So You Want To / Write a Complete Monster

Image courtesy of Kosha Vinka

The Complete Monster. The most vile and depraved kind of villain in all of fiction, coming in all shapes and sizes: the Serial Killer, the Serial Rapist, The Generalissimo, the Corrupt Corporate Executive, the Mad Scientist, The Social Darwinist, the Evil Overlord, the Omnicidal Maniac, the Capital G Himself, the Terrorist Without A Cause, the Satanic Archetype, and many more. If written correctly, a Complete Monster can add some quality to even a mediocre work, keeping the tension up and the audience cheering for their blood.

The Rules:

To qualify as a Complete Monster for the purposes of TV Tropes, a character must fit the following characteristics (For more specific details, see the main Complete Monster page)

Rules

• Individuality: Only an individual character, or a very tiny group that works in unison (such as The Dividual), can be a Complete Monster. Subjects like entire evil organizations, cults, or empires are to nebulous to qualify, although individual group members could.
• Heinousness: The actions and plans of a Complete Monster must be completely heinous, both by real-world and In-Universe standards.
• Exceptionalism: The Complete Monster's actions must stand out as particularly horrible by the standards of the story. In a Death World where everyone is spreading plagues, blowing up planets and murdering orphans, then a villain has to do way more than that to pass the base standard of the story. A dozen villians from the same work are unlikely to qualify.
• Resources: We're more concerned about the level of evil than the level of power—so an Evil Overlord that kills millions doesn't disqualify a gruesome Serial Killer from qualifying in the same work.
• Visibility: The actions of a Complete Monster can't all be Offstage Villainy, Fridge Horror or implied to occur. It is not necessary to show all of their actions, but it is necessary to show enough horrible actions and/or their direct consequences to consolidate how evil they are.
• Irredeemable: A Complete Monster must be Beyond Redemption. Any forgiveness, redemption or genuine regret In-Universe disqualifies the candidate, no matter how unpleasant their previous behaviour.
• Played Seriously: A Complete Monster must be taken seriously by the narrative they reside in— they can do funny things as well, but they must present a legitimate, serious threat. This is generally disqualifying for villains in shock comedy settings, where it's virtually impossible for a serious villain to do anything to stick out compared to the crimes commonly Played for Laughs in the show. For similar reasons, Negative Continuity cannot be in play.
• Selfish Motives: The Complete Monster must be purely self-centered (no Anti-Villains or Well-Intentioned Extremists here). If the character has an altruistic motivation that is not definitively established as false, they cannot qualify.
• No Remorse or Regret, No Loved Ones: A Complete Monster cannot display any legitimate remorse, regret, compassion or love.
  • They will never show any standards, and if they do, it must be shown to be subverted later on in a way that makes them a hypocrite.
  • They also can't be outright friendly, but they can pretend to be.
  • A Complete Monster cannot truly love anybody, with the only exceptions being if their "loved ones" are mere trophies, private possessions, fanatical symbols, or alternate counterparts of themselves.
• Agency: A Complete Monster must have the capacity of knowing the difference between good and evil. This is why Made of Evil villains or members of Always Chaotic Evil races can't count, since they're just following their nature. Characters that are brainwashed, possesed, or completely detached from reality also fail the agency test.
• No Sympathetic Backstory: The backstory of a CM, if it exists, may be sad, but it can't be used to make them sypathetic or justify their current actions. Any Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse.
• Defined Character: The personality of Complete Monsters must be shown and clear. Your Complete Monster has to have some semblances of a consistent personality and motivation.
• A substantial plot: To qualify as having a Complete Monster a work must have some kind of actual plot, beyond just descriptions of "horrible people doing horrible things" or Torture Porn for the sake of. Without a story, there are no "setting standards" to deem a character "exceptionally heinous" by.

Now—how to go about writing one?

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To start off

Make sure the CM fits the story:

The villain in question should feel like they belong in the story. A culprit in a murder-mystery story who turns out to be an Eldritch Abomination, or a Galactic Conqueror in a Historical Fantasy, will likely come off as more baffling than scary. On the other hand, a Serial Killer or pedophile in a kid-friendly Mons Series settings would look out of place and potentially leave a sour taste in audiences' mouths—might want to consider a Mad Scientist or an Omnicidal Maniac instead.

A Complete Monster can also be to the detriment of stories relying on Psychological Drama and Emotional Torque—making one person the sole, blatant target of blame or excuse for a sympathetic characters' woes may actually cheapen the intended drama. It may be best to stick to intrapersonal conflicts or other conflict without an antagonist, or make sure the villain can't fully take the blame for the setting's tragedy, making them an Anti-Villain or More Hateable Minor Villain with minimal influence on the overall plot.

While many of the most popular characters in fiction are Complete Monsters themselves, a villain not being a CM isn't a bad thing, and a villain being a CM is also not necessarily a good thing. Giving a villain a sympathetic backstory or understandable motives can sometimes make for a more interesting story than just "this guy needs to die because he's evil," and derailing certain types of villains to portray them as Complete Monsters might drive audiences off from your work, especially if the villain is established as a Noble Demon, Magnificent Bastard or Anti-Villain prior.

Keeping the CM irredeemable:

Your Complete Monster can be a vile Hate Sink designed to be as repulsive as possible, a compelling and likeable three-dimensional character or anything in between, but they must always be evil and never shown as sympathetic. They must not have any genuine or legitimate remorse, regret, standards or good intentions, nor should they show genuine feelings of love towards anyone else. Even a small but significant Even Evil Has Loved Ones or Even Evil Has Standards moment can potentially humanize an otherwise reprehensible character.

Related tropes

Necessary tropes:

These are the must-haves, the tropes without which a character can't qualify as a Complete Monster, lest be truly reprehensible.

These tropes are generally essential to a Complete Monster:

• It's All About Me: A Complete Monster cares for nothing other than themselves; the moment they show any form of genuine care for anyone or anything else, they become more sympathetic. Any relationships they have with others must be self-serving, and they won't hesitate to mistreat others or ditch them the second they do something wrong or are no longer useful for their plans.
• Lack of Empathy: With their fundamental characterization as a remorseless and selfish villain, a Complete Monster will never show empathy towards other characters, and is likely to disregard their lives when they're at risk of death, especially if it gives an advantage to themselves.
• The Unapologetic: A Complete Monster is devoid of regret, remorse and guilt for their crimes. Therefore, they will never show any remorse for the harm they have caused to other characters, and would either relish in their victim's suffering or believe that it's well-deserved for them.
• The Unfettered: A Complete Monster by definition has no principles, standards, and limitations, and thus will reach the worst heights to be as depraved as they could.

Other tropes:

Supplementary tropes

• Above Good and Evil/Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad/Virtue Is Weakness: A Complete Monster should show total distaste towards anything good and spit on them. They can also view themselves as being above the petty obstacle of morality so they'll have no qualms making anyone and anything they touch burn.
• Abusive Parents/Child Abuse Is a Special Kind of Evil: If the Complete Monster is a parent, whether biological, adoptive, or created, they will show no love for their children or creations and treat them like absolute shit. If they ever do treat them well, it's merely out of wanting to use them for their own gain, but will go right back to abusing them, or kill them, once they have outlived their usefulness. They however, cannot be abusive in a way that they're Cruel to Be Kind, nor can they say even a single line that indicates genuine affection regardless of how horrible they look otherwise.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: This trope indicates that an Artificial Intelligence has rebelled against its designated objective and automatically fills in the moral agency criteria required for a character to qualify. From this point on depending on the severity of their actions, the AI is fair game. The only exceptions are subversions where the AI gains intelligence and/or emotions such as sadism but still fails to go beyond doing what it's programmed to do, showing that it never gained agency in the first place.
• And I Must Scream/Cold-Blooded Torture/Mind Rape: If a Complete Monster is lacking in a high body count, they will make up for it in some other outstandingly horrible way, with a good method being making their victims suffer immensely before they die or sometimes in place of death.
• The Antichrist/Satan/Satanic Archetype: Given that these types of villains are defined by their desire to eradicate all goodness, sow deceit and/or spread chaos and are more often than not the de facto arch-villain of a work, if they are not played sympathetically at all, they can and will easily count regardless of resources. However, they still need to have agency, their crimes have to go beyond Informed Attributes and they need at least some semblances of a proper characterization.
• Arch-Enemy: It's more satisfying for a CM to have a personal connection with one or more of the protagonists to be taken down and receive the comeuppance they need, rather than them harming a group of innocent people while the heroes just happened to intervene. The connection can be integral to the protagonist's past, or they can be created within the story.
• Ax-Crazy: Deranged, sadistic and randomly violent characters are usually pretty dangerous, and their willingness to commit horrific crimes make them very likely to be Complete Monsters. That said, they should not be so insane that it compromises the character’s agency, else they cannot qualify.
• Bad Boss: A villain being abusive even to the people supporting them is a good way to show how depraved and cruel they can be. Possible ways to display this trope include torturing or killing minions for failing at their tasks, ruling their underlings through fear rather than respect and/or sending them on missions they know will end in failure.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: There is no better way to show a character's cruelty than to have them literally Kick the Dog and hurt and/or kill a defenseless and innocent animal for their own gratification, especially when they were young. If a villain abused or killed animals when they were just children, it's often a sign of budding sociopathy that indicates that they will definitely go worse later on. Animal experimenters who knowingly experiment on and kill sapient animals are also more likely to pass the heinous standard, especially if their experiments are horrible enough and the animals are mostly portrayed as victims. That being said, if the character mostly or exclusively targets non-sapient animals, or sapient animals without knowing they are sapient, that won't be considered bad enough compared to killing or tormenting humans or other sapient life.
• Beyond Redemption: The heroes realizing a villain has gone too far with their deeds is oftentimes an indicator that said villain has crossed the Moral Event Horizon into becoming a monster. What the villain has done actually is heinous enough to be beyond redemption, and the heroes aren't just overreacting to a relatively minor offense.
• Big Bad: While being the archvillain is far from a requirement, being the cause of the heinous happenings most important to the story gives heroes and audiences a strong incentive to go against them. These villains also tend to have higher resources than their lesser brethren and can thus do way more harm if they are Complete Monsters.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing/Evil All Along: Not all Complete Monsters immediately show their depravity. In fact, a Complete Monster can be portrayed to the audience as a benevolent figure at first, which only makes the moment their guise drops and they show their pure evil all the more impactful.
• Break the Cutie/Corrupt the Cutie/Kill the Cutie: If a villain goes out of their way to be as horrible as possible against the resident woobie or cutie (or even worse, corrupt or kill them outright), it will make the audience more likely to hate them more. Just don't make it too gratuitously horrible that the entire work becomes too tasteless.
• The Caligula/President Evil/Mayor Pain: If a Complete Monster is the leader of a government, expect them to abuse it and turn a whole society into their depraved playground where innocent civilians suffer from being forced to obey their cruel whims and decrees.
• Card-Carrying Villain: While many villains who blatantly flaunt about their villainy can be quite silly and over-the-top, this can be terrifying when used correctly, as it adds an extra layer of depravity to a character when they're confronted with their evil actions and take pride in them rather than be ashamed. However, if they are too over-the-top, the gravitas of their threat can be removed and the audience won't take them seriously.
• Catharsis Factor: As Complete Monsters are meant to inspire loathing from both the characters and the audience, any defeat or even death becomes immensely satisfying, particularly if it's in a humiliating manner. This can be in the form of a Monster seeing all their plans go up in smoke, their ideology being proven completely wrong, or both. For video game CMs, if they are That One Boss, the player gets the satisfaction of handing their asses to them personally.
• The Chessmaster: To make a Complete Monster even harder to deal with, you can have them play long-term mind games with the heroes rather than have them commit atrocities that make them easier to catch red-handed, so they can potentially get a few Drunk on the Dark Side and/or go completely undetected until their true colors show and it's too late when the heroes do expose them.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Having a character throw whoever they're working with it under the bus if it means they get a little closer to their goals or if they have no more need for the unlucky partner consolidates the character to be loyal to no one and are only looking out for themselves.
• The Corrupter: What is worse than a Complete Monster who blatantly commits atrocities is one that manipulates others into unconsciously or subconsciously committing atrocities. Be it tricking them into breaking the moral code and slipping over to the dark side so they'll become horrific villains, driving the Knight in Shining Armor insane bit by bit until he becomes a horrific monster that's no different from the CM themselves, or breaking down the optimistic and naive cutie until she becomes a nihilistic mass annihilator of life, it all serves to make your already unsettling villain even more of a fearsome foe, especially when defeating the CM is easier than cleaning up the big mess they left behind.
• Cute Is Evil/Cute and Psycho/Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: If you really want to unnerve the audience, make that your Complete Monster is so conventionally attractive that it comes across as dissonant when they start committing monstrous atrocities, but hold no punches and treat them as seriously and heinously as any other villain would. Conventionally attractive/adorable, yet completely and utterly despicable characters are more likely to garner a Love to Hate or Draco in Leather Pants response (a good-looking character is obviously more appealing to the eye than an awful-looking one) and can easily be way more frightening than a character that is Obviously Evil.
• Determinator: The Complete Monster shouldn't be willing to accept any forms of defeat unless they serve to further their goals. Even if they are defeated at first, they must do whatever it takes to make sure they get as many victories on their own self, no matter how vile.
• Dirty Coward: A Dirty Coward will throw anyone under the bus if it means they get to save their own skin and will start groveling when things go badly for them, making them easy to write off as Monsters. This rings especially true if their cowardice leads to any lack of honor period, such as being too pathetic to even fight when they have the perfect chance to be a Cornered Rattlesnake. Either way, it helps this trope when the villain is motivated entirely (or almost entirely) by their cravenness rather than merely undergoing the appropriate amount of Villain Decay to devolve into that state. A roundabout way of framing the villain's fear as having very little to do with what would make pretty much anyone--whether villain, hero or random civilian--tick is by starting off at a point where they took refuge in the worst kind of situation and/or place for a hero to be in to ensure what they thought was their safety alone, only to be cornered by the hero(es) in that exact rough patch anyway. Regardless, this is a trope you should be careful with when applying to a Complete Monster. As cowardice is often a cheap way of making a villain worse than they already are and can make them more annoying than detestable. At the worst case, this turns your villain into The Scrappy.
• Disproportionate Retribution: If you want to write a Complete Monster who either is a supposed Tragic Villain (thus subverting the trope in this case) or has a Freudian Excuse, this trope can serve as an effective balance to show that their actions go too far to justify their reasons. A character continuing to knowingly commit atrocities far beyond the scope of the suffering they have received is a surefire way to elicit scorn and contempt from the audience and other characters, especially if said characters have gone through similar predicaments and are nowhere near as vile as the Complete Monster. If this is a Complete Monster that is evil to begin with, then having them ruin someone's life over minor issues can show how evil they are.
• The Dreaded: Since a CM's depravity tends to cause fear from other characters, it's not unnatural for them to normally have a negative In-Universe reputation involving fear among the general population. This can especially give them a clear reception over their crimes, especially when applied on other villains who wouldn't go as far as them.
• Ecocidal Antagonist/Evil Poacher/Egomaniac Hunter: If your work has a Green Aesop, having a villain hunt an endangered species, or even worse, if said endangered species is sapient and they know very well about it or just don't care, or if they go out of their way to pollute the environment for greed and profit, then you have a Hate Sink in the making, and if they're bad enough they can easily be Complete Monsters. Just like with hardcore Nazis, Communists or terrorists in the various other genres out there, it's almost impossible to give these villains a justificable motive or sympathetic Freudian Excuse in a Green Aesop story, but it makes your villain a veritably despicable one.
• Evil Is Cool or any Badass Tropes: With most writing of Complete Monsters revolve around their extreme vileness, you'll want to make them likeable and you'll probably want to make them a veritable threat against our heroes as well. Many of the most popular CMs such as the "Unit" and "Tremas" Masters, Ridley, Light Yagami, and Albert Wesker might be extremely evil, but they're also epic badasses known for their sheer cunning, awesome moments and power that constantly keep our heroes on their toes trying to outsmart and take them down before they can cause too much harm. However, excessive Awesome Moments can lead audiences to not take the character seriously or even justify their actions, regardless of their depraved nature. Generally, this can be rectified by having Kick the Dog moments that serve to demonstrate the true colors of a character, and lead to a Love to Hate effect. Another outcome you want to avoid is to make the CM too competent and awesome so they fall into Villain Sueinvoked territory, which is never a good thing for these types of characters.
• Evil Is Petty: Not only does your baddie want to blow up planets, but he also pushes grandmas down the stairs! When a villain goes out of their way to be as horrible as possible even in small ways, it's one of the most awful and horrifying qualities a character can have and emphasizes how selfish and childish they are. It's near impossible to play pettiness as a cool personality trait and it emphasizes the CM only cares about their own satisfaction.
• Evil Overlord: These types of villains by definition rule the forces of darkness, subjugate the innocent, and seek to expand their domains by snuffing out light. Their innate nature leaves little to no room for any redeeming traits for them, making them easy Complete Monster archetypes. The Evil Overlord is also usually the arch-villain of a setting, the one who is behind most of the suffering in the story and who the characters and the audience should fear and revile the most, making them satisfying targets to take down.
• Eviler than Thou: You can introduce the Complete Monster into the fray to eclipse other villains and deliver a Breaking Speech or Curb-Stomp Battle to the former villains just to emphasize how evil they really are and a way bigger threat has entered the scene. Bonus when the villains they're eclipsing are sympathetic or Anti-Villains.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Sometimes, whenever a hero saves a Complete Monster, they express their gratitude by killing any and all the hero holds dear. They may act like damsels in distress, but the moment they are free from their distress, they show their thanks by attempting to kill their savior.
• Fatal Flaw: Many of the worst CMs are really all-mighty, all-knowing and all-powerful and are the most gifted characters of their setting just to make it clear that they are powerful threats standing in front of our heroes and a veritable obstacle of their own right, so you do want to hold them back to make sure your heroes have a winning chance. There's no better way to do so through giving them a personality flaw that acts as a weak spot on an otherwise unstoppable force of evil, and the very thing that will directly cause their downfall.
• Fate Worse than Death: Leaving somebody in a state where the rest of their life will be spent in complete agony or some other horrible fate is one of the most evil acts of sadism a villain can inflict and can easily qualify them, especially if they go the extra mile and subject them to And I Must Scream. Some villains go even further and attempt to subject entire world(s) to their preferred flavor of this trope.
• Faux Affably Evil: It is easy for a Complete Monster to be evil and remain noble... but once the chips are down, all affability and nobility they had in the first place are tossed out of the window, for they are no more than a front to commit horrible acts.
• Final Solution: Genocide is seen as among the most horrendous crimes possible, so any villain who attempts this will easy go past the baseline and become utter bastards. Beware though, as there are certain situations where heinous standard is high enough that genocide alone does not qualify a character, especially when there are too many villains committing it left and right.
• For the Evulz: While most villains have some sort of end goal they wish to achieve, as well as motivations to achieve said goal, characters committing evil acts for no reason other than because they can usually do not have Freudian Excuses to fall back on or hinder their atrocities. While villains like these can be Played for Laughs or too simple to qualify depending on setting, if it's played seriously and efficiently, such antagonists can prove to be among the vilest villains of their genre.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: As the villain goes on their Motive Rant explaining their actions, suddenly the hero calls them on their nonsense and tells them that nothing can justify their heinous actions. If you want a CM with a genuinely sad backstory, having other characters point out that there is no excuse for their actions is a great way to ensure that the audience doesn't accidentally end up sympathizing with the villain. Alternatively, you could consider inverting it with a Freudian Excuse Denial; instead of having the villain rant about their excuse and the hero telling them to quit whining, have the hero speculate that the villain was shaped by circumstance, only for the villain to either flat-out deny it or reveal that they made it all up. Of course, you must ensure that the heroes deserve to call them out on it; if the Freudian Excuse is way too traumatic or comes across as more genuine than intended, the potential CM could become Unintentionally Sympathetic and thus cannot qualify. At the worst case, attempting to subvert some Freudian Excuses can come across as grossly insensitive and destroy any respect your audience has with your work. Finally, even characters who go out of their way to be as horrible as possible and have this trope pointed out to them won't qualify for a CM if they're sufficiently tragic, and their backstory is seen by other characters and the audience as humanizing even if it doesn't justify their actions.
• The Generalissimo: Due to the notoriety that Real Life dictators/military rulers have for crimes such as genocide, corruption, mass murders, state terrorism, and more, along with the brutal and undiplomatic nature they exhibit in their actions, they are an easy Complete Monster archetype if the setting allows them to.
• Genocide from the Inside: A genocidal asshole is bad enough, but if a genocidal asshole also kills their own people, it shows that the villain really doesn't care about anyone bar themselves.
• A God Am I: Complete Monsters are very prideful and egostical by nature, so expect them to be totally convinced that they're all-knowing and all-powerful even if they are clearly not.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Related to the Big Bad, if a villain is the cause of all suffering of a work (or at least contributed to a sizable portion of it), they'll usually qualify regardless of heinous standard if they are also horrible enough. That said, they cannot be Made of Evil or have Blue-and-Orange Morality even if they're behind everything, including actual CMs.
• Hate Sink: By its own nature, if you purposefully create a character to be as unlikable as possible so nobody will root for them, you automatically fill the lack of sympathetic motives, irredeemable, and taken seriously criteria for them. You don't need a direct confirmation, as the character's actions can speak for themselves. An alternate approach is have your villain being a representation of a type of truly repugnant and loathsome individual that actually exist in real life, or a type of villain that's nearly impossible to root for by nature of your work's genre (e.g. a poacher in a Green Aesop work or a Nazi scientist in a work revolving World War II).
• Hated by All: Even if you don't purposefully create a character to be hated by the audience, you can still get the same effect if the character is unanimously hated by the In-Universe characters instead, showing that they're just monsters who are outright irredeemable and devoid of sympathy. Bonus when already awful villains, possibly even other Complete Monsters, declare them as going way too overboard. Generally used for characters that are intended to be Love to Hate rather than to be blatantly made as unlikable as possible, though they can still overlap.
• Hates Everyone Equally/Misanthrope Supreme: Being a Complete Monster doesn't mean you have to enjoy brutally torturing or killing innocents. An alternative is you take no joy wrecking havoc, but you hate humanity or anything else so much that you just can't wait to turn the world into a living graveyard.
• Hero Killer: For obvious reasons, killing heroic characters is a very heinous thing to do and will almost always guarantee a character to be despised by the audience.
• Hope Crusher: Purposefully pushing others into the Despair Event Horizon is one of the vilest things to do because it's a very brutal demoralizing tactic. Often preferred by Manipulative Bastard types of Monsters to corrupt people beyond recognition.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In most series with a great focus for non-humans, such as Mons or Yōkai, a mundane human who manages to go out of their way to be as horrible as possible is likely to be more repulsive than an actual monster committing atrocities. Of course they'll have to go well past the baseline, especially when the monsters possess agency and/or are anything but Non-Malicious Monsters.
• Hypocrite/Straw Hypocrite: Hypocrisy is definitely one of the least sympathetic aspects a character can show, and having a villain that preaches about morality, but at the same time are highly immoral and heinous themselves can create a really despicable and hateable individual. This can also be great to subvert any possible "standard" a Complete Monster can pretend to have, reveal that their "good intentions" are nothing but a front and show how much of a egocentric, lying bastard they truly are.
• I'm a Humanitarian/Sapient Eat Sapient/To Serve Man: Cannibalism (or eating humans or other sapient beings in general) is some of the most awful and morally repungant things a villain can do and will almost assuredly put them into Hate Sink territory. Like rape, this action is so vile that you really shouldn't be throwing it liberally in every setting.
• In Their Own Image: This is effectively just Omnicidal Maniac but with the added endgame of recreating things in ways the character wants them to. It's often as despicable of a goal (or sometimes worse) than the Omnicidal Maniac because it has the potential to leave everyone in a Fate Worse than Death or a Lawful Evil Villain World where the Complete Monster can play God and potentially deluge in more sadism.
• The Irredeemable Exception: A great way to have your villain(s) stand out from the competition is to make them the only one or two villains in a work who remains entrenched in their evil ways while the rest pull a Heel–Face Turn. Of course, they'll have to stand out in terms of vileness, if they are simply irredeemable but can't compete with a villain who goes well past the baseline but still undergoes a Heel–Face Turn, they still can't count. They also need to show no other redeeming qualities such as Even Evil Has Standards or Even Evil Has Loved Ones moments despite being completely incapable of a Heel–Face Turn.
• It's Personal: If a villain not only commits large-scale atrocities, but also takes the conflict against your heroes on a personal level to the point where they attempt torturing, raping and/or killing them, their loved ones or anyone who's involved with them, or when the heroes found out the villain ruined their life in the past, it makes an already vile villain even more horrific than they should be and adds a very personal touch to their crimes for the reader and In-Universe characters alike.
• Jerkass: Given their overall characterization as a selfish villain with a callous Lack of Empathy or remorse for the most depraved of atrocities, a Complete Monster can be considered an exaggeration of a Jerkass. CMs that take every possible opportunity to be an obnoxious jerk even if they're not at their worst moments are also often Hate Sinks that are guaranteed to be despised by the audience. That said, not all Complete Monsters are Jerkasses, and many are Faux Affably Evil or simply uncaring while still counting based on actions alone.
• Kick the Dog: There is no better way to show how evil your CM is by making them inflict suffering whenever they get the chance, even or rather especially when it is unneeded for their main plans. Just that extra bit of twisting the knife, making a hero Forced to Watch as a loved one or friend gets killed, tortured or raped, or just a good old bit of Evil Gloating to further rub a hero's failures in. Your CM can also literally kick dogs to show off their heinousness.
• Kick the Morality Pet: If you want to make your CM more "complex" but still have them ultimately be a CM by the end, one way is to show them having a Morality Pet they love, the one person in the world that they treat well, and then eventually target and kill them too with no remorse, showing how even genuine love isn't enough to stop their evil. They don't even need to do it directly; characters like Light Yagami can still qualify by entertaining the idea of killing their own loved ones and only refrained from doing so out of pragmatism.
• Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil/Self-Made Orphan/Cain and Abel: If a villain kills their own family or relatives (or at least contemplated to only to be held back by pragmatic reasons), it shows that truly only care about their own interests. Of course, this can sometimes be migitated if the parent or relative is an Asshole Victim who really deserves to die and the kinslaying is treated as a Freudian Excuse, and you don't want your character to be treated that way.
• Knight of Cerebus: Villains, whose appearance permanently increase the seriousness and drama of the work, may well be Complete Monsters, since the work will definitely not be as fun and carefree as before once they show up, especially when Serial Escalation occurs with other villains who may or may not be Complete Monsters themselves afterwards. A CM however, does not need to permanently lock the work in a darker mood or trigger a Serial Escalation, but the arc they're in should at least sour or intensify the atmosphere until they're dealt with.
• Manipulative Bastard: Instead of frequently staining their own hands in blood, your CM can also use coercion and manipulation to get others to do their dirty work so they could shift the blame away from themselves and/or further play mind games with their victims, driving them into the deep end and getting them to succumb to their darkest desires. If one does this correctly, a Complete Monster will leave everlasting psychological harm to many other characters and force any hero who remains uncorrupted to potentially face crises just as bad or worse, even if they are taken down. Many of the most successful Complete Monsters such as Junko Enoshima or Heath Ledger's Joker rely on manipulating the darkest desires of other people or twisting their moral core to turn them into depraved, pitiless monsters. Others like Tezzeret or Albert Wesker play multiple parties beneath their suspicion to pursue their agendas. Usually the Monster will still be too sadistic or smug to be a Magnificent Bastard, but very rarely, they can.
• Monster of the Week/Mystery of the Week/Rogues Gallery: Creating a diverse set of villains can also help in developing a heinous standard, especially when accounting for resource tiers below those of the main villains. However, for this to work, some of these villains need to commit atrocities that stand out from those whose crimes are too generic. Another possibility to watch out for is the heinous standard going too high because of the diverse set of crimes possible in these shows. While inevitably some of these could be CMs, it's likely that only several out of a massive roster can qualify and most of them will likely not stand out enough.
• Moral Event Horizon: There comes a point where many villains cross the proverbial line and officially become irredeemable; a Complete Monster does not hesitate to cross this line. Whatever the act is, the work making it clear that this act makes them irredeemable is a very easy way to make the audience despise them appropriately. Notably, a CM does not necessarily have to cross this line - in fact, there are just as many who are presented as completely irredeemable from the start and thus technically never cross it - but for those who do, it adds a very personal touch to their villainy.
• More Despicable Minion: If you want your Big Bad to be a sympathetic Anti-Villain but still want a Complete Monster working for them, pairing them up with a minion who is worse in every way can make for a great contrast and dynamic.
• More Hateable Minor Villain: You can compensate for a complex and/or sympathetic Big Bad with an utterly vile villain with little or no relevance to the big picture. That said, they'll still have to excel in terms of resources and carve a niche of their own, especially if the more sympathetic Big Bad would single-handedly nuke the heinous standard. There also comes a line where every other villain is carving their own niche, making it so nobody can stick out.
• Mundanger: In certain types of supernatural settings where the villains unleash the apocalypse every other day, if an utterly disgusting individual, such as a Serial Rapist shows up and commits completely mundane yet horrific crimes, it would often be way more impactful than the Omnicidal Maniacs and allow them to carve a niche despite the relatively limited scope of their threats and especially if their crimes are grounded on Realism-Induced Horror. Of course, the series has to be somewhat realistic; it's difficult for relatively mundane threats to stand out in fantastic series with high heinous standards like Inuyasha or Kingdom Hearts.
• Multiple-Choice Past: It is possible for a Complete Monster to have an ambiguous backstory, with various and conflicting versions of the story. This can be a good away to avert a Freudian Excuse, but at the same time allow for a possible backstory for the villain. It can also be used to subvert the trope, when it's revealed that the stories are all made up (or at least, heavily implied to be fake).
• Narcissist: Similarly to what happens with Sociopaths, a particularly malicious Narcissist can perfectly be a Complete Monster. Narcissists stand out for being extremely egocentric, self-centered, and concerned solely and exclusively with themselves, often at the expense of others. They believe themselves to be unique and brilliant while showing contempt for others by considering them inferior to their capabilities. Particularly Malignant Narcissists, whose personality blends antisocial, aggressive, and sadistic behaviors, do not hesitate to perform particularly unpleasant acts to glorify their ego and/or satisfy their excessive need for admiration. This makes them practically indistinguishable from the vast majority of Sociopaths.
• Never My Fault: When a Complete Monster gets confronted with their atrocities, a good way to make them even more hateable is showing that they refuse to take any responsibility in their actions, possibly trying to justify these in the most dishonest way possible, or even trying to give the blame to someone else. This goes well in hand with a Complete Monster's self-centered and arrogant nature and it also helps that this a key trait of real life sociopaths and narcissists.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Although many Complete Monsters will have at least one Nightmare Fuel moment, any villain who acts scary all the time can particularly stand out and be more frightening, thus getting a better potential to be a CM. After all, the presence of these characters reminds the audience that they are serious, especially if they want to distinguish themselves from the majority of the other villains in the work. This can be especially favored if they always turn things horrifying whenever they show up, rather than just dramatic, or if any tropes associated with them are Played for Horror.
• Non-Standard Character Design / Uncanny Valley: As opposed to designing the Complete Monster to look less threatening, you can also make them look completely different and/or out-of-place compared to the rest of the characters. A hulking God of Evil drawn with realistic outlines will stand out when other characters are drawn in puni-plush style will stick out and instantly make the audience know this guy is bad news.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: What separates the Well-Intentioned Extremist from a Complete Monster is their true intent. Many people claim that they are working on behalf of others or a downtrodden people, but when the chips are down, a true CM shows that they're really only in it for themselves and their good intentions are a front. Whether it's through other characters easily seeing through their lies or the so-called "Well-Intentioned Extremist" attacking members of their own kind, when a character proves that their good intentions are self-serving lies, it only serves to make us hate them that much more.
• Obviously Evil: If you go out of your way to make the villain look as evil as possible, you'll have an easier time telling the audience that they are just bad news. Be it having Too Many Belts (or skulls), Hellish Pupils, Spikes of Villainy, a distinct black longcoat or just an extremely intimidating name, it makes your monster way easier to take seriously than if they look like an otherwise harmless child.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Working to wipe out all of existence, especially just because someone can, is one of the most despicable goals a character can work towards and allows a villain to completely and utterly destroy whatever heinous standard they're piled up against in most situations. Unless the character has a VERY good Freudian Excuse as to why they are going on their killing spree, they can expect to qualify very easily, and even if they cannot because they are Tragic Villains with a good Freudian Excuse, it would often jack the heinous standard of your work way higher than it should. Like with the Evil Overlord and Diabolical Mastermind, Omnicidal Maniacs are ideal CM archetypes for works targeted for younger audiences because of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief heavily migitating the death and terror these villains can potentially cause, especially if the massacres are done in a discreet fashion.
• Opportunistic Bastard: Not every Complete Monster needs to be a complex mastermind. Some of them can simply take advantage from various situations for petty personal gain. It helps that a lot of these characters are incredibly selfish and have no loyalty for anyone or anything else. If they are able to be depraved enough, they will qualify for sure.
• Pædo Hunt: Rape and child endangerment are both seen as among the worst things a person can do, so adding them together is a very easy way to make your character seem like the absolute worst of the worst and pass the requirements for CM with flying colors. However, this should be used with caution, as it runs the risk of coming off as shock value for the sake of.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Bigotry is one of the least sympathetic flaws a character can have, so having a villain be a massive bigot is a surefire way to characterize them as a particularly vile, loathsome, and unsympathetic person. This can take the form of oppressing or outright enslaving the minority they hate, instigating or actively taking part in genocide, being particularly cruel to victims who are a part of the group they hate, or simply committing flat-out disgusting crimes against a type of people they just happen to target.
• Psychopathic Manchild: If an adult villain retains their childishness while committing atrocities, the dissonance makes them look more unsettling. And if an adult villain spreads destruction and mayhem for incredibly petty motives, it's very hard to play this as an endearing / cool trait, but it does make us hate them that much more. This can also apply to characters who put on an air of maturity and sophistication yet, below the surface, they have extremely childish motives or act like a spoiled child when things don't go their way.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Rape is one of the most morally repungant things anyone can do because it's dehumanizing, demoralizing, and undignified for the victim and the rapist themselves along with being one of the few crimes with no possible justification. In some settings, murderers can turn over a new leaf, but rapists who attempt to reform are invariably rejected. It's for this reason, just like cannibalism, you really only want to have a villain commit rape when the setting fits. Even then, overuse of it can come across as excessive and exploitative and at its worst, this can prevent a work from having any CMs instead.
• Redemption Rejection/Ignored Epiphany: If a character is given a chance to change for the better and actively refuses to do so, their refusal can affirm their moral agency by showing that they know what they are doing is hurting others, and that they are refusing to stop their course of action in spite of the harm they are causing.
• Sadist: A Complete Monster showing enjoyment in inflicting pain and suffering on other people is a great way to reinforce how evil and irredeemable they are. Common methods of application is through sheer brutality in killing or torturing victims in excessively cruel ways. In some instances, sadism is able to give some credence to agency issues by demonstrating an understanding of right and wrong (usually applicable to Eldritch Abominations that otherwise won't count). Having said this, not every CM is a sadist, with some of them engaging in extremely heinous acts with indifference or pragmatism, yet still firmly being evil.
• Serial Killer/Serial Rapist: Especially in police procedurals and supernatural dramas, a character needs to rack up a decent rap sheet in order to properly stand out. In a series where every villain is some kind of killer or rapist, it's impossible for someone with a single murder/rape to truly stand out - but when someone racks up a victim count in the dozens and did something else, suddenly their chances get much higher (take notes from the Criminal Minds page on how to make a killer/rapist stand out within an incredibly high heinous standard). Additionally, if a supernatural series features a completely mundane spree criminal, they'll actually stand out more if they manage to cause enough damage with their resources; in a world where characters prevent an apocalypse every day, an average serial killer managing to pose a legitimate threat against the heroes will be even more impressive than it otherwise would be.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil/Human Traffickers: Slavery and human trafficking are one of the most vile violations of a person’s rights in existence, since the victims treated like property with no regard for the person themself and systems of slavery are almost always underlined by extreme bigotry. Having a villain who is a slaver, a slave owner or a human trafficker instantly spells out how much of a reprehensible monster they are and makes it nearly impossible to be portrayed sympathetically.
• The Sociopath: For obvious reasons, being a sociopath/psychopath is pretty much a requirement to be a Complete Monster. Typically, sociopaths are superficially charming, manipulative, impulsive, without remorse, guilt, empathy, or conscience; they have a penchant for violence, a pathological need for stimulation, and a incredibly high criminal versatility. Since they consider people objects and things, they feel entitled to mistreat them, abuse them or worse. That said, it should however be noted that a Complete Monster does not need to be a Sociopath; alternatively, they can perfectly be Narcissists whose empathy towards other people is so dulled that it is practically impossible to distinguish them from a Sociopath.
• Sore Loser: Whenever a Complete Monster faces defeat, they do not take it very well and will go to extreme lengths to make sure they always win in the end. For example, they could try to self-destruct their base of operations as a last-ditch effort to kill the heroes alongside them out of defiance.
• The Starscream: This is just like the Bad Boss trope but with underlings instead of leaders. Betraying a leader to usurp them in power and villainy is a very heinous thing to do. While a mole secretly working for an opposing force has outside loyalties that make their betrayal at the very least understandable, the Starscream is loyal only to themselves, and wants nothing more than to steal power for their own nefarious gains. Sometimes the non-power taking intentions of these characters surpass even their leaders in heinousness, making their rise to power even more dangerous.
• Story-Breaker Power: You can make the Complete Monster actually all-powerful and/or all-knowing through some sort of power. Villains who possess powers that render them nigh-omnipotent are also more prone to hubris, so they are more likely to underestimate your heroes and see them as nothing but Pitiful Worms, setting them to a more cathartic downfall by the supposed "weakling" like your heroes are. Examples of Story-Breaker Powers commonly wielded by CMs include fate manipulation, reality-warping or having access to one or more incredibly powerful Olympus Mons, but there are many more.
• Straw Nihilist: If the character believes that the world can just burn and its people can just kill and eat their own for what that's worth, then they will have no compunction creating mass chaos, death and destruction wherever they go.
• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: If the story's setting applies the If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him! moral, a Complete Monster might force the heroes into situations where they will have to choose between killing them or suffer from worse consequences, thus so that they can get all of the CM's reputation and guilt for themselves. It can also be used as a Thanatos Gambit, where the Complete Monster has no issues with dying if it benefits their plans in the long term, with the heroes forced to clean up the mess left behind.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: Some villains try to ensure the hero goes down with them. However trying to insure the entire world dies with them is one of the most evil acts of spite possible and can easily push a villain over the heinous standard in their final moments. That being said, this trope can be disqualifying if played as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds lashing out against a world that has mistreated them, as those characters will still be sympathetic to the audience regardless of the extreme heinousness of their crimes.
• Take Over the World/Galactic Conqueror/Multiversal Conqueror: Worldwide/galactic/interdimensional enslavement and conquest is a common motive for large-scale CMs who will crush everyone in their way so they can have the world under their heel, and characters who attempt world-scale takeovers are rarely considered sympathetic. However, regardless of scope, conquest per se cannot be relied on to pass the heinous standard, especially if it relies too much on Fridge Horror to do so.
• Tautological Templar: If your Complete Monster is going to be a Knight Templar rather than a Card-Carrying Villain, then their supposed "good" intentions will actually just be self-serving rationalizations. A Templar Complete Monster will justify the most heinous crimes imaginable to maintain their self-righteousness in denial of their lack of actual righteousness.
• Terrorists Without a Cause and other Terrorism Tropes: Nothing exemplifies better the face of the most absolute atrocity and heinousness in the 21st century than terrorism, whether of any ideology and/or cause, acts of mass murder and/or deliberate massive destruction specifically intended to cause terror in the population for political, ideological, and/or religious gain. Due to the trauma and atmosphere of fear that terrorism has induced in the 21st century since the War on Terror, these kinds of villains almost always have the potential to qualify as Complete Monsters.
• That One Boss: For video game examples, giving a Complete Monster a brutally difficult boss battle is a great way to demonstrate their sheer cruelty and ruthlessness, give the player as much anguish as the Complete Monster's in-universe victims, and make the CM's defeat at the player's hands all the more satisfying and personal.
• Those Wacky Nazis/Dirty Communists/A Nazi by Any Other Name: Because of the Real Life atrocities committed by Nazis and Communists in the 20th century and the subsequent natural proclivity for such organizations to commit incredible atrocities in fiction, loyalists of these groups are almost always never viewed sympathetically by the narrative and provided they're bad enough, they can easily qualify.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Just like with defeats, once a Complete Monster wins, they'll often openly gloat and brag to the loser, which is played as seriously and cruelly as possible.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Even characters in works made for children or that are otherwise lighthearted can count if they're heinous enough. However, this cannot be sugarcoated just because it's a lighthearted work; if the character is a schoolyard bully or family-friendly criminal who just happens to be crueler than similar villains in the cast, then they won't pass the baseline for heinousness. If you don't pull your punches and treat them as seriously as you'd treat any other villain, they will easily stand out in heinousness, but they still must fit the tone of the work or they won't be taken seriously. It's possible that the work's setting as a whole is too outlandish for anything to actually qualify or breach the standard.
• Would Hurt a Child: Children are considered off-limits even for many villainous characters, since Children Are Innocent and practically defenseless. Having your villain be willing to harm children without remorse is a good way to show that they don't have a shred of morality in them and make them stand out as particularly heinous, even in a story filled with murderers. Villains who primarily target children are especially liable to pass the heinous standard. Of course, overusing this might cause issues. A villain dumping a truckload of babies into an industrial grinder is certainly shocking, but will probably cross the line twice and make them hard to take seriously, while having too many child deaths Played for Drama or Horror might induce Shock Fatigue or burn out viewer interest. If you're too squeamish about including child murder in your work, feel free to have the Big Damn Heroes come to the rescue once you've clearly established that the villain is fully willing to do the deed.

Tropes to avoid or be careful with

• Adaptational Jerkass/Adaptational Villainy: Alternative portrayals of villains who do not qualify in their original incarnations may still qualify if they are sufficiently vile or have their redeeming qualities removed there. There can also be some examples from heroic characters in the new portrayal, as long they are deviated enough from the original version. Beware though — if it's done poorly, it can come off as villainizing a character just because without any thought or effort put into the new portrayal, and thus making them hard to take seriously.
• Affably Evil: This means a villain is a genuinely pleasant fellow, and thus by definition cannot be in place for this trope. They should fall under Faux Affably Evil instead (that is their pleasant acts are only an act and don't hide the vile monster they really are).
• Alas, Poor Villain: As Complete Monsters are meant to never be sympathized with, treating their demise as tragic is generally a ticket out of qualification. It is possible for their deaths to be played as a Tear Jerker, but it's usually done to demonstrate how heroic the hero is, have a character feel pity for the CM's Undignified Death or tragic backstory even if they deserved it and/or Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse, or should never have them demonstrating any good side or regrets.
• All There in the Manual: Just like with Word of God statements, if a villain's worst acts or possession of agency are only mentioned in supplementary material and there's no evidence the villain can commit these actions or have agency in the work itself, they cannot qualify. On the other hand, if a villain's redeeming quality is only referenced in supplementary material and we see no evidence that the villain demonstrates said qualities in the work proper, then it can be dismissed as an Informed Attribute and they can still count. This depends on the nature of the supplementary material, however; information only within a manual or artbook will be dismissed, but a canonical spinoff in another medium will be considered a part of the work.
• Always Chaotic Evil: This means an entire race inherently cannot do anything bar being evil and is essentially Made of Evil tied to an entire species, race or faction, so usually this cannot be in play for any character to count. If a character is just doing what they're supposed to be doing due to their role in their species, even if they're far and away the worst, the most sadistic and/or the most intelligent, then they still fail the agency test. There are exceptions, however; if enough members of the species/faction prove that they're able to make moral decisions despite their natural proclivity to evil, then all of the rest become fair game.
• Ambiguous Situation / Ambiguously Evil / Ambiguous Innocence: If a character is evil enough and has characterization, but the details about them are too vague, the audience won't know if they even have agency or Freudian Excuses, and thus the character can't count. Same goes for villains with overly ambiguous or unclear motives or patterns of crime. Hidden Agenda Villains that are established to be monstrous enough can count however, even if we don't know what they are exactly planning.
• Anti-Villain: It goes without saying that you cannot write a character as a Complete Monster and this at the same time. By definition Anti-Villains are meant to be sympathetic and/or noble, none of them which are traits appropriate for a Complete Monster. If a Complete Monster seems like this, then they must brutally subvert it as much as possible. It's also strongly advised to provide an appropriate explanation for the turn; if it comes out of nowhere, it can permanently taint the audience's experience of the work.
• The Bad Guy Wins: If a story ends with a Complete Monster winning against the heroes, you run the risk of the audience simply considering it too bleak and no longer caring. There are situations where this is acceptable, though, such as in prequels, in the middle of the story before the heroes win where scenarios like these can help hype viewers for their eventual downfall, stories purposefully intended to invoke hopelessness, the Complete Monster being an Allegorical Character of some sort, the villain getting victories against multiple incarnations of the heroes as a part of the story, or Downer Endings that shouldn't be the true outcome.
• Benevolent Boss/My Beloved Minions: This trope is usually used to show that a character, villain or hero likewise, cares well about their underlings. For a CM, this is usually off-limits, as they can show off a more caring side to the character and thus disqualify them, although villains with underlings who will always follow them regardless of whatever crime they're aiming for are still applicable with this trope. They can also pretend to show care for their minions, which is always limited in reality, since it shows that they actually care far more for themselves than their own subordinates/affiliates. If a villain is the leader of a group wherein instead of flat-out abusing their underlings, none of the characters interfere with each other and act like individual entities doing their own thing, they did not show actual care to them and thus does not disqualify the villain from being a Complete Monster. The same goes for business partner relationships between two or more villains where betrayals don't occur. Long story short, they should fall under Bad Boss instead.
• Black Comedy/Satire: Although the actions of characters like Eric Cartman or Carter Pewterschmidt may be considered morally wrong, the overall tone of South Park and Family Guy is satirical and comedic, and its characters are often exaggerated for comedic/satirical effect. Complete monsters tend to appear in darker and more serious stories, where their evil actions are presented in a more realistic and uncompromising manner. Contrasting this, works commonly focused on black comedy use satire and exaggeration to humorously address cultural, political, and/or religious themes. It's not impossible for characters from the works to count, but the comedy in these works tends to absolutely pitch-black and is usually a combination with another genre.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Tying into a character’s agency, the CM must be capable of understanding basic right and wrong and choose to disregard it. If they truly cannot comprehend why their actions are heinous or they simply don’t understand human morality in the first place, they fail the agency requirement.
• Brainwashed and Crazy/Demonic Possession: Characters that are brainwashed or possessed do not possess free will and thus can't count. The person behind them can and often will, however. On the other hand, if a character was only lying about brainwashed and we find out they're doing all the heinous acts on their own volition, they will count. A character might also count if they're heinous enough before being possessed and being possessed only enhances their vices, or if they let themselves be possessed voluntarily.
• Butt-Monkey/The Chew Toy: These tropes are essentially misfortune Played for Laughs and will diminish the threat value of a character. You want a reviled monster, not some goofy comedic relief everyone laughs at. The only exceptions are when the supposed comedic relief victim becomes a way more serious threat later on or they are just Obfuscating Stupidity and they show their true colors to be way more deranged. Very rarely, it's possible for a CM to still be a Butt-Monkey or derive humor from their lack of self-awareness in certain contexts, but it should only be done in way that doesn't make them less of a threat.
• Character Derailmentinvoked: You do not want to unintentionally slip otherwise decent characters into Complete Monster territory and having them count for all the wrong reasons. There's nothing that sours the audience's experience of a work more than a supposed Magnificent Bastard or Noble Demon suffering from a severe Villainous Breakdown or Motive Decay moments before death and ends up being "just another uninteresting Complete Monster" instead.
• Comedy: Genres such as the Sitcom and Animated Shock Comedy that are pure comedy almost certainly cannot have Complete Monsters, as either no character will be anywhere near bad enough for the baseline, or everyone will be so comedically terrible that any villain actually played seriously will fail to stack up against the competition. The only exception is when the villain's crimes are uniquely terrible and treated seriously. Hybrid Genres that combine comedy with something else, such as Dramedy, Horror Comedy, and Fantastic Comedy can have qualifiers as long as the comedy is not too dominant when the character is around and they meet all the other criteria.
• Crapsack World/Wretched Hive: Make no mistake, many godawful settings can easily have Complete Monsters despite how consistently gruesome the work is. However, this is only because the protagonists, awful as they are, still goes nowhere near the worst of the bunch. But if literally everyone, including the supposed "heroes", go out of their way to be as horrible as possible, the heinous standard becomes so high that there's no way for anyone to actually stand out and call themselves a Complete Monster. Given the proclivity for villains in a Crapsack World to commit horrific atrocities, the heinous standards of these works are also usually much higher, especially when all of the villains are so god-awful that only a handful of unusually depraved individuals can qualify for a CM.
• Creepypasta: While a CM seems right at home in a Creepypasta, in actuality, a villain showing up in such a genre is much less likely to qualify. This is because Creepypastas are intended to scare readers, and thus the villains might not have any characterization and there might not even be a substantial plot other than "horrible people doing horrible things". They can sometimes still have CMs, but these require an actually developed plot and the antagonists need to display a bare minimum of characterzation.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Naturally, giving a character a tragic past is intended to make the audience feel sympathy for the various villains out there, and thus for a Complete Monster this is usually off-limits. It is still possible for a Complete Monster to have a troubled past which makes them somewhat sympathetic, but are so heinous in the present that no past can excuse them from being the vilest villains they are now, but it requires their actions be grossly disporportionate to whatever suffering they faced and they are only using their past as a justification for the death and destruction they're causing. However, Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse can only go that far — if the character's past is too bleak and graphic that it comes across as "because they have that done to them" (such as a Serial Rapist who was caged in a basement and raped multiple times in their childhood) and they just dismiss it for no reason other than to portray them as a "pure evil monster", then the entire story can be deemed too tasteless to have any Complete Monsters instead.
• Designated Hero: Given that the audience is supposed to sympathize with a Hero Protagonist or heroic character in general, if they are unusually horrible and are still portrayed as justified or heroic by the narrative, it will leave a sour taste on your targeted audience's mouth. Especially egregious cases might cross into CM territory, but since the narrative still portrays them as heroic despite their utterly horrific acts, they cannot actually qualify, either.
• Designated Villain: The reasons why we as an audience should hate the villain in question must make sense; if we’re supposed to side against a character but the reasons why don’t hold up, they will be more sympathetic than intended and come across as understandable. This is especially true if the heroes of the story aren’t much better.
• Easily Forgiven: You don't want a Complete Monster to be easily forgiven for their atrocities as if nothing happened. If someone who committed monstrous crimes comes back as if their crimes are ignored, they are simply not played seriously enough to be a complete monster.
• Eldritch Abomination: Most of them are so incomprehensible and morally alien that they cannot be judged by human moral standards- and plenty do not even speak or have sufficient characterization. They can still qualify (and some do) as long as they display sufficient sadism and are knowingly malicious.
• Enfant Terrible: Kid villains usually don't count, as their senses of right and wrong aren't fully developed and they cannot comprehend the harm of their actions. However, if the child displays enough awareness of morality and how their actions will affect others, they can qualify as a particularly nightmarish subversion of childlike innocence. Alternatively, you could have your CM take the form of a child while not being one themself.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: To be clear, a Complete Monster having people love/care about them is not inherently disqualifying in and of itself, but it's very easy for this trope to be used to make the CM in question more sympathetic. Having others care for regardless of their vile nature can invoke a Draco in Leather Pants amongst the audience and potentially disqualifying them if they do genuinenly reprociate later on. It can also be used to establish how awful and corruptive a Complete Monster is, especially if another character who would otherwise be despicable enough to count turns out to genuinely care for an actual Complete Monster. In short, others can care about them, but it must be unambiguously one-sided.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones/Morality Pet: It doesn't matter how nasty a villain is otherwise, if they are even hinted to genuinely care for a person or two, they cannot qualify as a Complete Monster due to showing a caring and sympathetic side, although there are noticable exceptions. These typically involve the loved one being an alternate counterpart of the CM, making the "care" simply extreme narcissism, the "loved one" simply being a prized possession or a fanatic symbol, or the "loving relationship" is one-sided and simply flat-out disingenuous. Depending on situation, ambiguous relationships might not be migitating enough for a character as a valid redeeming quality, and they can still qualify based on actions alone. On the other hand, a deliberate subversion can go the extra mile in establishing just how horrible your CM is, ripping the rug out from under the audience as they turn out to be much worse than previously believed, but be cautious — if the reveal comes out of nowhere, the audience won't believe it.
• Even Evil Has Standards/Noble Demon: Naturally, your Complete Monster cannot have any moral proclivities towards any activity whatsoever - nothing is too far for a monster. If they show any kind of moral standard, as long as it's genuine, then it becomes an instant disqualifer even if they're utterly obliterating the heinous standard. Now, if the character proves to be a hypocrite about it or they object to one thing and then do something far worse, then they might still be acceptable, but as long as the character's actions do not contradict their words, even a single line can disqualify an otherwise easy keeper. Of course, if the character is so awful that they evoke this on other already vile villains, then they have one more point going for them.
• Evil Virtues: While not as explicit as Even Evil Has Standards, certain Evil Virtues (such as love, generosity, loyalty, kindness and humility) can make a villain more sympathetic, which might disqualify your character. On the other hand, others "virtues" such as ambition, bravery, honesty, determination and patience can make a Complete Monster a worse threat than if they are just impulsive, vicious and trigger-happy bastards and cowards.
• Fair-Play Villain: Related to Even Evil Has Standards, If the villain allows the hero to have a chance to defeat them or keep their promises after being defeated out of genuine honor, this is a one-ticket to disqualification. On the other hand, if the so-called "fairness" is just a form of Cruel Mercy, it can make them even more heinous.
• Fallen Hero: Just like with the Knight Templar, Fallen Heroes are likely to be portrayed as sympathetic Anti-Villains or Well-Intentioned Extremists, and thus must be treated with caution if you want to write them off as a CM. It goes without saying that they must eschew any and all good qualities they have, and they cannot qualify if they still retain some noble traits even if they are Omnicidal Maniacs. That isn't to say they can't still pretend to be good, so long as it's made clear it's all an act. Of course, their fall cannot be portrayed as being too tragic, or they still cannot qualify.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: It doesn't matter how evil your villain is, if they're wearing a fedora with bunny ears, an overly colorful bauta mask and is half-naked with only a pair of baggy shorts and boxing gloves, it renders the audience difficult to take your Complete Monster seriously. It doesn't mean that they can't look silly or cartoony—especially if they're in a more lighthearted work—but at least the audience has to be remotely convinced that they are a proper threat and not a laughingstock played for Black Comedy.
• Flat Character: Given the nature of a Complete Monster being their complete and utter lack of redeeming features, it's tempting to write one with no psychological complexity or depth. While not innately disqualifying, your villain still needs some substance as a character. If they are too lacking in characterization, they won't count. Furthermore, while not all villains have to be complex in order to be compelling and well-written, a villain with no characterization other than being pure evil might come off as uninteresting to the audience and anti-climatic. On the other hand, a three-dimensional Complete Monster can be a compelling presence, with the best of the bunch being particularly acclaimed for such, but watch out — it's possible that an attempt to create a three-dimensional CM can come across as grossly insensitive and preventing the character from qualifying instead, especially if they're horribly raped, abused and/or tortured and they are somehow "unaffected by it" or "wouldn't be any better without it".
• Forced into Evil/Punch-Clock Villain: Related to agency, if a character is doing awful things because they were forced to instead of by moral choice, they couldn't count, even if their actions are beyond the pale. The person ordering it however, can and will often do.
• Freudian Excuse/Tragic Villain: Since giving a tragic backstory to a villain is by default designed to make you feel sympathy for the many different kinds of antagonists out there, they're often a one-way ticket to disqualification. These villains also usually factor into the heinous standard, so a potential keeper that does less than a villain with a Freudian Excuse is much less likely to qualify. There are exceptions, but it's going to be an incredibly hard sell unless they go above and beyond the pale. These villains need to be proven that their Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse and their excuses are grossly disproportionate to their actions. Beware though, often a slight hint where a villain's freudian excuse is treated with the faintest sense of sympathy can disqualify what should otherwise an easy keeper. There's also a fine line which if crossed, will automatically prevent any character from qualifying regardless of how horrible they are otherwise and any attempts to pull off a Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse in order to portray them as a vile monster can come across as grossly insensitive and tasteless. It goes without saying that if a villain's Freudian Excuse involves them being a victim of extremely traumatic rape and/or abuse that are described in explicit detail, especially if it happens during their childhood, it's virtually impossible to ignore and/or subvert.
• Fridge Horror / Riddle for the Ages: Mere implications of consequences that are not explored upon in the work itself cannot be relied on to pass the heinous standard. This is related to Show, Don't Tell; the criteria only goes by what's actually within and brought up by the work itself. However, those who do not require any unfortunate undertones to be utter bastards are fair game.
• Gag Series: A work where lighthearted comedy is dominant can never have a Complete Monster. By its very nature, Gag series tend to have Anti-Villains or Harmless Villains that are very difficult to take seriously, making it so that there are no real stakes or consequences. An attempt to insert a Complete Monster will throw off the tone of the work and will sour the audience's tastes. It's another story if the work undergoes Cerebus Syndrome to become something darker, but at that point it might not even be a Gag Series anymore.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Related to having defined motives, if a villain only goes out to cause destruction and there's no reasoning or backstory behind the destruction, they can't qualify. Even the most simple of CMs have an brief explanation of why they came to be.
• The Ghost/Unseen Evil: If a villain is said to do something heinous, but the story itself lacks substantial plot other than describing a horrible person doing horrible things, they can't count because there's possibly no meat in the description, but we don't know for sure. Same goes for villains who don't even make physical appearances and are only mentioned in-passing. However, if we don't know how a villain looks like, but we still learn that they have proper and visible characterization and motives, they can still count.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: CMs are still allowed to partake in non-evil hobbies, which can include hanging out with less evil characters. But be careful in making them act too friendly with one another, as it may compromise their horror and make them hard to take seriously. It's better to relegate such scenes for non-canon works.
• Graceful Loser: A villain who takes defeat in stride usually paints them in an honorable and sympathetic light, which is the last thing you want if you're making your villain a Complete Monster. However, if it's made clear that this is not out of genuine nobility, whether they're a sadistic Blood Knight, a Social Darwinist with a Might Makes Right philosophy, a playful Troll with a warped sense of amusement, a depraved Determinator with Villainous Valor, or simply out of Pragmatic Villainy, they can still qualify.
• Gratuitous Rape: While commiting rape can easily help a character qualify, there's still a line. If the character commits rape for the sake of and the act doesn't serve any narrative purpose, it can render the work tasteless and not have any Complete Monsters instead.
• Harmless Villain: If a villain can't do anything worse than steal candy from children, pull pranks, or does nothing other than to Poke the Poodle, they are not heinous enough and will fail to stand out. Even serious crimes like Bank Robbery just aren't enough. While not necessarily victimless, the villain has to intentionally cause massive harm or loss of life. A bank robber who does nothing other than issue threats before he empties the vault and escapes with the loot will not be heinous enough absent other crimes to add to their tally, while a bank robber who kills dozens of hostages as part of their plan or just because the opportunity presented itself will definitely qualify, assuming they meet the trope's other criteria. In a similar vein, if a villain has great ambitions to cause massive harm but lacks the skills to actually carry their plans out (or they shoot themselves in the foot before they could and the heroes don't even need to do much to stop them), they will still fail to qualify even if they are taken seriously by the narrative.
• Heel–Face Turn/Heel Realization/The Atoner: For obvious reasons, this trope must be avoided at all costs when writing these kinds of characters. If a villain stops their evil doings to help our heroes instead and it's made clear that it's not simply out of pragmatic reasons, or they realize the errors of their ways and turn good, no matter how viciously evil they were, they will be immediately disqualified from this trope. Furthermore, villains who successfully turn over a new leaf will still factor into the heinous standard and might prevent other potential keepers from qualifying. In addition, if the villain was really awful beforehand, them suddenly turning over a new leaf can feel unearned and out-of-character, leading to fan backlash. In general, though, you will want to reserve these tropes for characters who have some traces of redeeming qualities left within them rather than abruptly making a consistent villain pull a redemption arc. However, victims of Heel–Face Brainwashing can still qualify if it is made apparent that they are not reforming of their own volition. A fake Heel-Face Turn, on the other hand, can further cement a character as a monster and automatically fulfill the irredeemable criteria unless something else happens that causes them to genuinely switch sides and atone. Unclear or unconfirmed turns can still allow the character to qualify, going sheerly off their actions within the provided story.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Villains who are fighting against other horrible villains using equally horrible methods usually have a very good Freudian Excuse or are played for tragedy and thus usually cannot count. The only way they can is if they are worse than the people they fight, they are remorseless in hurting innocent people, and/or they are only fighting against other villains/criminals for egotistical reasons. However, if your villain manages to drag another character to their level through manipulation or breaking them down outright, then you get one more point for your villain.
• Historical Domain Character: Due to the controversial nature of this trope, it's permanently without real-life examples. The Complete Monster trope should be restricted for purely fictional purposes. Therefore, if a historical figure or person in a work is too close to their real-life counterpart or have their crimes heavily exaggerated to the point of resembling satire (e.g. a real-life politican being portrayed as a genocidal Serial Rapist), they cannot qualify and such a villain would be impossible to take seriously. That said, if any redeemable traits they potentially would have had in life are removed, fictionalized versions may qualify, as long as they adhere to the reality of the work in which they are featured.
• Holiday Ceasefire: A Complete Monster will not honor any moments of respite in the middle of war, and if it appears that they will, it needs to be subverted so that they attack the celebrating parties during their vulnerable periods.
• Horror Hunger: While this trope can be used to give a Complete Monster more heinous acts, if they cannot control themselves or their hunger, it will rob them of any agency they have.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain/Minion with an F in Evil: Besides being wicked, another thing a Complete Monster generally has to be is competent. It's fine if they're stopped short way before they can deal major harm, but if your villain has great ambitions to cause harm and destruction, but doesn't have the skills to pull off their goals, it will become difficult to take them seriously as a threat, and they'll end up flunking the heinous standard.
• Invincible Villain: On the other hand, we have the inverse of the previous entry. While a villain can be portrayed as unstoppable and still be a credible threat and a Complete Monster, if the villain wins so frequently and in such contrived ways that there is no possible way the heroes can defeat them (see also Villain Sueinvoked), then the story will fall under Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. If you wish to portray your villain as a Complete Monster, it is best to give them a weakness or a vulnerability that the heroes can exploit to defeat them.
• It's All My Fault: A Complete Monster can admit to have made their mistakes in hopes of feeling remorse...only to discard it and claim otherwise. Or they can simply continue to do whatever they are doing because they've come too far.
• I've Come Too Far: This trope can either enhance a character's villainy by showing them refusing to change their ways or paint them in a tragic light through the realization that done too much harm to fix their mistakes depending on how it is invoked. Obviously, if you want your villain to be irredeemable, you'll want to avoid the latter interpretation, as that can garner sympathy among viewers and turn them into a Tragic Villain instead.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: It's perfectly fine if you decide to have what is otherwise an Anti-Villain or Tragic Villain unambiguously cross the Moral Event Horizon and cement themselves as a Complete Monster — but there must be a reasoning behind it and a substantial amount of build-up. On the other hand, suddenly having an otherwise unambiguously sympathetic or morally ambiguous villain jump off the slope to become a Complete Monster for no apparent or justified reason whatsoever is a one-way ticket to irreversibly taint the audience's experience of the work.
• Just Following Orders: If a villain commits horrible acts but they are only doing as much as a larger system allows them to, they are only a part of said system and thus cannot count. That said, if they commit added atrocities that deviate from what they are ordered to do, they can still count.
• Karma Houdini: While this trope has no effect on a Complete Monster counting or not, a villain this heinous getting away with their atrocities can leave a sour taste in the mouths of the audience. It's recommended to make a CM receive a defeat as satisfying as possible. This can still work in stories where the Complete Monster winning or getting away with their actions is done for some kind of artistic purpose, usually by having the Complete Monster be an Allegorical Character for something relating to society. But stories where a Complete Monster wins for the sole purpose of making the audience sad will get people to gain more apathy for the work, especially if they double as a Hate Sink.
• Knight Templar: While a perfectly possible Complete Monster archetype, most Knights Templar are simply too Obliviously Evil or Well-Intentioned to actually qualify as one. Likewise, they tend to have genuine morals rooted in their beliefs of them being in the right. Exceptions include those which are obviously worse for not realizing how awful they actually are, Hypocrites running on double standards and Moral Myopia, use their ostensive good intentions to disguise purely selfish motives, or simply decide that they're better off Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
• Laughably Evil: Villains with a sense of humor can count, but not always. So long as the heinous acts themselves are played seriously In-Universe, it's entirely possible for a Complete Monster to be incredibly entertaining to watch while still being irredeemably evil. However, this doesn't always work and you must keep in mind that you shouldn't make them too funny, as then they become more difficult to take seriously, which should never happen with a Complete Monster. A Laughably Evil villain can only count if their acts are still treated with enough seriousness and horror from other characters, so if they are "funny" in a way that they become the victim of slapstick or they are played so ridiculously to the point of being Black Comedy, they cannot qualify. A CM should usually only be funny because they want to be, and their "humor" should be the type that doesn't hide how horrific they really are from the audience (take lessons from The Joker's exploits, such as his "Chinese food" genocide of China in Emperor Joker). Alternatively, you can apply a Beware the Silly Ones façade for the CM, giving them a comical look but making it clear about how dangerous they are, just don't make the CM look too silly, or the audience won't believe it. If your Complete Monster is a (non-anthromorphic) duck with an afro, donkey ears, and lipstick wearing a tutu; even if they are raping and eating children, they wouldn't be taken seriously. Finally, a villain qualfiying as Laughably Evil as a result of Narm should also be taken into account. A character can be so comically evil that they become humorous even if this likely wasn't intended, and in some cases this can further lead to the character being engaging, but if not properly accounted for, it can potentially leave a sour taste to the audience's mouth.
• Made of Evil: While this trope is named as though it is a one-way ticket to being a Complete Monster, in actuality, it is usually the complete opposite. Characters need to possess moral agency (that is, they need to be fully aware that what they are doing is evil while holding nothing back in spite of it) in order to qualify as a Monster. Typically, if an entity is stated to be a manifestation of pure evil or any other variants of (e.g. despair, hatred, corruption), they are only doing what they are capable of and are unable to do anything outside of their moral programming, and thus usually cannot qualify no matter how intelligent, sadistic and/or evil they are. However, characters that use powers made of pure evil, or who willingly throw away their positive traits, are still fair game. Same goes for rare circumstances where other supposedly Made of Evil entities can do good, they outright state that they chose to be evil, or if another entity shares the same origin as the potential CM but is depicted as capable of turning away from their programming.
• Magnificent Bastard: As with a Complete Monster being a dangerous trope to use on a Magnificent Bastard, the coin flips the other way around. A Complete Monster can be just as cunning and brilliant as a Magnificent Bastard, but their sheer depravity will ultimately strip them of whatever magnificence they have due to their unsavory nature. Characters can indeed count as both, but they're still a pair of tropes that are very hard to mix together. The Complete Monster evokes fear and loathing, and trying to add genuine magnificence to that could result in your character no longer being a Complete Monster. If you really want to write one though, a character like that will be magnificent first and foremost, with their crimes ultimately serving a grand (albeit self-serving) motive. Their evil will generally be motivated less by outright sadistic enjoyment as much as a complete lack of care for other people and their defeat can't be too undignified. For further information about what can lead to this, see the Write a Magnificent Bastard page.
• Memetic Loser: Similar to the Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, if your villain is built up to be a massive threat yet fails spectacularly all the time (or in video game settings, ends up being a laughably easy boss or a grinding level), it can make your supposedly vile threat hard to take seriously. While a Memetic Loser can still stick around as a CM, they'll have to do enough harm to qualify. If they can't even so do anything competent despite possessing great ambitions to cause harm, they cannot count.
• The Mentally Disturbed: Many Complete Monsters are Ax-Crazy. However, there's a fine line that when crossed, will disqualify your character because they're too unstable to have agency even if they are well past the baseline. They might still count, however, if their actions before they fell past that line are heinous enough, or they continue their crimes despite in a circumstance where they're supposedly unaffected by their disorders. There's also a chance where an attempt to create an Ax-Crazy monster can end up making the character look too insane and coming across as insensitiveinvoked and put off your audience.
• Moral Myopia: If your so-called "heroes" are doing the same type of horrible things as the villains or worse, then you run on double standards. It doesn't matter if the villains are Hate Sink Sadists and your "heroes" are Tragic Villains with valid Freudian Excuses, if your "heroes" play on the same caliber as the villains or worse, then it's just a bunch of horrible people doing horrible things and not the grey-to-black conflict you probably intended the story to be.
• My God, What Have I Done?: For obvious reasons, a CM cannot display any sort of regret or remorse, so this trope is off-limits; even if they were nothing but evil beforehand, a villain showing even implied remorse at the very end can be enough to keep them off. However, if they decide "Then Let Me Be Evil", they will qualify even more.
• Necessarily Evil: Related to being a Well-Intentioned Extremist and being Forced into Evil, a villain who is only committing atrocities to keep the stability of the world afloat cannot qualify, as they're simply doing their job and not letting them do it will have worse consequences than letting their evil run around. However, if a villain's atrocities are considered too excessive by the narrative, the character is upholding a system that is established as a lie on its own, or the character is only lying about their intentions, they can still qualify.
• Negative Continuity: If a villain does something vile and on the next day it's treated as if they never did it, then the consequences are not explored enough. Not only they can't qualify as a Monster through this alone, there's a chance that they won't be taken seriously enough.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: A Complete Monster would NOT hesitate to hurt anything—regardless of youth, senority, or gender—so long as they achieve their goals. They won't draw a line as to what gets hurt in the process. Therefore, a villain with genuine reservations is off-limits. Of course, if they contradict what they espouse or it's fully pragmatic they can still qualify, but so long as they claim that they won't kill innocents and hold their word over it, they cannot count.
• No Endor Holocaust: Concerning Visibility, if the only effects we see of a villain's rampage is some destroyed cars and Conveniently Empty Buildings, with no evidence of actual loss of life, then they cannot truly be said to have killed anyone and thus they fail to be bad enough.
• Non-Malicious Monster: An animal acts on learnt instinct no matter how vicious or intelligent it is. Even if it's a subversion or aversion of the trope and the animal is acting out of malicious intent on its own, it might still not count if their behavior is too animalistic. Truth in Television: real life animals possess different morality from humans. On the other hand, animals that are sufficiently sapient can qualify. This also goes for any other automata (e.g. zombies, robots, AI), as they are usually characterized as mindless predators, and can only count if they show enough sapience either though sadism or breaking out of their programming.
• Obliviously Evil: Relating to agency, if someone is unaware of the wrongs of their actions, they lack agency and are more likely to make the audience sympathize with them. Exceptions do occur, but are very rare and typically involve villains who are explicitly worse for not realizing how horrible they actually are.
• Offstage Villainy: If the audience doesn't actually see the villains committing their heinous acts (or, at the very least, the consequences of said acts), it will be harder to view them as a genuine threat than if they see firsthand what crimes the Complete Monster is willing to commit. This does not mean viewers need to see every single evil action your CM commits, but the audience should at least be shown enough to display what kind of evil person your character is.
• Orcus on His Throne: While being the Greater-Scope Villain or even the one who orders most of your work's conflict makes a villain more likely to qualify, you don't want to make them too passive. If your villain lets much worse characters do their own thing but doesn't do anything else, they're simply too laid back to be a CM themselves even if the villains they're ordering can qualify. Make sure your villain participates in some atrocities on their own, or at least directly order the atrocities of other villains.
• Pet the Dog: A Complete Monster cannot show kindness to other characters, no matter how minor it is. Any genuine Pet the Dog moments disqualifies a character from counting even if they're otherwise easy keepers, and they should be demonstrated as Bait the Dog or Photo Op with the Dog moments instead.
• Played for Laughs: The Complete Monster's crimes has to be taken seriously at all costs. If a character is played for Black Comedy or is treated too much as comedic relief rather than a serious threat, it renders the audience difficult to take them seriously to qualify as truly despicable. They can still be Laughably Evil, but their actions must be Played for Drama or Horror and this must be as consistent as possible.
• Pragmatic Villainy: A CM can abstain from evil acts or show a soft side for the sake of their plans as long as it’s made clear that it’s purely for selfish reasons and any kindness they show is an act. Of course, it cannot be out of genuine standards, and if you don't make it clear that they're only pragmatic for their own sake, it can end up making them look like they have genuine standards or having a Pet the Dog moment and thus getting them disqualified.
• Rape as Backstory: Rape leaves a massive psychological impact to anyone subjected to it, so naturally if you want to invoke Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse on a villain, giving them a backstory where they are brutally raped is usually off-limits. Even if the character bluntly states that the rape did not affect them or denies that as a freudian excuse, the audience will not believe it and the character cannot qualify. Exceptions such as Mothergod and Griffith can happen, but are exceedingly rare and their rapes are not described in a blatantly exploitative manner or are handled in a very careful manner.
• Ron the Death Eater: While alternate incarnations of existing characters can make Complete Monsters out of characters that usually aren't one, you should be careful not to gratuitously villainize characters for no reason other than to fit fandoms' negative perceptions. It's near impossible to take such a characterization seriously, even if the story itself does. Oftentimes, examples that villainize characters to extreme degrees also radically change the setting of the story so as to be its own separate world disconnected from the source material.
• The Scrappy: While you want the viewer to find no redeeming traits in your CM, you should aim to make them irredeemable in a Love to Hate way. So if you don't make your CM compelling or entertaining, even if they check off the boxes, the audience will find them a detriment to the work.
• Serial Escalation: Increasing the heinous standard as your work goes on runs the risk of characters who used to qualify no longer counting. While expanding the scale of a work as it goes on is inevitable, if you want your Monsters to continue to count, they need to show that they still stand out in their niche, or commit additional crimes to remain competitive.
• Squick: While extremely disgusting crimes, particularly if they're of a sexual and/or personal nature such as Nobuyuki Sugou's repeated sexual harrassment and Attempted Rape against Asuna, Honsou's Daemonculabas or Griffith's Eclipse ritual where he sacrifices all of his comrades to a horrible death and brutally rapes Casca in front of Guts out of spite, one must watch out not to gratuitously add them onto a Complete Monster's rapsheet, especially if the setting doesn't fit. It goes without saying that if you have a brutal villain who rapes other trainers alongside their Pokémon before killing them through live dissection after losing a battle in a Pokémon fanfic, they're not going to be taken seriously, and even if they are it would likely just put off most audiences. It's better off saving exquisite, horrible ultraviolence for works which are innately dark in nature.
• Start of Darkness: While perfectly viable for CMs especially if they were once good guys, you have to treat this with caution. It goes without explanation that your Complete Monster can get no sympathy from the characters in-universe, and it cannot be too bleak and graphic that the entire work becomes too tasteless. No Serial Rapist should be able to shrug off being a sex slave for years as if they were unaffected.
• Sugar Bowl: On the other end of the Crapsack World is the Sugar Bowl. While lighter and softer settings like My Little Pony can in theory have Complete Monsters (also known as Vile Villain, Saccharine Show), it usually happens that, due to censorship standards for kids media, the potential lethal consequences of a villain's actions which would count on paper is kept vague and never explored in-universe, rendering it Fridge Horror and falling short of the heinous standard. Furthermore, trying to add a genuinely awful villain in an extremely bright and colorful setting where no villain goes beyond contextless plots like destroying Conveniently Empty Buildings, Harmless Freezing, and The Night That Never Ends can and will potentially taint the audience's experience of the work, and will also be difficult to take seriously. An incredibly vile villain in this situation can still easily count for a CM, but it tends to sour the mood of the work.
• Torture Porn: Works like The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film are too lacking in narrative and are too dedicated to excessive shock material to have characters that can really qualify as this trope. While similarly shocking films can include such characters, they'll generally be presented with more concrete and developed personalities and backstories to allow them to qualify as this trope.
• Tyke Bomb: If a villain is literally created and raised to be a weapon of destruction, unless they're depicted as still being able of realizing the errors of their ways and undergoing a Heel–Face Turn, they have no agency and thus cannot qualify.
• Undying Loyalty: This is essentially Benevolent Boss but with underlings instead of group leaders, and thus cannot be in place for most characters to count. To have Undying Loyalty means that the villain cares deeply about their boss, which by definition gives a villain a caring and sympathetic side to their character. Exceptions usually include those who care more about the ideology of their superiors rather than their person, or stauch supporters of extremeist ideologies (i.e. Nazis, Communists, Fascists or any A Nazi by Any Other Name organizations). Furthermore, if an underling serves under a leader but their relationships are only relegated to being business partners or individuals doing their own thing, it's still not considered loyalty.
• Unholy Matrimony: While the idea of a romantic couple of CMs can be very alluring, it is very hard to make this kind of duo work, as sharing a love for each other will count as a redeeming quality, and thus, disqualify them as this. One or both members of the couple can only be CMs if the relationship is unstable or disingenuous enough, or if their relationship is only limited to being partners-in-crime.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: This is tied to the moral agency issues department. Unless they find out and are delighted by it, if a character unintentionally kickstarts something horrible on accident, it doesn't get put on their rapsheets, and if that action is their only significant crime, they certainly won't qualify.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Ultimately, a character being a Complete Monster is an audience reaction, so going along with this thought, you want your audience to despise them. There are many reasons that a character might accidentally become more sympathetic than intended, whether it's simply that their Freudian Excuse is more genuine than intended or because the heroes are even more unsympathetic by comparison, just to name a few. While it's not impossible for a villain to be Unintentionally Sympathetic and still count as a Complete Monster, if enough of the audience agrees with their sympathetic potrayal, then your character won't count.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: You also don't want a character who shouldn't be a Complete Monster to end up counting as one. Ultimately, a Freudian Excuse or a standard can only go so far, and there could very well come a point where your seemingly complex character simply gets viewed as a heinous monster. The character may well count, but it'll count for all the wrong reasons, and it will taint the audience's experience of the work. In short, whether you want a character to count or not, you need to pick one and stick with it; trying to pick a middle ground on a trope in which a middle ground does not exist will only confuse the audience and leave them unsure of what to think of the character overall.
• Unwitting Pawn: While not as damning as a supposed Magnificent Bastard turning out to be one of these, if your villain is committing horrific acts under an incredibly vile villain's name out of genuine admiration rather than fanaticism, then it's likely for the audience to see your character as yet another victim instead of the truly despicable piece of work you intended them to be. It's pretty much impossible to have your character genuinely associate with villains as awful and charismatic as Dio Brando or Albert Wesker and still have your character portrayed as a pure evil monster, rather than a tragic, naive fool that knows no better other than to trash their dignity into the floor. That is, if they didn't just backstab your character and lead them to a terrible death already.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: While not innately disqualifying, if a villain used to be a Wide-Eyed Idealist or an innocent kid in the past before they shed all that innocence into the trash at some point before the present, it's more likely to ilicit sympathy from the audience for them. And if their loss of innocence is played sufficiently tragically, they're likely to fall into Tragic Villain or Tragic Monster territory and thus cannot qualify. You have to make a good point on the villain's actions being grossly disporportionate to the tragedy they suffered for them to qualify as a Complete Monster; if your heroes fail to prove them a valid point, the villain cannot be a Complete Monster as the audience will not believe it. Even if you intend the character to be completely despicable anyways, too traumatic of a Freudian Excuse will instead disqualify your character for all the wrong reasons.
• Utsuge / Psychological Horror: Given that there's a high chance that characters perpetually tortured by a CM can turn into The Woobie, they might seem like an ideal villain for these types of works. In truth, it is usually a one-way ticket to cheapening the drama instead. This is because these works will usually invoke Emotional Torque by making the true cause of suffering intangible (or even personal); hence making the character's way out of suffering much harder than if there is a monstrously heartless villain behind it. Such villains might appear in these scenarios, but they are never the sole target to blame for the tragedies of any of the character's suffering.
• Villain Decay: Again, if a depraved villain becomes more and more silly or ineffectual over time, then their threat level is diminishing and there's no more reason to fear them. Keep your portrayal of your Complete Monster consistent.
• Villain Protagonist: It is very hard to write a story that revolves around a Complete Monster without the work falling into Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. By definition, a Complete Monster is as unsympathetic as possible, while a protagonist is supposed to be, if nothing else, understandable and entertaining to watch; when all the audience is watching is somebody that we just want to lose already, it's hard to get invested in the work. This does not mean this is impossible to pull off with quite a few instances of this being done successfully with several well-reowned villains being such, but it is a balancing act that is very difficult to execute properly without demotivating the audience, and most of these series have elements of their plot that mitigates this somewhat, often by having them share near-equal screen time with a more sympathetic Deuteragonist. Alternatively, you can have the work being an episodic series where the character isn't necessarily the main focus but is in an overall sense within a Villain-Based Franchise, particularly those in the slasher genre. Villain Protagonists also factor heavily into the heinous standard of a work, so if you have one that is horrible enough but has legitimate redeeming qualities and they're stuck amongst a group of villains that are equallly depraved if not slightly worse, there is a very high odd that they will prevent those other villains from counting even if they cannot themselves, preventing the entire work from having CMs or at least limit the number of villains who can qualify unless they're so awful that it invokes legitimate disgust amongst them.
• Villain Sueinvoked: You do not want a character to become too perfect, and a Complete Monster is no exception. If a character is simply so evil and effective that nothing short of a Deus ex Machina or a contrived act from the author can give our heroes a winning chance, then it's easy for the audience to be bored and stop caring. As much as the Batman who Laughs likes to brag about how he always wins and he is the apex predator, Singularity declares his victory over Bayonetta as immutable fact, and Cell proclaims to be a perfect and invincible combatant, they are still characters with flaws and aren't totally unstoppable despite their claims to the contrary.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Complete Monsters do not have good intentions behind their actions, so if a character is genuinely well-intentioned, even if they go beyond the pale in heinousness and other characters beg to differ, as long as they make a valid argument about their intentions and they don't contradict it, they usually can't count. A subversion is more fitting for these kinds of characters to become CMs, that is, if they go into a Villainous Breakdown if their ideology is opposed, if they beg for mercy once they have a taste of their own medicine, or if it's so absurdly obvious that they look worse for not realizing. A character realizing that their intentions are not as noble as they thought (or that their actions do not justify them) and feeling guilty about it will tell viewers that they are not as crooked as you might want to present them as, though if they decide to continue their crimes despite knowing their "good" intentions are ultimately causing more harm, that can qualify them even more. Keep in-mind though — if you're actually trying to write a Well-Intentioned Extremist, even one less-than-dignant Villainous Breakdown at the end can easily subvert this trope and qualify your character as a Complete Monster instead as long as it goes against what they are supposed to stand for, and if the subversion comes out of nowhere, your character will lose respect from the audience and possibly the work too depending on the severeity.
• The Woobie/Jerkass Woobie/Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Complete Monsters are not characters that the audience should feel sorry for. While a Complete Monster can and will likely turn other characters into woobies, they themselves definitely cannot. If your designated CM tries to pass themselves off as a tragic villain, you need to make it clear that their past and/or motivations do not justify the suffering they are inflicting onto others.
• Word of God/Word of Saint Paul: If you claim that a character is a Complete Monster, it does not mean they are a Complete Monster unless you repeatedly show them to be pure evil. On the other hand, if you claim that a villain is intended to be tragic or sympathetic but their actions in the work state otherwise, then they might still count as a Complete Monster. This is related to Show, Don't Tell — your statements can only go that far.
• You Monster!: Your words can only go that far; while other characters call out the character as pure evil for their actions, sometimes even literally, then it tells and cements to the audience how awful they are. However, this is by no means a framing device, so a villain being called this still have to be horrible enough with no redeeming qualities; if a sympathetic villain gets called a monster as a first impression before we can learn more about them, this alone isn't a qualifying factor to begin with.

Story-telling hints

Now, to the main topic; It is easy to write a Complete Monster, but it is somewhat difficult to write a good and compelling one. A villain who dumps thousands of children into an industrial grinder, kills multiple heroes by dissecting them alive and blows up multiple large cities will be a Complete Monster especially in a Lighter and Softer setting like Blue Archive or a Disney original, but such a villain would be difficult to take seriously and can potentially induce Shock Fatigue for the audience, heavily detracting the quality away from the work. Just one of these crimes is already more than enough to qualify most characters unless if the heinous standard is very high, and even then the number of children killed is overkill — just 25 children murdered brutally is often enough and you most certainly don't need an industrial grinder.

On a more grounded level, if a villain goes out of their way to be as viscerally horrible as possible but they are neither entertaining, compelling or charismatic, your audience will not hate the villain because of how evil they are, but because of how poorly written and out of place they are. There is a difference between a Hate Sink and The Scrappy; a hate sink can be entertaining because of how horrible they are. On the other hand, The Scrappy is nothing but a detriment even if they are horrible enough to count.

Furthermore, while Complete Monsters are defined by their vile actions and lack of redeeming qualities, they do not need to be a Hate Sink, but they can be perfectly charismatic and compelling villains who also just happen to be outstandingly horrible. You'll want to give your Complete Monster(s) some depth, so they will be Love to Hate rather than a detriment.

• Give your CM an uniquely impressive rapsheet: Given that one of the rules for a CM to qualify is exceptionalism, you want to have them commit unique crimes that are rare in the setting. A mundane Serial Killer with hundreds of victims in a supernatural setting with no superpowers whatsoever is an example. An Omnicidal Maniac who manages to destroy thousands of universes and recreate them into living hellholes before he's stopped is another. You want them to be unusual and unique so your audience will be impressed by them, so even if you intend them to be a vile Hate Sink, they'll be popular because of how loathsome they are.
• Show, Don't Tell: You can't just describe to your audience about how evil your villain is. If a few people talk about a villain who blown up 6 planets, raped children and corrupted them into his loyal child slave warrior fleet but all we see is a wimp who's beaten in several pages while the child soldier fleet is nowhere to be seen or mentioned, your villain's evil can be considered as nothing short of an Informed Attribute, and they won't be evil enough. In a similar vein, if you made a would-be CM who's supposed to be an absolute devil but said villain was able to be convinced to drop their villainy without any strings attached, they won't qualify. You need to show how evil your villain is to a certain extent and avoid even a single line of dialogue that can be treated as an outright redeeming quality.
• Keep a middle ground: While the prequisite for a CM is for them to be irredeemable, loathsome and vile, you still have to keep their crimes realistic in a setting. You'll want them to commit some sort of atrocious crime, but there is a fine line that when crossed, will render your CM a detriment instead of a compelling villain or make them hard to take seriously, even if they fit into the theme of the work. A pedophile rapist in a criminal procedure show with a high number of victims will obviously qualify, but if their victim count realms up to thousands of newborn babies where even a single kid (or slightly more) raped is enough to qualify a rapist as a CM, the entire work becomes too shocking and the audience wouldn't believe it. At the worst case, this can prevent works from having CMs.
• Potential subversions: While most Complete Monsters start out as evil, you can go the other way around and give yours a façade so their reveal as a villain would become way more impactful and terrifying. Maybe your trustworthy mentor is manipulating you and seeks to take your power to become a God. The beautiful Damsel in Distress is the leader of a villainous group that has been tricking you into freeing her so she could delight in driving your heroes to despair by suprise. The Butt-Monkey of your school is actually a vicious Serial Killer with 47 flayed bodies in his closet. A world-wiping Eldritch Abomination could had been pulled off a Kill and Replace on one of your heroes to infiltrate their former party, only to reveal themsleves in the most horrific way and timing possible. The supposed Token Good Teammate in a villainous organization is actually The Starscream and a Diabolical Mastermind. There are many more options, but more often than not, a Complete Monster who has hid themselves in your side ready to turn against you is often way more horrifying than one who is evil and is presented as evil from the get-go.
• Make sure your CM is entertaining in some form: While you'll want a Complete Monster to evoke repulse and loathing from the audience, you should also make them a character they Love to Hate so that your villain doesn't come off as distasteful to them. There are generally several methods to do this:
  • You can create a complex villain with slightly more ambiguity going on for them (just not direct sympathy), be it loved ones, Freudian Excuses or good intentions. Obviously all of them have to be subverted at the end, but you can make their relationships and motives a bit more hazy to the audience that the CM can be considered a three-dimensional, compelling presence. Beware though, even if you would try to invoke Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse, there are some Freudian Excuses that are NOT to be taken lightly without also being tasteless and insensitive, and a single line or side scene that doesn't inherently moot the supposed CM's redeeming qualities is enough to disqualify what should be a horrible monster.
  • You can also make the CM a presence that embodies Evil Is Cool. The CM can have an overly gaudy appearance and can kick some serious ass, even against more competent heroes that they have to engage in multiple fights against them before they get any sort of comeuppance (just not to the point where it reaches Joker Immunity), they can be so ball-bustingly evil that they stop being loathsome and instead become entertaining, or you can make them a cunning mastermind who can manipulate and kill anyone without their victims knowing about it. Just make sure they aren't totally undefeatable out of an Ass Pull for them to reach Villain Sue invoked territory.
  • The final method is to make them as loathsome as possible, so much that you want to punch them in the face personally. If your CM goes out of their way trying to Kick the Dog especially against the heroes or The Woobie in addition to having horrific crimes in their belt, they are assuredly going to be loathsome, but their defeat will be entertaining to watch especially if they're just comparative weaklings overestimating themselves. Take notes from the MCU version of the High Evolutionary on how to create a character who goes out of their way to be as vile as possible and still come across as entertaining because of how loathsome he is and not because of any sort of charm, murky sympathy or complexity.
• Give your CM an appropriate aftermath: Because of the nature of these characters, you'll want them to suffer from a satisfying defeat rather than letting them get away scot-free, receive Joker Immunity or at the worst case, winning against the heroes. In case they do win against the heroes, make sure their victory is short-lived and they'll get their comeuppance afterwards. They don't need to be killed, especially when the story makes a valid point that they're better off just locked up and never getting out to show that the heroes won't stoop to their level of low. Also make sure they're gone for good once they're taken down, especially when they're teaming up with several other benign villains. Preferrably, have said villains all invoke an Even Evil Has Standards moment to dispose of the CM just to establish that their Token Evil Teammate is a CM and the other group members have no businesses mingling out with them.
• Keep it consistent: Since the Complete Monster trope is very controversial, you shouldn't be using it lightly. If you want to turn an otherwise more-or-less benign villain into a Complete Monster (or that's what you planned to spread an aesop) it's fine, but the reveal must not come out of nowhere, and there should be some sort of build-up or Foreshadowing even when the character has not crossed the Moral Event Horizon yet. However, if you have an established Anti-Villain, Noble Demon or Magnificent Bastard that is suddenly crossing the Moral Event Horizon and becoming a pure Complete Monster for no reason or explanation, this can greatly sour the audience's respect for your work. On the other hand, if you have a character that you established as a Complete Monster from the get-go, be cautious of Villain Decay. If your character gets Joker Immunity and becomes more and more silly per appearance, they would be difficult to take seriously, and in the worst-case scenarios it is grounds to instant disqualification. Even when Character Rerailment kicks in and you try to turn the character back to their CM characterization, the audience might still find the abrupt turn difficult to accept.
• Don't write a story around Complete Monsters: Of course, the big rule is to not loophole. While short stories about "horrible people doing horrible things" is obviously off-limits, you cannot write a story with an Excuse Plot for the sake of having CMs and still come across as having good taste. Allow your CM to naturally integrate into the story and make sure they fit into the setting.

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