Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

Mumtaz. She's horrible.

edited 10th Dec '16 2:12:58 PM by MiraiYuji

ACW, I just realized there may be a problem with the heinous standard for Notorious.

Neither the rock star nor Alan may make it because there is a reporter getting executed by terrorists briefly shown in an earlier episode and the ninth episode introduced the enforcer of a mass murdering drug lord who's actions for now (murdering women and children at the least) as I'm watching the ninth episode (which aired over two weeks ago) are Offscreen Villainy.

Would these facts I forgot to mention mean that you get your wish and Alan gets cut?

edited 10th Dec '16 2:12:28 PM by futuremoviewriter

Possibly...different types of evil though (and the terrorists would be a group).
Is Barrington the only Final Fantasy rapist?
bobg: Drafts please.

edited 10th Dec '16 2:22:02 PM by ACW

If that's the case, Alan can stay for now. At least until 12/22 when two weeks have passed and I can say more about the potential final episode.

Ok, so I got my exams finished, and decided to sit down and knock out the writeup for Vykar in one sitting. The fact I got it out in ten minutes kind of makes me wonder why I didn't do it sooner.

General Vykar, the faux affably main villain of the Prionser Zero series, makes a habit of casually destroying planets (or just killing everybody on them). In the first two episodes, he has a neutral world enslaved, bombarded, and then destroyed... all because of his injured pride over the fact he lost control of the Rogue, an ancient starship. Not much time passes before it's revealed he had imprisoned another planet's population to use as bioweave capacitors, to grant himself superhuman abilities. From then on, most of his appearances were committing some sort of atrocity for his goal of ultimate power, and who cares about anybody who gets hurt because of his actions? The series finale has him attempting his bioweave capacitor trick again... only this time, on everybody connected to the bioweave. It says something that one of the plans for dealing with Vykar at this point involved sacrificing an entire planet's population to get him away from his latest superweapon.

I feel like it could be improved, but I think that sums up all the major points people need to know. I could go into specifics on how he lost the rogue, or getting all his troops killed through indifference, but each heinous act I include adds two or three sentences for no real reason.

edited 10th Dec '16 2:55:17 PM by Ekimmak

I've seen the fourth POTC movie (definitely an improvement over 3) and thought Blackbeard was pretty bad. And didn't Davy have a Heel–Face Turn in one of the movies? That automatically disqualifies him.

Also Saix was discussed I believe and voted down because every member of the Organization sans Xemnas have a decent Freudian Excuse in that they were not told by Xemnas they could grow new hearts plus Saix really only kicks the dog and nothing worse. He's reprehensible in Days but doesn't go the extra mile Xehanort does. And seeing as how Saix is technically an incarnation of Xehanort his crimes would automatically fall under Xehanort as well.

But yeah, thanks for sorting out those sockpuppets, mods.

Who wants to take over FFXV's effortpost (if there is an example)?

Blackbeard isn't going anywhere and no other member of Organization XIII counts at the moment.

Davy Jones didn't pull a Heel–Face Turn, but he was a Tragic Villain with sympathetic qualities and an Alas, Poor Villain death scene.

edited 10th Dec '16 8:44:36 PM by AustinDR

Just to add an addendum to Zathir given this talk about the heinous standard:

He's the ONLY villain in the entire blog, at least so far, with the possible exception of Malakhar, who turned Twilight into a genie against her will in the first place, but he was an Anti-Villain at worst because he only did it desperately trying to revive the Genies, something all of Saddle Arabia wanted, and fully intended, and did, inform her that she can just undo the transformation any time in the next three days (by the time he was ABLE to tell her, it was 24 hours, but that wasn't his fault) if she decided against it (meaning Twilight STAYED a genie fully of her own accord).

The canon events DO still happen, so the canon baddies are present in the timeline, but kept entirely offscreen with only mentions. Even if they ARE applied, Zathir's actions, both performed and intended, are in their league (particularly the And I Must Scream he intended to put Twilight in for eternity), and he showed next to know restrain in flat out murdering anyone who opposed him.

So just elaborating on that in case it's important.

edited 10th Dec '16 6:25:36 PM by Godzillawolf

to Mumtaz.

to Delilah Copperspoon. I've played the first Dishonored, and the second's on my to-do list; very interested in playing that.

Okay, I'll make this quick, as I've got a horrible stomach bug and hardly even feel like posting, but I've got to get this out of the way. You know those really poorly written unpproved entires that used to be brought up? Found one of those on Weiss Reacts, a RWBY fanfic. I will not divulge how I stumbled across it, but anywho, here it is. And this is the actual format, I haven't changed the listing at all or anything.

• Complete Monster: Siegmund Schnee, Weiss' grandfather. He's the only Reacts antagonist with absolutely no redeeming or sympathetic qualities. He is not an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain like Velvet, nor a Hero Antagonist like Beth who is simply attempting to stop Yang's antics- he is a genuinely Jerkass monster. To make a list of what he actually does:
  • He abuses his son Siegfried, mentally and physically, and demands he only makes friends with noble humans, not Faunus or lowborn.
  • He then disowns Siegfried- after attempting to forcibly take him back from Beacon personally- when he dates a lowborn girl who he eventually marries.
  • Later, when Winter is born, he outright attempts to kidnap Winter by storming the winter house where she, Siegfried and Freya are staying with armed soldiers.
  • He then manages to wrench most of Weiss' custody from Siegfried using bribery.
  • He then manipulates Cinder into joining the White Fang and taking over it in order to get back at him. Why? to spite Siegfried and to fund both sides of the resulting civil war. To repeat: Siegmund started a civil war in order to spite his own son and to profit from it.
  • He convinces Freya that the best way to protect Weiss is to leave Siegfried and Vale, which she reluctantly does for Weiss' sake. This utterly breaks Siegfried. He gets away with it until Siegfried catches wind he beat Weiss. He utterly loses it and storms the Schnee castle to successfully take his daughter home and take his vengeance upon his father.
  • And now, it's implied that he wants to outright kill Weiss.
  • Simply put, there is a reason Siegmund is so hated, in addition to being a Vile Villain, Saccharine Show type of villain. And to top it off, in the two years and dozens of fanfics that have comprised the Reactsverse, there still has not been a villain who has managed to top Siegmund's sheer evil yet- in a verse that features Kyubey and Validar.

Looking back, this was brought up once on the thread more than a year ago, but no consensus was ever reached, ergo, unapproved entry.

Also, this entry located on the same page doesn't make me very confident he's a keeper:

• Evil Is Cool: The aforementioned Siegmund is viewed by some as an appropriately badass, hammy villain. It helps that not many of his atrocities (bar his abusive and supremacist tendencies)) are focused upon.

If someone could cut and link here, I'd greatly appreciate it would do myself, but out of energy at this point...taking nap now.

edited 10th Dec '16 7:50:04 PM by Ravok

Pretty sure that manages to fall under Ron the Death Eater given that we're told the Schnee company only got really bad under the current management.

If it was Ron the Death Eater, then that would apply to a canon character. I've never heard of anyone in RWBY named Siegmund. Also, Evil Is Cool is YMMV too, so no bearings on CM (Dio, Yuuki Terumi, and Medusa Gorgon are but three examples).

But, in any case, that entry is such an eyesore...

@ South Park: Apparently the reason I'm given why it should be never again is because they treated ultra-heinous things like planetary genocide for a joke. But here's the thing...we have villains who've done or tried to done things that aren't as cataclysmic as other C Ms in their series. J.Geil's Serial Killer and Serial Rapist lifestyle is far less of a threat than Dio Brando's desire to Take Over the World and A God Am I ambitions, but they both count as C Ms.

Though this is more in general since I don't think we've gotten someone serious enough in South Park to count. Badger was close, but still a little too comic to count

South Park has done everything bad, big and small, for laughs. Murder, genocide, theft, assault, rape, etc. That argument doesn't fly.

Why are people so hell bent on having a character from this show?

edited 10th Dec '16 8:20:08 PM by Lightysnake

edited 10th Dec '16 8:44:59 PM by AustinDR

Can we please wait until December 21st?

On that day, we can spend time out of our holiday breaks tearing each other's throats out. It'll definitively put things to rest about South Park. Until then, can we keep the South Park discussions away?

edited 10th Dec '16 8:24:49 PM by erazor0707

That's one conversation I'm keen on staying clear away from.

The thought of South Park having a CM makes me roll my eyes.

Also, surfing through the DC Comics page, does anyone else think Mongul's write-up on the New 52 section needs a re-write? Aside from a few typing mistakes, the entire entry's only focusing on his encounter with an admiral.

Is South Park the new target for discussing before it's actually time to discuss it our replacement for when it was constantly done for Zamasu? Like, discussion for works before it's actually time to discuss it isn't exactly new, but it seems to be done much more often the past few months.

I have a new proposal from a book series. The work is a book called An Ember in the Ashes and its sequel, A Torch Against the Night. The candidate is called the Commandant, Keris Veturia. Warning, massive book spoilers below.

What is the background of the work?

The story takes place in a fantastic society based on Ancient Rome, where a group of people called the Martials have dominated and enslaved a group of people known as the Scholars. Long ago, the Augurs, immortal mystics that can see the future, predicted that one day a series of Trials would be held which would results in the winner taking over as head of the Martial Empire. The story focuses on two characters. The first is Laia, a Scholar whose brother was arrested by the Martials and must work as a spy for the local Scholar resistance before they can agree to help her save her brother. The second is Elias Veturia, a disillusioned member of the Masks, the most elite soldiers of the Martial empire, who planned on deserting until he was selected to participate in the Trials for the possibility of being selected as Emperor. The candidate I'm proposing is Keris Veturia, the abominable mother of Elias and the person Laia must spy on if she hopes to save her brother.

Who is Keris Veturia and what has she done?

Keris Veturia is the Commandant of Blackcliff academy. The academy’s a military school where certain children are selected by the Augurs at the age of six to attend, and are shaped into the most elite warriors of the Martial Empire, the Masks, so-called because of the Masks they wear that eventually shape to their faces. The Commandant is infamous for her cruelty and inhumanity. Though seemingly emotionless on the outside, the Commandant is an Ax-Crazy sociopath who will commit torture and murder for the flimsiest of reasons.

She’s first seen in An Ember in the Ashes assembling her students to witness her whipping a ten-year-old boy to death. The boy was a student of Blackcliff and tried to desert. The novel makes it clear that not only is this standard operating procedure for her, but she enjoys killing him. The Commandant first comes to Laia's attention when the Scholar resistance assigns Laia to go undercover as her slave to spy on her. When Laia first arrives, the Commandant makes her look at a wall of her office which she’s adorned with dozens and dozens of wanted posters of the people she’s had arrested and executed, which includes Laia’s parents, the former leaders of the resistance. They act as a grim "paper cemetery" celebrating her victories, and intimidation to new slaves, in case any of them are spies.

Within minutes of entering her service, the Commandant whips Laia for being literally seconds late with her tea. Abuse is commonplace for minor infractions such as lateness, stained clothes or asking questions. In fact, the entire reason the Commandant had an opening for a slave is because her abuse has already driven several of them to suicide. Within the first few weeks, the Commandant usually mutilates her slaves’ faces. The only reason Laia is an exception is because the Commandant thinks a blacksmith the Commandant wants to employ is attracted to her. She decides to make up for it by carving a giant "K" onto Laia’s chest instead. Surprisingly though, the Commandant also believes in encouraging friendships between her slaves… But only so that if one of her slaves messes up, she can torture someone they care about instead. One slave, Cook, was a former resistance member who the Commandant captured. The Commandant murdered everyone she loved, savaged her faced, forced her to swallow hot coals, and enslaved her as her chef. Cook eventually tried to assassinate her with poison once. However, the Commandant had been trained to detect poison, so, without saying a word, she grabbed a hot poker and stuck it through the eye of the five-year-old girl Cook saw as a surrogate daughter.

When the Augurs announce the Trials to pick a new emperor, instead of her backing her son, the Commandant backs Marcus Farrar, a student who’s a psychotic Serial Rapist, and his twin brother, Zak. The Commandant helps them cheat at the Trials, and gives them tips on how to kill the other two contenders, her son and his best friend, Helene. Eventually, the book reveals that the Commandant is working with the Nightbringer, the former king of the jinn whose entire race was imprisoned forever by the Scholars in revenge for the jinn refusing to share their knowledge with humans. Unfortunately, the first book ends with her and the Nightbringer succeeding in getting Marcus named as their puppet named Emperor, and Helene, the runner-up, is forced to become his Blood Shrike, his right-hand enforcer and spymaster. Elias, for failing in the Trials, is sentenced to death, which the Commandant eagerly awaits. Fortunately, the book does end on a hopeful note as Elias’s execution is prevented by Laia and Cook intervening, and it ends with Laia and Elias attempting to escape the city.

In the sequel, A Torch Against the Night, the Commandant tracks Elias and Laia down before they can escape the city. She engages Elias in a duel, during which he’s wounded but not killed. It turns out, this was very much intentional on the Commandant’s part. She needed the two to escape because she needed Helene, the new Blood Shrike, out of the way while the Commandant worked on her own plans. If they escaped, the Commandant knew that Helene would be sent to track down and kill Elias. As some insurance to make sure that her hated son is finally killed though, she doused her blades in an illegal poison that would eventually kill him in six months. She also planted a mole on Helene’s team to assassinate her if she got too close to bringing Elias back. As for Elias, the poison the Commandant used on him, does eventually kill him. He’s only okay because he makes a deal with the universe’s version of the Grim Reaper to take her place as the living being that escorts the spirits of the dead to the afterlife.

Now, to backtrack a bit, throughout the first book, the threat of a civil war loomed, with the current Emperor planning on waging war to prevent the Augurs naming a new Emperor. Though the Commandant pledged her loyalty to the old Emperor, in reality she had a mole in the Scholar resistance and was manipulating them into killing the Emperor. In the sequel, the Commandant proceeds to use this as an excuse to launch an attempted genocide on the Scholars. All free Scholars and Scholar prisoners are purged, with only the Scholar slaves spared because their masters don’t want to lose their "property." The deaths are seen in disgusting detail with Martials hunting down and murdering fleeing Scholars, and mass graves filled with Scholars. At one point, Helene comes across the Commandant about to execute Scholar prisoners. She takes the time to toy with a child before killing him, but when Helene tries to order her to stand down, the Commandant kills the child and all the rest of the prisoners before she can order her not to.

During her hunt for Elias, Helene eventually finds out that the Commandant is amassing an army and planning on usurping Marcus as Emperor. Her coup is prevented for the moment, by Helene rushing back to the capital to inform Marcus on it. Though her army is disbanded, the Nightbringer brings the Commandant back to the capital before Helene can reach Marcus, and has enough time to cover her ass. Unfortunately, since Helene came back without Elias’s head, as she was ordered to, Marcus has Helene’s family killed. Just to prove how much of a spiteful bitch she is, the Commandant offered to carry it out herself, and though she was denied, she took the time to rub salt in Helene’s wound as it was happening. By the way, it’s important to note that the coup wasn’t ordered by the Nightbringer. She was doing it for her own ambition, and though the Nightbringer brought her back before Helene could expose her, it’s hinted that he’s the one who exposed her plot to Marcus. And this is where the second book ends, with the Scholars in the process of being wiped out and the Commandant still free as a bird and scheming… Third book cannot be released soon enough in my opinion.

Is she heinous by the standards of the story?

I’d say hell yes. Granted the series does have a high heinous standard, with the main villains being disgustingly evil, but the Commandant is still portrayed as the worst of the them. Unlike her allies, she’s the only one lacking any semblance of humanity. The Nightbringer may want to Kill All Humans, but he’s a classic example of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. His entire character is defined as a paragon of his kind driven to madness from the hatred and sadness he experienced after losing his entire people, who were locked away despite being completely innocent of any wrongdoings. His primary motivation is to free the jinn from their imprisonment, even though the centuries they’ve spent trapped have made them twisted and insane. Emperor Marcus, meanwhile, is a bloodthirsty, psychopathic rapist, who allows the Commandant to carry out her genocide, but in spite of all of that, he clearly loves his twin brother Zak. When he’s forced to kill him during one of the Trials, at Zak’s own request, Marcus is clearly traumatized by it, and remains in mourning even by the end of the second book. In fact, it motivates some of his crueler actions, with him wanting Helene to experience the same pain he felt.

The Commandant is never afforded any such sympathy, and the only "humanizing" moment she gets (detailed below), happened long before the series began, and it’s made clear whatever good she once possessed died a long time ago. Despite Emperor Marcus and the Nightbringer being willing participants in the attempted Scholar genocide, the Commandant is the one personally carrying it out, and taking obvious delight in doing so. She doesn’t even have the Nightbringer’s excuse of holding them accountable for the loss of his people, and Marcus is portrayed more as just a puppet dancing on her and the Nightbringer’s strings in an attempt to secure his throne, since his lowborn birth causes hatred among the higher castes. Also, despite his newfound power, Marcus doesn’t devolve into The Caligula Helene expects him to be, instead he becomes more cunning and focused more on securing his position than engaging in pointless cruelty, with the sole exception being tormenting Helene, who he's hated and lusted after since their time together in Blackcliff. The Commandant, on the other hand, uses her newfound power to implement a purge of innocent people just because she’s a racist who thinks they’re inferior. She personally heads the charge and the bits of the purge shown are treated with the appropriate level of horror. Of all the villains, she’s the one whose countless Kick the Dog moments are given the most focus, and she earns the fear and hatred of practically everyone she comes across. The only one who can possibly compare to her in terms of sadism is the Warden of Kauf prison, a Mengele-esque psychopath who commits Cold-Blooded Torture on his prisoners, ostensibly For Science!, but really just for sadism and any secrets they might have. He’s another character who may get an effort post in the future.

Does she have any redeeming or mitigating qualities?

Keris does have a Freudian Excuse, but it’s woefully inadequate to justify her countless crimes. Namely, her father is a sexist who never acknowledged her despite her many accomplishments at Blackcliff. After he found out about her bastard child, he called her a whore, and passed her over as heir in favor of his grandson, whom he eventually came to love. This explains her bitterness and resentment to her father and son, but it comes nowhere close to justifying all the people she’s hurt, especially when the vast majority of them have nothing to do with her daddy issues.

When Keris first found out she was pregnant with Elias she tried to abort the child with herbs, and, when that failed, arranged a prolonged, solo mission for herself where she could hide her pregnancy and kill the child when the time came. She learned of how to safely give birth from a Tribeswoman mid-wife, then poisoned her after she outlived her usefulness. When Elias was born however, Keris wavered in her conviction. Instead of killing him, she felt a fleeting moment of maternal compassion, and, instead of leaving Elias to die as a baby as he believed, she made certain that Elias would be found by a Tribeswoman, Mamie Rila, who she was certain would raise him as her own. Keris then left with the intention of leaving Elias out of her life forever… This compassion lasted approximately 15 seconds, as she eventually turned around to murder her son as she originally intended. The only thing that stopped her was that by the time she got back, the tribe and Elias was gone, and she assumed she’d never see him again. Things didn’t exactly work out that way.

Elias was chosen by the Augurs to attend Blackcliff when he was six, and she has shown him no warmth or compassion in his entire life. Instead she’s regretted that one moment of mercy, and has tirelessly worked to weed anything remotely redeeming out of her in pursuit of her own ambition. And she hates Elias because he’s a constant reminder of that moment of weakness. So while she may have been a person once, in present day that aspect of her is long dead. Elias himself puts it best after she tells him the story and he reflects on it, "She told me that she’d been human once. That she’d had mercy in her. She hadn’t exposed me as I’d always been told. When she left me with Mamie Rila, she’d tried to give me life. But when that brief mercy faded, when she regretted her humanity in favor of her own desires, she became what she is now. Unfeeling. Uncaring. A monster." In present day, any redeeming feelings towards her son are long gone as she abused him at Blackcliff, tried to have him killed during the Trials, and condemned him to a prolonged death via poison.

That all being said, there is one ambiguous quality revealed about her near the end of the sequel. Harper Avitas, the mole that she assigned to assassinate Helene, reveals that he and Elias are half-brothers, sharing a father. The Commandant watched over Harper while he attended Blackcliff, and, though the Commandant has never confirmed this, Harper’s personal belief is that she did so because it was the last request of his and Elias’s father. Here are the reasons I’m not buying this as redeeming. First, this is just a theory Harper has, and the Commandant herself has never acknowledged it. Second, given that the story itself presents the Commandant as a person who’s weeded out any goodness in herself, it seems far more likely that she just kept Harper around as a convenient ally since he’s proven to be highly useful to her. At least up until the point he betrayed her. Third, when Keris tells the story of Elias’s birth, she makes a mention of how Elias’s father had tried to kill her. I assume she means this figuratively, but given that this is the only time she mentions Elias’s father at all and she sounds incredibly bitter at the time, it’s difficult for me to believe Harper’s theory that she was trying to honor the man’s request. With everything else established about her character, I just think it’s too much of a stretch to call this a real redeeming quality.

As for her allies, there’s nothing redeeming there either. Marcus is just a pawn to her, and she planned on murdering him to take the thrown for herself after he outlived his usefulness. Though she calls the Nightbringer master, she’s clearly using him too for her own ends, and by the end of the second book, it appears the two are plotting against each other while still being on the same side. She also makes no secret that she despises her fellow servant of the Nightbringer, Sellisarius, the Warden of Kauf, who she views as a threat and rival. It’s pretty clear the Commandant doesn’t have actual friends, just dispensable pawns she’s using to gain power for herself.

Conclusion?

I’m going with a hard yes. Of all the villains, she’s portrayed as the worst, a twisted monster who enjoys murder and torture, has engineered the deaths of thousands upon thousands, and invokes revulsion in everyone with even the semblance of morality. It says something that despite just being the former head of a military school, she's gotten the Emperor as her dancing puppet, and is treated as actually more evil than the book universe's equivalent of Satan.

edited 10th Dec '16 9:31:14 PM by OccasionalExister

I've read 'em. EASY yea to Keris

I... kinda want to wait until the third book comes out before voting here, due to the presence of an ambiguously sympathetic trait and the fact that the quite-thoroughly-vile-sounding Marcus has an unambiguous one.

I don't think there's anything preventing us from putting her up now rather than wait years for a third book.