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
Just a starting content creator
You should still delete the EP, a lot of us have spoilers on by default.
Edited by AmateurStorytime on Apr 22nd 2024 at 1:37:37 AM
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!
Can we get some clarity on the date thing? mir's got a good question.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Pending:
- Carl Reissman (Atlantis)
- The Count of Years: Amnās (Brendan)
- 1408: Room 1408 (King)
- Sanctimony: Tom Turner (TheMadCr0w)
- The Dragoneye: Duke Schubbie (NTG)
- Sentinels-related (Ravok):
- Skul: The Hero Slayer: Alexander (SomeNewGuy)
- Something More (Adventure Time): Dr. Cassandra Gross (VengefulBale)
Edited by ACW on Apr 22nd 2024 at 4:50:53 AM
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
for Tak.
Let's have another demon (sort of).
The Work
Black Dragon Bahamut is a German RPG created with the RPG Maker in 2001. It's the creator's (who really improved and even got a job in the video game industry) first game and sadly was just another "My first RPG maker game" with lots of spelling errors and a rather generic plot: Protagonist Abadon goes on a treasure hunt, finds a sword stuck in a stone and gets teleported to another part of the world (without the sword). His goal is to travel back home, but he soon comes into conflict with a group of monsters called “The Radical Demons”. With a name like this they should've formed a band, but instead they go for the good ol' “take over the world” plot.The Candidate
The Teufelskönig (Devil King), leader of The Radical Demons. Like many villains in RPG maker games he uses the standard Demon Lord model and has not much backstory. Just an evil guy who wants to take over the world. As usual.His Deeds
- Having heard that the father of Abadon is a researcher trying to figure out how to grant humans special powers he decides to pay the man a visit to obtain said powers. When he notices that Abadon has already gained these powers, he proceed to steal them, which Abadon describes as painful, and kills the father for trying to intervene. Abadon is then knocked out and loses his memories, which is never brought up again.
- Seemingly haven't done anything for several years, he decides to start with the whole taking over the world plan after Abadon has grown up. He and the other three leaders of The Radical Demons – Chango (standard Dark Elf model), Grex (standard Samurai model) and Minotauro (take a guess) – keep destroying village, killing some of the inhabitants and kidnapping the rest. There demands are simple: The humans either submit to them or they continue with the attacks.
- Eventually they decide not to take any more prisoners during their attacks. This really starts to bother Grex, who unsuccessfully tries to convince the others to stop destroying towns or at least not killing everyone. The Devil King rebukes him, claiming that they already have enough prisoners and Chango adds that killing people is more fun.
- Abadon, now accompanied by Cleric Lilli and Ninja Spark, finally manages to get back home only to discover that the Radical Demons have destroyed his town, too. They try to warn the King in the nearby castle and arrive just in time to learn that the King's soldiers are under attack while on a training exercise in a nearby forest. They rush to the forest but everyone is already death.
- The Devil King manages to defeat the group and Chango suggested that they should keep them alive and turn them into monsters. Somehow. They are teleported into a cell but Grex switches sides and releases them. They other monsters arrive and the Devil King threatens to hang Grex. But before anythings can happen, Abadon teleports the group away.
- Abadon then unlocks the power to summon the spirit of the Dragon Bahamut (hence the title) and thanks to Grex, learns that the hideout of the Radical Demons is a castle on the North Pole. He teleport to group to the castle and they are able to kill Minotauro, Change and finally the Devil King. The En... Wait no! There's still some pointless filler.
- Before he dies, the Devil King summons two Demon Knights out of nowhere, tells them to teleport to two shrines and wait there until they are strong enough to take over the world. He then gloats that the castle is about to be destroyed and since he has taken away Abadon's teleport they'll die, too. Then Bahamut appears and saves the group. They travel to the two shrines and defeat the knights. The En... No wait, there's still more.
- The last knights reveal that the Devil King faked his death and they were just a distraction. He's in a new castle and more powerful than ever. The party travels to the new castle, defeat the two knights again and fights the Devil King on last time. The E... Oh who am I kidding?
- The Devil King, of course, has a final form. Which turns out to be a mecha for some reason. But even this final form is no match for the heros and he dies, for real this time. The protagonists decided to help rebuilding all the destroyed towns and the game is (finally) over.
Mitigating Factors/Freudian Excuses
Generic bad guy who wants to take over the world and doesn't show any care about the other Radical Demons, not even acknowledging the deaths of Chango and Minotauro. And since Grex is a monster who decided to help the hero stop the others, it's clear that they aren't Made of Evil and committed their actions ou of their own free will.How bad is he compared to ther other villains of the story
- As leader of the Radical Demons he's responsible for the destruction of at least four villages – two are shown as destroyed, one is being destroyed in a cutscene and an NPC mentions that he's the sole survivor of his village – with the implication that these aren't the only ones. On top of that they also killed a bunch of soldiers and he personally murdered the protagonist's father.
- Now while Chango, Minotauro and Grex are also involved in the attacks they aren't as present as the Devil King. Minotauro is notably absent in the cut scene where the Radical Demons destory a town and doesn't acutally shows up until much later. And while Chango was around since the start when don't see him or Grex actually doing anything in the above mentioned cut scene. They just stand around while the Devil King uses dark magic.
My Verdict
Pretty generic villain without much depth but still a
Goku Black
devil king
Not the Eye
Devil King
to the Devil King. (Also, thanks for convincing me to name my still-nonexistent band "The Radical Demons".)
Edited by LoadsAndLoadsOfFreeTime on Apr 22nd 2024 at 3:42:14 AM
You've been kicked out of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. :(
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
Maou the Demon King (use that as a pothole).
Dagded Dujardin
Devil King
Devil king
Gentle Laborer
Tak
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
Mak
With Fallout—one of my favorite game series of all time—receiveing recognition from all sides of the globe thanks to the successful TV show adaptation, it's the perfect opportunity to discuss the franchise!
What is the work? Fallout: The Roleplaying Game is an official Tabletop RPG spinoff that allows fans of the franchise to go on many adventures and explore the wasteland using Modiphius Entertainment's 2d20 system. We'll be focusing on the Winter of Atom sourcebook, which serves as a Cosmic Horror Story prequel to Fallout 4 and follows the war against the Last Son of Atom, leader of a Renegade Splinter Faction that broke off from the Church of the Children of Atom and a Dark Messiah hellbent on forcing the entire wasteland to adhere to his teachings. The Last Son of Atom is not our candidate, he doesn't count for many reasons, we'll be discussing the Predecessor Villain of the story.
Who is he?
- John Whately, an army general who once served the pre-war American government, is the equally-deranged ancestor of Adam Whately, the Atomite cultist who would one day become the Last Son of Atom. As the founder and commander of the Whately Research Facility, John conducted top-secret chemical weapon tests on volunteer citizens for the government, freezing his subjects in cryostasis to observe the effects of his cruel experiments.
- Unbeknownst to his superiors, John was not a loyal supporter of the goverment at all, but a cult leader using the facility for his own insidious purposes. John's family worshipped a cosmic god known as the Black Star Who Dreams Beneath, and they believed that their god was sleeping in an ancienty city hidden somewhere below the outskirts of Boston. John, who despised christianity and believed himself to be the chosen messiah of the Black Star, created the research facility with the sole purpose of finding the dreaming god and waking him "so he might reveal his divinity to the world."
- John brainwashes the staff of the Whately Research Facility and converts them into more followers of his religion. The facility becomes an unholy place of twisted rituals in honor of the Black Star, with John's cult digging tunnels beneath the facility to reach the ancient city. Before his dream could come to fruition, however, the bombs dropped and the entire facility was buried. With his plans now gone to waste, John tries to freeze himself but the cryogenics fail and John dies with his icy-blue eyes "open wide in terror."
- The Black Star Who Dreams Beneath, posing as the Atomic God, eventually chooses John's descendant to lead a new generation of cultists and finish John's work. Adam has nothing good to say about his ancestor, considering him a blasphemous heretic who deserved to be punished for following a false god. With the Whately Research Facility now abandoned, Adam completes the excavation and finds not only a small portion of the city but also a nightmarish device called Atom's Glow, which he plans to use to go on a pilgrimage and subjugate the Commonwealth and every settlement that he comes across.
Mitigating Qualities? He's evidently proud of his heritage—his personal weapon, the Magnumnomicon, incorporates several teachings of his family... And its grip is all but stated to be crafted from human skin, while strange runes are engraved into the barrel. Most notably, we're told that the gunsmiths who created the Magnumnomicon died in mysterious accidents. It's safe to say that he's more proud of the fact that his family also has ties to the Black Star Who Dreams Beneath.
And if you're curious, Adam has noticeable mitigating qualities that stop him from reaching CM status. He's genuinely crazy thanks to a combination of chem consumption and usage of Atom's Glow, and one of the endings has him redeeming himself.
Heinous? Tries to unleash a Lovecraftian god upon mankind... I don't think that's a common occurrence in the franchise.
Conclusion?
Edited by TheMadCr0w on Apr 23rd 2024 at 6:22:18 AM
"Cool. Coolcoolcool."
Yes to Devil King and John.
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread John
Ultimate Moral Compass
Whately
Is it possible to disqualify a character from CM status based on a trailer? The tropers who made the page for the new M. Night Shyamalan movie Trap seem to have already decided it is a case of Even Evil Has Loved Ones but I think it's a bit early for that.
I have a CM image suggestion for D.J Wheeler from Black Cat Run. Since its my first time proposing an image, if there's anything I can do to suggest a better image, let me know
Insert title here
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I don't think so. Never Trust a Trailer is a trope for a reason.
Devil King
Just a starting content creator
Yes to John and Devil King. Hope nobody minds, but I'm calling dibs on Parkour Civilization, because it looks like there may actually be a potential keeper, whenever season 2 ends.
Check out my YouTube channel! I make audiobooks and whatever else I feel like!
Shin Megami Tensei IV
for Devil King and John Whately. Like the image as well.
pronounced 'Scraggle'
I have no idea what's happening in that picture. No to it.
Yes to John, though, and I've got a few keepers from the series to discuss as well (as well as two cuts, and I'll talk about those on the cleanup thread soon). For now, though, from Fallout 76, we have a duo of Raider leaders.
What have the Blood & the Eye done?
- The Blood and the Eye are a duo of chem-addicted psychopaths and opportunists who gathered a bunch of other chem-addicted psychopaths together and made a full-on gang out of them called the "Blood Eagles."
- The Blood Eagles share a creed based on sadistic violence and torture for its own sake. This manifests in the Blood Eagles killing people for simply looking at them wrong; murdering entire families, and the sickly and helpless; capturing people so they can be butchered and served as food for a cannibal restaurant (ala the Fiends); or kidnapping innocents to hook them on chems and then torture them into losing their minds and becoming new Blood Eagles.
- And let's elaborate on that last part…you see, the Blood and the Eye are really the only two Blood Eagles who are actually cognizant. The rest of them are innocent people Forced into Evil, all of them tortured so badly that they've embraced violence and pain as their own escape. The Blood and the Eye are a wicked duumvirate of bad bosses;
- The Blood travels around Appalachia serving for new "recruits" to kidnap and oversees the "recruitment" network. Although they leave most of the dirty details to the Eye (see below) they happily get involved in the torture themself, in one case gleefully promising a recruit they'd kill everyone he loved while forcing him to watch
- The Eye serves as the Torture Technician, personally breaking the minds of innocent people in batches as large as twenty people at a time. People have a high rate of dying in these "recruitments"; it's remarked that in the last batch of twenty, only ten survived.
- The duo's masterpiece is "the Claw," a man named Frankie whom the Eye tortured into completely incoherent lunacy. When it became clear Frankie was more of a psycho than even the rest of the Blood Eagles, the Blood and the Eye set him up as one of the gang's new leaders to fully utilize his brutality. The player allies with Frankie's brother, Beckett (an ex-Blood Eagle himself—and I should note here that out of hundreds of Blood Eagles, only three, including him, have ever shaken off the brainwashing) and, depending on player choices/speech checks, can either help Frankie overcome the brainwashing as well…or Mercy Kill him.
- Nothing. The only weird-ish thing is that unlike previous named Raider leaders, the appearances of the Blood and the Eye are both randomized, which leads to some weird moments of Gameplay and Story Segregation (the Eye is clearly a woman in a holotape where we hear her torturing a previous recruit, but she has a chance to spawn as a guy) but yeah, overall that's a non-issue. The Blood and the Eye are given clear, distinct characterization as the masterminds and only truly evil members of the Blood Eagles; in essence, these two are the reason the Blood Eagles are Always Chaotic Evil. It was them who organized the otherwise anarchic group of drug addicts into a functioning gang.
- The Raiders are nasty by default. Even no-name gangs decorate their lairs with the mutilated bodies of their victims, and they often have whole piles of victims in their hideouts.You need to be impressive even by those standards to even have a chance at qualification, and each game typically has a gang of raiders who are distinctly the nastiest group in a whole sundry of them. The cannibalistic, slave-trading, serial-raping Fiends, or the the socially Darwinistic Forged who burn entire families alive in their giant forge are particular examples here.
- The Blood and the Eye easily carve their own niche here, what with the cannibalism, the mass torture and slaughter, and particularly the usage of Being Tortured Makes You Evil as their main recruitment tactic. What's even more fun is that the Blood Eagles aren't even alone in this specific niche—Judge Zeller did it first, and I qualified him a couple of years ago under the reasoning that it was a unique form of evil for the Raiders—but the Blood and the Eye are so much worse about it that I honestly don't think Zeller can stay anymore. That's a topic for the cleanup thread, but the short of it is I think the Blood and the Eye easily keep.
Edited by Starkrafty on Apr 22nd 2024 at 9:43:07 AM
Watch for the sign of the Saint — he will be back!
Wanted to propose a video example of King Ghidorah from the monsterverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGYn-JoSmBE
Edited by Binfield94 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 8:37:08 AM
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Uh, you commited a mistake with names in the post? You say "Blood and Claw" but then mention how Claw is their victim while the other leader is named Eye?
Leaders of the Blood Eagles anyway
Edited by KazuyaProta on Apr 22nd 2024 at 10:41:14 AM
Watch me destroying my country
I thought we did away with the whole us release date thing?
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."