Music criticism IS supervillainy.
Alizarin's vivarrid frame is hale and sexy, a delicate, androgynous figure with musculature well-worthy of serpent hunting. His color scheme is another matter. The sleek fur coating his body is pale as chalk. The thick fur on his head, a sickly ashen grey, is moussed up in a spiky but rather fey style; one lock droops over her eyes in a way that would be gorgeous if it weren't so _drab_ and he weren't smirking. His eyes are grey and unsparkling like granite.
In fact, there isn't a speck of color on him, not even on his clothing. His undersized T-shirt bears some kind of logo of a horizontal bar through a circle, but it's such a faint grey that it's nearly impossible to discern the white letters on the bar which read, "Mind the Gap." Above it, he wears an absurdly faded faux-leather jacket, the ugly non-hue of pigeon down, and a spiky white PVC collar oddly lacking in gleam. Dirty white bondage boots cover his legs up to each thigh, pulled tight against the sinew with thick straps. Even the metal buckles and snaps on his outfit are too tarnished to reflect any ambient color.
Faintly visible underneath his collar, a spidery vein of black runs down his throat and underneath his shirt. It's almost imperceptibly thin and doesn't run with the contour of his fur, like it's a hairline fracture in his very image. It emerges on his midriff, running down under his waistband at jagged angles, like he's cracked right down the middle.
Alizarin was once a rather flamboyant mongoose; his trademark was dyeing his fur an outrageous blood-crimson red. He was the back-up allophonist for Sense Monument, a four-part Dancejack combo. Their first ampule, "Anthraquinone Upstart", received moderate bodyplay on Bottomwarp's pirate cranio networks, but Ali felt his dancewriting deserved a much better reception. He blamed it on the complacency of his fans, quit the band, and secluded himself, devoting himself to writing darker and darker pieces in a new genre he called "Blackline."
Obsessed with finding ever-darker themes for his work, he started studying the music of the Fever Cathedral and even stooped to doing ethnographic research among the Hemotopians. He must have discovered the sonic depravity he was looking for -- the experience was so intense, it drained all the color from his body and all the vibrance from his soul, leaving him unable to see the good in _anything_. Fortunately for the Mess, it also left him an utter creative wreck and he hasn't been able to compose anything sense. While he tries to recover and feed his aching color jones, he's found a niche among his contacts in the Fever Cathedral as -- what else -- a critic.
Ali isn't really evil, just exceptionally jaded, pessimistic, and bitter. He's been rendered totally numb to pure positive emotions, which means he can only experience pleasure and contentment if they're mixed with pain, anger, or sadness in some way. Thanks to the fissure in his soul -- what he calls "The Blackline Gap" -- pretty and joyful things decay in his mere presence long before he can sense them. To keep himself sane, he's rationalized that the problem lies with the _world_, not with him, embracing the Fever Cathedral's doctrine of "pre-emptive discord." He's embraced the Blackline Gap as a source of strength, a constant reminder not to become one of the naive followers who doesn't realize the whole Puzzlebox is on the fast track to eternal hopeless decay. The Gap can be healed, but he won't part with it easily.
The Blackline Gap continually drains all of the hue out out of its host's body, leaving it perpetually starved for contact with colorful things. More importantly, the Gap is an orgone leak -- this means that in its near vicinity, the cosmic property that allows conscious minds to experience pleasure, especially in its more "spiritual" forms, is disrupted. Things near the Gap just don't seem as good as they used to. The Gap IS contagious, but Alizarin would have to feed on a living being for several hours in order to blanch it completely and spread the Gap.