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}
Except that there are collections of myth that piece it together for us. The Bible, Apollodorus' Library, the Fabulae, the Zoroastrian Avestas (read as The Bible), the Koran, Snorri's collections of Norse myth. Really, as long as there are sources like that available, I'm not really seeing what the problem is.
On a specific note, I'll add that Tantalus' story is basically the same in every major collection of Greco-Roman myth out there. Apparently it was a keeper.
edited 30th Dec '12 9:56:58 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
The Merry Monarch of Darkness
Some Marvel Comics examples that might be worth checking:
- Mr. Sinister: There was a oneshot that implied he fell in love with one of his test subjects. Might be one of those cases (as with Sabretooth) where this is too apocryphal to take into consideration, though, as it's never been mentioned anywhere else.
- Cassandra Nova: She, I think, fits the "mindless destroyer" archetype I mentioned earlier; her Bigger Bad, Sublime, described her as a "blind predator." Yes, she killed all those mutants to spite Professor X, but I think it's made pretty clear that hating Professor X is literally the only thing she knows how to do. As well, there's an alternate future where she was redeemed, albeit by completely rebuilding her personality from scratch.
- Proteus: Says right there in the entry that later arcs turned him into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. His abusive dad may be a better fit.
- Vulcan: Has a Freudian Excuse, albeit an increasingly-weak one as the stories go on.
- Rev. Stryker: I really want to keep him, but there was one arc that tried to redeem him; it didn't take, and he came back a few years later even worse than before (albeit written by someone else).
- The Void, Abraxas, and Dormammu: Not really familiar with these, but I got the distinct impression they're Generic Doomsday Villains.
edited 30th Dec '12 11:43:12 PM by HamburgerTime
The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."
Let's see:
- With the case of Mr. Sinister, how canon was that story and how did it ultimately end? Because if he loved her but experimented on her just the same anyway it only reinforces things.
- Cassandra Nova, if she plays second fiddle to another villian, probably would fail the henious standard. I know nothing of her to really judge her moral heniousness, only that she was killed by Xavier while both of them were in the womb, so she would definitely not have any human morality system.
- Proteus, if turned into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds would be an easy cut.
- Vulcan, I suppose it would depend on just how weak his excuse gets. Eventually it'd get to the point where it'd become irrelevant.
- With Rev Striker, if his redemption arc didn't take, and later ones moved him back to type, then he'd still count (unless that arc introduced redeeming qualities)
- The Void is a split personality of The Sentry, so that would violate the rule against split personalities. He exists to balance out the sentry; he kills as many people as the Sentry saves, and is the personification of all the worst of Robert's druggie past.
Didn't we decide earlier in the thread to scrap the split personalities rule for being an one size fits all solution based on incorrect assumptions?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanRuss Cargill was listed in TheSimpsonsMovie, with the following arguments: "Cargill. See Moral Event Horizon below." The "Moral Event Horizon below" is " Cargill crosses a line when he plans to blow up Springfield with a small nuke. The kicker is that this plan would kill off thousands of (mostly) innocent people, including children. And he knows this, and doesn't give a damn." Opinions?
edited 31st Dec '12 2:33:49 AM by MagBas
The Merry Monarch of Darkness
On Sinister: The story was completely canon. Basically, this woman, now very old, is kidnapped by another villain who wants revenge on Sinister, and the X-Men try to save her. By the end, the old woman dies, and Sinister surprisingly lets the X-Men go, leading Beast to speculate that her death might just have affected him.
On Stryker: The arc didn't so much give him redeeming qualities as it did a reality-check; the gist of it is that he meets a mutant minister who does the same stuff to baseline humans. Though he is kind of nice to Kitty Pryde in the very last issue, albeit right after forcing her to Tele-Frag said mutant minister...
edited 31st Dec '12 2:32:42 AM by HamburgerTime
The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."
The Simpsons Movie: The comedic nature of the original nonwithstanding, his plans sound pretty evil. I am not sure if he's a Knight Templar though - that comes off like Well-Intentioned Extremist more.
And the example still needs to be rewritten to something more useful than "See that other example"
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I need I mention this mr. Sinister story was a one shot f dubious canocity and is never mentioned again. It goes firmly against everything we know about sinister there. Sinister is portrayed for literally decades as a monster without sympathy.
Also Vulcan has an excuse. You said yourself its not adequate. And e firmly distances himself from it. Cassandra isn't jut a generic destroyer either. She's just hateful and genocidal. She has enough personality to qualify. Dormammu is far from generic as well unlike abraxas.
And Stryker? He went right back to being evil. Easy keep all o those except void. And abraxas and proteus. And the only thing on sinister? Speculation. Nothing to override decades of consistent evil
edited 31st Dec '12 3:13:53 AM by Lightysnake
Foreign Troper
Regarding Vulcan: Doesn't he really love Deathbird? I mean, he marries her. And he goes batshit insane when she is hurt. So that would give him at least one redeeming quality => Cut.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
I forgot his wife. Yep that's a redeeming quality
On the split personality rule, it allowed exceptions in extreme cases, but as a rule an evil split personality is still apart of the same person, and you can't say "half of X is a Complete Monster but the other half is not."
Well, I am going to ask for some more explanation on what the personalities do - a blanket "one doesn't count because the other doesn't either" isn't going to cut itnote
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
It does, because a split personality is not a full personality. It is apart of the person's full personality, and thus doesn't count as a seperate entity because it is not a seperate entity. It doesn't have it's own soul, it inherrents it's personality traits from apart of the whole, and as a general rule split personalities are the result of some form of insanity, which excludes moral agency.
Ok, after reviewing the past discussions on the topic, I see that this description might work for realistic Dissociative Whatever Sydrome but not for what I usually see when something is called a "split personality" - they usually show up like separate things, just like members of a group. Thus, no dice: I am not going to mishmash personalities together randomly.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This was the argument I used last time the subject came up, and it's a part of why we ultimately cut Tobias Hankel but kept Dark Marik.
- The Masked Man from the G/S/C arc seems to qualify. It's majorly averted in the end, with both the characters and the reader realizing he's just an insane but miserable and lonely old man.
- The Masked Man from the G/S/C arc seems to qualify. It's majorly averted in the end, with both the characters and the reader realizing he's just an insane but miserable and lonely old man.
Reason why I cut it: He failed both extremely heinous and he does have some redeem qualifies. I'm not going to spoil it, through. Not to mention that it's an aversion example.
- Similarly to the above, there's Cyrus, who seems so monstrously evil and utterly detached from humanity but only because he's a deeply disturbed man who had rejected the concept of human spirit due to his Freudian Excuse. When seeing emotion, willpower, and intelligence united together to defeat him, he realizes how wrong he's been all along and has a change of heart afterward.
Reason: He redeemed. Therefore, A character can't be a Complete Monster if there's a redeeming qualify. And yes, I known that redeeming qualify doesn't have to be a Heel–Face Turn, it can be like the villain have their love one or he's being goofy.
- Here comes Ghetsis! You can be sure he's going to meet all qualifications.
Reason why I cut: He haven't show how evil is he in the manga yet. Time will tell. In fact, he is a bad exa.... Aw, forget about that.
Think of the mooks!
You know, I thought, with The Wall Will Fall finally being over, that I'd have time over the weekend to do some work here. And then post-mortem happened. Heh. Anyhow, I kept up doing work here before; time to get a few more examples done.
@6242 You didn't do a proper search of this thread. If you did, you'd note the many times that we hit Star Wars examples, and the part where we cut the page that used to exist for Sonic The Hedgehog because there were insufficient examples (starting back in @4701).
@6258 No, it's not strange. While I think both qualify, Tarkin is in some ways scarier because he isn't a Jedi, with all sorts of mysterious powers. He's a mere man... that is all too comfortable with destroying entire worlds.
@6261 This is why I didn't want the "don't even mention" list in the first post. I was kind of thinking that the second post would have been a better spot.
@6263 Is Moriarty still around to have further development? If so, I'd actually hold off including him for now on the "series still ongoing" reason. Whether it's likely (or would go over well) or not, I just got done with a series that gave James Moriarty some redeeming features. I put it past nobody else to attempt the same.
Also, as a side note, even if that entry was included, I'd cut the spoilered line completely. You're engaging in Fan Myopia a bit; I think the "blowing up an old person" part is much more heinous than the "frame someone else for it" part.
@6265 You brought up that page back in @2908, there were no objections to you cutting Dennis then, and I even supported a total cut in @2927. You can safely axe it all.
@6271 I'm inclined to cut him, based on what I'm reading. Classic "mad with grief" character.
@6279 To be honest, Apep still sounds like a Generic Doomsday Villain to me, although one closer to qualifying than someone like Surt. Anything else you can describe?
@6285 The biggest problem is that female characters are much more likely to get placed on this list for much less than their male counterparts, even within the same series. The trope itself isn't sexist; the way some people add to it is.
@6268 Wait, Kratos from God Of War? Even without the Player Character issue, he is constantly shown as loving his wife and child. Easy cut.
@6289 Very technically, a video game player character can count, but they can only count if there's a combination of mandatory qualifying actions and absolutely no route to show anything mitigating. So far as we know, nobody has actually made such a game.
@6304 Based on what I've seen others say, I think Nekron is a case where what the writer wanted to convey was not actually conveyed. I could be swayed with the right argument, but for now, I vote keep.
@6315 "Appreciating fine music" is not a reason to cut someone from this trope, so I still think Sisyphus qualifies.
@6317 He looks like a solid keep. Though I wouldn't say that creating the peacock is a good act; just a non-evil one.
@6319 You had me at the first bullet point. Cut Candie. I'm good for cutting Stephen as well.
@6327 Do you have more detail on any of those?
@6345 Wow, you keep finding the Dead Baby Comedy examples. Complete cut.
@6353 I mostly agree, but notes of contention:
Rev. Stryker - We do note Depending on the Writer for cases like him, where there's only one writer who tries to argue that he doesn't qualify.
Abraxas and Dormammu - these both are potentially gods of evil. I think they need to be weighed against examples like Darkseid (though Darkseid gets more characterization; I suspect both will be cut).
@6360 Oh, right... Vulcan can be cut then.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Overall I'd say Dormammu stacks well against darkseid. He's not just a god of evil or an elemental force like abraxas. He, like the big D, is a ruler of a dimension where he mercilessly oppressss everyone and subjects them to hideous torments and nightmares. Including his own family if they oppose him. He seeks to conquer more worlds and extend his rather nightmarish rule to everything he can and does hideous things to those who get in the way. He's sadistic, egotistical and tyrannical as big D himself.
As for moriarity? Yeah. His story is done definitely on the show
edited 31st Dec '12 8:55:36 AM by Lightysnake
I never got the impression Dormammu was an elemental force of evil or otherwise lacked moral agency. I have not read anything with him in it where he commited anything other than bog-standard villiany, though. Someone who knows him better would have to fill me in on what all he actually does besides being a dick to his sister and trying to take over Earth/ kill Dr. Strange a few times.
Also IIRC he does keep some sort of brainless monsters at bay with his powers, potecting his subjects from them. He treats his subjects poorly, but I think they prefered that over being torn about by monsters? IDK, that was early days in the comic, they may have reconned it.
Also Re: Ungat Trunn - I am of two minds about this guy. Looking at his rap sheet I have to agree that he is worse than most Redwall villians, and potentially has more moral agency to boot, since cats are 50/50 on being good or evil while rats/ ferrets/ weasles/ and foxes are shown to be evil 99% of the time (at least). On the other hand, I just finished rereading Lord Brocktree and Trunn just did not, I dunno, stand out at all. He has a very generic feel to him, despite the racism and canabolism. That is probably not a disqualifier in and of itself, but there you are.
@ 32_Footsteps: Moriarty killed himself. The spoiler I put in is mainly to protect the fact that he killed himself out of complete spite to screw over someone else's life, which is treated with the same magnitude in-series as him murdering a defenseless senior citizen.
edited 31st Dec '12 9:44:19 AM by LargoQuagmire
@ 6368
Give me a bit on Apophis. I don't have a book of Egyptian myth handy so I've been doing most of my reading online. I may be able to find something that settles the question of sentience, which goes a long way towards determing whether he's CM or GDV. Honestly, I'm more forgiving when it comes to myth, since everyone, hero and villain alike, is going to be rather stereotypical. The fact that there were whole temples dedicated to praying against this guy is what makes me think were dealing with something that people found very real and frightening as opposed to generic.
Think of the mooks!
@6369, 6370 Clearly, Dormammu needs a bit of a closer reading. I'll try, within the week, to read some of his classic stories to get a handle on him.
@6371 What have I said about spoilers? Multiple times? Anyhow, I stand by my statement - that spoilered line does not need to be in there at all, and it is still less heinous than what isn't spoilered.
@6372 Take your time; we're in no rush. That said, temples being against the guy are a suggestion that he might qualify, but I wouldn't use that as a qualifier against him.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
@6317
Looks like a pretty good fit. Angra Mainyu seems to have more personality than a lot of evil gods. The creation of the peacock doesn't qualify for a altruistic deed but does cement that he is evil by choice and not design. He also meets the heinousness standard from your description. I have no problem with him being added.
@6351
Writing examples for myth might be a little bit more difficult than examples from a novel but I don't think that it is impossible to do. As Ambar mentioned there are several collections of myth and we can use those as our starting point. If examples can be made from comic books where characterization can vary a fair deal with different authors I think that it is possible to tackle examples from myth.
@6370
Lord Brocktree in general happens at a point when the series as a whole is experiencing a downturn in quality, so you getting that feeling doesn't surprise me too much. Poor writing isn't a reason to cut though, unless it stops his crimes from being obvious or something similar.
@Footsteps
Forgot to mention—like the crack about Sisyphus and music. I'd also note to the person who first mentioned it, that Orpheus' music is essentially magical. People who listen to it don't get much choice when it comes to liking it or disliking it.
RE: Angra Mainyu. With three votes plus my own, I've done a tentative write-up and added it to the sandbox. Regarding the peacock thing, in Zoroastrianism that would be seen as a good deed since, in Persian culture, peacock's are associated with royalty, good luck, etc. Since Angra Mainyu only did it to emphasise his own evil though, it doesn't really count as a check on him.
I agree with those who want more description for Dormammu. Given his status as a feared figure in the Marvelverse he should qualify but that's no gaurantee that he does qualify. What's his rapsheet? I'm down with cutting most of those Marvel examples. A question on Stryker—to what degree should we factor in his Knight Templar tendencies? I've heard he can be okay to the people he believes are human. Is that true?
edited 31st Dec '12 10:38:41 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
I'm opposed in general principle to mythological examples, because they are so vague and apocryphal that it becomes a question of piecing together bits of oral tradition to find out what was in the original tales.
@Occasional Exister: You are correct that the only way a Player Character can be a CM is if the game steers them down that rail, and they must be a distinct character and not an AFGNCAAP. We must be able to observe their actions and motivations.
edited 30th Dec '12 9:32:47 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"