Eats Babies/Playing With

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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.
  • 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.
  • Inverted:
  • 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.
  • Double Subverted: And then someone else eats the baby.
  • Parodied: An EVIL cooking show features delicious baby recipes.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Played For Laughs: A Dead Baby Comedy with actual dead babies.
  • Played For Drama: Kidnapping a main character's baby, having him/her spend an entire story arc looking for said baby, and then eating the baby right in front of the parent.

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