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
Wild Child
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Cruiser.
Lies and Violence!
Yes to Clegane, the old man, and Cruiser.
What's the work?
The Oracle Code is another DC graphic novel, this time starring a young Barbara Gordon left paralyzed after a robbery gone wrong. Sent to stay in Arkham, reimagined here as a physical rehabilitation center for kids, chibi Babs ends up uncovering a strange conspiracy of patients vanishing from the facility.
The Obviously Evil director of the facility, Maxwell, is, well, obviously evil and the mastermind behind these disappearances. However, he's not the ultimate villain.
Who is Lachlan?
A physical therapist at Arkham, Lachlan is Maxwell's partner in the conspiracy. Many years ago, Maxwell's daughter died of a severe medical condition, and Maxwell became consumed with a desire to cure similar physical ailments so no one will ever suffer the same fate. To this end, he and Lachlan kidnap children from their facility, targeting those without families so no one will look for them. They gaslight the other patients into thinking they merely moved to other facilities, or graduated therapy.
In truth, the kidnapped patients are brought to the basement where they are subjected to genetic experiments in search of cures. The exact number is never given, but there are a lot of victims (maybe 7 tests in progress in the present), and the epilogue indicates there are even more who have died.
Barbara uncovers everything, of course, but is confronted by Lachlan, who gloats about how he'll change the world and dismisses the patients as "broken things" that will quickly be forgotten. However, he is saddened when their discovery forces Lachlan to "terminate" the "experiments" so they can relocate... because it's such a waste of time and resources. Maxwell protests this act—they're patients, not experiments, you can't just murder them all out of inconvenience. Lachlan proceeds to point his gun at him, but is knocked out by Barbara before he can do much more, and the two doctors are arrested.
Mitigating factors?
None. He talks a big game about how their experiments will end suffering for humanity, but given his Slasher Smile, his repeated insistence that his patients are broken nothings, and choice dialogue where he proclaims "This will change the world. We shall change the world!", it's clear he's running on sadism and an ego-trip.
And, again, no shared universe as far as I've been able to tell, so no other competition.
Edited by EmeraldEmperor on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:38:14 AM
Insert title here
Tezcatlipoca, Lucifer, Liz, Cruiser
Edited by fanman on Apr 17th 2023 at 9:56:41 AM
Ultimate Moral Compass
Old Man, Cruiser, and Lachlan
The Ultimate Lifeform
to Gregor, Old Man, Cruiser and Lachlan.
The Moron
Yep to Cruiser!
Alright, I've got one that I didn't expect, but away we go!
What is the work?
Sovereignty is a 2018 play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, a Cherokee playwright. To quote the trope page I'm making for it:
"In the modern day, a Cherokee woman named Sarah is returning to her home after a lengthy absence, but soon finds herself having to fight for the sovereignty of herself and her people. In the meantime, the play also shows the historical events that brought the modern characters to where they are, showing the struggles of John Ross, John Ridge, and Major Ridge as they attempted to fight for their sovereignty in the early 1800s."
And the reason for this struggle? The President of the United States.
Who is President Andrew Jackson? What does he do?
The US President most known for being responsible for the Trail of Tears, Jackson is portrayed exactly how you'd expect him to be portrayed under a Cherokee pen - as a racist monster willing to do anything to wipe out all the Tribal Nations. At the start of the play, the Cherokee Nation is under assault from the Georgia government and its governor, Governor Forsyth, so the nation tries to go to Jackson for help. Jackson acts very friendly with Major Ridge and even credits him for the victory of the War of 1812, but immediately after makes it clear that he thinks they should be relocated away from white Americans. Behind closed doors, he advocates passing laws that will eventually force them from their lands - and when the Supreme Court declares them unconstitutional, he says that if the judges want to make that law, they can enforce it, and does precisely nothing to stop the countless white attacks on Native lands and property, especially assaults against Native women (it's with a quote taken from real fucking life, too).
The result is that the Cherokee Nation effectively splits in half, with the Ridge family being the one to sign the treaty that will result in their relocation. This results in, of course, the Trail of Tears, where tens of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their land and thousands more died along the way. The fact that the Ross family and his clan refuse to leave is of no concern to him - as he views it, the extinction of Native Americans is an inevitability, and that one day the country will lose its "Indian flavor".
Jackson would eventually die in 1845, but the policies he enacted would lead to over 150 years of violence perpetrated against Native Americans while leaving them no jurisdiction to ever prosecute the offenders (since one of the cases Jackson caused, Oliphant, wrote into law that Tribal Nations have no jurisdiction over crimes committed against Natives by non-Natives), leading to countless assaults, rapes, and murders leading back to him and, eventually, Native women becoming statistically the most victimized demographic in America.
Any mitigating factors? Freudian Excuse?
There's a brief mention of his wife, but all he says is that he's glad that she left behind her apple pie recipe before he uses the apple pie as a demonstrative tool in a eugenicist rant about how Native American extinction is inevitable, soooo... we're good there.
He also demonstrates some Condescending Compassion but it's just that, it's racism demonstrating itself as compassion (such as "they don't know why they're inferior" and that sort of thing).
Is he heinous enough?
We're gonna hear from the governor whose physical actions trigger all of this, but Jackson's policies are directly responsible for both the Trail of Tears and also well over a century's worth of rapes and murders committed on Native lands. Tens of thousands of deaths and even more rapes and general violence against Native women are laid directly at his feet as a result of the policies he committed and his pointed inaction towards protecting them, even when his actions became unconstitutional. What do you get when you get one of the most heinous presidents in US history and give a pretty historically accurate account of his actions? You get this bastard.
Final verdict?
Shin Megami Tensei IV
The Ultimate Lifeform
to Mr. Jackson. Man how much the test of time makes historical figures even worse.
Goku Black
Andrew Jackson, Lachlan and Cruiser.
Ultimate Moral Compass
Andrew Jackson
Adora, the High Priestess
Jackson, Gregor, Lachlan.
Not the Eye
to the Old Man, Cruiser, Lachlan and Andrew Jackson
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Yes to the Old Man; Cruiser; Lachlan; Jackson.
For the Sovereignty sandbox, I potholed War of 1812 and Andrew Jackson.
Edited by ACW on Apr 18th 2023 at 5:05:46 AM
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Bye
Gregor, SCP-106, Cruiser, Lachlan, Jackson
Both Writer And Fighter
Well, here we are again.
What is the work? Limbus Company is a turn-based gacha game developed by Project Moon. The game's chapters are fairly episodic in nature with only loose continuity between each one, which is why I'm fairly certain that Chapter III's Arc Villain won't be turning up again as the game updates.
Who is Kromer? What has she done? Kromer, the One who Grips, is the leader of Nagel und Hammer, a fanatical military unit employed by N-Corp who believe that prosthetics are heresy and all who use, produce, or associate with either of the above deserve the most painful deaths they can inflict on them. Having previously exploited Sinclair's shared disdain for prosthetics to dig up dirt on his father and then murder his family, Kromer and her unit are dispatched by N-Corp years later to retrieve one of the Golden Boughs in the abandoned L-Corp facility located under Sinclair's family's manor. Using this as an excuse to carry out her vendetta, Kromer orders the genocide of the entire town, with her inquisitors carrying out inhumane execution methods that include burning people on pyres, removing their limbs and replacing them with damaged prosthetics, tying them to torture racks to test if they can feel pain, and willingly subjecting themselves to E.G.O. Corrosion so they may more easily slaughter "heretics". When she gets word of Sinclair's presence in town during the purge, she orders the death of Dante for possessing a prosthetic head, as well as the rest of Limbus Company for refusing to surrender him, while digging up the graves of Sinclair's family and crucifying their corpses just to taunt him about what she did. When Sinclair refuses to join her in her crusade to annihilate all prosthetic-users in the City, Kromer uses the Golden Bough to mutate herself into a hideous monster in a last-ditch effort to kill him and the rest of the Sinners.
Redeeming Qualities? Freudian Excuse? She spares Sinclair when she kills his family since he didn't want to use their prosthetics, but made it clear that it was a one time deal. When Sinclair refused her again, she immediately goes for the kill. There might have been a time where she truly considered Sinclair a friend, but few bridges have ever been so thoroughly burned. No reason is ever given as to why she developed a genocidal hatred of prosthetics other than she simply considers them a defiance of nature.
Heinousness Standard? The City is a pretty messed up place. There's an extreme class divide, human beings are literally treated as resources, and practically every Wing indulges in unethical scientific experiments that leave several people dead or permanently disfigured. That said, Kromer is considered batshit insane even by the standards of the City, and the Sinners, who ride around in a bus that uses other people as fuel, are disgusted by what she and the rest of Nagel und Hammer have done. For bonus points, compared to previous entries where most of the City's cruelty is conducted offscreen, Kromer's sadism and the scope of her actions are put on full display.
Final Verdict
Not the Eye
to Kromer
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
No to Kromer and anything from Project Moon. Sorry. The buck stops there.
That's the same continuity where mass murder, cannibalism and And I Must Scream is a norm.
I wouldn't be opposing this if she wouldn't have to compete with the insane shit that was in Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation. That's the EXACT SETTING where Roland, one of the protagonists went on a literal spree killing that ended a quarter of a finger ALONE (if you want to know, Roland can't count because he has a very traumatic freudian excuse). That's not even the only group he killed, it's an indiscriminate mass slaughter as a Shout-Out to Orlando Furioso. We don't know the exact number but we can infer that he killed an incredibly high amount of people in that rampage.
That's not even the only case of mass murder there either, in the same game a vampire Serial Killer murders 4,172 people for blood before being shot down by Roland and Angelica. (Her Horror Hunger excuse is exposed as a lie and she apparently killed people For the Evulz, but there's still an odd villainous friendship between her and another guy putting people in And I Must Scream situations by the bulk, so she can't count either. I won't get into the Love Town fiasco that they're involved in). There's another guy who blown up an entire nest worth 80,000 people in a fit of sorrow and I don't think he has agency issues especially when yet another shows up right after who decided to cope with a similar situation differently and positively.
The protagonist in Lobotomy Corporation is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but he's a serial human experimenter who also puts multiple people in And I Must Scream situations and repeatedly kills his employees over and over in a "Groundhog Day" Loop. And an Abusive Parent too.
And no, none of the shit on the above are offstage villainy. They are as "offstage" as Shido killing Futaba's mom and forged a suicide note that her mom hated her For the Evulz.
The shit Kromer pulls off barely stands out, especially when she's a member of a Wing. Mind you that's the same type of institution that routinely subjects entire groups of people to a Fate Worse than Death on bulk (Love Town Trains, anyone?). And even then there seems to be a very twisted version of love for Sinclair that can't be exactly called possessive.
TL;DR: So yeah. At this point no Cold-Blooded Torture or mass murder will put anyone as a CM there. The whole thing is as fucked as The Unforgiving Flowers Blossom in the Dead of Night and Journey to the West that I'm sure had multiple CMs cut over the same situation. When the protagonists are guilty of the exact same crimes as the worst of the bunch, nobody stands out regardless if they are Tragic Villains or Hate Sink Sadists.
Edited by Mr-ex777 on Apr 18th 2023 at 11:13:34 PM
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Assuming they've been approved, these writeups have been pending for over a week:
- Sled: Nikifor Yushkin (PS)
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) (Yorkobe):
Not the Eye
Switch to Kromer
to Kromer
Lachlan and Jackson
Kromer
Edited by Echidna on Apr 18th 2023 at 8:54:04 AM
Yes to Lachlan and Jackson
Tentative![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]")
to Cruiser, sounds like another villain that could be hit very hard by Alternative Character Interpretation. For me it sounds like "Maltheist Card-Carrying Villain who's trying to prove God Is Evil by being as evil as possible (so if God is "benevolent" then He'll stop him).
Edited by Mr-ex777 on Apr 18th 2023 at 1:00:43 AM