Sinister Sweet Tooth

A perfect ice cream cone for the sinister clown driving Sweet Tooth.

Generally speaking, there's no real morality attached to the common Sweet Tooth. It's just that their preferences just happen to lean towards the more saccharine end of the taste spectrum, so the trope is largely neutral... unless you're one of these guys.

Here, a taste for confection, chocolate, or other sweet foods is clearly identified as a villainous trait. The reasons may vary: perhaps it's being used to highlight the villain's hedonistic side; it can be used as a Trademark Favorite Food in order to identify the villain while disguised; if Real Men Hate Sugar in this setting, it may even be used to set them apart from other, more heroic characters.

A possible trait of the Villainous Glutton and the Psychopathic Manchild. In historical settings this may overlap with Aristocrats Are Evil, as back in the day, white sugar was so expensive that the only people who could eat sugary sweets on a day-to-day basis were nobility or royalty.

See also Genius Sweet Tooth, in which the sugary preferences are used to identify intelligence rather than villainy. Contrast with Straight Edge Evil, in which a villainous character abstains from unhealthy habits, which often includes sweets.

Not related to Hitler Ate Sugar.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Mello of Death Note is addicted to chocolate, has allied himself with the Mafia, and has set up his own gang of kidnappers.
• Dragon Ball Z: Majin Buu is the Big Bad of his own arc, a monster revived by Babidi and his crew in order to conquer the world — only to end up destroying it. Though he goes through various transformations, a common trait of Majin Buu is his taste for candies: most memorably, Fat Buu converts his opponents into chocolates and candies so he can eat them.
• In Odd Taxi, Yano, a gangster and one of the main antagonists in the story, can often be seen sucking on a lollipop.
• In an unexpected twist at the end of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, the Sweet Tooth Stocking betrays her sister Panty by cutting her into pieces making a surprising Face–Heel Turn that even shocks their evil rivals Scanty and Kneesocks.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who episode "Year of the Pig", Alphonse Chardalot is a Villainous Glutton with a thing for confection — to the point that he's stockpiled a mountain of cakes, chocolate biscuits, and dried fruit in his bathtub; he also turns out to be an alien scientist trying to capture and dissect Toby the Sapient Pig. Amusingly, though he disparages Toby's appetite, it doesn't take the Doctor and Miss Bultitude long to notice that Chardalot can't keep his hands off the dessert trolley. This is an early hint that Chardalot is actually another sapient pig.

Comic Strips

• Dick Tracy: Coney, a villain from a July 2020 strip, is a rotund gang leader with a thing for ice-cream cones.

Films — Animated

• Dr. Erwin Armstrong, the main villain in The Boss Baby: Family Business, is seen eating lots of candy, and even sugar straight from the bag. This is revealed to be because Armstrong is actually a Brainy Baby plotting a baby revolution.
• Rio 2: The head of the illegal logging operation which is destroying the Amazon is hardly ever seen without a lollipop.

Films — Live-Action

• Django Unchained: Calvin Candie, the tyrannical owner of the slave plantation Candyland, has a penchant for sweets. He's seen noshing on jellybeans at his club and white cake at home, and sports some spectacularly rotten teeth as a result. Notably, he becomes the enemy of Dr. King Schultz, the kindhearted bounty hunter and dentist who "doesn't go in for sweets".
• In The Fly (1986), one of the earliest signs that Seth Brundle's teleportation experiment is turning him into a monstrous fly hybrid is his growing taste for sugar: at first, he's merely ladling the stuff into his coffee and calling loudly for a cannoli to go with it; then, as he grows more violent and obsessive, he begins munching on chocolate bars while wandering the town in a rage. By the time his degeneration becomes plainly obvious, his once-relatively tidy lab is littered with boxes of donuts — a sign that his humanity is undergoing a very steep decline.
• The Godfather III: Don Altobello is revealed to be working with a consortium of white-collar criminals to screw over the Corleone family. He also has a thing for cannoli, eating his way through an entire box of them over the course of the climactic opera. Unfortunately for him, Connie Corleone had said cannoli poisoned as revenge for his part in the plot, allowing her to watch him expire in the final minutes of the opera.
• Hot Fuzz: Chief Frank Butterman, much like the rest of the Sanford police, has a weakness for ice cream and cake. He's also in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance that's secretly running the town from behind the scenes, ordering the assassination of anyone who dares spoil Sanford's image as the "perfect" village.
• In The Irishman, Jimmy Hoffa is a corrupt union leader in cahoots with The Mafia, arranging for campaigns of vandalism and bombing in order to get what he wants. He's also known for enjoying ice cream and soda pop as a preferred alternative to alcohol, a fact that makes him seem quite eccentric to his mobster associates; indeed, Tony Pro actually gets on Hoffa's bad side when he interrupts his dessert.
• Iron Man 2: Justin Hammer, the secondary villain of the film, loves ice cream and admits that he has a sweet tooth.
• Isn't It Shocking?: Oakes has a candy bar in hand while doing his killings and while observing the police. In one scene he drowns his pancakes in maple syrup.
• Men in Black: Taken to extremes by the monstrous Edgar; being a giant alien cockroach in human disguise, his favorite treat is straight sugar water that he guzzles immediately after crash-landing on Earth.
• In Road to Perdition, psychopathic assassin/crime scene photographer Maguire enjoys his coffee with a lot of sugar and has the brown teeth to prove it.

Literature

• In John Connolly's "The Cancer Cowboy Rides", Buddy Carson is not only a psychopathic Humanoid Abomination with the ability to spread rapidly advancing cancer by touch, but he lives almost entirely on sweet foods like candy bars and apple pie.
• Augustus Gloop of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the first of the kids to find a golden ticket and is said to get through so many chocolate bars a day that it'd be impossible for him not to find one of said tickets. On top of breaking the rules and drinking chocolate straight from Wonka's river, he's often portrayed as a bully in the adaptations.
• Alex of A Clockwork Orange is a brutal teenage gang-leader with a taste for ultra-violence and rape... but on top of his love of Ludwig Van, he also admits to having a "sladky tooth", practically shoveling sugar into his tea and adding jam to his egg-on-toast.
• Piilomaan pikku aasi:
  • The main villain, Mukkelis Muuli, loves ice cream and forces his subjects to eat it, and is seen licking a lollipop in one scene.
  • The evil witch Kuva Kuva is motivated to capture the heroes by Mukkelis Muuli promising her a castle made of chocolate, and also keeps a whole storage of ice cream. She however decides to turn good upon finding out that there's a whole chocolate mine under her mountain.

Live-Action TV

• Killing Eve: Villanelle is a psychopathic assassin with some very saccharine tastes, befitting her characterization as a Psychopathic Manchild: she puts honey on frying sausages, treats herself to ice cream, and places such value on high-quality pastries that she barely manages to hide her dislike of the heated fruitcake served by Frank's mother.
• In The Sandman (2022), John Dee is an honesty-obsessed murderer with a delusional ambition to make a world without lies through the power of Dream's Ruby. Also, he has something of a sweet tooth: in "24/7", he takes advantage of the chaos he's caused at the diner to steal a huge tub of ice-cream from the kitchen and sits at the counter eating it even as people start killing each other around him.
• The assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha of The Umbrella Academy (2019) love unwinding from assassinating and torturing people in the name of the Commission via regular visits to the local donut shop. Ironically, this ends up forming the basis of Hazel's redemption when he falls in love with the owner/chef.

Theatre

• In both the original play and the film adaptation of Amadeus, Salieri loves his sweets: he regularly offers his guests dessert dishes, often has a plate of confection within arms' reach, and first encountered Mozart while pinching something sugary from one of the banqueting tables... and as the story makes clear, Salieri is consumed with envy for Mozart, enough to try to ruin his career and even attempt murder.

Video Games

• Hitman: Blood Money:
  • The primary target of "Death on the Mississippi" is Skip Muldoon, a riverboat captain, drug smuggler, and gang leader who's been carrying on with an incestuous affair with his niece (possibly sans her consent, given that she's implied to be the client behind this mission). Muldoon is noted to have a taste for baked goods, especially cake: one of the easiest ways of getting close enough to kill him is to deliver a cake to Muldoon's office — either poisoned, concealing a weapon, or both.
  • Hank "Buddy" Muldoon of "Til Death Do Us Part" is a Small-Town Tyrant just like his father, having inherited leadership of the Gators following his death and is soon to be married to his cousin (his father's ex-mistress and the client behind this mission as well!)... and just like Skip, he's got a sweet tooth: he just can't keep his fingers out of the wedding cake — a very easy means of dispatching him if you've got a poison syringe with you.
• In the Left 4 Dead "Hard Rain" campaign, it's suggested that the highly dangerous Infected variants known as Witches are attracted to sugar — hence why they've swarmed a sugar mill in large numbers. This is an Ascended Glitch; the "AI Director" has an issue in its code where it spawns massive numbers of Witches in that one location, but the design team and testers were so amused that they made it canonical and gave the Witches this trait to justify it.
• Moshi Monsters features the villainous Sweet Tooth; they not only enjoy candy in the traditional sense, but their main shtick is to hypnotize someone with a lollipop.
• The Secret World:
  • Säid works for a crime syndicate known as the Kingdom and is known for being a greedy, arrogant, lustful, hedonistic and generally unempathetic Nominal Hero. Plus, he's indirectly responsible for triggering the Tokyo Incident via an ill-advised deal with a death cult, one of the few things he's truly ashamed of. He also indicates that he's got a bit of a sweet tooth, given that he often conducts meetings at Zahra's Cafe (known for its cakes) and recommends that he and a client treat themselves to ice lollies.
  • In Tokyo, it's revealed that the Filth has a taste for sugary Bingo! Cola. As it turns out, this is because it's actually under the control of the Black Signal A.K.A. John, a disembodied intellect causing chaos and destruction all over Kaidan District... and, when he was still human, the free Bingo! Cola was one of his favorite perks of being a member of the Fear Nothing Foundation.
• Twisted Metal: One of the game's playable characters, Needles Kane, is both a Serial Killer and Monster Clown, and some incarnations have shown a great love for ice cream and other frozen treats. For good measure, he and his vehicle of choice are often referred to simply as Sweet Tooth.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: Zigzagged with Nutty. His defining trait is that he's addicted to candy (or anything with sugar in it), and on various occasions, he has prioritized candy over the lives of other people. He's even stolen a lollipop from Cub without any remorse. However, he can be rather friendly as long as no one gets between him and sweets.

Webcomics

• Thog in The Order of the Stick is a brutal murderous half-orc with the mind of a child, who is rather fond of ice cream. One strip shows that his handlers have to continually stock him with ice cream sundaes lest he go on a murderous rampage.
  "oh tiny ice cream friends! thog delay boredom driven rampage only for you!"

Western Animation

• Grossology: The episode "Candy Isn't Dandy" introduces Gary Gumdrop, who likes candy so much he's willing to steal it to get his next sweet tooth fix. However, as a result of his candy obsession, his teeth are all rotten and he occasionally spits one out. Bitter at the next generation's healthy teeth, he invented the "Gary Gumdrop" persona and began giving out candy laced with concentrated gingivitis bacteria.
• As with the movie, the Bugs that appear in Men in Black: The Series are violent psychopaths obsessed with sugar.
• Rick and Morty:
  • Rick is undoubtedly an asshole and qualifies as either a Nominal Hero or a full-blown Villain Protagonist, having been known to do some of the most heinous things in the series out of anger, lust, greed, petty revenge, or pure sloth... and he's a fan of wafer cookies. "Mortyplicity" also features him electrocuting a small animal so it can excrete what appears to be a chocolate egg, which he immediately eats. Given Rick's noteworthy intelligence, this would also qualify as Genius Sweet Tooth.
  • The equally unpleasant inhabitants of the Citadel of Ricks also enjoy wafer cookies... and are actively flavoring them with the mental secretions of a Rick who tried to opt out of the usual Rick lifestyle, keeping him unconscious and dreaming just so that the cookies can feature "the impossible flavor of your own completion". In "The Ricklantis Mixup", the Shadow Council of Ricks can even be seen munching on a box of the stuff, celebrating the new flavor they've managed to acquire that day.
• Angelica Pickles from Rugrats is the series' main antagonist, constantly picking on her baby cousin Tommy and his friends. She also loves sweets and sometimes eats too many to the point where she gets sick. In fact, some of her schemes involve something relating to sweets, one of the best examples of this being in "Partners in Crime". In the episode, Didi bakes a dozen cupcakes, and Angelica eats all but two. Angelica later goes on stealing a bowl of cookies and a cake for the 100th birthday of an elderly man named Ezekiel Davis. She gets a stomachache as a result of eating all of these.

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