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
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Being a Karma Houdini or not is irrelevant to a candidate's qualification.
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Alright Scraggle has kindly gave me this one and has helped with feedback so thanks for that and gave a little help with the mitigating factors. From the Elder Scrolls books Infernal City and Lord of Souls, we have the mad scientist Vuhon use the titular city to travel across Tamriel and harvest souls. Why has he been able to do this and who's responsible for powering the soul harvesting? The entity Umbra.
Who is Umbra and what have they done?
It's not really a who but more of a what. Bit of backstory here, Calvicus Vile (a Daedric Prince) wanted a sword to trap souls. A witch called Naenra Waerr was tasked to make it, but needed some of Vile's essence to complete it fully. From there people would wield the sword and harvest souls with the sword overtaking the wielders and becoming their only purpose in life. Over time, through unknown means, the sword itself had managed to gain sentience. Umbra would attack Vile, injuring him, forcing the Deaedric Prince to link his realm to Umbra so he can't escape from Vile's influence.
Wanting out, Umbra escapes from the sword as an entity and stole some of Vile's power, weakening the prince and fleeing to avoid being captured by Vile. When the Ingenium blew up and ended up in Vile's realm, Umbra saw a chance and threw the sword into the rift created, eventually ending up in the hands of Elhul Sathil who went mad. In Vile's realm, Umbra took Vuhon (the listed CM) captive in which the mad elf bargained that if Umbra spared him, he would help him escape from Vile's domain. From there Vuhon created a new Ingenium and Umbra used the energies stolen from Vile to power it and turn the city he was hiding in into basically a travelling soul harvester, creating an army of the undead by harvesting souls to build more power.
To achieve full separation from Vile, Vuhon and Umbra would need to get to the White-Gold Tower. Story stuff happens and despite Umbra's best efforts, the Ingenium is destroyed and Umbra is eventually resealed into the sword and destroyed by Sul at the cost of his life.
Mitigating Factors or Freudian Excuse?
Him wanting to be of Vile's influence? It's not a sympathetic motive as Umbra is an actively malicious entity of it's own accord and originally attacked Vile first before being bound.
His partnership with Vuhon? Well Vuhon is the one piloting the soul harvesting city, Umbra is the one providing the power for the soul harvester. Umbra never shows any resemblence of care for Vuhon and since Vuhon's plan was out of the plea that he's more useful alive... and even then he tries to bargain with Sul in a last ditch attempt after leaving Vuhon in the dust.
Now agency issues?
Him being an entity formed from the essence of a Daedric Prince would be a concern... but it's not? Umbra is desparate to get away from Vile's realm while being it's own scheming entity. There's another entity bound to Vile named Barbas who is nothing like Umbra as you encounter him in the games and he's shown to be a fairly friendly albeit snarky being who warns players of Vile. Him being formed from a sword that harvest souls? He doesn't ramble on about needing souls to live or how it's his purpose so with our lax on agency issues he's good there.
When you look at Vile compared to Umbra, Umbra actually comes off in some respects as the worse of the two. Vile is affably evil; Umbra can't even bother. Vile collects souls; Umbra devours them alive.
Even if someone were to argue that Umbra still technically is a part of Vile under the Literal Split Personality clause, we still have precedent for that with Naruku and some of his his "incarnations" from Inuyasha. In this case, I think the case for Umbra is even more solid since Umbra lacks any and all of Vile's good qualities. Vile is Above Good And Evil, but Umbra plain-and-simply is evil. It's extraordinarily rare for any Daedra to be this self-
Heinous Standard?
Being the one responsible for powering the soul-harvesting-flying-city-of-doom and using them as fuel for an ultimately selfish motive, and overrunning entire cities as a casual affair, Umbra handily clears the standard. Vuhon's still good to stay as he's a part of the city and the one who has the city itself to be a hellhole.
Final Verdict?
What say we folks?
Edited by WetFlannels on Apr 4th 2023 at 12:57:49 PM
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Goku Black
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Umbra
Not the Eye
to Umbra
Animal Farm (1954): Napoleon is a cunning, hedonistic, gluttonous, and power-hungry British Saddleback boar who — following Mister Jones' expulsion from Manor Farm — begins plotting to seize power for himself. Raising a group of orphaned puppies into vicious attack dogs and using them to assassinate his well-intentioned rival Snowball, Napoleon names himself the supreme leader of Animal Farm. Gaslighting and intimidating the other animals into accepting the increasingly authoritarian changes he has his sycophant Squealer make to Animal Farm's laws, Napoleon quickly proves to be far worse than Mister Jones ever was — hoarding the food produced for himself and the other pigs, working the other animals to exhaustion and starvation, stealing the hens' eggs and selling Boxer the draught horse in exchange for human foods and alcohol, and using his attack dogs to terrorize or execute anyone who challenges his autocratic regime.
Yes to Vile. Its origin is indeed weird as shit. Vile has this to say on its origins:
- "What was in this sword was me, plain and simple. If someone cut your leg off and the leg starting calling itself 'Umbra', it would still be your leg, wouldn't it?"
But yeah, the way Umbra is treated in the novel, it's got a living, thinking mind of its own, and its entire goal is to extricate itself from Vile's influence completely. At absolute minimum, it's a Literal Split Personality of Clavicus Vile with absolutely none of his redeeming qualities or Blue-and-Orange Morality.
Edited by Scraggle on Apr 4th 2023 at 5:59:18 AM
Yes to Umbra and welcome to the thread Ravok!
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Does Umbra need to do what it does to survive, or is it presented as Immortality Immorality?
And how does its body count compare with others?
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Classy, Refined, Unstable
Umbra uses souls because they're powerful and can provide him the strength to escape, that's all.
Edited by WetFlannels on Apr 4th 2023 at 1:09:31 PM
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Pure Immortality Immorality. And Umbra has one of the highest body counts of any individually named Daedra in his role as Lord Umbriel. Compare him to other Daedra who are like actual children of Daedric Princes such as Molag Grunda from Online, daughter of Molag Bal, Umbra still comes off as worse.
Edited by Scraggle on Apr 4th 2023 at 6:10:05 AM
Adora, the High Priestess
Gosh did I accidentally start a meme?
Anyway yes to Umbra. I saw it as a Made of Evil person having legitimate good moments so it bolstered Umbra being a monster.
"I just need one of you to come here to give your life to the sun god. It will be for the monkey city's glory."
Classy, Refined, Unstable
It's not just a high body count ACW, he's harvesting souls by the city full for a selfish motive that he brought upon himself.
Oh, Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of clichés.
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Geeze, worse than some actual Daedra? I'll give a yes.
Though if Umbra is Lord Umbriel, Vuhon may need a slight tweak (don't know if Hierem does as well).
Edited by ACW on Apr 4th 2023 at 8:13:45 AM
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Not a Daedra per se, but we already have precedent for an Elder Scrolls supernatural being with a very specific origin/purpose being way worse than its purpose necessitates in the form of Alduin, so I feel comfortable voting for Umbra.
I'll rewrite Vuhon a little bit accordingly, but to sum up: Lord Umbriel is essentially the Fusion Dance between him and Umbra. IIRC, they're both in control at the same time.
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
Yep.
Edited by Scraggle on Apr 4th 2023 at 6:23:50 AM
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Gotcha. Is Hierem's fine as is?
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Ultimate Moral Compass
- Pushed to the Limit (1992): Harry Lee is a drug dealer infamous amongst Los Angeles for being worse than the mafia. Dealing with prostitution and extortion on the side, Lee makes most of his money through the Kumite, a deadly fighting tournament where martial artists are tricked into fighting for the chance to win money or a opportunity to work with him, only to be killed by his champion Inga in front of a bloodthirsty audience. Having his young associate and Mimi’s brother Johnny killed for stealing some of his coke and making a racist joke, Harry forces Mimi to watch her friend Terri get killed by Inga when her cover’s blown, while also kidnapping her mentor Vern with intent to torture him.
Umbra
Edited by therealjackieboy on Apr 4th 2023 at 5:29:50 AM
"No running in the halls!"
To Umbra
Yes to Umbra, and...
- Ten Commandments: Dathan begins life as a Hebrew slave who sells out his own people to become an overseer. Upon discovering the true identity of Prince Moses as a Hebrew slave, Dathan sells him out to Prince Ramses in exchange for power, status, and the Hebrew woman Lilia as his personal Sex Slave. Dathan takes up a position of authority over the Hebrews, working countless innocents to death and disability while sending Lila's beloved Joshua to the horrific copper mines of Geber. Siding against Moses at every turn, Dathan finds himself exiled with the rest of the Hebrews. He promptly tries to convert the others to idolatry and tries to sacrifice Joshua and Lilia to the statue of a golden calf.
- The Constant Gardener: Sir Bernard Pellegrin is a British diplomat who runs affairs in Africa. In truth a high-ranking member of a nightmarish conspiracy and corrupt to the core, Pellegrin oversees the testing of an unstable drug on numerous innocent civilians that leads to their horrible deaths. Upon the probing of human rights activist Tess and her doctor friend Bluhm, Pellegrin has them murdered. Feigning sympathy for Tess's widower, Pellegrin later has him murdered when he investigates the conspiracy.
- Tales From the Crypt: Lokai, secretly a vicious werewolf, is introduced as seemingly a werewolf "hunter" at a lodge beset by werewolf attacks. After numerous brutal assaults, Lokai has killed enough people that the owner has called in a "specialist" to deal with the threat. Lokai proceeds to murder a guest he believes is the hunter before brutally beating a maid to death when the moon rises. Attempting to murder the true hunter Janice, Lokai intends to massacre the entire lodge.
And finally...
- Bazil Broketail:
- Master Heruta Skash Gzug, Sorcerous Overlord of Padmasa, is the overarching villain for the first four books of the series. All the bloodshed and slavery Padmasa is responsible for traces back to Heruta and his endless, insatiable lust for power. Millions suffer under his reign, where at best punishment for any and all crimes will result in execution, and at worst the unlucky victim will be fed to a Thingweight to be consumed for weeks at a time. Thousands more become breeding slaves for Heruta's demon imps, replenishing his armies through demons borne of women kept in states of agony for months at a time. Projects under Heruta's purview usually entail the sacrifice of innocents as a basic function of their existence—such as the creation of the orcs, who need to be fed human slaves directly after they are born, which Heruta happily signs off on after ordering a demonstration. Despite his pretensions of being a Well-Intentioned Extremist, Relkin and Lessis see through Heruta's lies in an instant and drive him to his Villainous Breakdown by exposing what he is; an ego unchecked who won't stop until the Nine Cities of Argonath have been destroyed, to leave "not one stone atop another, except for the gibbets and the pyramids of skulls."
- Waakzaam the Great, the Deceiver and the Dominator, is the Big Bad of the latter half of the series. Formerly one of the seven divine spirits tasked with building and ordering worlds for the Great Mother, Waakzaam's pride gradually but totally consumed him, as he eventually committed the first murder in existence and went thereon from uplifting civilizations to destroying them. In the present day, any vestige of goodness in Waakzaam is dead and gone, as he rules twelve worlds as a cruel tyrant. Some of these worlds have their populations almost completely eradicated, leaving nothing but barren planets for Waakzaam to plunder resources from and a few select survivors upon which Waakzaam experiments. Waakzaam has a particular proclivity for children and infants in his monstrous experiments; in one instance, the heroes find a laboratory filled with over a hundred dead and dying children, kept in agony as subjects for Waakzaam's plagues. Waakzaam is responsible for the death of billions and seeks the death of billions more, seeking to conquer Ryetelth—or otherwise cull it of most life—and then a whole skein of new worlds alongside it.
- Bazil Broketail: The Blunt Doom of Tummuz Orgdeem is a living rock imbued with an evil consciousness by the Masters of Doom themselves. The Blunt Doom runs Tummuz Orgdeem as a hellscape of slavery and torture; the male slaves are castrated to depopulate the areas they're taken from, and the females are either put up for sex slavery or made breeding fodder for the demonic imps which make up so much of Padmasa's army. The Blunt Doom itself is a capricious sadist who, envious of all life for having the flesh and blood it does not, mutilates and tortures its own servants as a means of joy. It projects its mind into three slaves—respective its Eyes, Ears and Mouth—who have had all other redundant orifices sewn up. Its Eyes, in particular, used to be a human magician who made the mistake of sneezing in the Blunt Doom's presence, and paid for it with ritual mutilation.
- A Sword For A Dragon: Mesomaster Gog Zagozt, one of the most depraved apprentices of the Masters of Doom and already halfway to becoming a Master himself, is The Man Behind the Man to the cult of Sephis the Terrible. Gog dresses up a demon as the return of the pagan god Sephis the Terrible, and binds both the demon and its thousands of cultists to his will, brainwashing them into a campaign of slaughter and human sacrifice that soon consumes thousands of innocent lives. Entire villages are butchered at a time so their flesh may be used as the building material for grotesque golems known as "blood myrmidons." Having the cult of Sephis sweep across the country of Ourdh, decapitating its leadership and overrunning entire cities, Gog eventually plans to have the female population of the country enslaved for the imps, while keeping the rest of the country as a human-sacrificing puppet state for Padmasa.
- Dragons at War: General Lukash is the soldier assigned to lead the Padmasa military campaign against the coastal cities of Argonath. A dangerous combination of stupidity and bullheaded cruelty, Lukash engages in a general campaign of Rape, Pillage, and Burn across the Argonathi countryside, and engages in war crimes that infuriate and disgust even his allies with their pointless atrocity. Despite being explicitly ordered to keep the demon imps in his army under control and to spare officers who may offer valuable intel, Lukash openly shows no interest in trying to control them and repeatedly lets his imps off the leash. This results in his prisoners of war being roasted alive over open flames, eaten alive by demons and indiscriminately tortured to death, in such numbers the nearby lakes run red with blood.
- A Dragon at World's End: Lord Zulbanides is the most prominent and most influential of the golden elves who rule the hidden city of Mirchaz. In Mirchaz, human life is comparable to an animal's; tens of thousands of slaves are used as living psychic batteries to power an artificial universe in which Zulbanides and the other lords play their "Great Game." Life as a living battery is a short and miserable one, as slaves are replaced in no more than a year and then abandoned to die after their minds give out. The artificial universe itself is even worse; life is created simply to be tortured to death, or used to fuel pointless wars that consume hundreds of millions, all for the entertainment of the elves. As a member of the ruling clique and one of the top ten players, Zulbanides is the one chiefly responsible for all this horror, and comes off as monstrous even in comparison to his fellow elves, with a particular proclivity for torture and horrific human sacrifice that eclipses even the cruelty of his compatriots.
Umbra. The whole killing people for Immortality Immorality reminds me of The Beast
to Underground Robotnik.
Hey, remember when I did an effort post on a version of Reggie Mantle from Archie Comics? Wouldn't it be wacky if another regular character from that series got a CM incarnation? Wouldn't it be extra wacky if it turned out to be one of the nicest characters in the series, who's beloved by pretty much the whole town?
On an unrelated note, let's talk about Pop Tate, proprietor of Riverdale's famous diner, Pop's Chock'lit Shoppe. We're talking about Archie Horror again, tropers. Another one from the Chilling Adventures Presents... anthology series. This time, "Pop's Chock'lit Shoppe of Horrors". A couple, Nick and Sherry, attempt to dine and dash at the restaurant, get caught by Pop, and puts the two to work to make up for their bill. And as the couple work, they find out how Pops isn't all that he seems.
Who is he? What does he do?
This incarnation of Pop Tate regularly kidnaps and murders residents throughout Riverdale, chops them up, and prepares them as food to monsters who visit the diner during night time, and wealthy humans who happen to be cannibals alike. In the "Night Shift" story, it's revealed that Pop regularly tricks residents of Riverdale into being the server for the monsters who arrive to the diner late at night. If the server does a poor job or try to leave, Pop allows the monsters to murder and eat them, Nick and Sherry coming across the corpse of a recent employee who fell under this fate.
In "Soylent Teen", it's revealed that Pop hosts regular dinner parties for the wealthy within Riverdale. Pop focuses on serving them dishes he made out of the most intelligent busy body teens in Riverdale, as he found out that the meat of their corpses is of higher quality. He recently kidnapped the academically gifted Stacy Banks, and when Betty accidentally uncovers it, he tries to kill her too. Thankfully, Stacy is revealed to have broke free, and knocks Pop unconscious, the two blackmailing the cannibals at Pops to let them go or else their identities will be spread all across the web. But as they leave, Betty and Stacy are hungry enough to test out canibalism for themselves, and are implied to eat one of Pop's dishes before they leave.
At the end of the comic, Nick and Sherry work off their debt, Pop gives them a sundae on the house as a job well done. The couple are naturally suspicious after what they found out, but eventually decide that one sundae couldn't hurt. Big mistake. As it turns out, Pop is capable of taking the souls of patrons as payment for their orders instead of cash. And as such, he steals the souls of Nick and Sherry, traps their souls in coins while they're fully conscious and aware of their surroundings and puts them in a jukebox alongside the souls of Kevin Keller (who worked the Night Shift for Pop), Betty, and Stacy.
Any mitigating factors?
While the comic is definitely comedic, Pop and his crimes are treated with horror and magnitude, and the only jokes about him are ones that Pop himself makes. He's treated seriously enough.
The only big issue is the possibility that he cares about Jughead Jones. When Pop catches Nick and Sherry trying to dine and dash, Nick says that he sees Jughead leave without paying his pill all the time. Pop simply says that he and Jughead have a unique arrangement. Now, we don't see Jughead at all in the comic. So we have no idea whether or not it's Pragmatic Villainy on Pop's end, if Jughead is secretly a monster like the ones who come during the night shift, or if Pop actually cares enough about Jughead to spare him. However, as is, I'd say it's too vague for me to view it as a redeeming quality.
Final Thoughts?
Your call.
Edited by Awesomekid42 on Apr 6th 2023 at 8:19:33 AM
Adora, the High Priestess
I say a weak no to Pop because of that possibility he might legitimately respect him with some resemblance of goodness.
EDIT: Changing from a weak no to a strong yes due to what you said below me.
Edited by AlicornGaia on Apr 4th 2023 at 10:55:42 PM
"I just need one of you to come here to give your life to the sun god. It will be for the monkey city's glory."
Well, as it turns out, we don't have to worry about the possibility of him caring for Jughead after all! 
I re-read the comic just now, and when Nick empties out a trash bag for Pop, Jughead's crown-like hat spills out amongst the rest of the trash bag's contents, Nick being horrified at what he sees. The implication is apparent that Pop has killed Jughead as well.
Changing from a "Your call" to a to Pop now.
Edited by Awesomekid42 on Apr 4th 2023 at 10:47:03 AM
