When writing off the bad ends of bad guys, to what level of violence and gores are readers willing to tolerate?

LilTV1155

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When writing off the bad ends of bad guys, to what level of violence and gores are readers willing to tolerate?

In one of my stories, I am planning to create several scenes of violence and gores that may includes: torture, humiliation conga, inhumanity violence, and etc. But I need to know my limits (also the reader's limit) when writing gory violence for our sanity and morality.

Such as violence chopping off a guy's body in two? Or going as far to dismember the bad guy into oblivion? Pulling his fingernails and teeth to force a fake confession? What gory violence can you offer to create and how far should I stop at?
 
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It depends on how bad the guy is. If it's a person who rapes children, sure torture him as much and as cruel as you want. But if it's a kid who stole some candy, I think most viewers would start to question if you tortured him. I, personally, like to see bad guys get tortured, especially if they tried to do dirty things to girls.
 

LordAstrea

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Yeah. Definitely depends. Some antagonists do terrible things like committing evil for the sake of what they think is greater good. Sometimes we can even sympathize with them. Others are just evil because they are evil or take that evil to the next level beyond necessary. For the latter, hell yeah, pull fingernails, cut off limbs, burn their house down, poop in their cat's litterbox.
 

Redemit

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Yeah. Definitely depends. Some antagonists do terrible things like committing evil for the sake of what they think is greater good. Sometimes we can even sympathize with them. Others are just evil because they are evil or take that evil to the next level beyond necessary. For the latter, hell yeah, pull fingernails, cut off limbs, burn their house down, poop in their cat's litterbox.
Or poop on the cat that'll show em
 

LotsChrono

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When writing off the bad ends of bad guys, to what level of violence and gores are readers willing to tolerate?

In one of my stories, I am planning to create several scenes of violence and gores that may includes: torture, humiliation conga, inhumanity violence, and etc. But I need to know my limits (also the reader's limit) when writing gory violence for our sanity and morality.

Such as violence chopping off a guy's body in two? Or going as far to dismember the bad guy into oblivion? Pulling his fingernails and teeth to force a fake confession? What gory violence can you offer to create and how far should I stop at?
It depends on what expectations you’ve already set for your readers. You can’t just smack a gore scene in a none-gory story, but you can do whatever you want if you’ve already set expectations for it.
 

K5Rakitan

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Write what you want to read, and someone else will love it. There is no one size fits all when it comes to readers.

That being said, I would much rather read about sex than violence. I find it ridiculous that activities that could cause life are more strictly censored than activities that could cause death.
 

Macrendil-Ysmir

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I'd say "strangled with his own intestines as he twitches in a bath of his own blood, piss and feces" is an adequate level of description. Or "he felt his chest slowly carved open with a grating, dull knife before a hand slowly yet absolutely took hold of his still beating hard and squeezedI." This is also a good level of gore & satisfaction.
 

Aoi_Sora

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The only thing I can think of the best bad end of a villain is when the hero NTR'ed his/her lover.
 

TotallyHuman

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If your protagonist is a "good" guy, you probably should avoid having them torture anybody. Otherwise, you'll either have a bad guy pretending to be good or a very anti-hero one at most.
 

NotaNuffian

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Well, my work involved fingore, spine breaking, face off and rape. Yes, loads of rape. I have gone full Kawahara in terms of violence against women, but that is just me trying to show how crapsack the medieval world is, so the theme does stick.

Always tell yourself:
A. What are you trying to achieve with the violence? Readers going ooh, ahh?
B. Are ya winning, son?
 
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Valthan

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It can be satisfying too if their end looks like some clear karmic justice.

A man who's raped and killed more women than he can bother to remember? Kill him off with some extra intense butt-splitting lovin' from Big Bubba.
 

xluferx

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You would be surprised I think one bad end for a baddie was he went to hell to get r*PED by a really big pig and then eaten alive for eternity.

Well describing overral situation is acceptable the thing is when you go into details and all that
 

LilTV1155

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Okay. So limit is based on a villain's atrocity level?
It depends on how bad the guy is. If it's a person who rapes children, sure torture him as much and as cruel as you want. But if it's a kid who stole some candy, I think most viewers would start to question if you tortured him. I, personally, like to see bad guys get tortured, especially if they tried to do dirty things to girls.
Give me the evilest, hardcore ideas you can come up with that can mentally and physically destroy criminals such as rapists. Any references from other stories would also help.

"Til Death Do We Part" Manga
"Diner" Manga
"Genius Doctor: Black Belly Miss" Webnovel
"Fukushuu O Koinegau Saikyou Yuusha Wa, Yami No Chikara De Senmetsu Musou Suru" Manga
"Pygmalion" Manga
"Scum of Good and Evil" Manga
Feeling is more important. Leave the details to the readers to imagine.
Not sure how that one work. Need a little example.
The only thing I can think of the best bad end of a villain is when the hero NTR'ed his/her lover.
:blob_hmm_two:
Yeah. Definitely depends. Some antagonists do terrible things like committing evil for the sake of what they think is greater good. Sometimes we can even sympathize with them. Others are just evil because they are evil or take that evil to the next level beyond necessary. For the latter, hell yeah, pull fingernails, cut off limbs, burn their house down, poop in their cat's litterbox.
:blob_hmm:Cats?
If your protagonist is a "good" guy, you probably should avoid having them torture anybody. Otherwise, you'll either have a bad guy pretending to be good or a very anti-hero one at most.
My protagonist kids are not really that "goody by law," the girls are supposed to be nightmares like Furies for criminals in trafficking fields. When they kill, they are supposed to strike fear in their enemies' hearts. And their father is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a real scary dude.

If you have a sicko criminal who have most of these traits: persistent, psychopathy, sociopathy, multi-personalities, Sadomasochism, sexually active in violence, pedophilia, serious level of acting, would commit massacre or slaughter kids, trigger-happy, sacrifice cult fanatic/pious (Templar), or yandere. How do you break him or her or them to the point of having PSTD?
 

Ai-chan

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When writing off the bad ends of bad guys, to what level of violence and gores are readers willing to tolerate?

In one of my stories, I am planning to create several scenes of violence and gores that may includes: torture, humiliation conga, inhumanity violence, and etc. But I need to know my limits (also the reader's limit) when writing gory violence for our sanity and morality.

Such as violence chopping off a guy's body in two? Or going as far to dismember the bad guy into oblivion? Pulling his fingernails and teeth to force a fake confession? What gory violence can you offer to create and how far should I stop at?
That depends on your audience. You will find that the readers are completely fine with any level of violence and gore, as long as it doesn't hit them like an invisible freight train. For example, if you want to make a bad end where the villain is raped and cut up by her own followers and thrown into the river with her body mutilated and eaten by animals, you can. All you need to do is create a precedence first, maybe not to the same level of cruelty, but harsh enough to hint to the readers that, "This is that kind of story". If the readers still read it, then they have already prepared their heart for such violence and gore.

It's something like a balancing act. If you do the foreshadowing too much, the final bad end will feel bland because you've already desensitized them too much. But if you do too little, it becomes the kind of story that the readers do not expect and makes them feel cheated. You need to ease your readers into the possibilities, slap their faces gently several times, not smash their faces in with a mallet once at the end.

Suppose you can do that too, but the horrible repercussions may be more than you can bear.
 

witch_sorrowful

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It is almost always advised to not have to not have protagonists do terrible things, no matter how 'rogue-like' the characters are. It's a simple matter of the moral compass of the reader, as we want to keep a separation of the deeds of evil.

Almost every reader coming here would have seen some anime thing where the bodies become separated and cut through with a sword. Some even more violent things, for example the first few minutes Elfen Lied. That's not a problem - but when it is done by choice of protagonist, that brings up a lot of questions, that I think you will need to answer eventually.

Terrible things that you don't want your main characters to do unless you want them to become Anakin Skywalker: don't smash heads of children, don't burn cats, don't kill dogs, don't rape something, or watch such a thing happen. The main problem is that you lose sympathy with the characters, and ... it makes them Anakin Skywalker, not Zorro.

You can have cathartic violence. Like, in the Tarantino films. Django Unchained, for example. Or the extremely violent scene at the end of Once upon a Time in Hollywood. It's funny and I laughed, even though the characters are getting destroyed, and even one gets burnt. It is so violent that it becomes funny.

Psychological torture is almost always a better idea for an Antagonist to go through. Cf. "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe.

Rest, as Ai-chan says, is all dependent on how you put up your promises in the story at the beginning.
 
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