Basic Trope: A villain so evil that they actually eat babies.
- Straight: The villain eats babies.
- Exaggerated:
- The villain eats nothing but babies. Sometimes even onscreen.
- The villain eats FETUSES.
- Downplayed:
- Would Hurt a Child
- A non-sapient predator targets human babies, or a human eats the young of a non-sapient species.
- The villain is a Child Eater, but doesn't necessarily eat babies.
- Justified:
- The villain has to eat babies in order to survive.
- Alternately, the babies are eggs (eg, chicken eggs).
- He was starving. If he hadn't done it both he and the baby would have died.
- The baby was already dead, and that's how the character's culture does away with corpses.
- The villain is a psychotic cannibal who is depraved enough to devour infants without caring that others would see him as a monster because of it.
- Inverted:
- A baby eats the villain.
- The villain is a baby who eats adults (bonus points if the baby prefers to go after seniors).
- The hero eats babies. It's not unprecedented.
- The villain eats senior citizens (bonus points if the villain is a baby).
- Subverted:
- The villain is given a baby by one of his Mooks (or even The Dragon), looks at it hungrily, but decides to raise it as his successor instead.
- The villain appears to be eating something the shape of a baby from a distance, but on closer inspection it's revealed to be just chicken.
- It's merely a rumor spread by those that don't know what few standards the villain has.
- Double Subverted:
- And then someone else eats the baby.
- And then the "chicken" is revealed to be ground-up babies.
- Parodied:
- An EVIL cooking show features delicious baby recipes.
- Logical Extreme: The villain is skilled at performing fellatio and swallowing sperm.
- Zig Zagged: The villain is given a baby by one of his Mooks, looks at it hungrily, but decides to raise it as his successor instead. Then someone else decides to eat the baby, but before he can do so the baby eats him. Then the baby goes on a rampage, eating everything it can see, but is defeated when another baby eats it. The villain eats that baby.
- Averted: Nobody eats babies. Nobody considers eating babies. There may not even be any babies.
- Enforced: "We want to show the audience how evil the villain is. Make him eat a baby."
- Lampshaded: "Darth Bigbad eats babies! That's evil!"
- Invoked: The villain is intentionally eating the babies to up his terror cred.
- Exploited: The villain is a Villain with Good Publicity and the heroes expose his eating of babies to the public in order to reveal the horrible person he really is.
- Defied: The villain refuses to eat that baby, even when forced to. Even Evil Has Standards!
- Discussed: "Look, kid, I don't know what little kids you've been fighting in the sandbox, but this guy's serious. He's so crazy, he eats babies for their life-force...or something."
- Conversed: "Yeesh. This villain's so one-dimensional, I'm surprised they haven't made him eat babies."
- Implied: The Big Bad has his soldiers kidnap babies, but there's no sign of them afterwards, not even corpses.
- Deconstructed:
- We see the baby's family learning what happens and what they go through.
- Alternatively, the villain gets some kind of illness or becomes morally distraught after consuming the baby.
- Reconstructed: However, his dining habits further demoralize and terrify the general population, making the whole world-domination gig that much easier.
- Played For Laughs: A Black Comedy with actual dead babies.
- Played For Drama: Kidnapping a main character's baby, having them spend an entire story arc looking for said baby, and then eating the baby right in front of the parent.
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