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
So we're not even going to delete the 'sympathetic backstory' line from Syndrome's Never Again list entry even though everyone is in agreement that he doesn't have a sympathetic backstory?
Wild Child
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I'd suggest the upper-case D in Gul'dan's name be replaced with lower-case, since that seems to be how it's properly spelled.
edited 27th Jun '16 7:40:00 PM by Clown-Face
Why so serious?
A total has-been.
Yeah, that's the one thing we should do in regards to Syndrome before dropping him for good.
edited 27th Jun '16 7:26:59 PM by ANewMan
Gul'dan's writeup looks good.
@G-Editor: Nobody is talking about Syndrome anymore. The mods have spoken, no new evidence has been brought up, so we're canning discussion on this character for good.
I'm not sure how there'd be a pronunciation difference. Gul'dan, lower-case D, is the canonical spelling though.
The Unknown
edited 27th Jun '16 7:45:20 PM by Karxrida
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?
Yeah, I reeeeeeally think you should delete that....the mod put the kibosh on the conversation.
Well, glad I missed all that. Wish I had someone new to propose in order to help the conversation move along, but I sadly don't.
I will address a few things from the prior conversation, because I think they are points that are worth addressing:
1) Once a medium starts playing anything violent for laughs, you have seriously complicated any discussion of the heinous standard. You can't claim murder is heinous in your story when some murders get played as a joke. You can't claim rape is heinous in your story when you have previously treated it as a joke. Pick your crime, if someone does it and it is treated as a joke, you cannot proceed to treat it seriously later on and have it qualify. It does not work that way. I cite the cutting of all Family Guy and South Park examples as a case in point.
2) Flashbacks, even brief ones, absolutely effect the heinous bar. We have characters who only exist in flashback, yet are on the list—looking at you, Aerys II Targaryen. If a character can be qualified based on flashback, then a character can be disqualified based on what someone did in a flashback.
3) Finally, there's something I want to say about genre. We agreed, a long time ago, that most slasher villains can't be voted up, because the very nature of the genre dictates that they murder vast numbers of people in exceptionally ridiculous ways. In consequence of that, those slashers who have been qualified are either from the inception of the genre, are exceptional in some major way, or hail from nontraditional slasher films. A similar thing is at work in the superhero genre. The very nature of a superhero story dictates that supervillains try to kill superheroes—and their immediate friends and family—and endanger large numbers of civilians via collateral damage. If you remove those elements from a superhero story, the story does not work.
Those supervillains we have qualified are again, special in one way or another, be it in terms of who they target or how they do it. Doctor Light, to pick an example, is not listed because of heroes he has killed or civilians he has endangered but because of the "Doctor Rape" meme that "Identity Crisis" started and that all portrayals of run with since. Similarly Norman Osborn is not listed because of killing Gwen Stacy or regularly throwing bombs into crowds, but because he tried to murder his own son, withheld a cancer treatment from the public, and blew up a football stadium so he could start a pointless war. The Joker is not listed because he killed Jason Todd or crippled Barbara Gordon, but because of the wagonload of noncombatants he's shot, knifed, gassed, tortured, and burned alive over several decades worth of comics.
And yes this still applies to homages and parodies, because you cannot homage or parody a genre without echoing the key elements of it. Just as Scream is held to the same standards as the slasher genre as a whole, so too must the film that was just under discussion be held to the same standards as the superhero genre as a whole.
edited 27th Jun '16 9:40:27 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
I'll probably have someone to propose tomorrow.
Here is a possible quote for fan works:
Renard: I let Harvey know who he had really supplied with the explosives, and the fact it would in all probability result in him spending the rest of his life in prison. I had also made sure that the poor fool had absolutely no evidence of my involvement. It was just a matter of suggesting that the company would most definitely turn on him, so the only way he could escape his fate was to silence them all- perhaps they could all meet with a terrible accident. Explosives are dangerous after all.
Siegfried: You...! Y-you're saying it was... your idea!? You... you killed them all you bastard!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebAnimation/OperationTurnabout
Decent, I suppose, but I don't necessarily think a quote needs to be a paragraph.
edited 27th Jun '16 11:19:58 PM by Scraggle
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
I agree with Camberf about deleting that line (and was leaning ![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
after thinking about it), but I guess the mods have spoken 
. And Ambar, retired=/current superheroes.
Though for a good example of going above and beyond, take Willy Pete. Has the highest number of Cape kills (in a comic where it's actually NOT too common), plus has the eye-screwing.
edited 28th Jun '16 5:18:16 AM by ACW
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
That's a...long read. Ravok? After all, you read Worm in only a few days ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Also, I may watch the two Exo Squad eps with Ketzer so that I can expand his write-up.
Here's
a possible image for Western Animation, if we can get it in a better quality. Erzsebet Ondrushko.
edited 28th Jun '16 3:04:46 AM by ACW
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Has The Fiend from The Wardstone Chronicles been discussed? I tried to search but found nothing.
edited 28th Jun '16 4:03:52 AM by Silverblade2
Apparently not. In fact, the work itself was never discussed at all.
So I have two video game characters, one from a pretty ludacris game and another from a pretty decent zombie game. I'm gonna talk about the former as I feel I have to get this one out of the way asap, because the sooner this games out of the way the better.
Known as Fahrenheit in its U.K title and Indigo Prophecy it's American releases, is David Cage's first "interactive movie" which functions initially as a murder mystery story with supernatural elements...before skydiving in a magical (with sci fi elements) adventure with a looming threat of an apocalypse. The game is set in New York and opens with protagonist Lucas Kane being possessed into committing a murder and is forced to cover his tracks. While being investigated by two detectives Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles. The three protagonists try to put everything together and get caught up in an ancient conspiracy. Lucas also acquires magical superpowers.
I can hardly call this a Crazy Awesome game for how over the top it gets, but more in the So Bad, It's Good camp. It is also ripe with story flaws and Unfortunate Implications, a lot of which pointed out by Two Best Friends Play play through of the game (pretty much their commentary was mostly a "Reason You Suck" Speech to David Cage) such as obvious movie rip offs (Silence of the Lambs and The Matrix), racial implications (because obviously the black character must have a hip hop letimotif), cases of Sadly Mythtaken, negative portrayal of the mentally ill, and one biggest examples of Strangled by the Red String I've seen since Near Dark. Such things are failure of the game design.
Now onto the games antagonist, the Oracle.
To be up front The Oracle is something of an Un-person; no one knows his real name, his personal history, anything, although we do learn his motives as the story goes on. The Oracle is introduced in the beginning of the game, possessing Lucas into murdering a man in a restaurants bathroom. Lucas is shaken by the experience and tries to piece it together, while suffering hallucinations. We gradually learn the Oracle was once a Mayan sacrificial priest, who gained immortality and is an agent for a secret government called The Orange Clam and is seeking a prophetic child called the Indigo Child.
At the time of the game, New York has been hit by an unnatural winter, with a that all happens on the backdrop of global cooling around ten degrees Celsius every day. The prophecy says this winter will cause the apocalypse and the Indigo Child (real name Jade) is connected to it; the winter signifies her coming death and as she dies she is to reveal the ultimate secret of the universe. Before you think the Oracle or his masters want this child for some Omnicidal Maniac or Well-Intentioned Extremist motives, it turns out that who ever the secret is revealed to will have the ultimate power of the universe and the Orange Clan wish to use it to eternally rule the earth as Gods and enslave humanity. The Oracle has been seeking the Indigo Child for the past two thousand years, as a ritualistic Serial Killer; his is killing seven random people every seven years. Because he can't get his own hands dirty, he resorts to possessing people, also at random, into carrying out his murders. The experience drives his "executors" insane and into suicide.
Now in the game, Lucas manages to resist this long enough to get the Oracles attention. Now Lucas has acquired magic powers called Chroma which give him super human abilities. This is because when his mother was pregnant - she and his father where scientists living on a military base which discovered a source of chroma - Lucas was radiated in his mothers womb by it. After some belittlement from his masters, the Oracle decided to fix his mistake by abducting Lucas' ex girlfriend Tiffany and taking her to a high platform at an abandoned amusement park during a snow storm. This lures Lucas to a death trap by having the platform collapse, killing them both, but Lucas is reanimated by (bare with me here) a malevolent AI creature that represents the Purple Clan with its own intentions for the child. Depending on the players actions, The Oracle will also kill Lucas' brother Markus. The games female lead Carla also learns about the conspiracy from one of the Oracles former possession victims named Janos in a mental institution.
It's discovered that Jade is in a orphanage in New York, and when this is revealed both antagonist parties and Lucas and Carla converge to rescue Jade. Reaching the orphanage, the Oracle, backed up by the Orange Clans SWAT team, non chalantly kills a nun before getting into fight with Lucas. The AI also comes to collect the child but while its distracted fighting the SWAT, Lucas, Carla and Jade are rescued by (bare with me) a secret society of homeless people called "The Invisibles". They decide the best place to take Jade before she dies is to the now abandoned military base where Lucas grew up. There they are attacked by the Orange Clan soldiers, led by the Oracle, leading to the games final fight.
The game has three possible endings - Good ending; if the Oracle and the AI are defeated and apparently killed by Lucas, Jade reveals the ultimate secret to Lucas and the world returns to normal. Neutral ending; the Oracle learns the secret before he and the Orange clan disappears, but the closing narration states they soon plan to put their plans into motion. Bad ending; the AI learns the secret and allows the winter to ravage the world, what's left of humanity now struggles to survive. Only consistent thing is revealing that Carla is now pregnant and the game closes with Santa Monica by Theory Of A Dead Man.
Now the Oracle does have a personality and motives to save him from being a GDV. He is The Stoic although he does flash a smug grin here and there. He is given no Freudian Excuse. He also confirms that he is helping his master enslave the human race and clearly has no remorse or empathy for his crimes and a few Faux Affably Evil moments, such as complimenting a book Lucas is reading when he first possesses him and when forcing a laundromat manage to kill for him he says "Don't mind me, I'll be but a moment". He makes it clear that he and the Orange Clan wants to rule as Gods, and in a Shut Up, Kirk! moment, says "What does it matter to you ? We run everything anyways." So they want more power then they already have even though they are plenty powerful already. Only thing I wonder is if his loyalty to the Orange Clan can be seen as redeeming as its not painted in a redeeming light, but he's loyal to their cause.
He also helps set the heinous standard by having the highest body count and being part of an evil plan to enslave humanity. Only real competition he has is from the Ass Pull AI antagonist who in the bad ending of the game allows the winters apocalypse to wipe out two thirds of the human race.
edited 28th Jun '16 5:24:46 AM by Beast
"It's like...a cliff, and if I do it, I'm just gonna...fall." "I think we're already falling."
I never really got a CM vibe from the Orace myself...he comes off as more an extension of the evil Illuminati conspiracy than as a real character unto himself.
And for reference: The story begins as a thrilling murder mystery where you are the killer attempting to piece together why. It becomes a story of a man resurrected from death having Matrix-style kung fu duels with a Mayan Oracle who works for the Illuminati.
I really don't mid of the Oracle gets voted down, I just needed to check him off my list. Anyways, I don't have much to argue about him being an agent of the illuminati but I was going to compare him to the Cigarette Man in terms of being an agent for a greater conspiracy but last I checked he was more of a character.
"It's like...a cliff, and if I do it, I'm just gonna...fall." "I think we're already falling."
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_down_emoticon_3571.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
Oracle... I'm not sensing any real motivations besides "power", which puts him (?) firmly in Generic Doomsday Villain for me.
Also good god that is a confusing game.
on Oracle.
Yes to Wolfstar but no to Hagen. Even if he operates on a smaller scale, he still doesn't sound like he's as bad as he could be.
I'll also vote no to the Oracle for reasons lighty gave. Plus the evil AI seems to murk up the heinous standard.
Wild Child
Oracle.
Hey I have a strange question. Does the two week rule appply to fan fics?
Here's my shot at Gul'Dan: