Insults
Similes are an especially effective tool for crafting insults. That’s why insult comics built an entire sub-genre out of hurting the feelings of others; they’re easy and can be fun to create. For a writer, the intent is usually less about insult and more delineating aspects of character, such as when Parvati addresses the failings of her servant Kaali:
“You wash plates like a blind woman—just today I had to rewash three plates—and you mop like a baby.”
Crazy Talk
The nice thing about having someone crazy—or crazy-acting—in a work of writing is that the toolbox runs pretty deep when it comes to metaphors for mental problems. Some, of course, are not very nice while others are more an attempt at understatement. These are especially fruitful when the issues is not actual insanity, but merely behavior by one person deemed beyond the pale by another. On the scale of metaphorical viciousness, this particular simile-as-insult ranks pretty near the bottom:
“You’re talking like a person who needs to be admitted in an asylum.”
The Spider Woman
The idea of the Spider Woman who is just beautiful that men can’t help but get entrapped in her web goes way back, but taken out of the realm of horror, the underlying message is that Spider Women really do exist in the world. They are those women so beautiful and entrancing that men just can’t help themselves and in order to rationalize this failure of character on their part, it is collective reflected onto the woman. Or, as this metaphorical description succinctly encapsulates:
“The men disliked her because she wasn’t their wife, but was the women who despised her She was temptation for their husbands, a trap."
Metaphor as Vernacular
People use metaphors every day in the common discourse without even taking the time to think of them as metaphors. This is effective usage of metaphor in writing as it gives conversation a patina of reality; like when writers casually drop movie quotes or pop culture references into dialogue without drawing attention to its use. A good example is this dialogue which engages metaphor, but doesn’t make it about the fancy literary tool:
“Should I just put some money into his account. You know, as a security blanket?”
Poetry
At the opposite end of the spectrum—well, in this particular case not the exact opposite because it is still a fairly simple image—is using metaphorical language that does call attention to itself. Usually, this exists outside the realm of dialogue because most people simple don’t talk like this:
“They stared at the sky until the plane diminished into a little ball of fire and vanished altogether.”
