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Grotesque Gallery
- 141 statements
- 26 feature instances
- 28 referencing feature instances
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It's a secret so poorly kept, it's scarcely a secret at all: modern media doesn't like dealing in ugliness. Much of the time, even characters that are supposedly "ugly" are barely distinguishable from their "attractive" counterparts. This is why tropes like the Gonk carry such significance: in a work where nobody can really be called unattractive, a genuinely ugly character stands out so much more, to the point that they feel more like an oddity exhibit than a character. But what about instances where "genuinely ugly" describes not an isolated character or two, but an entire species or race of creatures? As far as tropes are concerned, these clusters of creatures belong in the Grotesque Gallery. The Grotesque Gallery trope describes any group, species, or race of creatures that is drawn or designed to be ugly, gross, or off-puttingly weird-looking. It's the concept of the Gonk writ large — instead of one or two isolated characters being hideous for the sake of comedy or a message, an entire group of creatures are designed to be extremely unattractive. Characters belonging to the Grotesque Gallery can serve a variety of purposes. Some of the more common intentional uses include using the creatures' ugliness as a signifier that they're malicious or untrustworthy, completely subverting that idea by giving the ugly creatures hearts of gold, showcasing the effects of a magical or environmental catastrophe, or simply showing that the creatures are completely outside of what we consider the natural order. Sister Trope of Gonk. Contrast Ugly Cute, in which a character is considered cute despite its conventionally "ugly" characteristics. See also Uncanny Valley, where a repulsive reaction is the result of a character looking "off" while being rather humanoid, and Nonstandard Character Design, which is a tool that may be used to create denizens of the Grotesque Gallery. |
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Dropped link to AphexTwin: Not an Item - IGNORE | |
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| Grotesque Gallery | isPartOf |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_1a044a10 | type |
Grotesque Gallery | |
| Grotesque Gallery / int_1a044a10 | comment |
1985's Return to Oz has the Wheelers and Jack Pumpkinhead, who then calls Dorothy "Mom"! | |
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The Simpsons: Some citizens, like Homer Simpson, Barney Gumble, Moe, Mr. Burns, Patty and Selma, Lunchlady Doris, and Krusty the Clown fit this trope exactly. | |
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E.T. Particularly his weird, spine-like legs. (And especially if you're only three in 1982, there's merchandise everywhere, and nobody has explained to you that E.T. is a friendly alien.) The better to make that intro scene in the garage pants-wettingly frightening with. As such, a lot of the imitators (like Pod People) that Followed the Leader make their aliens even uglier, like in Mac and Me or the Turkish ones "Badi" and "Homodi", which throw convincing special effects out for sheer horror. |
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Attack on Titan: Titans are a seriously freaky-looking bunch. | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_46518682 | type |
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From Sesame Street. Pictured above are the Martians. They have creeped out quite some toddlers over the decades, because their mouths move in a weird fashion, they are accompanied by weird music, appear out of nowwhere and just say "yip yip" all the time while staring at otherwise normal objects. See also Frazzle, with his largely immobile big-fanged mouth, heavy dark eyebrows, and devil horns. In his case it's harder to believe the effect isn't intentional. The same designer (Jim Henson) also created the "Land of Gorch" for Saturday Night Live. One of the characters (Fazh) was at best Ugly Cute and it went downhill from there. |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_524499fe | type |
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Spitting Image: This satirical puppets series made caricatures of celebrities into puppets. Many of them look absolutely grotesque to downright ugly. Just look at the image we put on the nightmare fuel page. | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_60e46d26 | type |
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MAD Magazine: The comics by Basil Wolverton often featured grotesque people, like his iconic parody◊ of Life Magazine. Similarly Tom Bunk and Bill Wray (Monroe)'s work is also a collection of ugly people. The magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman symbolizes everything that's uncanny and grotesque about the magazine. |
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Berserk has lots of horrifyingly ugly creatures, and they're frequently shown in large gatherings. Apostles are truly terrifyingly creatures, often consisting huge masses of eyes, teeth, tentacles, faces, and genitalia randomly strewn about their vaguely animalistic bodies. Their humanoid forms aren't much better, bearing anatomical proportions that only emphasize how inhuman they really are. Astral creatures, particularly from the darker recesses of the astral world like the Qliphoth, are very similar, looking very much like various animals mashed together in unconventional ways. In a decidedly more mundane example, Mozgus and his group of torturers. Mozgus is a regular human with unnerving square-shaped features on his face that can turn wrinkly and leathery when he gets furious, and his minions are all people who were born with deformities that make them look all the more monstrous. |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_8226b6fa | type |
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As such, a lot of the imitators (like Pod People) that Followed the Leader make their aliens even uglier, like in Mac and Me or the Turkish ones "Badi" and "Homodi", which throw convincing special effects out for sheer horror. | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_914ba844 | type |
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The Wizard of Oz has the unspeakably creepy flying monkeys. | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_93e8b35e | type |
Grotesque Gallery | |
| Grotesque Gallery / int_93e8b35e | comment |
Alice in Wonderland: Half of the people Alice meets in the original book, illustrated by John Tenniel are grotesque. Especially the Queen, the Duchess and her servant. These examples of Alice in Wonderland illustrations by Dusan Kallay fail to show the childhood-devastating terror that were those disturbing pieces of art, best described as "Salvador Dalà meets Hieronymus Bosch". |
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Grotesque Gallery | |
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Creator of Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel, David Feiss' is recognizable by the rather gross-looking designs of his human characters. His animal designs also carry some of this. | |
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One Piece is stuffed to the rafters with exaggerated character designs that practically look like their own caricature, and at least a third of the series' dialogue is shouted at the top of someone's lungs with an accompanying Wild Take, which usually makes them look even uglier. | |
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Haagse Harry: All characters are degrading foul mouthed people from The Hague, Netherlands. | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_a90d239a | type |
Grotesque Gallery | |
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Any character from Psychonauts is quirky at least (the camp kids are odd but still relatively cute) and often bizarre (characters like Loboto, Crispin, and most of the mental realms' inhabitants). | |
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| Grotesque Gallery / int_b4fe32c9 | type |
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A few in Invader Zim were especially ugly. Bloaty comes to mind. There were also a lot of grotesque background characters who ranged from unpleasantly greasy to clearly disfigured. | |
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Also all of The Dark Crystal by Jim Henson, since the entire world is composed of Muppets and environments that are either deliberately alien or designed off of nature's less cute critters, making the whole thing one dark fairy tale based on look alone. | |
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Lots of stuff in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, like the plague victims in the episode where Flapjack gets a pet rat, and the sea monster things from "How the West Was Fun"! | |
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Monty Python's Flying Circus: Terry Gilliam's cut-and-paste animation is full of weird collages of old photographs and paintings, with body parts moving in odd ways and sometimes even falling off. The sketch "The Visitors" has some of the rudest, unlikeable and weirdest ugly people paying an unwanted visit to Graham Chapman and his wife. Ken Shabby, the filthy man played by Michael Palin, is also grotesquely ugly, insane and lewd. |
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Most of the characters on The League of Gentlemen are played by the same three actors, so they need to use various prosthetics to differentiate between roles. Some of them (Tubbs and Edward, in particular) are quite hideous. | |
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Some viewers may feel this way about the character designs of Ed, Edd n Eddy due to Danny Antonucci's odd artstyle, something that he demonstrates well in his other cartoon: the infamous The Brothers Grunt. | |
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South Park: Plays with this trope whenever scenarios take place with handicapped or mentally challenged people. Though it also subverts this by making people like Timmy and Jimmy recurring characters so that we, as viewers, get used to their bizarre looks. | |
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Urbanus: Also a staple in this comic strip where the characters will typically be drawn ugly and vulgar. | |
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Grotesque Gallery | |
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The '80s French program Téléchat. The Joueur du Grenier (the French equivalent of The Angry Video Game Nerd) even dedicated his first Special to this show and how it abused this trope to no end. | |
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Lena Hyena in Li'l Abner, whose face is so ugly that it drives people mad. Al Capp avoided actually depicting Lena in the strip because it was funnier to leave her features to the imagination. He eventually held a contest to see if anyone could draw someone as ugly as he'd described Lena as being. Basil Wolverton (mentioned below) won it. | |
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Rankin-Bass' animated version of The Hobbit is a notorious case of going for characters that are so ugly they're cute and... failing. Badly. The wood elves. Most of the hobbits (with the exceptions of Frodo, Bilbo, Merry, and Pippin) especially Samwise from Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings are hideously deformed creatures with bulging eyeballs and jagged teeth. |
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