How to write better bad guys

Or whether the reason they don't eat it is in itself ethical, or whether they're deathly allergic, or have celiac disease, or...

AKA making people eat things they tell you they don't eat is top quality a**hole behaviour. If you fed me veal against my express wishes our friendship would be at an end. If you fed a friend of mine gluten against her express wishes her life would be at an end.

Someone might just tell you they don't like a foodstuff to avoid the whole "Gasp but I've never heard of a potato allergy before!" rubbish. Don't feed them what they've told you they don't eat.
 
So, while we're on the topic of good vs evil, how ethical is it to force people to eat something they don't want to?

Just so long as your clear that it's dislike and not allergy...

Personally, I avoid coffee unless I'm desperate and there is absolutely no other choice. I don't mind the taste of coffee, and we're currently enjoying a very fine home-made coffee ice-cream, but actually drinking coffee is borderline nauseating due to an accidental one-hit piece of aversion therapy when I was a kid. At least now it's only borderline nausea...
 
That depends on if you're trying to get someone to eat something they dislike, or if you're trying to convince a small child that fruit is not actually poison.

Well, I'm an atheist, so I eat children for breakfast. I really don't want to poison them first; what might it do to me!?

Or whether the reason they don't eat it is in itself ethical, or whether they're deathly allergic, or have celiac disease, or...

AKA making people eat things they tell you they don't eat is top quality a**hole behaviour. If you fed me veal against my express wishes our friendship would be at an end. If you fed a friend of mine gluten against her express wishes her life would be at an end.

Someone might just tell you they don't like a foodstuff to avoid the whole "Gasp but I've never heard of a potato allergy before!" rubbish. Don't feed them what they've told you they don't eat.

Fortunately, there really is no such thing as a lamb allergy. (The only thing that comes to mind is a vanishingly small chance of a meat allergy, which would suck, but means they wouldn't eat lasagna at all.) And if they're willing to drink cow's milk, they can handle goat milk, and then I tell them what it actually is. And several people I had drink goat's milk while being honest, especially if they'd had prior negative experience. The secret is chilling very fast, staying very clean, time frame of lactation, graze (wild onions, oh god!), and others.
 
So, while we're on the topic of good vs evil, how ethical is it to force people to eat something they don't want to? :D
Technically, it's not forcing, just tricking :devilish::whistle:. And I think it's absolutely despicable. But those tricks are also the reason I can now enjoy spinach, olives, and raisins. Like antagonists done well in literature, it is a morally-relativistic thing.

Or whether the reason they don't eat it is in itself ethical, or whether they're deathly allergic, or have celiac disease, or...
AKA making people eat things they tell you they don't eat is top quality a**hole behaviour. If you fed me veal against my express wishes our friendship would be at an end. If you fed a friend of mine gluten against her express wishes her life would be at an end.
Someone might just tell you they don't like a foodstuff to avoid the whole "Gasp but I've never heard of a potato allergy before!" rubbish. Don't feed them what they've told you they don't eat.
Obviously one checks that the dislike is not for health or cultural reasons, and only trying it with people you know well, where the relationship can overcome the small betrayal. Most of the times I find food dislikes are only people being set in their ways, or simply because they don't want to try new things, until they try them done "right". In the case of mothers, I think some just never outgrow the need to teach others to eat their meals and vegetables :D, and instead start misdirecting those motherly instincts unto random guests when the children aren't there to be fed.
 
And several people I had drink goat's milk while being honest, especially if they'd had prior negative experience. The secret is chilling very fast, staying very clean, time frame of lactation, graze (wild onions, oh god!), and others.

In Spain I've tried something they call calostro (goat colostrum, basically). It's goat milk in lumps, don't know if they ferment it or treat it in any way first, but the texture is like crumbly ricotta. I refused it several times (c'mon, the description alone can put you off your lunch), but I'm glad they finally wore me down, because it's delicious, sweet, smooth, and with a dry aftertaste. Reminded me a bit to rice pudding, actually. Is that a thing in other parts of the world, or do they only do it in Spain?
 
In Spain I've tried something they call calostro (goat colostrum, basically). It's goat milk in lumps, don't know if they ferment it or treat it in any way first, but the texture is like crumbly ricotta. I refused it several times (c'mon, the description alone can put you off your lunch), but I'm glad they finally wore me down, because it's delicious, sweet, smooth, and with a dry aftertaste. Reminded me a bit to rice pudding, actually. Is that a thing in other parts of the world, or do they only do it in Spain?

Was it a specific recipe? Calostro translates straight across as colostrum, according to translation.

Fresh colostrum can be very thick. It's the first quart to gallon of milk from the goat, after birth. Usually, it's best if the kid gets all of it, but usually the doe produces too much. If it was crumbly, it was probably heated - it's incredibly heat sensitive, I remember now. So you could get colostrum anywhere you can find goats. (Or any ruminant for that matter.) But I guess I was never that adventurous; I've never tried the stuff straight up. It's probably pretty good for you.
 
I've no idea if they prepared it in any way. Maybe they did heat it to pasteurise it? All I can tell you is I don't even like goat milk. But I did like that calostro very much. It's gross and wonderful at the same time. And yes, probably full of healthy vitamins, etc. The first milk is always loaded with extra calcium and such.
 
I've no idea if they prepared it in any way. Maybe they did heat it to pasteurise it? All I can tell you is I don't even like goat milk. But I did like that calostro very much. It's gross and wonderful at the same time. And yes, probably full of healthy vitamins, etc. The first milk is always loaded with extra calcium and such.

Yep... I drank my milk raw all the time, so I would have gone with raw colostrum. Pasteurized colostrum would yes, absolutely curdle. I had to be really careful when reheating it to feed to the babies.

And you should have tasted my goat milk... Only one other person had milk that tasted like mine; I learned from her. You have to get it right. I lot of people throw a goat in their backyard, milk the goat into a dirty coffee pot and toss it into the fridge. *sigh* You couldn't tell the difference between it and cows milk. It's just really sensitive. You can't get it from the store, either, because it tastes nasty. I don't know what they do to it. It's probably whatever they don't do to it.
 
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Moving away from recipes and back to bad guys, a lot of it is viewpoint. I'm thinking of Michael Moorcock here with his 'hero' Elric of Melnibone (sic). Elric dined while listening to slaves being tortured, they were surgically modified to scream a different pure scale note each and then chained into a choir of agony.

Elric was a weakling and, through his magic sword, drew strength by sucking souls until people died in terror, he was sometimes brought innocent captives to do this to.
Yet he was the hero fighting the evil forces of chaos and wept when friends died. When reading you were strongly drawn to his side.

Give villains a saving grace, much more reader friendly

Dexter?
 
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Obviously one checks that the dislike is not for health or cultural reasons, and only trying it with people you know well, where the relationship can overcome the small betrayal. Most of the times I find food dislikes are only people being set in their ways, or simply because they don't want to try new things, until they try them done "right". In the case of mothers, I think some just never outgrow the need to teach others to eat their meals and vegetables :D, and instead start misdirecting those motherly instincts unto random guests when the children aren't there to be fed.

Agreed entirely, but then what gives me the right to force my opinions into someone else's mouth? Ultimately if they're set in their ways that's their loss. It doesn't mean they should lose bodily autonomy :)
 
Agreed entirely, but then what gives me the right to force my opinions into someone else's mouth? Ultimately if they're set in their ways that's their loss. It doesn't mean they should lose bodily autonomy :)
Being tricked into eating a carrot is not a gross violation of human rights, but playful mischief among friends :D. It's a matter of scope and intention I guess, and I agree it might not be the most considerate thing to do, but where would that kind of interpretation on consideration towards others leave other pranks, off-color jokes, etc? Everything is a violation of some right, no matter how slight, and everything is an offence to somebody, somewhere. If you want to have a laugh, at some point you must draw the line. Granted, the line might move back or forward depending on the person.
In my personal experience, when people found out about the trick, they were usually surprised--not offended--had a laugh, and some even eventually ended up opening up to the "taboo" ingredient. I understand not everyone is up for that though, so one must pick his/her audience carefully.
 
@ DelActivisto - thanks :). I was just starting to peer at the periodic table and wonder is there any relationship between the villains and the elements that'd normally be in those spots and you've answered it. I'll go take another look.
 
@ DelActivisto - thanks :). I was just starting to peer at the periodic table and wonder is there any relationship between the villains and the elements that'd normally be in those spots and you've answered it. I'll go take another look.

Haha, yep. I'm not saying that's how they did it, as many of them I don't recognize. (Not quite as well read as I would give myself credit for!)
 
I've taken a bit of a look at it. Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a villain? Meddlesome arrogant pain in the arse, yes, but not what I'd call a villain.
Not read Sense and Sensibility in a while so can't even remember which Dashwood that is.
 
I've never read most of the ones on the periodic table, have heard of some.
Have also just woken up to I need to look at the 7 circles of hell and what it all means before I try and understand the table again. I was looking at it a bit chemist-ish and thinking hhm, a lot of Shakepearean villians in the transuranics.....
Interesting that the majority of the Shakespearean villains are coloured for treachery - also the vast majority of the entries for treachery are 17th century or earlier. Hard to tell if it is what Norton chose or whether that kind of treachery isn't used much in fiction today.
 
Being tricked into eating a carrot is not a gross violation of human rights, but playful mischief among friends :D. It's a matter of scope and intention I guess, and I agree it might not be the most considerate thing to do, but where would that kind of interpretation on consideration towards others leave other pranks, off-color jokes, etc? Everything is a violation of some right, no matter how slight, and everything is an offence to somebody, somewhere. If you want to have a laugh, at some point you must draw the line. Granted, the line might move back or forward depending on the person.
In my personal experience, when people found out about the trick, they were usually surprised--not offended--had a laugh, and some even eventually ended up opening up to the "taboo" ingredient. I understand not everyone is up for that though, so one must pick his/her audience carefully.

Choosing the audience is 90% of most good performances :D It's also where a lot of non-professional jokesters fall flat: not grasping the difference between an audience who have paid to see Jimmy Carr versus your sainted grandma and her tea-and-scone friends.

I think also we're talking at cross-purposes, since the original question wasn't in the context of friendship, but an overall question about whether or not it's ok to feed people things they've expressed no intention of eating, which runs the gamut of friends to guests to total strangers at your hot dog stand.

I do seem to know a bunch of people who are deathly allergic to the weirdest stuff, though. I had lunch at a pub with a friend whose allergy is, as it happens, carrots, so she made it very clear to the waitress when she ordered that she couldn't have the carrots could she please have this dish with the carrots removed (side of carrots, not cooked into the main meal) due to her allergy and the waitress made it equally clear that she understood.

The meal arrived with carrots, delivered by the same waitress who had seemed to grasp the nature of the problem, only to forget about it ten minutes later. No real problem, my friend pointed out said deathly carrot allergy, and this is where the issue arose: The waitress was extremely apologetic, and offered to go scrape the carrots off the plate.

Except the carrots had already touched other items on the plate, and my friend really is that allergic.

Again, no problem. They kindly apologised and re-prepared the entire meal from scratch, this time without carrots. It cost us an extra 10-15 minutes, but on the plus side said friend is still alive. But she goes through some variation of this at least 50% of the time she eats out because nobody really believes that anyone can have a fatal carrot allergy (for bonus points, her husband is equally allergic... but to mushrooms).

So in the instance of, say, my mum stuffing onions into a meal when I've brought a friend to dinner who has said they can't or won't eat onions (one of the earlier examples) we're looking at a gross violation of human rights, and perhaps even illness or death caused by someone's belief that they have more right over what someone puts in their mouth than they do.

In the instance of you chucking some carrots into your best mate's mouth when you know 100% that while he hates carrots they aren't going to kill him? That's regular Britishness, that is :D I mean, over here, c**t is a term of endearment between best friends.

There's a great Jimmy Carr joke from the end of one of his gigs I was at. It is horrifically offensive (but hella funny). He deconstructed it, explained exactly why it worked at that moment in the show and would have fallen flat earlier on or - for example - in front of your mum over Sunday roast. The humour of it was, in part, due to the idea that someone might think it appropriate to whip that joke out in public in front of a cold audience.
 

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