User blog:AustinDR/PE Proposal: Cecil Creepler

What is the work?
Moral Orel. The series revolves around the young Orel Puppington, an optimistic young boy living in the town of Moralton. Season 1 had Orel misunderstand his reverend's sermons to comedic effect. However, season 2 started to hint at a more darker underbelly with Clay shooting Orel in his leg and not going to get it fixed, but season 3 is where the series dropped any pretense of being a comedy and became more dramatic. It is possibly one of the darkest pieces of western animation out there.

Who is he? What has he done?
The candidate is a 30-year-old man named Cecil Creepler. Obviously because of the name, Creepler was the town's soft-spoken ice cream man. Starting off as a minor character, Creepler became the primary focus of the Season 2 episode Courtship. In it, he tried to lure Orel's best friend Doughy into the back of his ice cream truck and later decides to shower Doughy in gifts in an attempt to win him over. This was made still around the time that the series was slightly comedic, so it could also be written off as being PlayedForLaughs. But then, Creepler became worse as the show entered its darkest season.

Arguably the darkest episode of Moral Orel was an episode simply known as Alone. In it, you follow three women; Nurse Bendy, Miss Agnes Sculptham; and Miss Censordoll and their daily lives at their apartment. Creepler is a prominent figure in this episode. If being a pedophile wasn't bad enough on its own, Creepler was also revealed to be a SerialRapist who disliked blondes and targeted and raped brunettes. As a means of securing him, Miss Sculptham offers to dye her hair black and leave her apartment door unlocked. Through a flashback, Creepler slinks into her room through the window and rapes her. Besides her, Creepler had also raped 7 other women, and 3 of them are shown for the front page news. Creepler however is successfully captured and sentenced to prison.

But that's not the end. The effect that he had on Miss Sculptham's life was an understatement. She was raped and impregnated by Creepler...but she fell in love with him. To the point that when she heard that he had died in his cell, she has a psychological breakdown. She even is implicated to have...terminated the pregnancy due to her disgust towards the word "abortion" and the presence of a bloodied clothes hanger.

Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
For that, I'd say that's a nein. Had the series had continued, a later episode of Season 3 expands on Creepler's assault by having an inmate and fellow rapist who had known him claim that Creepler deeply wanted a legacy to exist hence his obsession with procreation. Upon hearing that Miss Sculptham had an abortion, he committed suicide. However, as the episode was never produced, this can at best be taken as non-canon. Even then, this only sounds like Creepler only was interested in having a legacy rather than caring for the child itself.

On Doughy, it was clear that he was only interested in him because of his lust. Come Season 3, and he no longer displayed any interest towards him. Miss Sculptham, he was only interested in her because she fit the modus operandi. Sculptham "loved" him and genuinely was mournful of his death, but...that is purely and simply Stockholm Syndrome at its very worst.

Heinous standard
With Moral Orel, several characters fall short due to insufficient heinousness. Clay is a no brainer as he doesn't breach the baseline of the series and he had a backstory that was understandable, but he was still a jackass. Miss Censordoll sought to control Moralton through Clay, but she also isn't heinous enough and her childhood was also fucked up. Here is where I would have to mention the CerebusSyndrome. Season 3 removed the comedy and the show became much more darker as the hypocrisy of the people of Moralton took the central stage. But doing so also caused a considerable amount of EarlyInstallmentWeirdness. The show for instance once had magic in one episode and had the show continued, Censordoll would've also been shown to perform voodoo. One episode in particular had Orel -- who had misinterpreted one of Reverend Putty's sermons again -- impregnate several prostitutes due to his assumption that he had to "share" that gift. There is a brief reference to this in the episode Alone, but otherwise, the previous episodes of the earlier seasons are ignored.

Creepler I feel does enough to stand out. He is a confirmed serial rapist who had assaulted and raped 8 women, and caused deep psychological damage in one. And he has absolutely no resources to work with.

Conclusion
He had been on my mind a lot lately since I began looking back at the series, and I noticed that he wasn't mentioned in earlier discussions for the show. He is probably one of the most disturbing antagonists I have seen in probably western animation as a whole, and his crimes are treated with uber gravitas.