Old Complete Monster cleanup thread
Welcome to the Complete Monster proposal 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 (for cuts, rewrites, expansions, and the like), 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, please check here for the earliest date a work can be discussed (usually two weeks from the U.S. release date) and whether the work has already been reserved by another user.
Here is how the process works:
- If you have a candidate to propose, you can simply come right in and propose them! If the character's run is brief, such as a single issue of a comic book, then a simple summary of their actions and any potential redeeming qualities will be enough; for longer-running candidates, an effortpost (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.
- After the proposal, there will be a 72-hour discussion and voting period, where people may ask questions and vote on the candidate. The number of upvotes must outnumber the downvotes by at least five for the character to be considered "approved".
- Three days after the proposal has been made, if the character has been approved, you may post the writeup (the text to be posted on the trope page itself) on the thread and send it to the drafts page. Your candidate will soon be added to the CM subpage. If the work has a page, you should add your candidate to the relevant YMMV page. Voila! It's that simple!
Outside of this process, we do have a few ground rules:
- 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 proposing or writing up characters from a maximum of three works at a time (from initial proposals to end of their voting period). 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!
- No plagiarism of any kind. This is a very serious matter site-wide, as the website could get in actual legal trouble over this; as a result, this can very quickly lead to mod intervention. This can take many different forms:
- Direct plagiarism, i.e. wholesale copying. This is not only the easiest to find, but is also the most likely to warrant quick moderator intervention. To be clear, quoting in some places is perfectly acceptable, but it has to be very clear you're quoting from something else and it cannot be anything longer than a sentence or two - if you're quoting an entire work summary from Wikipedia, no one is going to believe you've actually consumed the work, so even if you cite your source, your candidate will be downvoted anyway.
- Self-plagiarism. Even if you can prove that you wrote the same text in both places, the site itself can't contain any of the duplicated text. If you already wrote something once before, it's not too hard to write it a second time.
- Using another site's work as a template for a proposal. Just because you don't copy and paste something directly doesn't mean it's any harder to detect if you're basing parts or all of your proposal on text someone else wrote. To be clear, this doesn't violate site rules and won't lead to mod intervention, but just like if you directly plagiarize, no one will believe you've consumed the work if you're clearly basing your proposal on something else. This thread largely operates on the honor system, and tweaking someone else's work to pass it off as your own is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
- Votes must be for specific candidates, meaning no blanket voting (i.e. "yes to everyone I missed").
- If you are the first person to downvote a candidate, please provide an explanation of why when you do so. We're here for discussions above all, and a hit-and-run downvote doesn't facilitate anything.
- If a work is already reserved by another user, please don't comment on the work or any potential characters worth discussion before the discussion date. We know how exciting it is when a work has a keeper that you're waiting to talk about, but it's not fair to the person who reserved the work who is just as excited to lead the discussion to see the discussion getting spoiled before they get to do it. On the other hand, if the reservation only has one name attached, shoot them a PM - they may be down for a collaboration, which will get you in on the fun as well!
- Please keep the thread on-topic. While discussing the trope is fun and we encourage people to enjoy it, questions like "who's your favorite CM" are off-topic and can lead to thumps. That's the kind of question to take to people's PMs if they're willing. Similarly, while we encourage friendliness and familiarity with other users, posts should always have some kind of thread-relevant purpose; for instance, if you want to wish someone a happy birthday, feel free to, but if it's the only thing in the post, it's off-topic and needs something else alongside it. Again, though, while we strive for a friendly atmosphere, this is not Facebook; life updates are fun, but unless they have some kind of impact on your thread participation, please do not bring it here - we have Yack Fest for that.
- Please refrain from asking anything along the lines of "How Did We Miss This One?" In almost every case, the answer is simply "No one thought about it before". This Is a Wiki where everyone has different interests, and the fact that people missed a particular candidate, even one that seems like a textbook example of a trope or a character who is particularly iconic in pop culture, means absolutely nothing. The question is disruptive, has a simple and consistent answer, and provides nothing to any discussion.
- If you are suspended from parts of the website, it is still possible to participate!
- For users who are suspended from editing the wiki, you still have full access to this thread. You can propose candidates and write them up with no issues whatsoever; while you will have to ask someone else to post the entry to the relevant pages once it is done, all write-ups are considered thread-approved - as in, done by consensus - and thus doing so does not violate any rules regarding meatpuppeting.
- If you are suspended from the forums, your participation is limited but not impossible. It is still possible for a forum-suspended user to assist in creating the write-up for a character who has already been approved; as previously mentioned, write-ups are inherently considered a consensus-based edit and thus not tied to any one particular user. However, you can not assist in the proposal of a character; as a proposal is based around the forum rather than the wiki, doing so with a forum suspension qualifies as meatpuppeting.
- Please keep all discussions "in-house".
- What other wikis use for CM equivalents is irrelevant here.
- Please be wary of using other wikis, Fandom or otherwise, as sources of information. They are just as fallible as a site like Wikipedia in regards to accuracy because they can be edited by any user, just as this site can.
- Do not attempt to force a communication with an author in an attempt to gather evidence or settle a debate; besides the fact that this is a YMMV trope and thus author intent has variable weight depending on the circumstance, doing so may cross the line into drama exportation, which is prohibited site-wide.
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 look at 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 a one-shot character versus long-running antagonists)
- The quantity vs. quality of their crimes compared to others (someone with a lower victim count but far more visceral and personal crimes could be considered as equally bad overall as someone with a higher body count but less horror involved)
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.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This thread tackles very serious and dark matters on a daily basis. We will be discussing things like murder, rape, torture, human trafficking, crimes against children, and in particularly dark cases, several of these issues at the same time. We keep a lighthearted air, but all candidates carry the general assumption that these are awful individuals committing disgusting crimes. We ask that if you participate, you do so with the requisite seriousness such dark topics require; exclamations of how gross something is, whether serious or sarcastic, are disrespectful to the topics at hand, and if you cannot handle such topics, please do not participate.
And that's everything you need to know. Welcome to the thread!
Edited by Twiddler on Jan 17th 2024 at 5:42:49 AM
The Moron
No to Hill. In terms of stuff that's actually visible, Harvey (who, besides blowing up the city block, is responsible for a militia that causes a shootout with the GCPD), Thomas (whose forceful lobotomization of Esther is onscreen and directly kickstarts Penguin's crusade), and Vicky (who gasses all of Gotham) all blow him out of the water. I'd even argue that the Vales do far more onscreen than Hill does, with the stuff that could really push him over just being Fridge Horror. I also don't think it's fair at all to not hold Joker against him - Joker starts the series as a mentally ill weirdo who barely even has any friends and claws his way up to (potentially) being a citywide threat.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Apr 2nd 2024 at 8:38:33 AM
Ultimate Moral Compass
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
Hill
Woagh
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
to Walker and Nightfall.
to Hill, i'm already reading about some guy trying to nuke the entire city by himself.
A Girl, Just One of Many Kinds
When it comes to Joker, he had access to a whole virus that could threaten the city, something Hill never really had so it still feels an unfair comparison. Harvey did endanger a great junk which is completely fair but it was when he was just mayor, meanwhile Hill was mayor for decades and helped prepetuate the crap sack setting we see it now.
And it’s shown Thomas’ actions were helped By Hill, who had a personal hand in many things including the lobotomizing of Esther and other Arkham patients. And it’s made pretty clear Hill had a huge hand in all of that and in the end was willing to betray both Thomas as well as Falcone to protect himself, and his actions basically help make him responsible for the series, so I think that’s more than enough for him to stand on
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Riddler had multiple missles at his disposals which, again. Hill never had the resources of
Edited by MermaidEyes15 on Apr 2nd 2024 at 8:43:37 AM
Keep Fighting. Keep Loving.
The Moron
Again, he gets that virus after spending most of the series as a complete nobody who's barely able to talk to his girlfriend, much less coordinate an assault on the city. It's textbook From Nobody to Nightmare.
And the one thing we see Harvey do is already way more than we see Hill do directly. Again, he blows up an entire city block within days of becoming mayor if I'm remembering the timeframe directly.
But again, Thomas is the one that we actually see doing the things onscreen and the one that the narrative mostly blames for all of it. You're assigning more blame to Hill than the actual game does.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Apr 2nd 2024 at 8:45:42 AM
A Girl, Just One of Many Kinds
All three of them (Thomas, Hill and Falcone) are equally to blame for the events of the story, with the three being partners in helping perpetuate the crime in Gotham. I’m showing that Hill had a direct hand in Thomas’ operations, including the torturing to insanity.
The Moron
That is pure and simply not true - the narrative goes out of its way to make it clear that Thomas was ultimately the worst of the group (Penguin, Vicky, Bruce, Alfred, and John all speak in depth about the horror of Thomas's crimes, and it's mostly Thomas's actions that lead to the Penguin and the Children of Arkham's crusade). Like, sure, Hill helped out (in a way that, from my memory, is never spelled out in detail), but when the narrative goes so far out of its way to pin the majority of the blame on Thomas, I simply can't see where you're getting the idea that the narrative blames all three of them equally.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Apr 2nd 2024 at 8:52:12 AM
Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object
Hill
No to Hill. Nothing is convincing me we can lay as much of the blame at his feet as the EP is attributing. Star is making a compelling counterpoint about how the narrative weighs things out.
Yes to Nightfall and Walker.
No to Hill.
What was the vote count on the Professor? I know there were continuity concerns around him and I want to ensure a majority of positive votes for him.
Hill
....Phenomenal
for Nightfall and Walker.
for Hill.
Not the Eye
Goku Black
nightfall
hill
I’ll take a potato chip… and EAT IT!
Tally for the professor
: Geode, Clean, Gryphon, MGD, (4)
: Ravok, Jackie, Passing, Tyk, Grey (5)
Abstain: jlvs, turtles, Larry (3)
In honor of Akira Toriyama
to Nightfall and Walker; to Hill
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Did Ravok change? He mentioned how we made an exception for Loki.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Walker; Hill
What's the work?
Ish State Experiments is a series of experiments by Ish, where Ish puts 200-1000 people in a situation and watches what happens. The events are pretty fictionalized, so I decided that candidates from his work are worth discussing.\\\
In "1000 Players simulate Prison in Minecraft," 1000 people are put in a prison, 100 of whom are randomly assigned as guards. The prison is also funded by anonymous investors, the very last of whom had a very special request near the end of the video...
Who is MagicGum? What does he do?
MagicGum is the last funder of the prison. If he pulls the funding, the prison's server-side protections all go down and all hell breaks loose. As mentioned, at the end of day 4, MagicGum had a request to fulfill, and if it failed, the funding would be pulled. The request: A game, in which all the surviving prisoners would be split into four teams and tasked with fighting to the death until one team remained. If he was entertained, he would allow the prison's funding to continue. The Warden, Solev, was reluctant to fulfill his request but at that point he felt he had no choice.
On day 5, when the game began, prisoners were predictably uncooperative, so some of the guards began shooting at them. However, what was unexpected was that many of the guards also chose to stand in solidarity with the prisoners, as MagicGum's request was too vile even for them. Instead of a massive deathmatch, the prisoners and prisoner-allied guards stormed the prison, the elite team tried to quell the riot under Solev's efforts, former escapees helped the prisoners escape, and MagicGum, holed up in the top of the central tower with Solev while the rioters were closing in on them, pushed Solev off the top of the tower in a fit of anger, killing him before the rioters (implicitly) took his life as well.
Is he actually bad enough?
Solev isn't exactly a good person either. He turned the prison into a labor camp, he falsely locked up prisoners for crimes they didn't commit, he tortured people, he forced prisoners to kill each other on a one-on-one scale, he even went out of his way to kill peaceful protesters in an incident on day 4. However, Solev can't count as a CM because he genuinely believed that he was helping make the prison secure, which was justifiable as a prisoner killed the former warden after pretending to be rehabilitated, and even he was appalled by MagicGum's request.
However, should his request have gone through, it's made extremely clear that literal hundreds of people, regardless of their innocence, would have died by each other's hands, all to keep the prison secure in the end. The only reason this might not stand out against even Solev's cruelty is due to how hard the request failed, and even then the prison went defunct largely due to him.
Verdict
I say a somewhat weak .
Gentle Laborer
Hey, I know that video. Having watched it, I don't know if I feel okay upvoting Magic given the circumstances. It's not really a complete work of fiction, the creator confirmed the events are only partially staged.
I'm proposing a candidate from the most dark and twisted of narratives: MY UNIVERSITY READING LIST
What is the Work?
The Round House is a book that got assigned to me in my Native American literature course. The book's plot is a coming-of-age story in South Dakota about a vaguely misogynistic 13-year old Native American boy named Joe Coutts, whose mother Geraldine is violently beaten and raped by an unknown assailant as he seeks out to find the identity of the perpetrator while navigating the frustrating legal discrimination forced onto native tribes that prevent justice from being correctly given to her case.
Who is the Character? What has he done?
The perpetrator, as revealed about halfway through the book, is Linden Lark, a white man who lives a short distance outside of the tribe's reservation territory. Prior to the start of the novel, Linden's grandparents were members of a lynching mob, which insulated a hatred of Native Americans into him, particularly Native American women. Despite this, he fell smitten with an underage Native American woman, Mayla Wolfskin, who had worked for and was impregnated by a state senator. Noting his escalating jealousy while living with him, Mayla submitted a request for assistance to stop his abuse to Joe's mother and social worker Geraldine Coutts, who Linden blindfolded, beat, kidnapped and raped before dragging her to his house.
He reveals that he intends to use the money given to Mayla for her child after murdering her, using the money to become rich, planning to kill Mayla's infant child as well as Geraldine if she tries to stop him. Geraldine barely escapes, leaving Mayla's child in her car to be adopted by the senator while Mayla is burnt to death and buried in a construction site.
Afterwards, evidence is found clearly implicating Lark, from his sister's testimony, a doll found near his house, and the testimony of Geraldine following her undergoing enough time to speak on what happened, but he's ultimately released by legal technicality, free to kill Geraldine and her family for being a danger. When Joe and his father, the judge Bazil, encounter him in a supermarket, they beat the shit out of him before he smugly grins at them and runs away. At the conclusion of the novel, Joe comes to the ultimate conclusion that he must kill Linden Lark to ensure his safety, awkwardly shooting him in the stomach before his friend Cappy finishes the job. Even afterwards, Linden haunts Joe's dreams as a Wiindigo, as Mayla's mutilated corpse is found a few days later.
Mitigating Factors?
None. A point of criticism for the book was Linden lacking dimensionality, and he is blatantly evil and representative of violent misogyny towards Native American women as humanly possible. Even when his sister Linda, whose birth mother disowned her at birth for a facial deformity and was adopted by a native family, gives her one of her kidneys due to him nearly dying from heavy drinking, he shows no appreciation, insults her appearance, and continues drinking regardless.
Heinous Standard?
This is a low-to-earth realistic fiction novel so heinousness is no concern. He sexually assaults two Native American women, brutally kills one, tries to kill the other one, threatens to kill an infant, and Joe and Bazil notes he would almost certainly try to go after their family afterwards to cover up his crimes.
Verdict?
Yes. Thanks, to my very own college Native American literature course for this candidate. I have another one in mind soon.
Edited by Orangutans on Apr 3rd 2024 at 12:12:40 PM
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Sure to Linden.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
for Linden Lark.
Abstain on Magic Gum for the time being, and for Mayor Hill.
I’ll take a potato chip… and EAT IT!
A tentative![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]")
Hill
I feel it’s safe to say he is worse then those two
Edited by YorkobeShounen on Apr 2nd 2024 at 5:31:01 AM