This page will cover a wick check for the trope ____.
Progress: /XX.
Why?:
Comments in bold.
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The Problem:
Potential solutions:
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MB Template
What's the setting?
Who is (character name), and what have they done?
Why are they magnificent?
Why are they a bastard?
Conclusion
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CM Template
What's the setting?
Who is (character name), and what have they done?
Do they have any redeeming features?
How do they compare to the work's other villains?
Conclusion
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Potential "Artistic Licence: Sex" index
- Adam and Eve Plot: A man and a woman must rebuild the population of a world, taking no account of genetic stumbling blocks.
- All Gays are Promiscuous: Gay men always have lots of sex.
- A Man Is Always Eager: Males are perpetually horny and are always ready and willing to have sex.
- Anatomically Impossible Sex: Sex is depicted in a manner that isn't physically enjoyable or even possible.
- Bigger Is Better in Bed: Men with larger "equipment" are depicted as more satisfying lovers.
- Bondage Is Bad: BDSM is portrayed as immoral and/or enjoyed by villains.
- Conveniently Common Kink: Characters share often-obscure fetishes or fantasies.
- Crazy in the Head, Crazy in the Bed: Mentally unstable people are wild and passionate lovers.
- Eternal Sexual Freedom: Applying present-day sexual mores to Historical Fiction.
- Everybody Has Lots of Sex: People get laid in fiction more commonly than in Real Life.
- Fetishes Are Weird: Having a sexual fetish makes a character creepy.
- Flexibility Equals Sex Ability: A character who is "bendy" is a freak in the sheets.
- Got Over Rape Instantly: Being raped or sexually assaulted doesn't affect a character's sexual appetite.
- Idealized Sex: Fictional depictions of sex tend to leave out the less erotic bits.
- IKEA Erotica: Sex described and/or depicted in a dull, mechanical manner.
- I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: Men are completely unable to control their sexual urges.
- Instant Seduction: A character is able to seduce others with minimal time and effort.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: The more a couple want to conceive, the less likely it is to happen, and vice versa.
- Lie Back and Think of England: Women dislike having sex and only do so reluctantly and out of obligation.
- Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Being bad at sex is a character flaw.
- Madonna-Whore Complex: Women are either honourable and chaste or promiscuous and depraved.
- Male-to-Female Universal Adaptor: Aliens' genitals always allow them to have sex with humans.
- Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Only those who are sexually frustrated or repressed masturbate.
- Mills and Boon Prose: Sex is described with Unusual Euphemisms for the physical acts and flowery language for the emotional bits, common in Romance Novels.
- No Pregger Sex: Pregnant women are never shown having or wanting sex.
- A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: Wild parties inevitably devolve into sexual debauchery.
- The Pornomancer: A character who always "gets lucky", often in spectacular ways, and whether they are trying or not.
- Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Delivery workers, plumbers and the like are willing to spontaneously have sex with their customers.
- Sex Equals Love: Romantic feelings will inevitably arise from any sexual relationship.
- Right Through His Pants: Characters have sex with an impractical amount of clothes on.
- Roll in the Hay: Sex in a pile of hay — that somehow isn't scratchy or unhygienic.
Terror Weapon
R.J.L. JR. CM draft proposal
What's the setting?
Cyberpunk: Fatherhood is a crossover between Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077 that builds off of the simple premise that V, specifically his Corporate Samurai incarnation, is David Martinez's father. As such, when Gloria is critically injured in the car crash that kicked off the events of Edgerunners, David finds a number in her Agent for "Vinny" marked "emergencies only". This causes V to realise, for the first time, that he has a son, and the early chapters follow a Fix Fic plot line where V's corporate resources protect David, Gloria and the rest of Maine's Edgerunner crew from the tragedies that befell them in canon. But dipping a toe into the toxic morass that is the domain of the corpo-rats will always have its consequences: and beyond V having an entire graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, it would be an understatement to say that he has some family issues of his own. Enter our candidate.Who is Robert John Linder, Jr., and what has he done?
- Robert John Linder Junior, otherwise known as V's father, is an incredibly powerful Arasaka executive and commander of the corporation's "private security" forces, who serves as the fanfic's Big Bad and Knight of Cerebus, with his introduction massively increasing the stakes for all characters. The bastard son of legendary Rockerboy-slash-terrorist Johnny Silverhandnote and a member of his Groupie Brigade, Robert resented his absentee father and sought to become the polar opposite of him in every way — developing a twisted obsession with order and control to equal if not exceed exceed Silverhand's destructive commitment to freedom from corporate rule.
- Fuelled by spite, Robert began to climb the quite literally cutthroat Arasaka corporate ladder, and along the way he seemingly developed a fixation with forming his own perfect family — one that would never, ever do anything wrong. After marrying the interior designer Eleanor, he would forcibly implant her with a Doll chip that overrides her personality with that of a simpering submissive at his command, leaving her true personality conscious and aware of everything that's happening to her body. And when she tries to escape her torment, she discovers that he's registered her to a "Black Level" Trauma Team Plan, which has involved the implantation of cyberware that won't let her die.
- He would later father a son, Vincent, who he would submit to an utterly torturous upbringing while grooming him to be his successor, which involved implanting a Doll chip in him, too. When V, already taking after his granddad and becoming a Rockerboy while trying to defy his father in any way possible, meets and falls in love with Gloria, Robert is furious as this denies him an opportunity to entrench his position in the Arasaka hierarchy via Altar Diplomacy. He attempts to bribe Gloria to stop dating his son — when that fails, he gets her parents fired from their jobs as retribution, and when that fails and she falls pregnant with his grandson David, he hires a mercenary to force her into a back-alley abortion at gunpoint. She survived only due to luck, being able to push the goon off an overpass to his death, prompting her to go into hiding and a heartbroken V to join Arasaka.
- At some point after an adult V attempted to cut off as much contact with his parents as possible, Robert also fathered Valerie, with whom he took an extremely different direction — no Doll chip, but she's been trained, brainwashed and controlled from birth to act as his personal assassin and spy: forged into a tool to the extent that he thinks nothing of ordering her to pose as a Joytoy in order to try and pry information out of Pilar.
- He is reintroduced to the narrative as having become aware of his grandson's existence (due to V's sudden burst of erratic behaviour) while working in Tokyo. He dispatches mercenaries to monitor David and Gloria, while also informing Eleanor, currently trapped in a Gilded Cage of an apartment back in Night City, that he plans to return. Her confinement is due to her cheating on Robert at some point, as punishment for which he killed her lover while she was Forced to Watch.
- His second major appearance involves him upstaging Faraday, the crooked fixer and Big Bad of Edgerunners, by subjecting him to an utterly horrifying fate: he is brutally tortured at Robert's instruction, and then his own hand, which he bluntly admits his enjoyment of, then sent to the Ax-Crazy Maelstrom gang to be loaded up with as much cyberware as possible, all done while he was fully conscious, leaving behind an utterly broken Empty Shell that's hardly even human. And then Robert puppeteers the body to viciously slaughter Royce, a Malestrom higher-up who's causing problems for the current leader Brick, and his minions, complete with creepy sexual overtones. To make things even worse, it's very strongly implied it's not the only time he's inflicted this exact fate on a horribly unlucky enemy.
- Robert finally makes his move by confronting V and inviting him to dinner, at the end of which he has Valerie Taser her brother and allow Robert to activate his Doll chip. The puppeteered V is then subjected to a full swap-out of his chrome while under sedation only, allowing the 'real' V trapped inside to experience his body being torn apart and rebuilt. And just to play up the Psychological Horror even further, Robert directs that minor cosmetic changes should be made to V's face to make it resemble his, letting his son know he can completely destroy anything that makes him unique at his whim. V eventually manages to break his control due to a clever Dead Man's Switch, but the experience left him an utterly hopeless and despondent wreck both physically and literally.
Does he have any redeeming features?
He's got a Freudian Excuse of having a father who never even acknowledged his existence, but this can be very easily dispensed with — many people are brought up by single parents, and surprisingly enough the vast majority of them do not become power-hungry, cold-blooded corporate despots. While he has incredibly twisted "family values", and there is perhaps some element of protectiveness he has for his descendants, given that he punishes Faraday for insulting his son, it's difficult to see his treatment of his family as anything other than comparable to literal "Dolls" — mannequins to be exploited for his amusement, or pawns to strengthen his power and serve his interests. There is no genuine love displayed towards anyone by this man.How bad are they, compared to the work's other villains?
Robert is the Big Bad, so there isn't that much in the way of serious competition. Faraday the Starter Villain doesn't manage to kill anyone, so there's no contest there. He does later team up with Kurt Hansen from the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty storyline . In fact, his closest completion is V himself who released a Hate Plague on civilian populations during his time in Neo-Oxacata, but V does genuinely care for his family and has an awful lot of emotional baggage stemming from that incident.Conclusion
He's a sicko who Mind Raped his entire family, seems to have serious nonconsensual surgery and torture fetishes, and kills anyone who gets in his way horribly. I'd say he counts.Imperium Ascendant description:
It is the 29th millennium. Dawn is finally breaking on the savagery and strife of Old Night, as the feuding techno-barbarian states of Terra are brought to heel by the nascent Imperium of Man.The being known as Revelation, The Emperor, or any one of a dozen other names prepares to put his grand schemes into motion, setting the stage for a galactic conquest that will, hopefully, return to mankind its long-lost glory.
And in a secret gene-lab beneath the surface of Luna, twenty infant Primarchs — impossible beings far, far beyond human — sleep peacefully, unaware that the foul forces of Chaos are to scatter them across the galaxy, sowing the seeds for a saga of resentment, betrayal and heresy that will tear the galaxy asunder.
Lowbeer MB draft:I have another possible candidate — I've been going back and forth about her for a while due to certain characteristics that made me concerned she might not count, but I've come to the conclusion there might be enough here to give it a whirl.
What's the setting?
The (ongoing) Jackpot Trilogy consists of two science-fiction novels by William Gibson. By the 22nd century, a cavalcade of natural and man-made disasters known as "the jackpot" has wiped out 80% of the human population, with nanotechnology and other super-science developed just in time to prevent a total apocalypse. What's left of society is ruled over by "the klept", an oligarchy of Corrupt Corporate Executives who were rich enough to weather the Jackpot. With nearly unlimited wealth, lots of spare time, and access to super-advanced technology, members of the klept and their cronies often take up bizarre and elaborate hobbies to amuse themselves. One of which is Time Travel, or specifically use of a mysterious server which allows digital signals to be sent to and from the past. When contact is made, a new timeline known as a "stub" is created, which can be interfered with without affecting the present. People who engage in this practice call themselves "continua enthusiasts". The two books in the series, The Peripheral and Agency (2020), both deal with what happens when the future takes an interest in someone from a "stub" and consequently their timeline, with our candidate playing an important role in both books.Who is Ainsley Lowbeer, and what has she done?
- "Detective Inspector" Ainsley Lowbeer was a high-ranking and influential spook in the British Government around the time that the devastation of the jackpot first started to take a toll on human civilisation, then identifying as a man known only as "Griff". Determined to do whatever it takes to preserve some semblance of stability and order in London amidst the apocalypse, Lowbeer would prove instrumental in ensuring the rise to power of the nascent klept, comprised mostly of The Mafiya, who were more accustomed to operating amidst the breakdown of law and order. But once the dust settled, Lowbeer, being a Machiavellian schemer extraordinaire, was determined to carve out a significant role for herself in this new society. She managed to persuade the klept to accept her as their "Adjudicator", the only law-enforcement authority with jurisdiction over the oligarchs, on the basis that a ruling class consisting entirely of Diabolical Masterminds would inevitably rip itself apart without some form of regulation to keep its most destructive impulses in check. The klept, being savvy enough to begrudgingly accept this, allowed Lowbeer to amass an extraordinary array of powers using the wonders of 22nd-century technology, including self-aware surveillance systems that make the Thought Police look like bratty kids with tin cans and twine, fleets of lethal microscopic Attack Drones, immortality, and control over assemblers that functionally turn her into a Reality Warper. Thus, Lowbeer granted herself Vetinari Job Security: since plotting to usurp her is itself a crime worthy of having your hotel suite reformatted into a broom closet with you still inside, she can only be deposed if the klept collectively decides they've had enough. And since plotting against her is incredibly dangerous, while leaving her alone allows one to continue basking in post-scarcity luxury, Lowbeer's position as the godlike shadow ruler of London was secure.
- Lowbeer first appears in The Peripheral when the main "future" cast of characters finally accept they'll have to contact the police given that Flynne Fisher, a woman living in a stub Just Before the End, witnessed a murder while piloting a drone in the future. Lowbeer is introduced as a simple Metropolitan Police detective, and, in a stark inversion of Police Are Useless, proceeds to assume total control while running rings round the other characters to get what she wants — namely, securing access to the "stub" and setting up a elaborate Benevolent Conspiracy in the past to protect Flynne from the powers wanting her silenced, then using her, controlling a "peripheral" in the future as bait to draw out the perpetrators and execute them. However, it also becomes apparent that Lowbeer regrets the role she played in establishing a kleptocracy, and as some way to make amends, extends the Benevolent Conspiracy massively to avert the jackpot in the alternate timeline using Flynne and her family as a proxy, after subjecting them to a Secret Test of Character to ensure they are good people.
