CM/MB Policy and Thread Culture

Welcome to the Complete Monster Effort Post thread! This is the thread where new Complete Monster examples are vetted, approved, and written up. If you're looking for the general cleanup thread, please go here

Important: Before suggesting any new examples, please read the Frequently Asked Questions and Common Requests List; if you have any questions, the odds are high they are answered there. Additionally, to avoid mod intervention, please check here for the earliest date a work can be discussed (usually two weeks from the US release date), as well as for if the work has already been reserved by another user.

Here is how the process works:

1. If you have a candidate to propose, you can simply come right in and propose them! If they're a shorter character, such as a comic book one-shot, then a simple summary of their actions and any potential redeeming qualities will be enough; for longer-running candidates, an Effort Post (EP) might be helpful for organizing the proposal. An EP is not outright required, but please be mindful that if a post becomes too clunky and unorganized, it can be very hard for other people to follow.

2. After the proposal, there will be a 24-hour discussion period, where people may ask questions about the candidate. Once this period has passed, users may vote on the candidate. The number of upvotes must outnumber the downvotes by at least five for the character to be considered "approved".

3. Three days after the proposal has been made, if the character has been approved, you may post the writeup on the thread, send it to the drafts page, and voila! Your candidate will soon be added to both the CM subpage and, if the work has a page, to the relevant YMMV page. It's that simple!

Outside of this process, we do have a few ground rules:

1. To keep the thread moving at a reasonable pace, there are some restrictions on when a proposal can be made. There should only be a maximum of four EPs posted both per page and per hour to ensure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle; additionally, each individual troper should only be discussing a maximum of two works at a time. If your proposal would fall outside of either of these guidelines, we'd like to ask you to please wait until they would fit within; feel free to type them up on an outside document, and then when the time comes, you can just copy, paste, and post!^note This will only apply if the proposed restrictions are approved by the mods

2. No plagiarism. This is a very serious matter site-wide, as the website could get in actual legal trouble if the material on it is found to be plagiarized from another source. You can source some pieces of it, but any wholesale copying will not only convince the thread that you have not actually consumed the work in question (and thus the candidate will be downvoted), but it will lead to mod intervention in repeated instances.

3. Votes must be for specific candidates, meaning no blanket voting (i.e. "yes to everyone I missed").

4. We use our own criteria for what constitutes a Complete Monster and do not care what another site uses for their criteria. Do not reference other sites approving a character for their CM equivalent as a reason why we should approve them; this will very quickly lead to mod intervention.

If you would like to use an EP for your candidate, here's the general format. This format does not have to be followed exactly, but these are the main topics that need to be covered:

What is the work?

This is a brief summary of the work you're going to discuss. We don't need a full plot summary here, just however much we need to understand going into the discussion - it can even be as simple as quoting the summary on the work's page.

Who is the Candidate and what have they done?

This is essentially the character's biography - who they are, their story, the crimes they commit, and, preferably (though not required) what happens to the candidate at the end. It does not have to include every single thing they ever do - for some villains, we'd be here all day if that was the case - but it should include the highlights of their journey.

Any redeeming qualities? Freudian Excuse?

This is where any potential redeeming characteristics or tragic backstory should be discussed. Do they have a tragic past? Do they show that Even Evil Has Standards or Even Evil Has Loved Ones? Maybe a Pet the Dog moment or two? This is where these should be discussed in full. Not every potential redeeming moment is a clear-cut disqualifier, but we should hear of any potential issues to ensure the character is discussed in full.

Are they bad enough?

A Complete Monster has to be particularly vile by the standard of the work they appear in. Therefore, you should compare what the character does compared to similar characters in the same work. This takes into account things like their resource level (a human Serial Killer can't stand up to an alien Omnicidal Maniac, but they can be bad by the standard of other human serial killers), the amount of time they have to work with (such as the aforementioned one-shot versus long-running antagonists), the quality vs. quantity of their crimes compared to others, etc. Essentially, this section is an analysis of the kinds of villainy shown in the work and an explanation of why this particular character's villainy stands out within it.

Final verdict?

This is where you post your final conclusion on the character in question. You can continue elaborating on your reasons or even just say a simple "yes" or "no"; at this point, we've heard everything we need to hear.

And that's everything you need to know. Welcome to the thread!