Thoughtlets: Seven Deadly Sins as Temptors

From ShifterCat here.

For a while now, I’ve been discussing a frequent problem with anthropomorphic portrayals of the Seven Deadly Sins: six of them will be drawn to elicit disgust… except for Lust, who’ll be a bodacious babe. It’s like, “Yes, straight male audience, here are the parts of yourself you should fear. Plus that one, who is totally the fault of evil wimminz.”

Which: no, guys, you can’t have it both ways. Either portray ALL of them as tempting, or ALL of them as horrible warnings. And if you’re going with the latter, then Lust ought to be a man in a dirty raincoat, lurking outside a schoolyard.

(Credit where it’s due: Edmund Spenser, way back in the sixteenth century, portrayed Lust as a gross dude in The Faerie Queene.)
I was discussing this with Christopher, and he asked, what might the Seven Deadly Sins look like if, instead of simply embodying their sin, they were designed to elicit that sin?

Here are my ideas:

Wrath is primarily a talk-radio host, though he also publishes his rants in book and blog format. He whips his audience into a fury against a host of enemies, some obvious, others ill-defined. On social media, he commands a veritable army of internet trolls. His followers are both sore losers and sore winners: as long as dissenters exist, they cannot consider themselves victorious. And that will never happen, because Wrath is always ready to point out a new enemy.

Gluttony looks like a kindly grandmother. Everything that comes out of her kitchen looks, tastes, and smells absolutely delicious, so it hardly seems like a burden when she chivvies you to eat, even when you’re already full. But she always makes far too much, and throws out all of her leftovers. Meals that could have fed a soup kitchen for a week congeal in a dumpster outside, crawling with maggots.

Avarice is a corporate lobbyist. He convinces the rich that they owe the public nothing, and the poor that they are but temporarily embarrassed millionaires. At his smiling suggestion, laws restricting businesses’ power are jettisoned, or else rendered powerless. He speaks of “the free market” as though it were a wise and benevolent deity, though he has also been known to argue Social Darwinism and Prosperity Gospel without even pausing for breath.

Vanity is a motivational speaker. She tells her audiences that they are all especially gifted and deserve everything they want -- they just have to focus on it really hard. Anyone who tells them that they’re being selfish, or evading other responsibilities, is just dragging them down; anyone to whom bad things happen brought it on themselves by being so negative. Her Facebook page shares a lot of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, framing believers as smarter than the masses.

Sloth comes off as a good-natured stoner. He’s always happy to share his shabby couch and his coffee-table covered with game controllers, TV remotes, and an endless assortment of substances to drink, smoke, or inject. Schoolwork can wait. Tell your boss you’re sick again. Someone else’ll do the other stuff. Just take it easy. Don’t be a buzzkill.

Envy runs a string of popular magazines. The cover models are Photoshopped into impossible beauty; the ads feature products well out of most readers’ price range. The text portions contain “health plans” that are recipes for failure, celebrity gossip that is by turns fawning and venomous, and advice columns warning against “man-stealers” or “girl-stealers”.

Lust is a pick-up artist. He doesn’t simply advocate promiscuity, but employs an entire dialect encouraging straight men to think of women as objects to be evaluated, used, and discarded. Though his focus is primarily on heterosexual males, he also argues that it’s “naturally masculine” for gay men to treat their partners in a similar fashion.