Old Complete Monster cleanup thread
Welcome to the new Complete Monster (CM) cleanup thread! This thread is where we clean up or cut already-existing entries.
If you're looking to add new entries, please see the approval thread.
IMPORTANT: Before you begin any discussions on this thread, please see the Frequently Asked Questions and Common Requests List. Here, you'll find explanations of the criteria for the trope as well as our rules/procedures for approving and cutting candidates.
What goes through this thread?
- Cut requests. If you believe a CM has been approved and they do not count, this thread is where you propose their removal. To know how to go about this, please see the FAQ folder on the Administrivia page, where the process is explained in detail.
- If we ever need to consider cutting multiple examples without individually reviewing them (e.g. if we discover widespread plagiarism with a particular troper's CMs), the initial discussion will be on this thread and we'll then escalate to the mod team (as described here) to get a formal consensus if we decide to recommend a mass cut.
- If an entry was put on the wrong subpage/YMMV page, you may propose where they should be moved to.
- Full rewrites of existing entries, including expansions, trims, and ground-up rewrites. If your rewrite is approved by the thread, feel free to add it to the drafts page so that other users can check grammar and the like before it is included with the rest of the weekly swaps.
- If an entry on a work's YMMV page doesn't match the entry on the media subpage, you can bring it here to discuss which entry works better.
What does not go through this thread?
- New candidate proposals - as stated before, those are done on this thread.
- Unapproved wicks - if a Troper encounters either of these kinds of wicks, they can be cut with no approval.
- Any CM link on a non-YMMV page - as a YMMV trope, it should not be linked on those pages regardless of any cleanup effort. The only exception is if the wick is being used within the definition of another trope.
- If an CM link on a YMMV page refers to an unapproved character. If it refers to an approved character on any such page, the wick can stay. On the other hand, if the unapproved character being linked to sounds like they might have promise (and you don't feel like checking it out for yourself), feel free to mention it on the approval thread - someone may already know why they don't count, or it could invite a brand new discussion!
- Proposals for images, quotes, and videos of already-approved CMs - quotes and images are proposed on the approval thread, while videos can be uploaded normally as they are screened for approval by the moderation.
- Crosswicking examples to YMMV pages - if an example has already been approved and added to the main page, you do not require any special permission to add the example to a work's YMMV page (assuming the work has a page already). If a YMMV page doesn't exist yet, then you can make it yourself, but either way, feel free to just add the example without asking.
- Small changes to existing entries - these can simply be done on a Troper's own prerogative with no approval.
- Spelling and grammar fixes.
- Pothole changes.
- Minor rewordings.
- Spoiler tags.
While these changes do not require any kind of approval, it is requested that should you make any of these changes, you do one of the following:
- Make the same changes on the relevant Sandbox page, then add the Sandbox to the list at the bottom of the drafts page. This will add the Sandbox to the weekly swaps and ensure that the edits end up on the relevant locked page. If the Sandbox is already listed, then once you make the edits, your job is already done!
- If you don't know how the Sandboxes work or simply don't have the time to find it, then you can simply post on the thread about the changes you made. Someone else can then make the edit on the relevant Sandbox and add it to the weekly swaps.
- Alternatively, you can simply request that the change be made directly to the locked page on the Locked Pages thread. Members of this thread keep track of that one, so we will ensure that the changes are made in the Sandbox so that it doesn't get deleted during the next swap.
Again, these changes don't require any approval, but we prefer to keep the entries on the YMMV pages and the locked pages the same in order to avoid any miscommunication or errors between entries, so if you do make the change, we would greatly appreciate it if you could ensure the change is made on the locked page as well.
As a final note, we do not care what other sites have to say regarding whether or not a character counts. We have our own criteria and they have theirs for their CM equivalents; while they are similar, they are not exactly the same and should not be treated as such. Another site removing a character from their equivalent should not be a reason why a cut is proposed here, and if this is the case, it will likely lead to mod intervention.
Other than this, once again, welcome to the cleanup thread, and we look forward to your contributions!
Edited by Mrph1 on Jan 14th 2024 at 11:30:03 AM
RIP Toriyama
I'm good for chopping Crow
So, looking into it, I think we can probably keep both Friends. The new ending came many years after the original manga ended and can only be found in, specifically, the "Perfect" edition of the story. Said Perfect edition seems to be taking cues from the film trilogy where there is indeed only one Friend, but that also came out years after the OG manga...So, much as we allow characters to keep or not in "Director's Cut" and vice versa, I think Fukubei is fine to stay. Let's just do this:
- In the original manga, the first Friend—Fukubei Hattori— grew up ignored by his classmates, with their attention often focused on hero Kenji Endō. Thus, Fukubei developed a craving for attention, and a disproportionate hatred for Kenji. Already wicked as a child, Fukubei psychologically abused his so-called "best friends," regularly tried to terrify people with his tricks, and ruined the childhood of one of his classmates—who would later become the second Friend thanks in part to the Fukubei's cruelty. Forming the "Friendship Party" as an adult, Fukubei began developing a virus that painfully killed anyone it infected, all while silencing anyone who got his way. Unleashing the virus, Fukubei framed Kenji and his group for the ensuing 150,000 deaths, took over much of the world as a "hero", and ruled it with an iron fist, sending people to reeducation camps for even minor crimes. Fukubei's master plan is then revealed: Use a new virus to wipe out 99% of the human race, then rule over the remaining 1% of "true believers". Sociopathic, egomanical, and petty, Fukubei Hattori set the bar for wickedness in this manga.
- The second Friend—Katsumata—grew up unliked and bullied, in particular by Fukubei, and this resulted in a hatred for all humanity. Taking over after Fukubei's death, Katsumata destroys much of human civilization with a new virus and rules what's left even harsher than Fukubei, spreading tales of "aliens" invading to keep innocents terrified in the process. To further cause chaos, Katsumata regularly sends out small doses of vaccines to groups of potential rebels, knowing they will tear themselves apart trying to acquire the antidote. Revealing he plans to destroy all of humanity with an incurable virus, Katsumata tries to make Kenji watch as he kills Kenji's niece, Kanna—Kanna's mother is Kenji's sister, while her father is Fukubei—as revenge for a transgression Kenji committed against him as a child, and, when finally defeated, it is revealed he left an Anti-Proton bomb to be detonated by his followers, which will destroy the entire world when activated. In the alternate Perfect edition, Katsumata is revealed to have been both Friends all along, having masqueraded as Fukubei and carried out all the initial atrocities himself.
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Cheers for verifying there Ravok and a yes to those writeups!
Since it's fairly at the top, I'll link the IP threads here so they don't get buried.
DC Series,DC Films, Marvel Films.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Rewrites work.
Incidentally, is the Friend in the films different enough to count?
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Not the Eye
Yes to rewrites
Cut Crow
Speaking of, I have a cut of my own to propose: Joe Carroll from The Wraith:
- Complete Monster: John Carrol is the son of a wealthy man trying to get his dad's inheritance. Taking advantage of Dad's fear of the dead rising to kill him, Joe pays off a magician to teach him how to puppeteer a corpse so he can gaslight the man into signing everything to him. On the day of his plan, he has the magician killed to cover up his method, ordering two other people investigating the crime to be killed. He then carries out his plan, laughing when his father dies of fright.
Simply put, I don't think he's bad enough, even for a Golden Age one-shot. When I proposed him I thought mass murder was way less common than it actually is, and he has two murders with one attempt on the heroes. If he dies scrape by it's just barely and solely on the grounds of the Gaslighting being somewhat unique, but honestly I don't think it's enough. Even if he does keep, the writeup needs to fix his name in the first sentence.
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Are the way he kills the first 3 victims uniquely depraved? If not I'm going for a cut.
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Not the Eye
Cut John
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Mass murders are relatively common in Golden Age comics?
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Lies and Violence!
Cut Carroll.
Finally finished rereading Worm, and I wanted to put down my thoughts while preparing effortposts. I've got a lot to work with.
- The currently-listed Jack Slash, as I've said before, easily remains the worst of the worst. He's the leader of a team of roving serial killer supervillains who regularly torment entire cities for shits and giggles, and upon learning that he's destined to end the world creates a clone army of his former associates to slaughter as many people as possible. Even upon being defeated he manages to fulfill the prophecy, convincing super-Jesus that it would be super fun to murder the entire multiverse. Again, worst of the worst. No one comes close to upstaging him in sheer depravity except maybe the Simurgh, but she's effectively a robot whose singular purpose is to create conflict. Of the antagonists with agency, Jack remains on top.
- Of Jack's compatriots in the Slaughterhouse Nine, the only other two that stand out enough are Shatterbird and Gray Boy.
- Shatterbird has the power to control glass, which she uses to make every piece of glass violently explode whenever the Nine travel to a new city. This naturally causes hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries while leaving the cities too weak to fend off the rest of the Nine, giving her likely one of the highest personal killcounts out of the team's entire roster—it helps that she's implied to have been one of the few members to last more than just a few weeks or months. She admittedly has potential loved ones, but they're dubiously canon due to only being referenced in a deleted chapter.
- Gray Boy is the minion with "specialty powers" mentioned in Jack's writeup, who traps people in time loops. Only his victims' brains go unaffected by the loop, and the only changes to the loops are whatever Gray Boy inflicts on them—namely burns or stabs. So essentially you relive injuries over, and over, and over, and over for thousands of years. Many go insane within only a few months, and while he only gets a few victims before being killed off, ending up in Gray Boy's loops is unambiguously considered to be the most horrific fate in the entire universe.
- The supervillain Coil is bog-standard villainy for 99% of his tenure in the story. His worst acts are releasing the identities of a neo-nazi gang to the public so they'll go on a rampage throughout the city and enslaving a precog child with drugs to give him prophecies. All of his other acts are controlled chaos or efforts to stop worse villains—his one major act of terrorism, an attack on a crowded mayoral debate, is intentionally staged to cause as few deaths as possible, and he helps in the efforts to prevent Jack from ending the world. It's for purely pragmatic reasons of course, but that doesn't change how he doesn't pass the baseline... until we learn he wants to use a nascent Endbringer—giant unkillable monsters, three of which, the aforementioned Simurgh among them, have already been loose in the world for decades and caused billions of deaths—as an attack dog, and upon being killed releases it to wipe out as many people as possible for revenge.
- Bakuda is an exceptionally vile Starter Villain. She's a Mad Bomber who takes over a gang by implanting Explosive Leashes in its members, then has them kidnap hundreds of innocents—at least one as young as twelve—to be implanted with bombs as well, converting them into an unwilling army to kick off a city-wide gang war. After that she constructs a device as powerful as an atom bomb to wipe out the city, with a secondary emp effect that would have wiped out the electronics of a good fifth of America.
- The super-terrorist Teacher and the Serial Rapist Heartbreaker are also sure-fires, but they have important roles in the sequel Ward—the former continuing to be a major antagonist while the latter is the father of several big characters—so I'll wait to read that first. Said sequel iirc should also introduce two human traffickers, a cult leader, and a terrorist who tries to blow up an alternate earth. Fun times.
- The Big Bad, Scion, is an alien Eldritch Abomination with very little grasp on human emotions, setting up humanity for extinction as part of his own species' life cycle. While he does go on an omnicidal temper tantrum, it's ultimately fueled by grief over the death of his partner (who had similar plans to see humanity devolve into war because of Blue-and-Orange Morality).
- Cauldron, the Greater-Scope Villain conspiracy of human traffickers and mad scientists who kidnap subjects by the thousands throughout the multiverse, are motivated solely by stopping Scion. Their leadership has devolved into uncaring sociopaths over the years, but they ultimately desire to save the world even if it comes at the cost of their own lives, and the only member solely in it For the Evulz is a glorified security guard ghost.
- The only other member of the Slaughterhouse Nine with a high enough bodycount/affinity for fates worse than death, Bonesaw, ultimately has a Heel–Face Turn. The Nine's founder, King, accomplished nowhere near enough death and devastation compared to the group under Jack's leadership, even with Gray Boy in his employ.
- The Endbringers, as I said above, are essentially just robots who depend on destruction and conflict like humans depend on food and water. Echidna, the "nascent" Endbringer I mentioned with Coil, is just a normal teenage girl driven insane by a bad combination of powers.
- None of the white supremacist supervillain gangs do enough, save that one time Coil provokes them into a quickly quelled rampage. That said, their forces get consolidated under that cult leader from Ward I mentioned above, so we'll at least get one nazi.
- Villains with massive bodycounts in the thousands like Moord Nag and Black Kaze commit their atrocities entirely offscreen.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Geeze, this is gonna be one of those settings like Westeros or Warhammer 40,000 that has an absurdly high heinous standard, isn't it?
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
@Wet: Joe only has two victims and two attempts. One success and the attempts were gunshots. The second succesful murder is Gaslighting his own dad into thinking he's being tormented by ghosts so he'll die of a heart attack.
@ACW: Oh yeah. The genre heinous standard is similar to pulp magazines, so lots of baddies attempt or actually commit massacres.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Geeze...the gaslighting still seems unique, but it still may not be enough.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Classy, Refined, Unstable
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Eh the gaslighting could be slightly unique but his actual body count is severely lacking IMO, still gonna stick with a cut.
Edited by WetFlannels on Dec 29th 2022 at 8:43:19 PM
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Not the Eye
Makes sense golden age was pre-comic Code.
@ Emerald Emperor, really looking forward to it.
@ Demon Duck, how common is Mass murder in comic itself?
Edited by EmperorGeode on Dec 29th 2022 at 12:46:17 PM
Barb / Temporary Kylo
I'm fine with keeping the original manga versions of the 2 friends seperate.
Though, maybe the 'perfect edition' of Friend could get a new write-up? Cause if all the crimes of both friend's were him all along then that sounds easily different enough to warrant a separate write up. Though I'm not sure if that is best suited for here or the proposal thread sense it's technically a new version of the character.
The First man
RIP Toriyama
@ACW: Yeah, Film!Friend is on my exceedingly long list of to-dos when the approval thread opens ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
I'm good for cutting Wraith, I think.
Very much looking forward to the Worm proposals Emerald, I recalled Heartbreaker and Gray Boy as exceedingly easy keeps and though I wasn't the biggest fan of the work, I'm eager to see your coming proposals from it!
Tonight I dine on monkey soup.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Oh, and if someone wants to take Gungrave: G.O.R.E. from me that's fine. I don't know when I'll get to it.
Edited by ACW on Dec 29th 2022 at 4:03:41 AM
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
@Geode: Not at all, he does have the highest attempted bodycount in the comic. I'm far more concerned about the genre standard.
RIP Toriyama
@Snoke: I see where you're coming from, but I personally would say it's unnecessary tbh. The Reveal that Katsu was both Friends is a one-off line right near the end of the Perfect edition with no other real detail or heftiness attributed to Katsu. Funnily enough, this has in fact caused a lot of headscratchers with the fanbase who basically have to make up their own headcanons for how tf Katsu was somehow behind everything when really the only change in the Perfect edition is that one-off line...meaning there's several plot hole-ish style things now going on retroactively since in the original manga, there was definitively 2 Friends, lol.
And while Fukubei got up a lot of nastiness of his own, Katsu's rapsheet kind of already covers most of the similarities (weaponizing a virus; ruling over humanity harshly; etc.)
It's a unique situation though, so if enough people feel like the Perfect edition incarnation should have his own entry, we'll go from there. But atm I'd personally lean towards my additions to the write-ups as being enough.
Edited by Ravok on Dec 29th 2022 at 1:07:41 AM
Tonight I dine on monkey soup.
I'm fine cutting Joe Carroll. Duck's right; villains in the Golden Age, especially (especially) pre-Code, would get up to shit like torturing children to death completely on-page. I had a Namor candidate from the 40s who crushed a ten-year-old boy into bloody pulp without censorship and he was hardly the only one of his ilk. Remember these comics were produced:
- at the height of World War II, where human atrocity was at the forefront of public consciousness
- in an era where the old EC Comics could flourish unrestricted (which was the impetus for the Code and led to the more conservative Silver Age, which was more heavily moderated for content).
I'm not really sure what the "genre standard" would be for 40s pulp detective comics (certainly it couldn't be anything as insane as the literary genre standard, where prose heroes such as the Spider would fight characters who every book or so tried to destroy an entire city) but on his own, he may or may not pass. TBQH I kind of feel the latter. Patricide is nasty but it's not enough when his other crimes are virtually non-existent.
Edited by Scraggle on Dec 29th 2022 at 2:53:35 AM
Not the Eye
Okay that feel like the author is trolling .
For the wraith guy honestly lean a weak keep. From trope page it sounds like old time detective show where hero just happens to be a ghost superhero. Coupled with him having hidgest body count and succefuly gashligting his own father to death feel like just enought
Edited by EmperorGeode on Dec 29th 2022 at 1:46:25 AM
I'm good with a cut on Duck's
Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object
Cut Old Joe.
IPP Wick Check created.
"Cool. Coolcoolcool."
So long for Crow's status then.
(Made a page topper.)
Edited by MasterJoseph on Dec 29th 2022 at 11:15:33 AM
IPP Wick Check created.