Complete Monster Cleanup

• The Story Keepers: Nihilus, the centurion in service to Emperor Nero, is defined by his ruthlessness and utter lack of conscience. After participating in the burning of Rome, Nihilus continues to lead The Purge of Christians, having countless victims captured to be thrown to lions. At one point Nihilus implements a plan to have entire neighborhoods burned down, endangering hundreds of people. Upon learning that his fellow centurion Tacticus was secretly a Christian, Nihilus attempts to have him executed. Learning that Ben was a Christian leader, Nihilus arranges a public crucifixion for him while attempting have his wife and adopted children burned alive. Murdering his colleague after he saves Ben’s life, the disgraced Nihilus follows the heroes into the desert, planing to kill Tacticus and leave children to die of thirst as revenge.

Alright, I can stand to keep Diavolo after these arguments. I love the proposed rewrite, it's much better than the current one.

Also, I actually do believe that Diavolo is the most evil JoJo character by far, even worse that Dio, Angelo, Cioccolata, or anyone else. However, the reasons why I feel this way involve unconfirmed theories (I interpret Diavolo as an immortal demonic entity who possesses random people and forces them into a life of evil. He's been doing this for much of human history, potentially making him responsible for some of the worst atrocities ever committed, with Doppio simply being his latest victim.) so I didn't bring them up during the argument because they're somewhat far-removed from canon.

Edited by Zuxtron on Dec 18th 2022 at 12:05:01 PM

Again, I approve of the Senkhara and Denby rewrites. I also approve of the Memnon and Infinity Ultron ones too.

I've got another page I wanna go through for questionable examples. This time it's Die Hard. I'm not at home right now so I'll just put up the first bad example and get to the later two when I'm home.

Writeup:

• Year One comic's issues #1-4: Alan Douglas is a hippie and Eco-Terrorist, who was a former employer of millionaire Walden Ford, before growing jealous of the latter's rich status and deciding to rob him of his millions. Getting himself a mini-submarine, Alan orders his henchmen to take Ford's yacht full of people hostage, using the fireworks during the 1976 bicentennial celebration over New York Harbor as a cover. As his men kill innocent staff inside the yacht, Alan extracts a large amount of money from Ford and orders his men to plant dynamite on the yacht, planning to blow it up, along with dozens of innocent people on it.

Original EP here. I guess Alan Douglas, on his own, would pass the standard; his endgame of murdering a couple-dozen hostages is the same as Hans Gruber’s, except replace “in a building” with “on a yacht.”

Here's my issue: Alan Douglas is a diet Hans Gruber in a franchise where even Hans Gruber qualifies on strange technicalities. Alan Douglas’ rapsheet amounts to:

• taking a couple-dozen people hostage and trying to kill them (attempted by pretty much every terrorist in the series and then some; the ones who actually don’t try and kill their hostages, like Simon, are the exception rather than the norm)
• being indirectly responsible for a handful of murders his Co-Dragons commit (which they mostly do on their own initiative–he's not specifically directing them to kill staff on the boat, and the first person they kill was against his initial orders of just doing a business deal on his behalf)

Alan Douglas, simply, doesn't meet the franchise standard. He barely even meets the genre standard. Villains in this genre are expected to take and kill hostages, kill guards/cops, and say I Lied simply because those are evil cliches of the genre; villains in this series go on to kill hundreds and engage in sadistic flourishes Alan never does. Hans himself aside, the absolute minimum I would consider needing to pass the baseline would be Kores Botha from Skyscraper, whose overall body count is essentially the same as Alan’s. Kores, though, has those aforementioned “sadistic flourishes” that help (barely) pass him along in a genre like this; he kills people with his own hands, he forces people to watch as he kills their friends, he kills his own men, he Would Hurt a Child, etc. Even Hans Gruber himself has those flourishes; one of his victims is a pregnant woman, which he displays full knowledge of. Hans likely would have failed the escalating standard of the series if he hadn't

• A) defined the franchise’s standard to the point nearly every Big Bad is an expy of him, and
• B) defined the standard of nearly every modern action-thriller movie made since Die Hard, to the point every second Big Bad in that genre is an expy of him

The one thing keeping Alan Douglas on at the moment is the prequel comic’s cases of Continuity Snarl (they include references to McClane fighting in the Vietnam War, a plot point IIRC was never brought up in the movies) which the original poster used as justification to weigh Year One by its own merits’ instead of the greater franchise standard. My issue with simply electing not to weigh Alan more firmly against the other villains is that Year One is a prequel. The comic is designed to be followed by the subsequent series of films. I have far greater issue measuring something like that by its own merits as I would an explicit Alternate Continuity or adaptation, each which would stand by their own merits as an explicit choice of them being alternate continuities. That distinction with Year One is, at best, a flimsy technicality, and it's not one I see being strong enough to justify keeping Alan when he’s so generic compared everyone else on the page.

I think there is some wiggle room to discuss, but I'm currently vouching we cut him. Opinions?

Edited by Scraggle on Dec 18th 2022 at 2:43:00 AM

Agreed he’s not making it. Voting cut.

When i proposed him, Year One comic's dubious status in Die Hard canon and the bodycount that he attempted to do, while being just a relative pathetic wannabe compared to other Big bads, made him stand out for me. I'm okay with cutting him.

Seems like a cut.

And yeah, agree that if Hans weren't one of the action baddie OGs he probably wouldn't count himself (he has, what, several dozen attempted victims at worst? Hell he'd fail next to Col. Stuart).

Cut Douglas, I feel like I know who the other two you plan to talk about cutting are, but I will wait for that.

Cut Alan douglas

Eh, the page would still have 7.

Hello. I would like to bring up this entry on YMMV.Life Is Strange.

Jefferson didn't kill Rachel, it was Nathan who did that. Jefferson tells Max in Episode 5 that Nathan wanted to imitate his "art" to impress him using Rachel, but ended up giving her an overdose by accident. Of course he doesn't care, and the game still treats him as guilty by association, but the wording in the entry makes it sound like he directly killed Rachel when he was only indirectly involved.

Edited by GenericGuy2000 on Dec 18th 2022 at 4:58:22 AM

Die Hard probably won't justify a page without more than 7 honestly.

It won't.

Another thing I am wondering is if maybe we should take another look at the Warhammer page. I have been concerned for a while we may have been to lenient towards the heinous standard, which is incredibly jacked up. If people aren't in favor of that though I won't pursue it.

Cut Allan.

• Yawn* Evening. I don't really have anything new to say about the thing we were discussing so I'll just sit on it for now.

Are there any villains you don't think count? Personally, there's one I'm a bit shaky on but it may just be semantics over the entry.

Edit: Cut Douglas

Edited by MinisterOfSinister on Dec 18th 2022 at 10:07:56 AM

x6 That sentence can probably be removed then unless you want to somehow fit that information in. Don’t know enough about the game and too busy to rewrite myself right now.

To my recollection Warhammer was pretty well scrutinized as candidates were being added precisely due to its infamous heinous standard. I’d need the particulars of a concerning entry to discuss further.

Cut Douglas

From Kaiserredux

• Complete Monster:
  • Lavrentiy Beria is the leader of the "People's Guard", the armed wing of the neo-Bolshevik movement in the Socialist state of Georgia, and Ioseb Jughashvili's second-in-command. In the wake of Jughashvili's ascension to power, Beria would facilitate the arrest and subsequent purging of the Mensheviks from Georgia's government. If Jughashvili dies in a hunting accident implied to have been orchestrated by Beria, Beria would seize power for himself, killing anyone suspecting his role in Jughashvili's death. As leader of Georgia, Beria will launch a persecution of ethnic minorities, implementing laws forcing them to have only one children while enacting propaganda promoting the "genetic superiority" of Georgians, and subsequently pushing minorities and any political dissidents into slave labor in the Gulags where they are forced into penal battalions or experimented upon in the name of progress. In addition, Beria will take advantage of the economic liberalization he initiates in Georgia to establish Human Trafficking routes, with the intention of using it to track down women, children and the mentally ill to serve as his sex slaves.
  • Ante Pavelic is the leader of the far right wing of the Croatian Party of Rights. When Illyria falls into chaos as a result of its ethnic tensions with its Slovene and Bosniak population, Pavelic and elements loyal to him in the military may attempt to launch a coup of its government. If he succeeds, he declares a campaign to rid the nation of "enemies of the state", choosing to focus on either suppressing Republican Croatians, or going after either one of the Slovene and Bosniak minorities. He then unleashes death squads and gives them the order to patrol the countryside and use scorched-earth tactics against all that oppose him; these scorched earth tactics turning the sky black and causing immense damage to the soil in Illyria. Later on, he forcibly conscripts the entire Croatian population into the army and launches a massive campaign of violence against anyone demanding independence from Illyria; this campaign of violence results in a massive refugee crisis in the Balkans.

Beria has been removed from the mod, the devs confirmed it. As the character no longer exists, he should be cut IMHO on the basis that he no longer exists.

Because a couple of characters are on the chopping block, I may need to revisit Kaiserredux in the future when the effortposts can go ahead with a more looser heinousness standard.

Edited by xie323 on Dec 18th 2022 at 2:18:57 AM

...That is not how that works. YMMV pages don't need to be updated to ignore history.

Right now there is only really one that comes to mind.

• Llandu'gor, the Flayer, cursed its Necron killers for revenge after abusing them as their former master. Becoming the Flayer Virus, the C'tan now plagues the Necrons, turning them into mindless beings with an insatiable and infinite appetite for flesh and causing them to seek out and gruesomely kill any and all organic life they encounter.

This entry feels too short for a Warhammer one and they only have one notable atrocity in a series where villains regularly do far worse.

Were they removed in an update? Cause if that’s the case, it’s better to start the entry with “Prior to update X” than get rid of it entirely

Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Dec 18th 2022 at 5:35:11 AM

Cut Douglas. And yeah I kinda know who the other two are.

reposting so this isn't buried

Edited by Scraggle on Dec 18th 2022 at 3:40:07 AM