We’ve talked about word games a few times here, and several of the TKZ crowd have mentioned Wordle as being a favorite.
For people unfamiliar with the game, the challenge is to guess a hidden five-letter word within six tries by creating words and seeing how the Wordle game responds. The simplest way to explain it is by example. I have a habit of using the word “HOUSE” as my first guess.
If a letter is in the solution and in the correct placement, it’s shown on a green background. If the letter is in the solution, but not in the correct place, the background turns yellow. If the letter isn’t in the word at all, the background is gray.
In a game I played a couple of weeks ago, here’s how the first four guesses looked:
After the first three guesses, I had all five letters of the answer, but I wasn’t able to come up with a word that was a valid solution. (Wordle will not let you enter arbitrary letters. Your guess has to spell an actual word, and I don’t think it’s fair play to look up possibilities online.)
The only word I came up with was “ROILS,” but I knew it was wrong because the letter “I” couldn’t be in the third position. Still, it was the only English word I thought of, so I entered it just to see if any of the other letters would be in the correct positions.
This was the strangest Wordle game I’d ever played. After the fourth guess, there are only two possible solutions: IOLRS or LORIS. I didn’t know either of those words, but LORIS seemed the most likely, so I went with that one.
It was the first time I solved a Wordle game with a word I hadn’t heard of. (My apologies to all the linguists and zoologists out there.) Of course, I looked up the meaning of the word, and found that a loris is a very interesting animal.
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You can’t get much cuter than this guy. Big, sad eyes in a furry little body. So adorable. So cuddly. You want to pick one up and pet it.
Not a good idea.
According to worldwildlife.org,
With wide eyes and furry bodies, these slow-moving, pint-sized primates look like cuddly stuffed animals. But their venom-filled bites can rot flesh and cause anaphylactic shock in humans. (my emphasis)
Ouch.
It turns out the loris is the only mammal that is venomous. When I considered that surprising fact, it got me thinking about villains in general. Maybe the most dangerous ones aren’t the big, bad guys with the tattoos and spiked hair. Or those dark space villains. You know they’re the bad guys.
Maybe the scariest ones are the adorable characters whom everybody loves and trusts. The ones you can’t imagine would ever hurt you.
Here are a few examples I found on screenrant.com:
- Hans, the handsome prince in Frozen, who appears to be in love with the Princess Anna, but really just wants to marry her to usurp the throne.
- The “killer rabbit” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. How dangerous could a cute little white rabbit be?
- Dawn Bellwether in Zootopia seems to be a cute sheep helping ensure cooperation in her community, but in fact, she’s the mastermind behind a conspiracy.
In addition, I asked our TKZ expert on villainry, Debbie Burke, to give me some ideas of villains who fit this category. She mentioned nurses who kill patients. Makes me want to try doubly hard to stay out of the hospital.
But maybe the scariest villain of all was Anthony Freemont in the 73rd episode of The Twilight Zone. He was a really cute kid with powers of evil.
I saw that episode many years ago, but it still gives me chills when I think about it.
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Over to you, TKZers: Are you a Wordler? Did you solve the recent Loris puzzle? On another subject, who is your favorite villain? Do your characters ever become victims of wolves in sheep’s clothing?
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They may be cute, but there’s nothing villainous about these two detectives. 10-year-old tree-climbing Reen and her 9-year-old, feet-on-the-ground cousin Joanie are on a mission to find a hidden treasure, but along the way they discover something more important than what they were looking for.
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