Otters In Space

...that's not the title of the story I've been working on. It's 'space otters'.

So, if you're having a sort of lets-kind-of-pretend-to-be-hard-scifi-but-not-really-more-of-a-space-opera story in the Honor Harrington vein, is it appropriate for the main bad guy (at least of this chapter) to die in a really over-the-top cartoony manner?

I'm just saying, when your skin is a nigh-invulnerable pressure-suit-kevlar-thing, and you get your insides liquified by a sonic weapon, and then some of your antigrav thruster rings short out and starts spinning parts of you around in different directions, squeezing the juices out through every available orifice and leaving a wrung-out pelt... in zero-G so that gore ends up coating *everything*... maybe that's a little too silly for an otherwise dramatic death scene. Even if the 'physics' make that actually be the most likely outcome.

What do people think?