Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

I can remember Annhilus clearly, I just don't know what he is, the characters in the show just guess. He's just a space bug that shows up and wants to kill. It doesn't even communicate, just sends his bugs to kill them. What I mean is, I don't know what its motives are, though he seems sentient.

edited 10th Oct '12 6:44:55 PM by DrPsyche

If there is no clear motive—not even something as basic as For the Evulz—than my advice would be to cut him. He can always be put back if a motive is revealed later on.

EDIT: Here's Craster's rewrite.

Craster, a particularly vicious Wildling and ally of the Night's Watch, who in his own words, kneels to no man, including Mance Rayder, King-Beyond-The-Wall. Living alone in a huge, ramshackle compound, Craster keeps a harem of women in line with brainwashing and violence, breaking their spirits until they cannot rise up against him, despite the fact that they vastly outnumber him. All of these women are his "wives"; many of them are also his daughters and granddaughters. When one of them becomes pregnant, Craster waits to see if it is a boy or a girl. If the child is female, he waits until she is old enough (read eleven or twelve) and does his best to impregnate her. If the child is a boy, Craster leaves him in the woods to be killed by the cold or devoured by the Others; this way they cannot challenge his control over the women. Obsessed with his own hedonism, and raising the next generation of wives, Craster uses his alleigance with the Night's Watch to make sure that nobody, not even the Watch, interferes with his business.

edited 10th Oct '12 9:29:02 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Seeing as he's an alien bug that doesn't talk, I'd say you're right in cutting him. He sounds like a Generic Doomsday Villain at it's finest.

Excellent, Craster rewrite.

edited 10th Oct '12 7:21:38 PM by OccasionalExister

Thank you

@ Ambar: Craster rewrite looks good.

As for Anhilius, I re-watched the episode, and I learned two things 1. The Leader is voiced by Jeffrey Combs, and 2, The Leader exposits what Annhilus's plan was, he seemed to embody chaos and the negative zone, and saw life encroaching on it, and hoped to kill it. I don't know if that's a correct interpretation, because in addition to learning that The Leader's mind was thrown into chaos by Annhilus, but that's Annhilius's motive. I say cut.

edited 10th Oct '12 8:07:53 PM by DrPsyche

From what I'm hearing about Anhilius, I have to say this guy should most likely be cut.

edited 10th Oct '12 8:14:37 PM by rmctagg09

Oh, one thing I would add regarding Craster- the fact that he is basically an intermediary between the Watch and Wildings, and each side insists he's a member of the other group.

@Dr Psyche

That could be a sympathetic motivation if you were to stop and think about it. If his home is the Negative Zone, and his goal amounts to "get the intruders out," well then I can have some empathy for that. I support a cut.

I'll add a bit about that.

EDIT: I've posted those rewrites and Rorge and asked to have a few minor things changed. I now declare myself done with ASOIF (at least until book 6 comes out)

edited 10th Oct '12 9:35:58 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

I don't know, he had to control the other creatures of the zone, suggesting that they're just animals, to attack the Shield Agents. When his control was broken, they turned on him, suggesting some sentience. Even if this isn't, he still shouldn't count, he's like the anti-monitor, he's made of the opposite to our universe, and subject to some Blue-and-Orange Morality, IMO.

edited 10th Oct '12 11:16:45 PM by DrPsyche

Being The Beastmaster is hardly just a power used by bad guys in Marvel, and having dangerous 'pets' turn on you is always a concern. I'm not sure there's a moral element to that.

I wasn't trying to insinuate a moral element, I was merely stating that these creatures would have minded their own business and probably not attacked the Shield Prison, if not for Anhilus. I was trying to say that not every creature felt that the positive matter was intruding on their domain like Annhilus thought (they didn't even seem to have some instinct that told them the positive matter was bad), or else they would have continued their attack. Basically I was trying to convey that the negative Zone denizens didn't want the positive world out, only Anhilus. My opinion to cut remains.

edited 11th Oct '12 12:57:18 AM by DrPsyche

@3738 I see I was too subtle. Let me be direct.

Push comes to shove, we really do not want to be sticking our necks out into the "what counts as rape" debate. I've dealt enough with discussions about levels of consent, the role of prostitution, and the role of masculine viewpoints on females in fiction to know that it's a gargantuan rhetorical minefield. And honestly, TV Tropes have been raked over the coals enough over issues about any tropes related to rape - it's not hard to find information about the shitstorm that erupted when TV Tropes temporarily cut all tropes about rape (or even those that had "rape" in their name) due to advertising pressure, and questions about whether it was appropriate for a wiki comprised primarily of geeky males to even have the topic for discussion.

In short, I really think that it's best that we, in this thread, do not touch any sorts of questions as to what actually counts as rape, how much authors may use/overuse rape, whether rape as a crime is thematically appropriate, or any of that.

To be perfectly frank, I try to avoid discussing rape at all in this thread unless it's intrinsic to whether or not a character qualifies. This is why I was pushing the "not completely heinous" line with Tywin - because he's disqualified for that reason on its own, we don't need to split hairs on whether it was rape and how much rape is needed to qualify in the Crapsack World of A Song Of Ice And Fire for Complete Monster.

TL;DR version of the above - if we don't need to address the controversial issue of rape to make a decision regarding this trope, don't address the controversial issue of rape. It'll save us a ton of headaches.

Okay, now with that done...

@3743 You need to give the name of the book that the character comes from.

@3749 I'd rather cut Annihilus, actually. Most of his actions really are just killing folks invading his home (to set up a prison, no less). Also, it's not entirely clear if he's sentient or not. I vote to cut the Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes version of the character.

I'm going to cut Annihilus in 24 hours.

For Cut: Me, Ambar Sonof Deshar, 32_Footsteps, rmctagg 09, Occasional Exister,

If anyone has any more input, please say so, PM me if I missed an opinion or misrepresented one, so I may edit this post.

edited 11th Oct '12 12:37:16 PM by DrPsyche

Anyone else have any thoughts on the Mass Effect entries I listed here? Whether the entries qualify or not? Or if the rewrites are okay?

So far there are 2 tropers in favor of keeping Nassana, 3 tropers against. There are also 2 tropers for keeping Saleon, 2 leaning towards cut. The arguement against the entries boils down to them possibly not hitting the heinous standard.

EDIT: Also, I think I requested this awhile ago, but are there any objections to me cutting the Abarat examples on the literature page, Christopher Carrion and Princess Boa, the former for being a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds and the latter for failing the heinous standard?

edited 11th Oct '12 1:19:20 PM by OccasionalExister

@3764 If we decide that Nassana and Saleon "don't fit the standard" of a Complete Monster, then that's fine, but I think that we should definitely reconsider a good deal of the other entries for this trope, because those two are pretty fucking evil.

Qualifying for this trope isn't simply a matter of adding up all the evil and seeing if it passes some arbitrary bar. The character also needs to be more-or-less flat and one-dimensional. (Though too far in that direction can give you Generic Doomsday Villain.) Real(istic) people are inevitably more complex than this trope would allow.

It's a great trope for horror, and maybe for video games and YA stuff where you don't want to complicate matters for the kiddies, but outside of that I generally consider it a bad writing trope in most cases. And yes, I know some people disagree. Those people are simply wrong. :)

(And for those who simply complain that X is a good work, and it has a CM, I simply reply: one bad writing trope is not enough to make an entire work bad. It can have other redeeming features. Nevertheless, confirming the presence of this trope in a work inevitably lowers my interest in that work, unless it's horror or YA.)

Complete Monster is a relative thing, according to the standards of the work. In, say, Spider-Man, killing/permanently crippling children would put you over the Moral Event Horizon. In A Song Of Ice And Fire, that just pushes you into Anti-Hero territory.

I exaggerate, but not by much.

And in Berserk it makes you an average joe, off to work. I can't remember if you were here or not for the debate on that series that we had in one of the other threads, but the sheer awfulness of most of the people in the series made deciding who qualifies a real pain.

@32_Footsteps

If you look at the posts, Jordan, Occasional Exister, myself, and a couple of others already had a very civilised discussion that embraced both the rape issue, and other facets of Tywin's character and agreed to cut him. I understand your concerns (I've seen what a couple of other threads have dissolved into as soon as the subject comes up) but seeing as the issue was settled, I'm not sure we should worry too much (though I'll keep it in mind if a similar example comes up again).

Jordan's post at 3743 is actually a response to a post I made about Craster here. My proposed rewrite for him is at 3752, a few posts up.

EDIT: Speaking of Berserk, there's two examples from the page that I was hoping to bring up.

• Gambino was probably the closest thing that Guts had to a father, and as a kid, Guts tried everything he could to gain his approval. Unfortunately, Gambino's heart was hardened against the poor kid long ago when Sys, his lover, died from the plague just three years after they first took Guts in and Gambino blamed Guts for her death because of a superstitious belief about picking up children from corpses(Guts having been born from the death throes of his mother when she was hanged). While the hellishly hard training Gambino puts Guts through could be viewed as "tough love" and lays the foundations for Guts' future badassery, the same cannot be said for his most despicable act: selling Guts to Donovan, a notorious pederast among his soldiers and a scumbag in his own right, as a child prostitute for three measly silver coins, resulting in Guts being raped despite his best efforts to fight the big man off. Things come to a head when Gambino, who lost his leg in battle and can no longer lead his men, gets drunk one night and tries to kill Guts in his tent. He proceeds to show off his true character in heartless fashion by not only revealing that he was behind what happened with Donovan, but also calling Guts "disgusting," telling him that the one responsible for Sys's death "couldn't be raised to be loyal like a dog" and that Guts should have died instead. It is all but a relief when Guts finally kills him in self-defense, though given that Gambino was still an important figure in Guts' life, Guts still felt terrible about the whole ordeal.

• At the order of the king of Midland, an unnamed torturer spends a year doing unspeakable things to Griffith, thus indirectly being, to a large extent, the cause of Griffith accepting the Godhand's offer. He shows up for a very small amount of time and establishes all of the horror with one fairly short conversation. Despite his insistence that he was following orders and is therefore not evil, his gloating over what he did to Griffith for a year leaves absolutely no conceivable way for him to be considered anything other than a sadist.

Gambino and the torturer are both awful people, but the fact is, they're far from the worst people around. Even accepting that they appear before the Eclipse goes down, and the series as a whole takes a turn for the even darker, neither one of them approaches the level of depravity that Wyald reaches, let alone that of post-Eclipse baddies like Griffith/Femto and Ganishka. To see the company that these two gentlemen are keeping, click here. I suppose that the case could be made that they are both as bad as it is possible for them to be, given that they are only ordinary humans (and in Gambino's case a crippled alcoholic, old man), but I don't know. I'm not deadset on cutting them, but I would like to discuss the matter.

edited 11th Oct '12 3:48:44 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

@3766 - I have no idea what you're trying to explain to him. Especially since the main reason why Nassana does not count is because she actually is "flat and one-dimensional" in an utterly indistinct fashion, and not in a Generic Doomsday Villain sense.

@3768 - Yeah, I'll second that and say that neither of them are all that heinous when everyone else is a genocidal dictator or a walking, breathing atrocity machine. This might not means much of anything, but I'll add on to the torturer and say that I believe he only appears twice and does nothing in either of his appearances. While the result of his actions are visible and have grave repercussions on the universe, we never really see him in the act of doing anything. He's just a scummy dude who appears and then brags after the fact about how badly he mutilated Griffith. Again, I'm not sure if this has any real bearing on if he should not be on this list, but there's not much of a reason to give a damn about him in practice.

edited 11th Oct '12 3:55:50 PM by AquaRegia

If Gambino loved Sys, and hates Guts because he blames Guts for her death, wouldn't that give him a good trait that disqualifies him? Yeah though, I'd say neither quite reaches the heinous standard of the series. In a show like Berserk it seems like you have to be evil incarnate, with the only excuse for not comitting as many atrocities as humanly possible being a lack of power to carry them out. Gambino and the torturer sound like repulsive human beings, but it doesn't sound like they go out of their way to cause as much pain and misery as they can, especially in Gambino's case where the only person he hurts is Guts. From that description, I'd say Gambino's a vile bastard and crosses the Moral Event Horizon, but he's not a Complete Monster. I'm leaning towards cutting both.

edited 11th Oct '12 4:00:10 PM by OccasionalExister

It does have a bearing actually. Offscreen Villainy is one of the things we use the most when it comes to disqualifying potential candidates.

I know, I'm just not sure to what degree; the results are very much visible so it may almost count as a Gory Discretion Shot as detailed in the first post. Well, it would if Berserk was ever concerned about showing that kind of brutality...

That rule might need a bit more detail added to it. A good amount of bad CM examples seem to run afoul of Offscreen Villainy subsets, therefore it is pretty important to flesh out a bit more just to make those entries easier to tackle.

Well, provided I'm not just stupid and complicating a succinct "never" =)

edited 11th Oct '12 4:24:13 PM by AquaRegia

Sometimes I wonder whether it's having too much emphasis put on it, in fact. But in this case it's certainly a disqualifying factor.

On the subject of those Mass Effect examples, I'm going to reiterate what Aqua Regia said on the previous page - I can't see much if any difference between Nassana Dantius and numerous other mission antagonists in the second game. Most of them are Bad Bosses with little regard for their employees' lives. Admittedly, her employees are much more innocent victims then most, but I still can't see her counting when we have Henry Lawson (who certainly qualifies) as the standard for Corrupt Corporate Executives in the setting.

As for Dr. Saleon, I just don't think he has enough screentime or characterization to count, but I'm less adamantly against including him.

edited 11th Oct '12 4:22:53 PM by nrjxll

I think the only reason why Nassana got on the page while the other Arc Villains didn't, is because, unlike the others, her minions are actually shown gunning down innocent people, while the mercs never really kill anyone onscreen. However, I think it's important to note she didn't kill her employess For the Evulz, but because her paranoia over the assassin coming for her was causing a steady but severe Sanity Slippage on her part. Compare how calm and composed she is in Mass Effect 1 to how Axe-Crazy she becomes in Mass Effect 2. Also, Henry Lawson's existance is why I'm not sure either Nassana or Saleon qualify, since Lawson's like an amalgam of the two, combining Corrupt Corporate Executive and Mad Science with a dash of Offing the Offspring, plus his actions are far more widespread than either Saleon's or Nassana's.

edited 11th Oct '12 6:57:03 PM by OccasionalExister

If there's no argument, I intend to remove Manfred Von Karma, and edit a few of the entries, (Based mostly on Footstep's post here) on the Ace Attorney Complete Monster page. We were in agreement, I believe, that since Manfred has a family that he cares for, he doesn't count.

I also wish to edit and clean up a bit the Trauma Center entry in the main Video Games Monster page.

Looking back, I believe we wanted to remove Actrise from the Castlevania page, correct? Since she's never shown to have sacrificed a hundred children. She does talk with glee about having killed her own child, but that doesn't count. Shall I remove her?

edited 11th Oct '12 6:59:46 PM by TriggerLoaded