Basic Trope: Villains exhibit a tactile or sensory enjoyment of being evil.
- Straight: The villain licks his lips when doing evil deeds, describing results as "delicious".
- Exaggerated: The villain bakes a pie made out of unbaptized babies and groans orgasmically when eating it.
- Downplayed: The villain is occasionally seen licking his lips when he's being particularly evil.
- Justified:
- The villain has a neural implant that releases narcotics whenever he does something suitably evil.
- Or he's just that screwed up in the head all on his own.
- Due to brain damage, he can taste sound. Cries for mercy taste like his favorite food.
- The evil of choice for the villain is cannibalism.
- Inverted:
- Done straight but with a hero doing good deeds.
- Evil actually tastes awful.
- Subverted:
- The villain describes the sensation of doing evil as like eating a delicious chocolate and pecan pie before revealing his hatred of pecans, chocolate and all pastry based desserts.
- The villain shows his evil by licking the maiden he has captured but then splutters it out because she tastes like sweat and bad perfume.
- The villain is addicted to the taste of power and dominance, rather than evil itself.
- Double Subverted: The villain describes the sensation of doing evil as eating a delicious chocolate and pecan pie... Which someone has just dropped a pile of dirt on top of. But the villain loves dirt!
- Parodied: The villain's uncontrollable lip licking gets out of hand and the villain starts to lick his own arms, the enemies face, the floor, sharp objects...
- Zig Zagged: The villain loves to lick his lips, but after a battle he's covered in blood and ends up spluttering on it. However he discovers he loves the taste of blood and has even more of it... But then the blood gives him AIDS! Instead of getting sad though, this fuels his fetish and he decides to force feed other people his own infected blood.
- Averted: "Delicious", "Feel the power", gluttony and lip licking? These simply just don't show up because we've got a very Machiavellian, Chessmaster type villain.
- Enforced: The network is offering you money if you fit a negative portrayal of drugs into your show. You make the villain's tongue fixation and gluttonous behavior into a drugs metaphor.
- Lampshaded: "Listen, Ghoulish Gourmand? If evil tastes like delicious food, why don't we just cut the middleman out and I buy you some cakes or cheeseburgers and we'll call it a day?" "...Make it a chocolate ice cream cake and we're golden."
- Invoked: The villain actually hates doing evil, feeling a deep visceral revulsion for his crimes. So he eats something delicious (or imagines he is) whenever he commits a crime in order to get over this.
- Exploited: The villain likes to lick his victims to enjoy the taste of his evil deeds, so The Hero covers himself in poison.
- Defied: The villain realizes the slippery slope this trope represents and actually sniffs something foul after doing evil.
- Discussed: "Dude always talks about murder like it's some kind of cake".
- Conversed: "It's a good thing being evil only tastes good, if it were actually food with calories there wouldn't be any skinny villains."
- Implied: The villain does something horrible and shudders with delight afterwards.
- Deconstructed: Villains with a focus on sensory comparisons are so focused on short term sensory gratification that they make ineffective long term planners with little constitution. They're always going on drug binges before battles and are afraid to stretch their supply lines lest they run out of sugar coated plums.
- Reconstructed: A short term foresight and a focus on immediate gratification is exactly what suits someone for a criminal lifestyle where they don't think of the consequences. Each villain of a rogue's gallery is based around fulfilling some particular short term desire.
- Played For Laughs: The local paladin has an encounter with a villain and becomes convinced that food is synonymous with evil. They try to save someone from evil by casting Greater Radiant Banishment on their guacamole dinner.
- Played For Drama: The villain injects the local food supplies with a virus to control them. His gratuitous references to food ensure that his victims think about it and get hungry.
Mmmm... This back button tastes good. I must destroy it!
