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
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Hoffman
Actually, I think we can just get the effortpost for anime!Satou out of the way right now. The OAD is releasing in April and it doesn't look like it'll disqualify him.
The work, anyways, is Ajin.
Here we go:
Foreword
A quick overview of the setting.
Ajins (demi-humans) are humans that cannot die. When they die, their Invisible Black Matter (IBM) regenerates them and they live again. If their head gets chopped off, the head chopped off experiences Cessation of Existence as a new head with a new but identical consciousness grows out of the original body.
They can let out a scream that triggers basic human instincts to freeze on spot in fear. The "other species" can also summon and control an animate but invisible IBM humanoid entity to do other jobs for them. (they are frequently compared to stands from JoJo, if that helps you understand them) When an Ajin gets stressed enough (like in life threatening situations), he can summon a lot of IBMs at the same time.
Who are they?
Satou, real name Samuel T. O'Brian, an Asian-American man and former US Marine currently in Japan, is a faux-affable, cold-blooded, violence-loving Ajin terrorist, and is the primary antagonist of the anime.
Loving video games and carnage, Satou runs his Ajin terrorist group allegedly for the liberation of the Ajins from government and corporation abuse, it was in truth just an excuse to commit atrocities for his own satisfaction.
What had they done?
Satou dreams of changing the world for the worse.
Satou plans to create an Ajin terrorist group in Japan and plunge Japan into chaos. He first step is to kill his way into an Ajin research facility and release abused Ajin Koji Tanaka, (the second Ajin discovered in Japan) before corrupting him into a sociopathic and misanthropic murderer that will follow his orders.
When Nagai Kei, an antisocial Ordinary High-School Student is revealed to the public as an Ajin, Satou made Tanaka abduct Kei's sister Eriko to get Kei to talk with him at a shrine. Mid-way through the talk, a tranquilizer hits Kei, but the screen then turns around and shows Tanaka's IBM firing the tranquilizer, showing that Satou had planned this. He plans to get Kei to his side by sending him to the government so he can be tortured into misanthropy and follow him against the government.
Days later, he killed his way into the government facility where Kei is being experimented on to release Kei. Kei is not going with him, and ran away from Satou after a short struggle between the two, during which Satou states that he will chop Kei's head off and make him suffer Cessation of Existence for Kei wronging him, a statement which he repeats every time the two go into confrontation and to which Satou had shown to be willing to go through.
Failing Kei, Satou works on the other part of his plan, because he's not just here for Kei. Satou, faking to be an affable man, got a new set of bloodless clothes and revealed himself to the media (who are unaware of the happenings inside the facility) with Tanaka, publicly revealing the atrocities that Japanese government and corporations committed against Ajins, and rallied people in Japan to a meeting to rebel against it.
The meeting gathered few people but many Ajins, most of which are undiscovered Ajins in Japan fearing for their own future. He gathered the Ajins that came, and quite bluntly, asked them if they want to cause a massacre, explaining that the apathy of the society to the Ajins made him willing to completely destroy it. Naturally, some of the Ajins (including Kou Nakano) resented, but a few other thuggish and sociopathic Ajins thought that they're fine with it. He told the disagreeing ones to leave, but really, he made Tanaka fire tranquilizers on them when they turned around, intending to remove them as a threat by trapping them alive in oil drums, forever. Kou ran away, but everyone else either followed Satou or was captured and neutralized.
With a functional terrorist group, Satou begins to put his plans into action, coming in three waves that he announces in advance.
In his first wave of attacks, his target is the CEO of Grant Pharmaceutical, a corporation that used Ajin for illegal human experiments.
Satou and his team bombs a nearby building, causing it to topple directly on the Grant Pharmaceutical HQ, killing the guards and police and anyone working in the HQ that day, including his target. Satou stood on the top of the building when it's coming down to get right into the center of the action. With assistance from his subordinates, he then kills his way out of the Special Assault Team responders, all the while live-streaming his act with an amused smile.
In his second wave of attacks, his target are 15 Japanese government and corporation officials associated with Ajin abuse.
This will be a good time to mention that Satou plain kills people left and right. He kills his targets and anyone who tries to stop him. He had killed (or will later kill) police, guards, government agents, JSDF, and SAT. He kills and spares when he wants to. When he's bored, he kills. When he's not so bored, he might spare a few when killing. He had killed unarmed researchers in the government facility. He had killed civilians when he wanted to. He blew up a civilian plane when killing one of his targets (don't worry, it landed on water). When one his targets try to appease him by giving him what he said he wants, he dismissed it and killed him. He also really wanted to kill Kei. He did all of this while broadcasting his terror progress to the public through his website.
At this point, Kei and Kou had allied themselves with Yu Tosaki's Ajin Management Committee to stop Satou. The anime also begins to diverge from the story of its source material quite significantly at this point.
Satou slowly went through his list and arrived on the final target, the CEO of Musashi Heavy Industries, who is fortified behind a massive police lockdown zone and an entire building guarded by expert Anti-Ajin Special Force military personnel, while Tosaki's group prepares for their own plan in the building. Satou deploys an EMP (he made with the help of his genius subordinate, Okuyama) on the Musashi Heavy Industries HQ, then has Okuyama bomb the defenders with drone bombs, before personally leading a group of terrorists into the top of the building with zip-lines and kill their way through the defending Anti-Ajin Special Force.
Kei and Satou once again went into confrontation, with Kei getting an early upper hand but soon losing it to Satou. Kei goes desperate and loses his cool, and Satou decides to emotionally torture him by killing other human agents on Tosaki's group, especially Hirasawa, a human government agent whom Kei had shown some humanizing care to, killing him with a slow choke from his IBM before preparing to decapitate Kei. Backup arrives right after that and Satou drops Kei and escapes to the basement along with his target, whom Tanaka kills shortly after.
In his third wave of attacks, his target is Japan itself.
Satou took 20 nerve gas missiles (it's VX gas from one of the displays that appears later in the anime) from the basement of Musashi Heavy Industries and then then takes over a JSDF base, capturing the survivors as hostages, sets up the missiles (The Rock style, complete with the government discussing the potential power of the nerve gas missiles with similar quotes as in The Rock) and sends out a message: the Japanese government will submit Japan to Ajin rule within three days, or else he will kill everyone in Japan.
Under pressure, the Japanese government tries to compromise some smaller islands to let Ajins set up a new nation, and tries to negotiate a ceasefire.
Satou rejects the offer and fires a missile aimed at the Prime Minister's Official Residence.
He then reiterates that he wants the entire Japanese archipelago under his rule. The entire nation. He doesn't want any of this boring stuff.
The liberation of Ajins wasn't his goal. HAVING FUN was his goal.
Shocked by the revelation and disgusted with his act (if descriptions in The Rock were applied here, he had just killed around 60-70,000 people in one go), much of Satou's subordinates voices their distaste of Satou as they had sincerely hoped for some rights to be gained out of all their attacks. Satou responds that he doesn't care about them. He just wants to have fun, and he would be willing to chop off the heads of everyone in the room if he wanted to. Almost all of his followers then abandon him, some of which turns to Tosaki to stop him, with only Tanaka left by Satou's side in the end.
US forces become involved with the situation since Satou was of American nationality. They raid the JSDF base to rescue the hostages and capture Satou, only to find the place trapped with explosives, which Satou then detonates and kills most of them with.
Satou and Tanaka hid in the sewers and prepares for a final showdown with US forces, who had managed to retake the JDSF base and the nerve gas missiles in spite of the casualties (and are now planning on releasing a missile into the sewers to recover Satou with certainty, considering him to be more important than collateral damage).
Kei and his group launch their own independent assault on Satou to prevent the US forces from dispersing the nerve gas. The group has some early victories, managing to tranquilize Tanaka, but Kei eventually finds himself alone with Satou, cornered and at a disadvantage.
Satou once again talks about slowly killing Kei by decapitation and make him see his own body grown a new head, and then he talks about making him see everyone Kei had cared die in front of him like he did with Hirasawa, starting with his sister, then Kaito, then his parents, then everyone whom he had worked with and cared about, to make him suffer through the worst hells.
Kei, desperate from the extreme stress, summons a massive amount of IBMs and chops up Satou, killing him again and again, concluding on decapitation. The US forces then arrive, cancels the deployment of nerve gas, and captures Satou and Tanaka.
Satou, now captured, casually quips with Tanaka abroad their air transport about starting another game, before detonating a bomb hidden inside him and crashes their transport, setting up a hook for another sequel.
Heinousness?
The world of Ajin is not a pretty place. Ajins are regularly exploited by corporations with government backing as an endless source of human experimentation. We see one such torturous experimentation up close and one can easily sympathize for the Ajins for their strong wish in getting full citizen rights and not being oppressed. (Tanaka was tortured for years, so it must not be hard to understand why he's violent)
However, Satou, not ever intending to help the Ajins in the first place, trumps everyone in so many evil departments by a massive margin. He had performed multiple terrorist attacks that plunge him way beyond the Moral Event Horizon. He sets a high bar and stands out even in the corrupt setting.
If you want some more personal pains, then I am sure his intension of making Kei suffer is more than heinous enough.
Freudian Excuse / Redeeming Qualities?
No Freudian Excuse. (He was never abused by the government, unlike Tanaka.)
He is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist. It had been proven that his actions only worsens the relationship between Ajins and normal people.
He seems to have a Villainous Friendship relationship with Tanaka, but I find this to not be the case. Tanaka was just as willing to commit evil as Satou is, making it seem to me Satou is only fine with him because he is also evil like him, not because of actual companionship. He is not being nice out of the altruism of his heart, and as proven by his previous actions, he is OK with decapitating Ajins who wrong him.
He has some Villainous Virtues like going through with some his promises (like releasing Eriko Nagai), but that does not disqualify him and is more along the lines of Pragmatic Villainy.
Despite performing significant amounts of Kick The Son Of A Bitch at the government, they do not disqualify him since he is not doing them out of the goodness of his heart. Plus, the collateral damage towards civilians is also intentional on his part.
Generic Doomsday Villain?
Nope. His faux-affably evil personality is strong.
Final Verdict?
Anime!Satou:
edited 3rd Mar '17 9:13:02 PM by Wuz
Easy to Samuel T. O'Brian/Satou.
@Ravok: I see your point about the Myers write-up. Not really a big deal anyway; the only issue I had with the original was with how it ignored Halloween II (he kills almost twice as many people there as in the original; you'd think that'd be worth mentioning). And with Fate/Zero, I agree that Ryuunosuke is one of the more thoroughly despicable anime monsters I've seen (of course, no other anime CM has yet made my skin crawl like Ragyo Kiryuin did).
It is better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
I... swear someone proposed Satou already? Like, not that long ago.
Regardless, I'll shelf out a yea to Satou.
The Unknown Unknown
Satou, Hoffman
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I made an effortpost and edited it out on the last page. Is that what you were thinking?
edited 25th Feb '17 7:50:10 PM by Wuz
No, it was another user entirely, I think. I swear we've already seen this character.
The Merry Monarch of Darkness
Satou.
Your friendly neighborhood stank goblin
Apparently déjà vu is spreading around this forum.
Satou, Hickey, and Hoffman. ....I swear we talked about him before. Maybe we started voting and never reached a conclusion. Who knows.
A search proved no results... regardless, I think the original reason Satou didn't go through is because there wasn't enough votes.
Also, wasn't there talk of something like an in-thread search system a while ago?
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_down_emoticon_3571.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
Tim Allen I like Last Man Standing.
Also, another to add to the list of too satirical to have a CM: Mr. Young (though that show's been over for nearly four years now).
edited 25th Feb '17 8:23:10 PM by futuremoviewriter
Your friendly neighborhood stank goblin
I don't know about in-thread, but there was some talk about some Google search function.
Mr Young? Does that show even have villains? It looks rather lighthearted.
Satou. Yeah I remembered talking about Satou before, but there was never an Effortpost made mainly because the Manga was still ongoing. I believe an EP for Manga! Satou will be made once the manga gets approved and he will most likely be approved just like his anime counterpart.
As for Fate Zero, I have to be perfectly honest and say that I don't really find myself hating Ryuunosuke Uryuu that much.
Yes I perfectly agree Ryuunosuke is horrible, deprived, and monstrous excuse of a human who the world is better with out but he does some of the most humorous sense even if they are related to his hobby Murder, a perfectly friendly relationship with his equally depraved servant, saying his catch phrase ''COOL" whenever he see people die, and that fact that he has no idea what the holy gail is.
Plus, I find the likes of Zouken Motou, and Especially his grandson Shinji Motou to be far more hatable than Ryuunosuke.
All of which kinda makes fun to watch him whenever he's onscreen and be such a deplorable monster that I Love to Hate, making him one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite anime series not to mention one of my personal favorite Complete Monsters.
special mention goes to the voice actors who portrayed him:
Japanese VA: Akira Ishida
English VA: Johnny Yong Bosch
edited 25th Feb '17 11:54:28 PM by G-Editor
RIP Toriyama
Easy 'Yes' to Satou.
I'll concede that Zouken is actually even more hateable than Uryuu (As difficult as that seemed at first), and Uryuu does have his humorous moments, but personally, the second we got a full glimpse of him crucifying children, then starts whining when his partner-in-crime kills one, solely because it ended the poor kid's suffering sooner, that was the moment I decided "Yeah, this guy needs to die brutally in the next episode. Or this one. Someone please kill him. Please."
I'd also argue he got off way too easily with his death, but I digress.
Anywho, to the thread as a whole, I have an issue I wanna discuss, so just bear with me.
Now, it's been brought to my attention that some of the entries on DC's main page are somewhat lackluster, so, I was requested to perhaps consider re-writing a couple. I was perfectly happy to do this, and decided to start with one baddie I remembered being particularly nasty, Prometheus, from the Justice League of America comics. For reference, here's his current entry:
- Prometheus started out as a Magnificent Bastard in his inaugural storyline written by Grant Morrison. He then went on to suffer from severe Villain Decay in most of his follow-up appearances... until now. In his grand return following a one-shot that used Final Crisis to retcon all of the non-Morrison/Villain Decay stories into being about an impostor, he unleashed a wave of chaos, carnage, and torture on the heroes of the DCU; along with slaughtering countless D-list superheroes, he killed Mikaal Tomas's lover and Congo Bill's pride, sewed Freddy Freeman's lips together to keep him from speaking his magic world, cruelly lobotomized genius IQ, mutilated Red Arrow, and murdered 90,000 people in Star City, including Red Arrow's young daughter; all because, as a boy, the police shot his criminal parents to death in front of him, prompting him to vow to avenge them by "annihilating the forces of justice".
Ok, so, I reread all of his comics, and there are definitely some crimes worth mentioning in a new write-up and such, but first, I have to voice a.....doubt with Prometheus, that being his Freudian Excuse.
Story goes, Prometheus' parents were a pair of criminals, basically a hippie version of Bonnie and Clyde, and Prometheus grew up alongside them, always on the run while robbing, cheating, and murdering their way across America. Until, one day, Prometheus' parents were finally caught, and prompted to go down in a shoot-out with the cops rather than be taken in alive. This lead to Prometheus hating police officers, superheroes, and the idea of " justice" as a whole, and goes on to murder dozens of police officers and their families, try to kill numerous superheroes, and threaten to destroy entire cities that are hometown's of superheroes, succeeding in one's case.
Here's my issue: Prometheus' excuse is....actually pretty understandable. When his parents reveal their plans to go down in a blaze of glory, Prometheus begins sobbing for them to stop, and when they die he bursts into tears, then flies into a psychotic, rage-filled frenzy where he literally bites a police officer and refuses to let go. Years later, he murders the officer who approached him immediately after his parents' deaths while screaming in anger, and, even all these years later, he fondly recalls his parents as his best friends and the greatest people he ever knew (Twisted thing, but still).
So....yeah.....while in his final appearances, he never explicitly references them, his goal hasn't changed, and he makes no gestures or boasts to suggest that his care for them has diminished over the years. I kinda feel like this is a villain who slipped through the cracks back when the Freudian Excuse wasn't fully defined and didn't need to be seriously petty or ridiculous for the villain to still qualify.
And that's my issue. I'd love to hear counter arguments, but....from my reading? I saw no indication that Prometheus doesn't legitimately miss /still care for his parents, and his excuse, though used to perpetrate serious Disproportionate Retribution, is actually kinda understandable in a twisted sort of way.
What do we say? If he's deemed a Keep still, I'll have no problem giving him a more detailed write-up, but first, I'd like to discuss this elephant in the room.
edited 26th Feb '17 12:04:59 AM by Ravok
Tonight I dine on monkey soup.
Yeah well you got your wish which also happens to be his
Prometheus Im going to abstain
edited 26th Feb '17 12:36:34 AM by G-Editor
Unfortunately...I think I have to agree Prommy loves his parents.
I've... no real issue with cutting Prometheus, anyways. Even if he did count, I think he's a pretty bad execution of this trope in general.
RIP Toriyama
I'd say that Prometheus as an idea is highly interesting, and, dare I say, a rather unique concept. He's basically Batman (He even refers to himself as a criminal Batman) just if his parents were evil and thus, when they were killed, he swung in the opposite direction of the moral spectrum. So a strategic manipulative bastard who, because he's a human, has to come up with creative ways to kill heroes, thus making him somwthing of an underdog? Sounds pretty cool.
The issue is in the execution. Prometheus is literally portrayed as arguably the smartest human villain in the DC, and ends up comes across as a parody of Batman.
You know all those hilarious/memetic VS fights where Batman is involved? Like...
"Batman VS Goku? Batman wins because he would have already found the Dragon Balls easily then wished Goku out of existencre".
Yeah, THOSE kinds of fights? That's the kind of stuff Prometheus gets up to. He is SO strategic and SO much of a Magnificent Bastard that he instead turns into a Villain Sue who, despite being chained to a chair SURROUNDED by heroes of varying moral ethics not ONE of them can get him to tell them deactivation codes for bombs, be it by manipulating their morals, to having somehow created mental blocks to keep people like Miss Martian, one of the premiere superhero psychics, from probing his mind.
So, again, I'd say the idea of Prometheus, of done well, could have been a classic baddie with an interesting excuse and philosophy, and a great Evil Counterpart to Batman. Instead we get a hilariously overblown Chessmaster who is so many steps ahead of everyone else that he has circled them. Twice.
Who then proceeds to get killed by an arrow. I crap you not, he successfully escapes the Justice League with ease, teleports to his base located in another dimension, then gets ambushed by Green Arrow and shot with a plain wooden arrow. How did GA get there? How did Prometheus not "see this coming' like everything else? Why didn't Prometheus just catch the arrow with his Batman-like reflexes? WHO CARES, JUSTICE WAS SERVED!!!
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
This so much. That original tale by Grant Morrison was actually really god (In my humble opinion), but after that, when other writers got ahold of him....was when he kinda took a nosedive into the "hilariously overblown strategist" .
edited 26th Feb '17 12:55:18 AM by Ravok
Tonight I dine on monkey soup.
To be fair, Prometheus from the original JLA is...far better done than what he was turned into
Yeah, I was mainly referring to how he was depicted in Cry for Justice. Then again, that run did a lot of things wrong. Having a bastardized, Villain Sue version of Prometheus as the main antagonist is just one of the more major flaws.
edited 26th Feb '17 12:57:24 AM by Scraggle
Cut Prometheus
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
- Hmm, I think I'll Hoffman. Here was the original entry BTW; this look good?
- Hoffman from "The Double Blind Job" is the new CEO of a drug company. He plans on increasing profit by releasing a drug known as HT-1 under the new name Vioplex. HT-1 is known to cause things like liver failure and death in many of the drug trial participants, so Hoffman added some chemical delays to Vioplex, which will result in people dying in months maybe years after taking it rather than weeks. He kills one doctor who he couldn't bribe to keep quiet about the drugs being the same and wiped the records of a group of people who also died from HT-1 from the internet. When confronted by Sophie, under the guise of an FDA agent, about the seriousness of the fines assessed for bad drugs, Hoffman laughs it off as those fines are typically around 15% of the drug's profit yield.
- Hickey.
- Thanks therealjackieboy for the expansion.
- Satou.
- Abstaining on Prometheus.
Hickey and Tim Allen.
I should assume Hickey's loyalty to Doyle is not genuine?
Also, to Prometheus. Cry For Justice is terrible and while it forgets Prometheus' backstory we still remember. Still, the writer apologised, so that's something.
