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
Big yes to Ares!
Here's Joe:
- Killer Joe: "Killer" Joe Cooper himself is a mad detective who moonlights as a hitman. Contracted by Chris Smith and his father Ansel to kill Chris' mother Adele for insurance money, Joe forces Chris to let him take his mentally ill sister Dottie on a date when he cannot pay upfront. Intimidating Dottie into sleeping with him, Joe begins living with the Smiths and regularly uses Dottie for sex before killing Adele, only to discover the beneficiary of her insurance policy is her current partner Rex. Catching and killing Rex, Joe reveals Ansel's new wife Sharla's infidelity to him as he brutally beats and rapes her, threatening to kill the whole family lest they give Joe Dottie in lieu of paying him.
Lies and Violence!
Have another for Worm. This dude sucks, but... honestly, coming off Star's it's kind of meh.
Who is Heartbreaker?
Universally considered the biggest piece of shit in the setting, Heartbreaker is a villain with the power to manipulate emotions. With this ability, Heartbreaker can permanently affect anyone he lays eyes on with fear, anger... or unbridled lust.
Heartbreaker is the most notorious rapist in the world. With his powers, he has assembled a cult-like harem of women who wait on him hand and foot and are willing to die on his behalf, which he leverages to have them commit crimes, and if he collects any married women he takes their wedding rings as personal trophies. Because of this, he naturally has a lot of kids. The children of capes tend to be able to get powers early, so Heartbreaker keeps them around in the event that he can use them as child soldiers. I've mentioned triggers a few times, right? The most traumatic event in a person's life that sees them get superpowers? Heartbreaker goes out of his way to arrange trigger events for his kids, often holding "tests" on their birthdays or whenever he's pissed off and needs a punching bag. One of these tests sees him bring his daughter to a birthday party for one of her classmates, where he forces her to decide what kind of torture he'll subject to each and every one of the children there lest he bring about even worse torment on them.
His abuse doesn't end there, of course. He inflects waves of paralyzing terror on his kids and slaves to "discipline" them—or just because he's had a bad day and, again, needs a punching bag—to the point where a common boast among the kids is that they literally eat fear for breakfast. One woman he tired of he made permanently, utterly terrified of other people, driving her insane, and then told the daughter he fathered from that woman it was her fault for being a little needy that day (it wasn't her fault, he would have done that anyway, he just wanted to be a dick). He also rents them out, children and harem slaves alike, to other villains to do whatever they'd like to them—the one "session" we see thankfully only involves an ice cream fetish without any molestation, and I am so disappointed that sentence even needs to be a thing.
Woman A has a fight with her boyfriend, drives the man away, and becomes more isolated, she heads to her job, orders in, and generally mopes and acts normal for a recent divorcee single mother. Enter Heartbreaker.
Haha, no. Heartbreaker was there from the beginning. He targeted her and her daughter, had her drive her spouse away and disconnect from extended family, and moved his flock into the nice house... a surprising number of people can be fit into a house if they're willing/forced to sleep five or six people to a room.
Maybe target the neighbors too, if there isn't enough room around. Woman A continues to work, embezzles from the company, and disappears from the grid. Authorities only learn that Heartbreaker was there after the fact, when they connect the dots.
The group moves on to Woman B, who happens to work in a police station or PRT office. She's not that attractive, but she's useful. Like Woman A, she continues to work, but she keeps an ear to the ground regarding all things Heartbreaker related.
Maybe it's one of the once-a-year times when something slips. A kid gets recognized. Forces mobilize, the mole alerts Heartbreaker. Forces teleport in or mobilize via. flying vehicles, and Heartbreaker is already gone and running. He's got kids like Guillaume and the like, who already have dozens of unwitting spies watching (Guillame touches everyone in a crowd, and senses through their eyes, like Taylor's swarm sense, minus the control aspect, and can temporarily blind them or fuzz their senses), allowing the escape route to be plotted, and the group gets a few seconds of warning time before the flying suit passes over the area. Capes are forced to move in groups, because moving out alone means running the risk that Cherish might sense them, and the small group of Heartbreaker's kids, a handful of captured capes, and his elite zealot-soldiers could flank them and give Heartbreaker the moment he needs to wololo the solo cape.
Meanwhile, the women he's tired of are armed and ready to fight like the worst kind of zealot, convinced he's in the bedroom. The heroes approach, forming a perimeter, and neighbors of the initial victim make a move, flanking, opening fire with hunting rifles or improvised weapons. Chaos, fires are set.
It's hell — fighting guerilla forces made up of people you really don't want to hurt, blameless. Heartbreaker moves out to the periphery of the city to live in a rural location, or just disappears into another densely populated neighborhood. Authorities maintain warnings and circulate pictures, they keep an eye on things, root out moles, and everyone knows but few say that the open confrontations are too costly, and the subtle stuff is matched by the power of this one cape and his nine or so cape children. It's bad enough with controlled assaults, but bringing a Kill Order into it? Crazies coming out of the woodwork, making mistakes? Nightmare.
His kids naturally get a bit warped by his parenting. One of the main characters of Worm, Regent, is one of Heartbreaker's kids, and is an unquestionable sociopath from having his emotions blunted by repeated exposure to his dad's powers as he grew up. When he got his own emotion powers that made it harder for his father to manipulate him, Heartbreaker instead forced him to commit dangerous, morally-bankrupt crimes in an effort to break his spirit and make him submit. In such a shitty environment and without any other parental examples to know better from, Regent and the other children were also encouraged to satisfy their base desires, becoming murderers and rapists at the tender ages of around 12 on average—Regent bodyjacked others to have sex with himself, or experienced drugs through other people's bodies without subjecting his own body to the negative effects.
Eventually, after being forced to repeatedly murder rival gangsters in another session of spirit breaking, Regent realized that his father would never be satisfied and left the family. He traveled to Brockton Bay, cleaned up his act (mostly, he's still a sociopath but he now knows rape=bad) and joined the Undersiders...
And gets killed in a completely unrelated incident. Heartbreaker was traveling to the city in an effort to get Regent back under his control, but after this happens Regent's friend, Imp, decides to honor him by killing his dad. She has the power to make people forget she exists, so she spends weeks harassing Heartbreaker and gaslighting him into insanity until he slits his own throat.
As for the rest of his children? Imp takes them under her wing, encouraging them to follow their brother's example and become heroes only murder assholes. They're still really fucked up, every single one of them traumatized as all hell and having some kind of psychosis that makes them a flight risk, and their own journeys to recovery are a major part of Ward.
Is he heinous enough?
Heartbreaker is the single most notorious rapist in the setting—there are others, sure, just wait until we get to the nazi rape cult, but they have expansive operations while he's just one guy with an impressive power. He ruins countless lives for the sake of his own hedonism, abandoning or torturing his victims when he's done with them—and his powers are permanent, so even if you manage to detain one of his slaves they will stay devoted to him for the rest of their life. His kids are abused and twisted 24/7, encouraged to follow in his footsteps as rapists and murderers, and while all but one of them for the most part avoid that fate, they're still left with lifelong trauma that haunts them years later.
Mitigating qualities?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Please, for the love of god, don't genuinely ask this question, it would make me lose faith in humanity. Heartbreaker has no care for his kids, routinely ignoring or abusing them, and the only reason he puts so much effort into retrieving them when they run away is because he views them as his property. Some of them manage to go to school, but this is only because he doesn't care enough to stop them. Even then, whenever they make new friends or boyfriends or what have you he will absolutely go out of his way to drive them away/horribly torture them in front of whichever child dared to try to find happiness. He's also stated to have had a few friends, but from little we hear of them they're similarly sick perverts he rents his kids/slaves out to, and we never learn what his trigger event was, so if there's any sympathy to be gained from that we never hear it.
Verdict?
One of the sickest bastards in the entire story, and that's saying something.
Edited by EmeraldEmperor on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:34:04 AM
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Ares and Heartbreaker (nazi rape cult? WTF)
Yes to rape Nazi.
Also...
What's the work?
Metropolis (1989) is a play based on the groundbreaking, sci fi codifying film by Fritz Lang. As in the original, our protagonist Steven (Freder in the original) is the son of the city's founder and a member of the upper class who falls in love with the beautiful working class revolutionary Maria.
Interesting to note is the roles the villainous characters play get shifted about: Warner (the Rotwang standin) is practically heroic and John Freeman (aka Joh Fredersen and our hero's Archnemesis Dad) gains a litany of crimes and without reference to his dead wife becomes one of the nastiest villains put to the stage... but makes it clear he holds some affection for his son. To enact his plan however, he ropes in Warner's creation, "Futura", who proves a far more knowingly sadistic force of evil than her original, working under the elitist Freeman rather than the more heroic Warner here.
Who is Futura? What has she done?
Originally just a faceless robot made by Warner as the prototype for Freeman's plot to replace the city's workers with machines, Freeman sees use in using her to disrupt the rebellion brewing thanks to Maria. Capturing and delivering the beautiful Rebel Leader to Warner, Freeman has the Reluctant Mad Scientist graft Maria's likeness onto Futura. To test her capabilities, Freeman shows her off at a party for the city's "elitists", where her beauty wows the crowd and decides to use her to destroy the rebellion-to-be.
Ordering her to venture to the city's lower levels and pretend to be Maria, Futura immediately sets about manipulating the children who Maria had been teaching into letting her negotiate with the adult workers. Claiming to have come to an agreement with the upper levels, Futura presents them with the asinine "generous" offer to be allowed a single day they may gaze upon the son in return for having the children work on the deadly machines, as Freeman had desired. Infuriating the workers... this distracts them from working on their machines which begin depleting the quarters' oxygen supply.
Futura gleefully proclaims the lower levels can be damned, ecstatic to watch them go up in flames and takes a little girl hostage to keep them from attacking her. Steven approaches her in an attempt to stop her madness but she stabs him, wounding him badly. Steven is rescued from Futura and the furious crowd grab her, throwing the cackling machine into the furnace and destroying her as she laughs till the end about the destruction she's set off and the lower levels are rendered uninhabitable.
Sadly Freeman hears mistaken reports she killed Steven and decides to flood the city in his rage and grief, forcing the lower class to leave their home as it is all destroyed. Though Steven escapes with the workers the upper class is wiped out in Freeman's grief as he decides the city is his to die alongside him.
Heinousness?
Freeman is a total bastard working people to death, not allowing slaves so much as to gaze upon the sun and hopes to one day replace them all with machines.
Futura however is punching out of her weight class as The Dragon, directly and gleefully carrying out the scheme to ruin Maria's reputation and uses his order to get through to "use the children" to get to the workers to instead distract them in the hopes of wiping them all out, much to her excitement:
Mitigating factors?
In the original her origins are too sketchy to list but here she's actually designed by a good hearted scientist and while Freeman guides her somewhat, her gleeful insanity and Joker-like wish to watch the "lesser" people of the city burn paints the picture of a knowing sadist.
Additionally while she's employed by Freeman, she manages to make his plan worse by trying to wipe out the workers and even tries to kill the one thing he cares about, Steven and indeed the belief that she succeeded is what drives him to destroy Metropolis. The one and only redeeming quality of her employer is nowhere to be seen in this psycho.
Verdict?
Proud yes.
Heartbreaker the Nazi Rapist. (Two of the most evil and vile things in life for the price of one. May his soul burn in hell).
Showtime!
to Heartbreaker and Futura
*loud sigh*
Edited by Libraryseraph on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:42:44 AM
Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?
Not the Eye
Yes to Hearthbreaker. Almost as disgusting as Atwood. And Futura as well.
Lies and Violence!
Yes to Futura.
Okay, are people actually reading? Heartbreaker is not a nazi. That's another character I'll be getting to.
Goku Black
Futura and Heartbreaker.
I know he's not a Nazi, but you did mention an upcoming Nazi rape cult and WTF
Also Fut
Edited by Agentofchaos on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:45:34 AM
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM, BUY GOLD BYEEEE! | She/Her
Not the Eye
Honestly not suprised given what I hear about Worm.
The Moron
And a yep to Heartbreaker and Futura
Lies and Violence!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
x3 I got that, but everyone else is ballooning off that impression.
To clarify, I was mostly trying to be funny. They're not literal 1940's German nazis, they're white supremacist hillbillies.
Edited by EmeraldEmperor on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:47:33 AM
Woagh
to Futura and Heartbreaker.
Goku Black
Okay quick time out. Are people actually reading this or just going off what Agent said without context? That was a serious issue of rubber stamping in the previous thread and I'm hoping for that not to roll over here?
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Showtime!
I read it, I was just making fun of the grimdarkness of "nazi rape cult" in general
Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?
The Emperor of Evil!
to Futura and Heartbreaker.
to Ares. Have my own video game revisit coming up.
Hearbreaker.
And Futara.
to the Original God of War, Heartbreaker and Futura
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Yes to Heartbreaker (reminds me of Purple Man) and, since don't seem to be agency issues, Futura.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Yes to Heartbreaker and Futura.
all I'm gonna say is people need to read the EP's, and just going off a throwaway joke that doesn't describe the character doesn't inspire confidence. That said, I'm kinda getting to the level of Worm's heinous standard being too high already, and it's only a few villains in. I do not see 11 villains keeping in this work. I don't see anywhere CLOSE to it, and I need to hear about the villains upcoming and what they do rather than introducing it piecemeal.
Not the Eye
Well emerald did make a compilation of all who count and notable who don’t on cleanup thread.
I read the EP, but I guess I misread the Nazi rapist part and thought that he was it. My bad.
Can you link me to that, Geode? I missed it
Eager yes to Ares
Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jan 20th 2023 at 6:19:15 PM