User blog:Mattia Garavini/Pure Evil proposal: Baron Harkonnen

This one is a spicy PE proposal becuase it's the big bad of the first Dune book, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The PE proposals must flow.

What's the work?
Dune is the first book in a famous series of Science Fiction novels, written by Frank Herbert, it was rejected twenty times by various publishers before finally being published in 1965 by Chilton, a publishing house best known for its DIY auto repair guides. Dune is a Hugo Award, Nebula Award and Seiun Award winner.

The novel is set approximately 13,000 years into The Future, in the year 10,191 AG, or After Guild in a galaxy-spanning empire loosely based on the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires, ruled by feuding nobles, arcane religious sects, and corporate monopolies.

Much of the action throughout the series takes place on the eponymous planet, Arrakis, commonly called Dune by the native Fremen. Arrakis is a desert planet largely populated by the nomadic, xenophobic Fremen and inhabited by giant sandworms that destroy anything caught out in the open, and would be of little interest to the rest of the galaxy if not for one thing: it is the only known source of "Spice" (its "official" name is melange), an all-purpose chemical that triples the human lifespan, makes it possible for females (and some few males) to transfer ancestral memories to one another, unlocks or enhances the capacity of humans for telling the future, and therefore makes Faster-Than-Light Travel possible in a culture where computers have been made illegal by religious fundamentalism while being ferociously addictive.

Who is he and what he has done?
Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is the main villain of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune. The morbidly obese and maniacal leader of House Harkonnen, he rules from his cyberpunk industrial homeworld of Giedi Prime, exercising a tyrannical rule of exploitation and sadism over the lives of the slaves unfortunate enough to end up in the service of his House. A long-standing rival of House Atreides (the good guys, sort of), the Baron is determined to bring about their end, with particular emphasis on seeing Duke Leto Atreides' humiliating defeat.

Baron Harkonnen is a monstrous figure whose only concern is his own advancement and the glory of House Harkonnen. Initially lower than the Noble Atreides household, Harkonnen engineers its downfall, leading Duke Leto to a failed suicidal attempt to try to kill the Baron. When his wife and children flee to the desert world of Arrakis AKA Dune, Harkonnen assists in trying to crush the resistance in an essential genocide of the Fremen people. Revealing his two nephews, brutish Rabban and intelligent, reserved Feyd-Rautha, Harkonnen plans to assign Rabban to brutalize the Fremen and then later have him eliminated by Feyd to cultivate the Fremen's goodwill with him. When Feyd tries to assassinate the Baron, the Baron, in amusement, forces him to kill every woman in the pleasure quarter, chiding him "there will always be more women, Feyd." At one point, a character comments Feyd might have become a great hero, if only someone who wasn’t such a monster had raised him. One of his hobbies is sexually abusing and killing pretty slave boys, and the Dune Encyclopedia, though not canonical, hints that his attractions may extend to Feyd-Rautha. There are hints of it in the David Lynch film as well. He certainly had designs on Paul, but gave them up when he realized how lethally dangerous the boy was.

Heinous standards
He is easily the most depraved and disgusting character of the early parts of the Dune series. A sociopathic pervert and mass murdering fatass obsessed with his own advancement in the imperial foodchain, he's devoid of any moral compass and values no life, including his nephews and his loyal mentat who are just tools to him.

Final verdict
Easy keep.