This page will cover a wick check for the trope ____.
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The Problem:
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What's the setting?
Who is (character name)?
Why are they magnificent?
Why are they a bastard?
Conclusion
CM Template
What's the setting?
Who is (character name), and what have they done?
Do they have any redeeming features?
How bad are they, compared to the work's other villains?
ConclusionTerror Weapon
Missin' Dex
- Amusingly Awful Aim: A character is a terrible shot, and this is Played for Laughs.
- A-Team Firing: Lots of gunfire is exchanged, but nobody gets hit.
- Diving Save: A character tackles another in order to save them from an oncoming threat.
- Dodge the Bullet: A character's enhanced reflexes allow them to physically dodge bullets.
- Hero-Tracking Failure: Characters struggle to lead a target.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Mooks can't shoot for toffee.
- Powerful, but Inaccurate: A weapon packs a mighty punch, but it's difficult to hit anything with it.
- Standard Hollywood Strafing Procedure: Ground-attack aircraft always produce neat lines of impacts on the ground that always miss their targets.
- Taking the Bullet: Someone else gets in the way of the intended target.
R.J.L. JR. CM draft proposal
What's the setting?
Cyberpunk: Fatherhood is a crossover between Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077 that builds off of the simple premise that V, specifically his Corporate Samurai incarnation, is David Martinez's father. As such, when Gloria is critically injured in the car crash that kicked off the events of Edgerunners, David finds a number in her Agent for "Vinny" marked "emergencies only". This causes V to realise, for the first time, that he has a son, and the early chapters follow a Fix Fic plot line where V's corporate resources protect David, Gloria and the rest of Maine's Edgerunner crew from the tragedies that befell them in canon. But dipping a toe into the toxic morass that is the domain of the corpo-rats will always have its consequences: and beyond V having an entire graveyard's worth of skeletons in his closet, it would be an understatement to say that he has some family issues of his own. Enter our candidate.Who is Robert John Linder, Jr., and what has he done?
- Robert John Linder Junior, otherwise known as V's father, is an incredibly powerful Arasaka executive and commander of the corporation's "private security" forces, who serves as the fanfic's Big Bad and Knight of Cerebus, with his introduction massively increasing the stakes for all characters. The bastard son of legendary Rockerboy-slash-terrorist Johnny Silverhandnote and a member of his Groupie Brigade, Robert resented his absentee father and sought to become the polar opposite of him in every way — developing a twisted obsession with order and control to equal if not exceed exceed Silverhand's destructive commitment to freedom from corporate rule.
- Fuelled by spite, Robert began to climb the quite literally cutthroat Arasaka corporate ladder, and along the way he seemingly developed a fixation with forming his own perfect family — one that would never, ever do anything wrong. After marrying the interior designer Eleanor, he would forcibly implant her with a Doll chip that overrides her personality with that of a simpering submissive at his command, leaving her true personality conscious and aware of everything that's happening to her body. And when she tries to escape her torment, she discovers that he's registered her to a "Black Level" Trauma Team Plan, which has involved the implantation of cyberware that won't let her die.
- He would later father a son, Vincent, who he would submit to an utterly torturous upbringing while grooming him to be his successor, which involved implanting a Doll chip in him, too. When V, already taking after his granddad and becoming a Rockerboy while trying to defy his father in any way possible, meets and falls in love with Gloria, Robert is furious as this denies him an opportunity to entrench his position in the Arasaka hierarchy via Altar Diplomacy. He attempts to bribe Gloria to stop dating his son — when that fails, he gets her parents fired from their jobs as retribution, and when that fails and she falls pregnant with his grandson David, he hires a mercenary to force her into a back-alley abortion at gunpoint. She survived only due to luck, being able to push the goon off an overpass to his death, prompting her to go into hiding and a heartbroken V to join Arasaka.
- At some point after an adult V attempted to cut off as much contact with his parents as possible, Robert also fathered Valerie, with whom he took an extremely different direction — no Doll chip, but she's been trained, brainwashed and controlled from birth to act as his personal assassin and spy: forged into a tool to the extent that he thinks nothing of ordering her to pose as a Joytoy in order to try and pry information out of Pilar.
- He is reintroduced to the narrative as having become aware of his grandson's existence (due to V's sudden burst of erratic behaviour) while working in Tokyo. He dispatches mercenaries to monitor David and Gloria, while also informing Eleanor, currently trapped in a Gilded Cage of an apartment back in Night City, that he plans to return. Her confinement is due to her cheating on Robert at some point, as punishment for which he killed her lover while she was Forced to Watch.
- His second major appearance involves him upstaging Faraday, the crooked fixer and Big Bad of Edgerunners, by subjecting him to an utterly horrifying fate: he is brutally tortured at Robert's instruction, and then his own hand, which he bluntly admits his enjoyment of, then sent to the Ax-Crazy Maelstrom gang to be loaded up with as much cyberware as possible, all done while he was fully conscious, leaving behind an utterly broken Empty Shell that's hardly even human. And then Robert puppeteers the body to viciously slaughter Royce, a Malestrom higher-up who's causing problems for the current leader Brick, and his minions, complete with creepy sexual overtones. To make things even worse, it's very strongly implied it's not the only time he's inflicted this exact fate on a horribly unlucky enemy.
- Robert finally makes his move by confronting V and inviting him to dinner, at the end of which he has Valerie Taser her brother and allow Robert to activate his Doll chip. The puppeteered V is then subjected to a full swap-out of his chrome while under sedation only, allowing the 'real' V trapped inside to experience his body being torn apart and rebuilt. And just to play up the Psychological Horror even further, Robert directs that minor cosmetic changes should be made to V's face to make it resemble his, letting his son know he can completely destroy anything that makes him unique at his whim. V eventually manages to break his control due to a clever Dead Man's Switch, but the experience left him an utterly hopeless and despondent wreck both physically and literally.
Does he have any redeeming features?
He's got a Freudian Excuse of having a father who never even acknowledged his existence, but this can be very easily dispensed with — many people are brought up by single parents, and surprisingly enough the vast majority of them do not become power-hungry, cold-blooded corporate despots with nonconsensual surgery fetishes. What's more difficult to consider are his incredibly twisted "family values". There is perhaps some element of protectiveness he has for his descendants, given that he punishes Faraday for insulting his son, but it's difficult to see his perception of his family as anything other than literal Dolls — mannequins to be exploited for his amusement, or pawns to strengthen his power and serve his interests. There is no genuine love displayed towards anyone by this man.How bad are they, compared to the work's other villains?
Conclusion
RobinRounds clearly sought to create a villain who was as vile as possible, and who would make full use of the Cyberpunk universe's technology for his own sick ends, and she certainly succeeded. While he has pretensions of propriety, he is described by his wife as "a horrendous thing that looks like a man" and by Gloria and Jackie as Satan, being a rather disturbing villain who would merit a CM entry.Imperium Ascendant description:
It is the 29th millennium. Dawn is finally breaking on the savagery and strife of Old Night, as the feuding techno-barbarian states of Terra are brought to heel by the nascent Imperium of Man.The being known as Revelation, The Emperor, or any one of a dozen other names prepares to put his grand schemes into motion, setting the stage for a galactic conquest that will, hopefully, return to mankind its long-lost glory.
And in a secret gene-lab beneath the surface of Luna, twenty infant Primarchs — impossible beings far, far beyond human — sleep peacefully, unaware that the foul forces of Chaos are to scatter them across the galaxy, sowing the seeds for a saga of resentment, betrayal and heresy that will tear the galaxy asunder.
