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"No, Dr. Tenma, I don't think you should take my Freudian Excuse into consideration." This is it. The end of the line for tropes about evil. Simply, there is nothing worse than being this. Trying to put a value to how horrible the qualifications to be a Complete Monster (bold-italics necessary, for reasons soon to become obvious) are is like trying to assign Bill Gates a credit score: it becomes a moot point. This is not the villain who is designed to be comic, or tragic, or even so awesome you can't help but root for him. This is the villain who is so repulsive and completely irredeemable, that the only satisfying end for him is a death just as horrible as he is... or hopefully worse.
Complete Monsters typically appear in Darker And Edgier works and those on the very cynical side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Vs Cynicism. In Lighter And Fluffier works, it's incredibly hard to depict a character bad enough to invoke this trope without breaking the mood. On the other hand, as a work slides into Black And Grey Morality, it gets harder to be so evil that you become the focus of the audience's hatred. Thus, only the most exceptional of villains can qualify - only the worst of the worst belong on this page. Far from every Serial Killer, Psycho For Hire, Ax Crazy, or Omnicidal Maniac is bad enough to be a Complete Monster. While most Complete Monster villains are Obviously Evil, not everyone who is Obviously Evil is a Complete Monster. Almost all Complete Monsters are also old, Ugly, creepy or unnatural making them immune to the Draco In Leather Pants Treatment. If a Complete Monster does become a Draco In Leather Pants, expect this to be the only way he ever acquires any substantial fandom at all.
- The character must do truly horrendous acts, and the story makes no attempt to gloss these over or present them in a positive light. Acts concealed behind a Villainy Discretion Shot don't count. In other words, the Complete Monster usually starts at the Moral Event Horizon and keeps on running. He must also have a direct, active role, and the Evil Overlord doesn't count if he only sends out waves of minions to do horrible atrocities - he must perform these himself or force someone else to do it while he looks on. It's the character that's supposed to scare and disgust you, not his Mooks.
- A Freudian Excuse is either not present, or inadequate to excuse his behavior— villains who invoke Cry For The Devil need not apply.
- The character must show no regret or remorse for his actions, however terrible. It's better if he obviously enjoys it, but complete emotionlessness or lack of caring will suffice. For this guy, Its All About Me is not just a choice; it's the core of his existence.
- The character must evoke fear and/or hatred from the other characters in the story. If there are other villains around, they are afraid of him/dislike him too — Even Evil Has Standards, after all. If this character is not the Big Bad, there's likely to be an Eviler Than Thou subplot.
- The character should affect the tone of the work. His scenes are the darkest, scariest, and most serious. He can push a work into Darker And Edgier territory simply by his presence, and if it's already dark, he makes it a candidate for High Octane Nightmare Fuel. This type of villain will almost never appear in a comedic work unless it is a Black Comedy of the nastiest sort.
- Defeating the character should be a major element of the story, if not the main plot — especially if his opponents are motivated by revenge or hatred for him. When it happens, it's usually someone's Crowning Moment Of Awesome. If the villain wins, it's game over for the good guys, and even if he's defeated, he often leaves one heck of a mess behind.
- Very rarely will a Knight Templar or Well Intentioned Extremist be a Complete Monster, and an Anti Villain never will.
- Most importantly, the character must have no chance of redemption without being considered a Karma Houdini. The only way the story could come to anything resembling a happy ending is if he dies or is otherwise removed. A Heel Face Turn is out of the question, and nobody would believe it if it happened. There can be no Redemption Equals Death for this character, and no Fate Worse Than Death is too extreme.
Remember, it takes something truly, truly special to be a Complete Monster. Far from every villain qualifies, especially if they turn out to mean well. No Real Life examples, please.
Tread carefully through the examples. It probably goes without saying, but due to the nature of the trope, there are huge spoilers that may or may not be marked. And also, some of the deeds listed here are quite disturbing, even though they're all fictional.
Due to the number of Complete Monsters throughout fiction, they have been separated by media for your viewing convenience.
Examples:
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Tabletop Games
- Oh stop dancing around the issue. Warhammer40000 is a
grim dark and brutal place to live, with no side truly in the right, most of those remotely in the area associated with "good" in the territory of the Well-Intentioned Extremist. As such, there are multitudes of monstrous men and women, but there are enough genuinely heroic people in the setting to not make this game a non-issue in terms of morality. And yet, in a sea of corruption and evil, there are mainly pawns and incompetent pencil pushers. The nadirs of morality stand out, even here.
- To start with, we have the Chaos empowered Fabius Bile, Evilutionary Biologist and Mad Scientist extraordinaire. His horrifying experiments with Warp science and genetics can and often will slaughter the populations of entire sub-sectors.
- Considered an ideal by the Rapine Storm in Cthulhutech. It's worth noting that the Storm contains numerous actual Lovecraftian monsters in their ranks, and they aren't as bad as the human members.
- Really, all the major cults count: apart from wishing to unleash a new age of Cosmic Horror... The Death Shadows seek to corrupt human society from the inside, by providing forbidden pleasures and vices and blackmailing those they snare to go ever deeper beyond the Moral Event Horizon until they snap and gleefully serve the cult, using designer drugs, magically brainwashed sex-slaves, snuff pornography, and pretty much any other kind of depravity you can think of (and probably a few you can't); the Esoteric Order of Dagon conquer and raid coastlines and islands for slaves, and those they don't eat (i.e. girls and women) they put in rape camps to breed more Deep Ones faster; and the Children of Chaos have taken over the second-largest Mega Corp, using its clout to secretly finance, foster and cover up everybody else's atrocities, all the while using science and magic to breed and turn humans into a secret army of sadistic Humanoid Abomination Super Soldiers, digging up ever more horrible eldritch secrets to either augment themselves or disseminate among the populace (whichever is worst), infiltrating every level of society, and fueling every destructive or negative impulse of humanity to hasten our species' demise, all For The Evulz. And they're Dangerously Genre Savvy about it. No wonder even the Migou fear and loathe them.
- Stone of Deadlands is an example of this trope. He is one of the Harrowed, revenants who came Back From The Dead with a demon using their body as a time-share. Most Harrowed must engage in a constant battle of wills with their demon. Stone has no such conflict, because his demon is afraid of him.
- The list can be made longer; Darius Hellstromme, Ezekiah Grimme, and Raven all qualify. Darius Hellstromme may be the creepiest of the bunch, since he is still at least nominally human... but actually Hellstromme is not a Complete Monster. He proved this with a good old Heel Face Turn in The Unity
- Desus, a canonical NPC from the Dreams Of The First Age supplement for Exalted. Hailed by everyone as Creation's greatest wandering martial arts hero, as well as perhaps the most loving and devoted husband among the Solar Deliberative. In reality: the event hailed as his greatest victory of legend was actually him sucker-punching an innocent being while negotiating with them under a parley flag; his wife suffered less psychological trauma from being alone in the heart of pure maddening chaos for three thousand years than she did from their marriage; part of his good reputation is his researching a custom magical effect that forces every single person who sees him or hears him talk to rationalize all of his actions as being for the best of intentions, no matter what they actually are; he is stated to be the worst kind of sadistic serial killing rapist, but since his victims for that particular fetish are anonymous mortals they're never missed and he's never suspected; he is one of the five seniormost members of the single most corrupt political cabal in the later First Age.
- Let's not forget the part where his wife Lilith had been so psychologically broken, both by normal and magical brainwashing tactics, that her single deepest core motivation/primal impulse is "Please Desus", that he beats her routinely (causing her to miscarry at least once, which says something when you're a demigoddess whose big theme is survival and toughness), that part of her mental conditioning is to be forced to rationalize reasons why it's her fault for every single cruelty he lays on her, and that anyone attempting to explain any of the above to her will trigger post-hypnotic imperatives in her mind forcing her to kill that person and then blank her memory of the entire incident. The several millenia she spent hiding in the depths of the Wyld, the uttermost depth of purely insane chaos? Was how Lilith regained (some of) her sanity in the millenia after her husband finally died. That's how horrific it was, that the Deep Wyld would be a comparative rest cure.
- Basically, imagine Angelus, as mentioned above. With the power of a god and 500 extra IQ points. And being right-hand-man to the ruler of the world. And having the entire planet fooled into thinking he's the equivalent of Captain America. And who has had several thousand years in which to have gotten very, very bored... and no epic goals or master plans to occupy himself with, just an epically jaded sadist looking for a good time.
- Let's not forget the fact that he believes his own hype. All of it. The things he did to Lilith? He genuinely loves her, and it's not like she can't take the abuse, and she never asked him to stop. After all, only a handful of beings in the whole world can resist the above-mentioned compulsion to interpret all of his actions as virtuous for any length of time and see how screwed up he is, and all of them are corrupt or uncaring so they can't be bothered to tell him about this. So, naturally, after being told that he can do no wrong for a few hundred years, Desus himself started to believe this. He is the poster child for why the Usurpation was worth it. Of course, anyone who researches a technique that compels all around him to rationalize away and forgive him his every sin as a permanent, always-on effect instead of a weapon to be used against specific bad guys is starting out from a vastly dubious position, so he may very well have been a case of "You can't fall off the floor".
- The Ebon Dragon, a canonical NPC from Exalted. The Ebon Dragon is a Primordial, one of the in-game entities that created the game's setting. While other Primordials presumably introduced things like rainbows, hugs and teddy bears into Creation, one of the Ebon Dragon's major contributions was the concept of treachery. Why? Because he's a Dick. Given his cosmic significance, it's quite accurate to say instead that he is THE Dick, who will sell out anybody and everybody at any moment for personal gain (or sheer amusement). Among his lesser nasty accomplishments is the Phylactery Womb, which houses the Exaltation Shards of the Infernal Exalted when they're not inhabiting humans. The Phylactery Womb, by the way, is a young girl who has been repeatedly violated in every possible sense of the word; at this point she's a bloated demonic monstrosity with occasional flashes of lucidity. At least Desus has the Great Curse as an excuse; the Ebon Dragon is just thoroughly foul, evil and rotten through and through, almost by definition completely, irredeemably evil.
- Just to clarify: The Primordials were largely described as being pretty nasty already, the Ebon Dragon just likes to go that extra mile.
- To clarify even more: The Ebon Dragon is actually the literal embodiment of dickishness. According to his Excellencies, he is literally incapable of, for example, "Telling the truth, except to reveal a horrible revelation", or to take any action which will benefit others more then himself.
- And if you thought the Primordials were bad, you should see what happened with the dead ones and their chosen servants. The Neverborn want to enter Oblivion and plan to destroy the world in order to do so; this is very slightly sympathetic if you squint hard enough and have been having a sufficiently bad day. The Deathlords...well...one of them killed 90% of the world's population with the Great Contagion, another one spends his time torturing a few hapless Shards (the things that bond with Exalts to make them Exalts) for deeds they can't remember because they took place centuries ago in a previous life, and a third has the right stats and the right degree of inventive sadism to be Desus himself, back from the dead as a scheming, deceitful tyrant.
- It's probably worth going into a little more detail on the one who might be Desus, the Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Water: much like the Lunars, he set up a nation (in the Skullstone Archipelago) that fitted with his goals. Then he predicted his own return and faked his own death, before spending 500 years corrupting the country so he would have something to reform when he returned as the Silver Prince. The problem here? One of the central tenets of his New Order is that everyone is given an accelerated path through reincarnation through their faith, except the few who remain as ghosts because they were still needed. What happens instead? They're dragged off to the fifth island of the archipelago, where they are forged into soulsteel and used to build ships. Even the currency is based on soulsteel.
- In Dungeons And Dragons, the supplement Book of Vile Darkness, explores and defines the nature of evil in the game quite thoroughly, inevitably going far beyond the Moral Event Horizon, including many grisly options for evil P Cs like power derived from cannibalism, sacrifice of sentient beings to evil gods, necrophilia, sadomasochism, and more. Among other things, it introduces The Dread Emperor, who lives up to his grandiose name. His armour has four children chained to it at all times, and striking him transfers the damage to the children.
- And, of course, there are the demons, devils, and yugoloths, who are literally made from evil... and, well, it shows. And the mind flayers, who start their lives as humanoid aberrations by eating an entire human nervous system and steadily get worse. And the aboleths. And...
- ...and Mind Flayers again. Let's take a closer look at them, shall we? They are mostly humanoid shaped creatures with tentacles coming out of their heads. These tentacles are for eating your brains. If you meet a mind flayer and you're not a superheroic adventurer (or you don't have a good will save), the best you can hope for is to have your brains eaten immediately... otherwise, you go back to the slave pens, which are as nice as they sound. The mind flayers have special magical emotion-emitting devices there that replicate the effects of soul-crushing, suicidal depression turned up to eleven. If you're unlucky, instead of being freed by heroes or eaten, you will instead have an alien tadpole implanted in your skull. This tadpole will devour and replace your nervous system over the course of a few days. Mind Flayers have been revealed to only be able to feel certain emotions on the normal spectrum - pretty much all being negative, the closest to a positive emotion they can feel is something like sadistic joy. Mind Flayers are led by Elder Brains, which are huge brains that live inside vats. The closest Mind Flayers have to the idea of an afterlife is their belief that when they die, their brains will be absorbed by the Elder Brain and they will join its consciousness for eternity. In actuality, the Elder Brain simply eats the brains, destroying the 'donor' forever. In their spare time, Elder Brains also like to eat baby mind flayers.
- And we can't forget that mind flayers experiment with tadpole implantation in their spare time. Their biggest success: urophions, a mind flayer version of a roper (a form of living stalagmite). Despite their form, urophions are no different mentally from any other mind flayer... yet are banished to defending paths, desperately lonely as mind flayers go, and with their only reward being the chance to meld with the elder brain upon death (which, as we've already seen, isn't much of a reward).
- The Book of Exalted Deeds had a mind flayer do a Heel Face Turn, but that's kind of an isolated case.
- Going back to the 1st edition, one has to mention the two most famous of the original Mystara villains: Baron Ludwig "the Black Eagle" Von Hendriks, a mad tyrant who cruelly oppresses his people and takes pleasure in the Cold Blooded Torture of his prisoners (to the point where he doesn't even care if the victim is guilty or not, only that he/she screams as much as possible); and his right-hand-man, the aptly-named Bargle the Infamous, a sadistic wizard whose criminal record encompasses the murders of his mentor (all in order to steal his magic books and gain more power) and of Aleena, a female cleric who was the complete inversion of this trope.
- Most of the sorcerers of Geoffrey McKinney's pulp fantasy-inspired Carcosa, a recent supplement for the 1974 edition of D&D, are Complete Monsters to the core. Many of the ninety-six rituals available to sorcerers require them to carry out the often graphic murder and/or torture of human sacrifices, ranging in age from newborn to aged, with four of the rituals in question involving sexual assault, the most infamous one involving an eleven-year-old girl being raped eleven times before being strangled to death with her own hair. The only rituals that do not require a sorcerer to do horrific things to people are the banishment rituals, which are reserved for player sorcerers. Not surprisingly, McKinney offers two versions of the Carcosa setting — the original version for mature audiences and the "Expurgated Edition" which removes the explicit violence and sexual content and is more in line with standard D&D fare.
- Battle Tech's not without its share of Complete Monsters. Chronologically speaking, first there's Stefan Amaris, the Usurper. He's the lovely bundle of joy who overthrew the Star League, executed everyone in the Star League Court, killed everyone in the Vatican before burning the place down, and whole laundry list of deeds including genocide and sterilizing planets. Later on, there's Minoru Kurita, Coordinator of the Draconis C Ombine, who arranged the Kentares Massacre, attempting to kill an entire planet's population. Because a Davion military sniper assassinaterd his father as a legitimate military target. As a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming of sorts, a good number of his troops refused the order. And then there's Katherine Steiner-Davion. Arguably a fine politician when first presented, a combination of author fiat and other factors led up to the revelation that she'd hired an assassin to kill her own mother, her brother, her other brother's girlfriend, and her own boyfriend. All for political gain.
- And that's just scratching the surface. With the exception of Candace, you don't become a Liao without being a Complete Monster. Then there was the Kurita commander who demanded the massacare of the Eridani Light Horse's families and non-combatants in retaliation for the ELH not renewing their contract with Kurita. The Mech Warrior Brotherhoods in Davion Territoriy strayed onto this path also, looting, raping and murdering — because they were Mech Warriors, and therefore automatically better than the people they were victimizing. Hanse Davion too has skirted this line, but is just so damn awesome he's been able to avoid the tag.
Other
- Music example: The eponymous character of The Decemberists "The Rake's Song" relates how he murders his three children after their mother dies in childbirth because he wants a new life, including beating his son to death and burning the body for daring to fight back, and concludes by saying that he doesn't regret it at all.
Web Comics
- Jack gives us Drip Tiberius Rat, the sin of Lust, one of if not the vilest webcomic villains ever, whose lowest point was raping a small child to get revenge on the title character (said child being one of Jack's only friends). The real kicker? It was Drip's son. And he knew it, too.
- Considering that he's almost a word-for-word expy of Violator... yeah, no surprise. Original does it far better, and far cooler, though. He's also a little bit of a self-insert if you've seen Dave's old galleries.
- The rest of the Sins, excluding Sloth, get pretty close. Sure, Jack was a mass murderer who quickly climbed the ranks to successfully driving the entire human species to extinction over a Dead Little Sister, but at least he's somewhat sympathetic compared to most of Hell's denizens. Sloth we just don't see do much.
- Silver, Big Bad of The Law of Purple, masterminded the plot to murder his entire extended family (which happened to be Caligula's Royal Family) in order to erase the stain of his cousin Blue's birth from the bloodline. He's since begun work on "purifying" Caligula as a whole using similar methods.
- Gloog from A Game of Fools
 . Even the Big Bad is pretty horrified by his alternate plans for the Alien Invasion. Not to mention his treatment of poor, poor Neeg.
- Trace Legacy from Two Kinds used to be this before he got amnesia. This page should be proof enough.
- Advisor Toh in Blade of Toshubi enjoys torturing & breaking women.
- There's also Major Kohi, who is by far the most sadistic Feline soldier we've seen so far.
- Interesting example from Mind Mistress. First, we have pedophile and murderer Les Kidman who fits this trope perfectly. Then we find out that Lolerei's grandfather (who appears only in retrospections) hired him as a part of Xanatos Gambit in which he was supposed to kill her. Why? Because Lolerei is mentally challenged and her grandfather considered it a disgrace to the family name.
- Smiling Man in Lightbringer was just Slasher Smile guy with Forthe Evulz elements. But in The Crossoverlord he easily proved he is worth a place on this list. Twice. At last.
- Xykon, the Big Bad from The Order of the Stick, will vary between this and Evilly Affable since his Moral Event Horizons are also Crowning Moments Of Awesome just out of how stylish they can be (such as getting Paladins to kill each other off with a Super Ball with a Brown Note on it) as well as having excellent Shut Up Kirk moments against the Hero Antagonists. A particularly notable acts of monsterhood, you say? How about when, after breaking an elven druid's neck, animating her corpse as a zombie, and trapping her immortal soul in a gemstone, he then ordered one of his ogre minions to eat said zombie while Xykon held the gem up for the trapped soul to watch - just so he could inflict irreversible psychological damage on the soul in a world where death can be undone. He also tried to shoot a Meteor Swarm spell down Vaarsuvius and O-Chul's throats, lucky the Monster in The Dark saved them.
- In the published webcomic Trace, a scientist who became a trace follows this path very shortly after.
Web Original
- The Whateley Universe has three particularly stand-out examples:
- Emil Hammond, a modern-day Josef Mengele who likes to perform horrific experiments on kidnapped mutant children — and believes himself justified because, to him, they're not even human.
- Deathlist, a psychopathic, Nigh Invulnerable cyborg who gets off on widespread carnage and considers the world to owe him a debt of pain. The most horrific thing he's done so far was to kidnap a mutant superheroine, jam a power-neutralizing device into her skull, then hack off her arms and legs and give her to his troops as a sex toy. Then, when she died after more than a month of torture and rape, he impaled her corpse on a pole with a message to one of her former team-mates carved into her chest. Not even his Freudian Excuse (namely, that his parents tried to kill him by crushing him in a garbage compactor) nets him any sympathy after that.
- The really horrifying part: That message to a former teammate? It was a thank you note, for allowing him to do that. Moral Event Horizon for said "hero" right there.
- Hekate, a wizardess supervillain-in-training, whose rap sheet includes using a spell to enslave two of her classmates for a year, during which they were repeatedly raped and otherwise abused, as well as the fact that the athamé she used in the spell was empowered by the ritual sacrifice of two young children. Not only that, but during a magical battle with Fey (after trying and failing to ensnare her in the same enslavement spell mentioned earlier), she summons a trio of iron elementals using the promise of dozens of future sacrifices. To top all that off, she used her athamé to stab Jade in the heart beforehand, just to torment Fey.
- Four: Overclock, who plans to trap super-regenerator in a holographic sim, drive her insane, cause her to accidentally kill someone and maybe blow up her friends too, all so she'll end up in the prison known as ARC Red Complex until she dies... which, since she's a super-regenerator, might be forever. Why? She ate up all of his favorite cereal one morning, before he got any.
- There are a few in Broken Saints: Mars, Lieutenants Charles and Bravado, and Benjamin Palmer.
- In Survival of the Fittest, Cody Jenson starts out as simply a perverted, arrogant asshole. Then he gets hit with a tire iron, and his mind breaks down. Then he kills Adam Dodd's girlfriend, brutally rapes her friend, then kills her too. And those are just his first two kills. Adam Dodd gets his revenge and Cody gets his comeuppance at the end of Version 1, when he kills Cody with a katana and carves the word "Rapist" into his stomach.
- In Book III of Tasakeru, a wolf named Ares is introduced as being one of these: a completely unrepentant rapist. He gets worse. The title of Book III is Soulsnatcher, to give you an idea of how much worse...
- Imperium Nova doesn't have many of these, but Patrice Rey Barte of Gemini managed to earn the title by orchestrating an orbital bombardment of the planet Dnoces 13 that can killed over a billion people because he was bored.
- Alexia from The Return who uses Mind Rape as a recruitment tool, turning unwilling humans into her compliant, loving, daughter Succubi and then gleefully abuses, discards and uses them as Cannon Fodder, after all it doesn't matter is they die she can always make more. Of the Big Bads so far she might not have been the biggest, but certainly the scariest due to her ability and willingness to strike at our heroes' sense of identity and security. She also caused the most pain and suffering. Considered appalling even by the standards of other demons.
- Marrissa from Adam Cadre's Dark Marrissa. Among other things, she beams down half of a baby to punish its parents for suggesting that she take a moment to reconsider genociding a planet for launching a scientific probe at the ship.
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