All posts by KingSparta300

Time for a new proposal, this time, one of my favorite animated villains.

Scarface. villains.fandom.com/wiki/Scarface_(The_Animals_of_Farthing_Wood)

Scarface is a blue fox in White Deer Park, the second most powerful animal after the Great White Stag. But when Fox and the Farthing Wood animals arrive, Scarface takes an instant dislike to them, mainly Fox. After he is forced to give up some land to the Farthing Wood animals, he gets real pissed about it, going out of his way to try and make sure the animals die. This leads to him attacking and killing Mrs. Vole while on Farthing Wood land, breaking the rules set by the White Stag and almost leading to Fox taking the fall for it until Weasel rats him out.

Then Scarface, after learning Weasel saw him kill Mrs. Vole but not learning she told the others, bites her arm savagely and forces her to become his spy. When poachers begin preying on the White Deer, Scarface uses this as an opportunity to try and get Fox, who is working to drive out the poachers, killed for the sake of 'revenge.' What is Scarface taking revenge for? Why, his the death of his kids.

Specifically, the part where Fox and Vixen took the chickens they had nicked from a farmer who shot them. How dare they steal his food! That was his, not theirs! Sure, his kids are dead, but that's besides the point!

This attempt ends up failing and things are somewhat peaceful... until Fox and Vixen have cubs, which Scarface hates because he thinks they are better than his own. He says as much to his mate Lady Blue, while also stating his cubs have her "lily livered blood!" To get even, he murders Fox's daughter, Dreamer, leaving her body for her parents to find. Then he also kills Mrs. Hare in front of her family, just to be a spiteful bastard.

Fox cannot do anything because no one can prove Scarface did anything, sneaky bastard, so he tasks Adder with killing Scarface. Unfortunately, Adder kills the wrong fox, one of Scarface's sons, and for her troubles, Scarface bites off part of her tail, establishing a deep and mutual hatred for each other.

Scarface eventually leaves and after learning his mate Lady Blue was wounded in a savage fight with Vixen, uses that as an excuse to try and wipe out the Farthing Wood animals. This culminated in a fight between himself and Fox, with Fox trying to make Scarface vow to leave the Farthing Wood animals be if Fox wins... Scarface response with an evil chuckle.

After he is defeated, Fox spares his life as the other blue foxes won't follow him after such a humiliation, so Scarface slinks away to lick his wounds... and then kills Mrs. Rabbit, showing that he will never stop in his quest to destroy the Farthing Wood animals.

But Adder finally takes her revenge on Scarface before Fox and the others can, sinking her teeth into him and pumping him full of venom. As he lays dying, Scarface declares his line will avenge him... but in the end? They don't.

In terms of heinousness, Scarface has the highest body count in the series. Other animals kill for food, but not Scarface. He's killing for power and out of spite. Even in a series this grim, Scarface stands out.

In terms of redeeming qualities... his relationship with his family is interesting, as he will avenge his children's deaths, but this always ties back into his hatred of the Farthing Wood animals. When Adder kills his son, he only goes after her once Lady Blue tells him that there is an Adder among the Farthing Wood animals, not even considering it could have been any adder and not the one with the Farthing Wood animals.

Scarface uses the deaths of his kids and the attack on his mate as excuses to destroy the Farthing Wood animals, never showing any grief for any of this. At best, Scarface views his family as either his possession or extensions of himself. At worst, they are soldiers to die in his war on Fox. He is constantly abusive to them, even though his family clearly loves him. Lady Blue, his mate, mourns his death as does his son Ranger, but he never shows them any real love, only treating them as things he owns. At one point, Ranger, while trying to warn the Farthing Wood animals of Scarface's coming attack, admits his father would kill him if he found out he had gone behind his back and he clearly means it.

So yeah. Along with being a ruthless killer driven by spite, Scarface is an abusive father and husband who, as pointed out, only cares about others as things to be used for his purposes.

In the end, Scarface is an easy keep. He's also, again, one of the best animated villains I have ever seen. He's just such a bastard you cannot help but love him for it.

So...this is going to be an interesting one.

Are you at all familiar with the Great God Pan, a story by Arthur Machen which Stephen King called the scariest story in the English language?

The character I am proposing comes from that.

Helen Vaughan is without question one of the most enigmatic and terrifying villains in all fiction. And what adds to this is how little we learn about her.

That being said...I think the little we do learn is enough to give her a proposal.

We first meet Helen through a second-hand story retold to Clarke, a man who witnessed an experiment involving a young girl, Mary, being lobotomized and seeing the god Pan, after which she went mad.

In this story, Helen is sent to a small village by a relative to stay for reasons later revealed at the end. While there, Helen would often sneak off into the woods. One day, a young boy saw her dancing with a strange naked man then came back screaming to his father about it, but when Mary was confronted, she had no knowledge of the boy being "molested." That same boy later goes completely mad and brain dead after seeing a stone figure - of a faun or satyr.

Then there was Helen's close and intimate friend Rachel. Look, they were both children at the time but there's some blatant lesbian subtext. One day, Rachel comes back from the woods, her clothes shredded and crying, asking why her mother let her into the woods with Helen. We don't find out what happened to her at all...but Rachel later died. And I'm fairly certain she was raped, given the amount of subtext behind Helen's later crimes. I don't know how, I just know she was.

Fast forward a few years after Helen went to the states and partook in orgies. How scandalous. However, there are a series of strange suicides of wealthy young man associated with a Mrs Beaumont/Herbert. They all kill themselves by hanging themselves in a strange fashion, and one man died of fright on Mrs Beaumont's doorstep. All fell under her influence and took part in debaucheries of some kind. After a group of men, among them Clarke, investigate the killings and discover that Mrs Beaumont is indeed Helen Vaughan. We never know what Helen did to the men. One says she whispered things man wasn't meant to know to him in bed. But there's a lot of subtext behind the deaths.

Eventually, one man comes across a noose and tracks down Helen, somehow getting her to hang herself. The details aren't revealed, so we don't know the exact reasons for Helen's death, yet once she dies she changes from woman to man, man to beast, etc, with reference to phallic symbols from Pompeii as well.

Then we learn the terrible truth; Helen was born nine months after her mother, Mary, saw the god Pan.

There's a reason H.P. Lovecraft referenced this book in the Dunwich Horror.

So, with all that out of the way...let's examine Helen and determine if she is pure evil.

First, let's address her father, Pan. The story portrays Pan as an eldritch abomination and heavily implies him to also be Nodens, and both are implied to be the Devil. This would in turn suggest Helen could be interpreted as the Antichrist. Would this affect her agency?

No.

Helen, though never directly met first hand, is never indicated to have impaired morality. Note how she tells the father of a boy she didn't "molest" them, clearly showing she has some idea of right and wrong. She's also clearly lying. Even her father being maybe the Devil doesn't work against her, as the Devil did start out as a fallen angel and thus has agency.

Second, her personality.

Again, we never meet Helen directly, yet she is not a Generic Doomsday villain. Helen clearly has a personality, one as a woman who seduces men and enjoys sex, so she could be classified as a hedonist. She also comes across as rather sadistic in the stories of her as a child. Especially when talking with some of her "little friends." And the way she talked to her husband in bed, ruining him and driving him mad.

Now, the big one. Her motive.

I'm not sure what it is, but there are several that are implied. Most notably, she seems to be driving men to suicide for money. Or pleasure. Maybe both.

The men she interacts with intimately tend to end up ruined financially before dying, but I have to note this isn't the case with a few. In any case, they always end up drained of energy and a shadow of who they used to be, and given what happened to her husband and what she described, going so far as to say she corrupted him body and soul, she is motivated by sadism as well. These two motives stand out the strongest to me.

And of course, her death. Why did she kill herself?

Hell if I know. I doubt it was out of guilt. Maybe she was going to be exposed? In any case, she died.

So, that's what I have to say on Helen Vaughan. I think she is Pure Evil, but I'll let you guys decide. You can read the Great God Pan or listen to the audiobooks online, if you want to examine her yourself. Wouldn't mind it either.

But for me, yes.