Who, or what, is your favorite villain?

Cafe Society
121

Wow, hostile much @MrDibble? But fine, I would say as a fey he’s bound by his contracts, and she, willingly and with zero manipulation on his part, entered into a contract with him. In stories about the feyfolk, they almost rarely initiate anything, but do favors with strict rules based on contracts or debts they feel they owe. Not by any means all, as the fey are a huge term with different legendariums, but it’s reasonably consistent for most of the derivations found in the West.

And that’s leaving out of he exists at all, or is just a metaphor for the FL’s reluctance to let go of childhood and embrace an adult sensibility.

As for your quoting Pratchett at me, I quoted the exact same sequence when talking about the Fey and Peter Pan in a PRIOR thread about Heroes that should be considered villains. And I agree that Peter and Jareth are antagonists, and should NOT be considered heroes. Just that while Peter cajoles, entraps, and manipulates his victims, Jareth is largely playing it straight by the standards of the old stories - he sets challenges and makes them harder, but it is the arrogance/hubris of those who try to deal with the fey that often leads to their downfall.

Which leads me to -

Of course, for many fey, it is a matter of evil intent, but in just as many stories, the human has a good thing going for them from the fey gifts, they become arrogant, and abuse it, and loose the gift and all the gains of said gift, leaving them ruined. In that sense, it shares the mythos of the Greek mythos, which is why I used hubris in the earlier section. If you want to call it villainy, feel free, the OP explicitly said that’s up to us, which is why I mentioned my nitpick with MrDibble was unfair in the post quoted.

122

Oh yes. But for this? Not really, no. Unless you consider pointing out the real villainy there to be hostility.

The kidnapping part is arguably contractual. The wanting to get down with the 16-yo girl part?

Of course, it is just art imitating life.

He cheats, too.

What about all the goblins who, by implication, used to be human babies?

123

Okay, I want to take this down a notch, because I fully understand from past threads how the issue is deeply personal for you. One, for the third time, I express that in the context of this thread, you have the right to consider how severe the villain is.

So, I’m going to try to moderate my, at best, half-hearted defense of the Goblin King. The kidnappings is, as you granted, possibly contractual. At which point, everything after that is a NEW contract as the GK had zero obligation to return the child at ALL. Basically, our FL charges into the Fey realm to create a new bargain to get the child back, at which point she’s subject to additional challenges, during which (see the Hubris) she keeps saying it’s effortless, and the King, responding to it, increases the difficulty - it is the challenge she then accepts, if grudgingly. As for cheating… in both historical and modern stories, both sides cheat, and it’s normally the mortals that suffer, if not always immediately.

About the whole 16 year old being skeeved on by an immortal being, yes, doesn’t feel good. I’m not sure in the context of the story (please add as much extra emphasis to this as possible) that Jareth is indeed that passionate about her or is instead playing the role (see all the times they refer to the play that is the source of the reality/dream that is the movie) that the FL expects of him.

As for the last point, “what about all the goblins, who, by implication, used to be human babies” - I was specifically speaking to the context of the historical fey stories, but sure, let’s go with them. If we assume that they’re other children that were given up / abandoned by their rightful caregivers, as is the infant of this story, they may well have been better off as goblins rather than starved, sold into slavery, indentured servitude or exposed as may have happened historically.

Do I -endorse- those fates, or a lifetime of feudal servitude to the goblin king? Hell NO - but I won’t say that it didn’t happen during the times in which the majority of fey stories take place. The constant tales of changelings in the myths always leave a bad taste in my mouth, where a human child is abducted and replaced with a fey is unabashedly villainous, without even the figleaf of informed consent that I have mentioned otherwhere.

But from the POV of the story, and history/myth, if not morality, the caregivers who abandoned their children to the Goblin King were benefiting from the loss, and, sadly, the were a commodity, not participants in the deal. So yeah, as you say, they got screwed. As did every child sold, abandoned, neglected unto death, or starved by circumstances both historically and currently by neglectful, disadvantaged, or out and out hateful parents.

124

You don’t remember all the goblins hiding inside the walls, urging her to say the words? Words which Jareth just might have taught her. She might have entered willingly into the contract (for a fey definition of “willingly”), but it was not without manipulation.

125

The story is very clearly set in modern times, so those goblins are going to have been other modern kids.

And the villainy of their caregivers in giving them up is immaterial to the villainy of the one who takes them.

126

Eh, probably not. I’d expect they come from a wide range of times - being turned into a goblin probably means giving up your mortality, so there’d be goblins who got kidnapped hundreds of years ago.

127

One last effort, and then I’ll drop the hijack.

There is zero evidence she is hearing them. Or that they’re affecting her. More the opposite, as the words of the script (The Labyrinth, natch) she was reading prior to the supernatural events of the movie play into what happens later. So yeah, not seeing it.

An assumption not proven. We have no idea how long the goblins have been there, and if fey, if they are mortal at all. I can with equal (if not better evidence) say that all those goblins have been present for centuries. For that matter, while the movie suggests that Toby may become a goblin if kept, it doesn’t explicitly state that the others are former humans. The various books about the Goblins by Froud don’t indicate that they ever were human. And the secondary works, which I won’t strongly argue are canonical however, explicitly state that nope, they were found a thousand years ago by Jareth after their civilization collapsed and he assumed rulership of them, more or less enslaving them (much to his own later regret and ennui).

128

So, as to constructively get back to the thread topic, I also wanted to suggest Milton’s Satan.

A well spoken (as it were), charming, charismatic and unapologetic villain who even from the literal depths of hell claims his victory, and if measured by the strength of his enemy, one of the greatest of all time. Generations of writers and poets root for him, or interpret him in the more possible generous light.

I mean, damn, but that says things about what a great villain he is.

129

Along the same line, Applegate (the devil himself) is a quite likeable villain in the movie Damn Yankees, which was based on the book titled The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.

130

Khan!!!

131

-chuckles-

I knew when I mentioned Milton’s Satan, someone would mention Khan. Although I like him far more in Space Seed (for all the same reasons I like Milton) than in Star Trek The Wrath of Khan.

132

The Vampire Lestat

The Terminator

The Joker

133

Sure, some - but are you saying Jareth just gave up the kidnapping for the intervening period?

This of course skips over the other weakness in ParallelLines’ argument - that past kidnapping victims were better off as goblins - as though there weren’t plenty of children not starved, enslaved or murdered historically.

Don’t need to be “proven” - this is my view on it, and why I consider Jareth a villain. He’s clearly continuing the same storied behaviour into modern times. Thinking Toby is some aberrant modern exception is the special pleading, in this case.

Do you see any other human changelings?

Look, you can’t have it both ways - you can’t argue for fey traditions as an excuse for Jareth, and then make appeal to the decidedly non-traditional lore Froud wrote after the fact. If it’s a traditional narrative, then Toby would not be the first kidnapped child.

134

Duke Igthorn from The Gummi Bears.

135

“…Before your little brother becomes one of us forever!” doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be turned into a goblin. It could mean he’d be kept as part of the collection as a human slave.

136

This reminds of my more favorite cartoon villains:

Gargamel from The Smurfs

Cobra Commander from GI Joe: A Real American Hero

Skeletor from He-Man and The Masters of The Universe

Megatron from The Transformers

137

" “Say your right words,” the goblins said, “and we’ll take the baby to the Goblin City. And you will be free.” But the girl knew that the king would keep the baby in his castle for ever and ever and ever, and turn it into a goblin."

138

That does seems kind of likely. Not that he “gave up on it,” so much as he stopped being offered the opportunity. He takes Toby because Sarah specifically asks him to. There isn’t any evidence that he takes children under other circumstances, and Sarah obviously doesn’t expect her request to work - she thinks the Goblin King is just a character in the book she’s reading.

If the Goblin King can only take children when specifically invited, and nobody remembers that the Goblin King is a real entity, I can pretty easily see it being a century or more since he last took a kid, simply because people stopped offering them to him.

Sure, but are the kids who are loved and taken care of getting offered up to the Goblin King? I’d assume, generally, no - it’s people who have kids they don’t want who are giving them away to Faerie.

139

By their jealous siblings?

That’s not generally the way changelings work in other stories. They aren’t willingly given.
In this one, it’s not the parents’ opinion that matters Kid could be the apple of their eye and they’d still be taken, apparently.

That wasn’t a dusty hundred-year old book she’d just found, that she was reading, so one assumes the belief/story has persisted in some form. Which offers plenty of opportunities for kids to be wished away by their siblings or other young relatives (I think only kids would buy into it - kind of like other childlore stuff)

140

In this story, the goblins clearly need permission of some sort to take Toby, as there’s those reaction shots of goblins waiting for her to say, “I wish…” and being frustrated when she keeps not quite saying it. I am curious how Sarah had the authority to give up Toby, since Toby wasn’t her kid. It’d be great if, as her parents were leaving, they said something like, “You’re in charge of Toby now,” and that was what gave her “legal” authority to give him away. Maybe the fact that she’s been forced into a parental role by her dad and stepmom is what gives her the authority? At any rate, it’s clear they can’t just waltz in and take the kid without the “wish” part, and I assume they can’t just take any kid just because someone, somewhere, wants the kid gone, otherwise there’d be an ongoing epidemic of infants disappearing from airplanes. There are definitely some rules in play about this, even if they aren’t made explicit to the audience.

The book she’s reading from at the beginning does appear to be old, though. Just going off the cover design, that looks Victorian to me? I’m certainly not an expert, but it doesn’t look like something you could find on the shelf at B.Daltons. (I recognize that, in the still, the book looks physically new, but I think that’s because it’s a prop recently made for the movie, not because the book in-universe is supposed to be new.) Where she got the book is never even slightly explained, except it appears that she’s preparing for a school play. Did the teacher who assigned it know what the book represented, or was it just an old (and, even better, out of copyright) play that they’d found and thought it would be a good, cheap production for the high school drama club?