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
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Brokenclaw
Alright here's one I think passes the bar
The work
NEED is about to quote the page description I wrote:
In the small town of Nottawa, Wisconsin, Kaylee Dunham is a high school student desperately trying to find a kidney donor for her sick little brother DJ, with her primary hope being to find her father who walked out on them shortly after DJ's diagnosis.
Recently during Winter break for Nottawa High School a new social media exclusive for NHS students called NEED appears. Offering to provide needed things it's users request in exchange for doing some minor tasks, but soon what's being asked of them escalates into more dangerous things and Kaylee sets to learn the more sinister purposes behind NEED.
My candidate is the one behind NEED, the Evil All Along Dr. Jain
Who is Dr. Jain and what has she done
Dr. Amelia Jain is the seemingly nice and kind Nottawa High School psychiatrist and is secretly the one running NEED.
Kaylee knows her as she's been sent to her for her antics trying to find a donor for DJ being seen as excessive and Jain tells everyone that she has a hero complex and people start to stop trusting her.
Eventually setting up NEED people request things like phones or concert tickets, and initially the assignments to earn them was just to invite other NHS students to NEED, though when Kaylee asked for a kidney for DJ there is no assignment for her. Soon though, everyone at school had signed up, so the assignments began to change.
Things are simple at first, like pulling small pranks, but soon escalate, like posting other people's private information, digging a grave in Kaylee's yard and leaving a note saying DJ should just die already or brutally killing some dogs.
But then, through a chain of assignments the local bakery makes an order of peanut cookies supposedly ordered by Kaylee, it's delivered to local girl Amanda's house for her party and she eats on without knowing it has nuts in it, as she's severely allergic to them causing her to go into a brief coma before she dies.
Kaylee sees on NEED the pictures post on there as proof they did their assignments a strange box at Amanda's door and the grave dug in her yard and realizes NEED must've arranged these and calls the police, only for the site to suddenly go down before she can show them.
Kaylee's mother calls in Jain over this and Jain convinces her that Kaylee might be dangerously unstable and so she leaves with a DJ for a few days for Kaylee to cool. Kaylee then gets an email from NEED saying they know what she did and say if she's tries it again they'll do something more permanent to shut her up.
More NEED assignments happen, such as having someone replace a person's Tylenol with some other pills, causing them to go to the hospital, a person's car is damaged which ends up causing it to crash into a snow plow and kill the 2 passengers inside.
NEED then has a girl Hannah knocked out and tied up at the school, while also having a fire bomb set up there, before having Nate abducted since he's actually a viable donor for DJ.
Kaylee tries to expose NEED again, only to have to run since the police think she orchestrated Amanda's death due to the order that killed had her name on it. While on the run she ends up at the school and saves Hannah just before the school explodes.
Kaylee figures out that Jain is behind NEED (the bomb was set up specifically in her office to destroy any possible evidence) and calls her to confront her.
Jain admits to it when called out and says that if she wants to do anything about Nate to meet at a specific address.
Kaylee goes there knowing it's a trap with Bryan, a guy who feels guilty in his part with Amanda's death and when they get there Kaylee is shot in the arm by Ethan, a little Psycho for Hire working for NEED before he and Bryan kill each other.
Jain doesn't bat an eye at this and lets Bryan bleed out while Jain restrains Kaylee and explains why she did all this:
Jain was from the area before years ago she left and got a job from the government after her husband cheated on her. She returned and got her job for the school her real purpose was to test out a way for the government to get ordinary citizens to do things for them and learn information so they could try this in foreign nations.
She then says she's going to have the person whose going deliver Nate there kill her to not "corrupt the data" only to learn that the cops are on their way there due to Kaylee sending them evidence about all this, so she decides to just shoot Kaylee herself.
Only then, the guy who was delivering Nate, Sydney shows up and shoots her in the head since he didn't want to be tied to her.
Mitigating qualities
She's mad that her husband cheated on her those years ago, but that is so shallow a reason to deliberately kill a bunch of teens it can't be called an excuse.
She claims that she killed a bunch of Americans was for American security, which is brought up only once and is called out as Knight Templar BS at best.
The reason Kaylee never got an assignment was because she genuinely needed the thing she asked for, but Jain didn't do that out of kindness but just as part of the experiment.
Heinousness
She's behind everything in the book, with it being stated along with the several deaths we do see that it also caused several more, with a total of 12 deaths, and while 2 of those deaths are hers and Ethan's she still caused 10 innocent deaths, tried to kill Kaylee and Nate as well and frame Kaylee for Amanda's death, with it being clear she's going to do this again with similarly lethal results.
Yes, everyone does the things for NEED voluntarily, but most people only play small parts in the more dangerous schemes and don't know the full harm that they're causing until everything happens. The only person who knowingly does anything malevolent is Ethan, and it's all under her orders.
The book does end with Sydney joining up with the government and has him open up another NEED for a different town, but we never see it and Jain was the one who came up with the idea in the first place.
Conclusion
I think Jain manages to keep
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM, BUY GOLD BYEEEE! | She/Her
Unofficial co-Wiki Curator for Magnificent Bastard
Ok, looking at the entries ACW published, who allowed the 5 Minute Dating entry?
Edited by Siegfried1337 on Mar 19th 2023 at 3:45:37 AM
MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Is there any particular reason you think it shouldn't be going up?
Yes to Jain.
Not the Eye
to Jain
Edited by EmperorGeode on Mar 19th 2023 at 4:31:53 AM
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Jain
@Sieg might help if you say what your issue is with the writeup?
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Unofficial co-Wiki Curator for Magnificent Bastard
How many upvotes did it get before it was written? Just asking.
MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates
Showtime!
I can't remember the exact amount, but it got five more upvotes than downvotes. If you have a problem, it'd be nice if you said it directly
Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?
to Dr. Amelia Jain.
Unofficial co-Wiki Curator for Magnificent Bastard
, so a minimum of 5 upvotes is required at the end of a voting period to have a character be accept as a CM/MB, right?
5 more yes votes than no votes is the requirement, if there are zero no votes then yes the minimum is 5
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM, BUY GOLD BYEEEE! | She/Her
Yes to Jain. Okay, mea culpa, I CLEARLY forgot Tiger and Bunny off the pending, mind if I get that in next reeeeal quick, with my Training Day and Videodrome lads?
My Diagnosis Murder and Wo Long will follow, then FINALLY to bloody Draculas and Star Wars
I might as well ask since it's also your reservation, but should an episodic show with no set release date like Helluva Boss be discussed two weeks after an individual episode or wait until the season is over. I only ask since it could take a year or more for all the episodes to be pumped out.
to Dr. Amelia Jain.
Only one other EP on this page right now, so…good-timing.
Thank you to Lighty for saying I could do this one if I wanted to! Didn't read the book this movie was based off of, but know he's different enough though—and have seen the movie a bunch too.
- Work: Hannibal—the 2001 film adaptation of the 1999 Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter novel—third of those four, second of the four canon movies released and the fourth and final in the chronology in both cases.
- Who/What: Mason Verger is a creepy serial child molester:
- who escaped legal Justice for his crimes using his wealth, only for Dr. Hannibal Lecter to drug him; get him to peel off his own face and then leave him for dead.
- Claiming to be a reformed man who found God, a now horribly disfigured and crippled Verger seeks to track down Lecter and enact his violent revenge on him
- by means of having wild boars devour him on command.
- While having Lecter tracked once he's located him—and three men working for his cause dying in the process,
- Verger coaxes and bribes Paul Krendler into helping frame FBI Agent Clarice Starling not only to get her off the case,
- but to use her as bait to trap Lecter as well.
- Once getting his hands on Lecter and nearly enacting his plan,
- Verger upon seeing Lecter nearly escape with a wounded Starling
- tries to force his long-suffering and abused physician Dr. Cordell Doemling to risk his life in the boar pen—where another one of Verger's men is being eaten—just to go shoot Lecter.
- Additional Information: When Cordell refuses for his own safety and it's clear he won't have a choice with Verger outright extorting him to ("You're INVOLVED is what you are in ALL OF IT!"), Lecter tells Cordell he has his permission to blame him if he pushes Verger into the pen ("Hey Cordell, why don't you push him in? You can always say it was me!"); Cordell releases the wheelchair; Verger falls in; a boar makes their way to Verger helplessly laying there; face to face, the boar opens their mouth and CHOMP!
- Redeeming/Mitigating: Verger's not truly reformed and just claims to be—his getting in touch with God being to both give that impression and be able to assert the power and authority to punish Lecter how he sees fit makes him a fanatic with no genuine feelings expressed about it, he cares nothing about his men, has no respect towards anyone he's around at any point in time and everyone who works for or with him is a means of guaranteeing and servicing his own agenda as well.
- Heinous Standard: While we don't see his horrible history of abusing children represented with him being seen going after a child in the past—and his sister Margot is also not a character here like in the book or the show, which the latter I have seen, Verger is fully established as acknowledging that past and his actions being fully known to all too—and thus having an insanely unique niche as well; he knows how dangerous Lecter is and still sends his men after them with all of them killed in service of his agenda—one of them in the pen by the boars that Verger wants to slowly and torturously have Lecter (who's very affable and has very HIGH standards) eaten to death by over the course of days as well; his using Starling as a pawn to get to Lecter also nearly gets her killed—proving he doesn't just endanger his own people too and both emotionally abuses and blackmails his own timid caretaker to be complacent to his crimes and nearly endanger himself too.
- Verdict: He certainly makes it based on all this alone and I definitely say .
Anybody wishing to see the writeup ahead of time can PM me of course. This'll be the seventh in the franchise if I'm not mistaken (three in the show, one in the books, one in the books/movies and two in the movies).
Edited by futuremoviewriter on Mar 19th 2023 at 7:56:25 AM
to Jain and Mason Verger
No to Red. It's still Dragon Ball and he fails the standard big time.
The Draftsman of Doom
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Mason
How many Hannibal guys is this now? There's quite a spread out media collection of them.
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
5?
I’m plotting my schemes wherever I go! They’re perfect in every way…
Yes to Gary Oldman Verger.
Seven as I said: the show has Verger, Ingram and Wells; the book Hannibal has Verger; the book/movie Hannibal Rising has Grutas (I hear he's virtually the same in both) and the movies Manhunter and Hannibal have Lecktor and Verger respectively.
Edited by futuremoviewriter on Mar 19th 2023 at 8:28:05 AM
I do have to question some of the stuff being buffed out in the heinous section… I know Mason and I know the work but “he carelessly sends his men to their deaths” and “he tries to feed a cannibal serial killer to his boars” really aren’t what you should be spending your time on when talking about a trope for the worst of the worst.
RIP Toriyama
Sure to Verger
So quick question: The Last of Us (2023) concluded one week ago. There's a discussion to be had from the series...but it's for a character who was a one-shot that showed up, died, and was not mentioned afterwards over 2 weeks ago. Would we be cool with me going ahead and discussing that character (when my Pending list clears ofc), or would we rather I just wait the extra week since the season's finale?
Tonight I dine on monkey soup.
Classy, Refined, Unstable
I thought it was handled when a possible candidate dies then we wait 2 weeks rather than the whole show then two weeks?
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say nobody's gonna count from the Tetris movie (which is a "true story of the high-stakes legal battle to secure the intellectual property rights to Tetris"—pretty sure there was no rape or murder in that specific legal case) but go nuts. Likewise I'm not interested in Mando, though Ravok and Lighty may feel differently.
@Fireball, please don't mention anything about Shazam! and whether anyone counts until two weeks. Not even "yeah, I think X could make it."
Yes to Brokenclaw.
Edited by Scraggle on Mar 19th 2023 at 3:57:25 AM