During the investigation of recent hollers in the Complete Monster thread, it's become apparent to the staff that an insular, unfriendly culture has evolved in the Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard threads that is causing problems.
Specific issues include:
- Overzealous hollers on tropers who come into the threads without being familiar with all the rules and traditions of the tropes. And when they are familiar with said rules and traditions, they get accused (with little evidence) of being ban evaders.
- A few tropers in the thread habitually engage in snotty, impolite mini-modding. There are also regular complaints about excessive, offtopic "socializing" posts.
- Many many thread regulars barely post/edit anywhere else, making the threads look like they are divorced from the rest of TV Tropes.
- Following that, there are often complaints about the threads and their regulars violating wiki rules, such as on indexing, crosswicking, example context and example categorization. Some folks are working on resolving the issues, but...
- Often moderator action against thread regulars leads to a lot of participants suddenly showing up in the moderation threads to protest and speak on their behalf, like a clique.
It is not a super high level problem, but it has been going on for years and we cannot ignore it any longer. There will be a thread in Wiki Talk
to discuss the problem; in the meantime there is a moratorium on further Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard example discussion until we have gotten this sorted out.
Update: The new threads have been made and can be found here:
Please see the Frequently Asked Questions and Common Requests List before suggesting any new entries for this trope.
IMPORTANT: To avoid a holler to the mods, please see here for the earliest date a work can be discussed, (usually two weeks from the US release), as well as who's reserved discussion.
When voting, you must specify the candidate(s). No blanket votes (i.e. "![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
to everyone I missed").
No plagiarism: It's fair to source things, but an effortpost must be your own work and not lifted wholesale from another source.
We don't care what other sites think about a character being a Complete Monster. We judge this trope by our own criteria. Repeatedly attempting to bring up other sites will earn a suspension.
What is the Work
Here you briefly describe the work in question and explain any important setting details. Don't assume that everyone is familiar with the work in question.
Who is the Candidate and What have they Done?
This will be the main portion of the Effort Post. Here you list all of the crimes committed by the candidate. For candidates with longer rap sheets, keep the list to their most important and heinous crimes, we don't need to hear about every time they decide to do something minor or petty.
Do they have any Mitigating Factors or Freudian Excuse?
Here you discuss any potential redeeming or sympathetic features the character has, the character's Freudian Excuse if they have one, as well as any other potential mitigating factors like Offscreen Villainy or questions of moral agency. Try to present these as objectively as possible by presenting any evidence that may support or refute the mitigating factors.
Do they meet the Heinousness Standard?
Here you compare the actions of the Candidate to other character actions in the story in order to determine if they stand out or not. Remember that all characters, not just other villains, contribute to the Heinousness Standard
Final Verdict?
Simply state whether or not you think the character counts or not.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 31st 2023 at 4:14:10 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
sorry, that was too harsh. I need a more calm answer that doesn't bring up posting as I already got that.
It's none of our business how you choose to define the trope on your own time. Again, there is no elite squad of TV Tropes Thought Police who will Un-person you if you choose to think that Discord is a Complete Monster under your definition of the trope.
Now can we please move on from this ridiculous argument?
edited 2nd Oct '11 4:26:40 PM by nrjxll
yes, I'm good now.
on another subject, by this wiki's standards, do Red and Belladonna from the All Dogs Go To Heaven series count? they are on the Western Animation subpage and they seem to count.
Off of Complete Monster.Webcomics:
General Tarquin is a result of experimenting with how much you can make the character this and still make him likeable - he is Affably Evil Magnificent Bastard and seems to love his son Elan, but the ways he express said love involves killing a lot of people in very terrible way. He isn't above any means to get a woman to marry him, involving lying, orchestrating death of her current husband and tortures. He mentions he avoids having more children, after his son Nale betrayed him, yet still picks new wifes. Then you remember his last wife dies in "mysterious circumistances".
I'm not seeing it. Compared to Xyrkon, whose inclusion on the list is justifiable, Tarquin seems more like a regular Manipulative Bastard Take Over the World Evil Overlord and may actually believe his conquests bring stability to the region. He's genuinely hospitable to his son and his guests. He's a fan of No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine. On the Sorting Algorithim Of Evil he falls below Xyrkon by quite a bit, and probably even lower than Nale on the "actual threat to the heroes" scale.
Yeah, Tarquin isn't a complete monster. Too friendly and actually cares about people. Very few people, but he cares nonetheless. Just killing or ordering the deaths of people doesn't push you into Monster Territory.
Don't take life too seriously. It's only a temporary situation.
The "make him likeable" line alone suggests that this is a bad example, and a little more information pretty much clinches it. Tarquin is a good deal nastier then the Noble Demon type he initially appeared as, but that is a different trope completely. He fails most if not all qualifiers to be a Complete Monster.
Chop the entry.
edited 3rd Oct '11 12:52:05 AM by nrjxll
Think of the mooks!
On The Joker... appropriately enough, the Trope Namer for Multiple-Choice Past would be the most problematic for this trope. It doesn't help that there have been so many incarnations of him, running the gamut from the ridiculous to the monstrous, that pretty much any trope you want to apply to him could work (as I recall, there have even been enough Elseworld stories out there on the subject that you could even tick down the heroic tropes for one incarnation or another).
I think it's fair to call at least some incarnations (like my personal favorite, from Batman Arkham Asylum) a CM, but you definitely cannot call him one across the board. I can't think of any other character, except maybe Wolverine, where Depending on the Writer is actively encouraged.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Azor Ahai
Good point. The animated one was a mob hitman before becoming the Joker * , so he was a bad guy to begin with. On the other hand, the Joker is generally implied or stated outright to vary in his sanity, so it's sometimes hard to decide to what extent he's "responsible" for his actions (although a lot of the real Moral Event Horizon ones are shown as being calculated).
edited 3rd Oct '11 8:13:07 AM by Jordan
Hodor
Think of the mooks!
I think DC actively avoids figuring out just how insane the Joker is in part because they don't want to give anything like adequate justification. And really, just how much insanity would qualify as justification for some of his darker actions?
Though personally, I think his only real insanity is pure psychopathy, combined with an extremely intelligent mind. As such, he's smart enough to play up various mental illnesses, which obscures what he's actually planning on doing. But that, of course, is as subject to authorial whim as anything else about the character.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Lost in Space
And all of the above are why I consistently argue against the Joker as a Complete Monster in a general sense.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
You can't argue for or against The Joker in a general sense. You have to specify the writer it depends on...or more accurately, the continuity.
Lost in Space
Precisely. List the specific continuity in which he is a CM.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Cure Candy
This oh so much, and the fact that people just pothole anything and everything to The Joker and get mixed up left and right is the biggest issue... there are like 50 The Jokers.
(/Rant mode....I wish that page didn't exist like that, it causes so much trouble like this.)
edited 3rd Oct '11 12:53:59 PM by Raso
Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!
the DCAU Joker definitely fits, the point is driven home in ''Batman Beyond Return Of The Joker". and The Batman version might count. and then there's The Dark Knight version.
edited 5th Oct '11 2:16:55 PM by brony99
Probably also Brian Azzarello's version from Joker. The story's whole point seems to be "Nope, the Joker is not cool. He's a deeply disturbed unstable psychopath who hates everyone and everything, including you."
I'm still unsure about the second criteria. I'm not really trying to bring up Discord again, this concerns all villains.
and again, what about Red and Belladonna?
and again, like other people on this thread, I believe that the second criteria only applies to in-universe perceptions of the character. and if you notice, the second criteria does in fact contradict itself. one of the first posts explains why.
Azor Ahai
And the definition of the trope disagrees with you.
For the love of all that is good and holy, stop double (and triple) posting.
Hodor
sometimes it's just no one else posts before I do again. and look at the second or third post on this thread to see what I mean.
Is Eric Cartman from South Park really a Complete Monster? Yes, he did some evil stuff, like making one kid eat his own parents, but he is usually played for laughs, the other characters constantly mock him, he almost never gets away with it, he has at least two Pet the Dog moments and the show has mostly a Negative Continuity anyway. Sorry if this have been brought up somewhere already.
at this point people tend to dismiss me but to me, it's really a question of if the actions and not the character are played for laughs. the character himself needs to be played straight to a degree but the actions or the real deciding factor.
I've actually brought it up three or four times and no one else has said anything. Anyway, he defiantly is not, because he's almost always played for laughs.
edited 10th Oct '11 6:43:26 PM by nuclearneo577
Lost in Space
I've also said that Cartman does not qualify. To be sure, he has moments and even whole episodes where he behaves in horrifically evil ways, but at its heart, South Park is a comedy show and thus it's impossible to take any of it seriously.
edited 11th Oct '11 6:29:19 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Think of the mooks!
Eric Cartman is one of those examples that are always going to engender arguments.
On one hand, he is played for Dead Baby Comedy, he's a Jerkass Woobie to some, he has Freudian Excuse after Freudian Excuse for his actions, and the expected grasp of morality for someone his age is not that great.
On the other hand, his actions are very vile, even fans of South Park will at times say Dude, Not Funny! about his antics, there's simply no excuse for some of his terrible acts (particularly his animosity towards Kyle - either I missed the episode that explains his virulent anti-Semitism, or he's just that much of an ass), and his lack of morality is all the more stunning when compared to how Kyle and Stan act.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that, for some people, there's a line for just how much they can tolerate before the character becomes utterly hateful, even in a comedy. And Cartman is past that line for some... so he might be the poster boy of why this trope is YMMV.
For the record, I don't think he is, although I think he deserves to be The Chew Toy.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.