should be behind bars, he ends their party because the pettiness on their part and the disobedience on the Corinthian's part offends him.

[selenak]

I think you mean Lyta Hall? (The woman who becomes Morpheus' nemesis and the embodiment of the Furies.)

I just can't root for someone who's character arc is "you mean sending a woman to hell for not sleeping with me is wrong?"

Firstly he figures out that one early on in the saga, partly due to his own imprisonment; if I had to find a one liner summing up his arc for the entire Sandman saga, it would be "change or die". Secondly, I didn't get the impression we're meant to "root" for him the way he we're meant to root for, say, Superman, Batman, Spider-man etc., because Dream isn't a hero in that sense, he's one in the sense Othello (who kills his wife) or Macbeth (regicide followed by a lot more murders) or Oedipus are heroes of their stories; his arc is following the Aristotelian demand that the hero of a tragedy should be brought down through a combination of his own flaws and circumstances against him. It's just that most modern narratives don't do tragedies, especially not in comics. Also, Sandman is about a hell lot more than

[flo_nelja]

With Umbridge, I have the problem that in book Five, I never understood if she sincerely believed Harry was a liar or not. It seemed contradictory to me anyway I was trying to read it. How do you see her, on this point?

[selenak]

I think she believed Harry was lying the same way Fudge did - wilfully ignoring all evidence to the contrary because it didn't fit what she wanted to see. Considering the last eight years delivered some real life examples like George Bush and all the neocons, I find this very life-like, too.