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.
- Don't delete an EP unless you intend to swiftly repost it. We know that there are reasons why you might want to delete an EP, especially if it's being downvoted - rejection is hard, even in a low-stakes environment like this. However, deleting it renders the current discussion null and void, makes it impossible to reference the discussion in the future and can confuse tropers who didn't read it before the deletion. If the issue is temporary (such as formatting problems or a post getting overlooked as the thread moves on), then deleting and quickly reposting the EP is a valid option, but to fully retract an EP, please use the [[strike:]] markup instead.
- 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 Mrph1 on Jul 12th 2024 at 3:13:36 PM
So, any more votes for these quotes? Also, do they go in the drafts. Just wanted to make sure.
Demon
I like those quotes and nah you take it to the locked page thread
and ask the mods to put it in the designated quote page.
Yes to the Demon.
Also, looking at it, Warner could use a rewrite. Something about the writeup seems...I dunno, like it's missing something.
Also, to-do:
- Emperor Erebus
(Agentofchaos)
- Voice 3: Masayuki Kaneki
(Echidna)
- Sled: Nikifor Yushkin
(PS)
- "The Blackest Heart", by Zach Rosenberg: Conte Aurelio di Bentivoglio
(Riley)
to the Demon.
Edited by gjjones on Apr 24th 2023 at 6:21:35 AM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.- Stunt Squad: Valli is a racketeer and criminal kingpin responsible for the death of dozens of civilians and cops alike. His opening scene has him bombing a series of businesses that refuse to pay up to his protection racket; just a few among a series of bombings that have taken out everything from trains to supermarkets. Over the course of the film, Valli has a survivor of one of his bombings murdered in the hospital; gruesomely kills another cop with a hidden bomb; and guns down a man who recognizes him in public, before running over and killing another innocent woman in the getaway without even looking back. Valli ends up taking a passenger bus full of people hostage in the climax, threatening to kill them all after having murdered a detective in front of them. No less ruthless to his allies, Valli punishes a pimp who spills information by killing the man's friend, then castrating and murdering him, and after that rewards another mook who gives him a fake passport with a chestful of lead.
- Damon Dran is a sociopath billionaire and arms trafficker who, paranoid of the prospect of his death in nuclear war, tries to attain immortality—no matter who he crushes. Dran tricks mercenary Danny French into killing a lab full of scientists to capture a powerful MacGuffin called "Project Four," then agonizingly mind-probes French for its location when he tries to run off. When he attains the power of Project Four, Dran becomes the immortal "Indestructible Man" and decides to begin a rampage across the entire world, trying to begin by cutting a swathe through Chicago and vowing he'll keep whatever parts of mankind he doesn't destroy as his "cringing slaves." Mostly depowered after this, Dran nevertheless keeps committing atrocities, from killing his own men for petty reasons, to ordering assassinations he's not afraid to have kill dozens as collateral, to trying to frame Black Widow for murder and destroy her life. Dran isn't even above trafficking children to become brainwashed Nazis for Baron Zemo.
Here's my final Diagnosis Murder, btw. We're switching tracks again from the TV series to the books for this one, in this case the book The Past Tense...
- Dan Marlowe initially just appears an old widower, an elderly man without a wife who's now dying of terminal cancer. Mark Sloan takes an interest in him because he's a potential witness to the first chronological murder Mark ever investigates, that occurred years and years before the main plot...
- ...well, turns out Dan Marlowe is Evil Old Folks defined. And, possibly, the most sadistic killer in the entire series. Solely For the Evulz, Dan has chosen times in his life to murder people—usually women—in cruel and unusual ways. His MO is to paralyze them with anaesthetic that leaves them just aware enough to feel what he's doing to them and to feel terror over it, without being able to fight back.
- Dan's serial killings increase in brutality as the book goes on. In order:
- he leaves one in a running car that goes off a cliff
- he throws another down the stairs
- he buries another alive
- he cuts one victim's throat when she's already suffocating, just to increase her agony
- he finally just outright tortures his final victim to death, keeping her alive for fifteen minutes before she expires
- Dan, his life near an end due to his terminal cancer, decides to make Mark Sloan his "masterpiece." He paralyzes Mark and makes it clear to work on Mark for hours on end, culminating with his intention to vivisect him and show him his own heart while he's still alive.
- Dan is gunned down before he can do this, but one line Mark reflects on at the end of the book implies two more victims for him...his wife, and Mark's own long-deceased wife...
- If Dan's body count is somewhere on the lower end for our keeps (assuming he killed both his wife and Mark's wife, he maxes out at seven victims and one attempted) Dan is easily the most sadistic villain in the entire series. Torture is already frighteningly rare in this series, and Dan predicates his entire MO on it, complete with forcing his victims to watch everything.
- Fuck-all. His Motive Rant would be a great choice for a page quote and hits him at the core of his character:
"I killed Muriel because I wanted to and because I knew I could get away with it. I wanted to see what it was like to look into a healthy person's eyes, someone untouched by illness or old age, at the instant they realized they were going to die and were powerless to stop it. It's unbelievably exciting. Better than sex. Better than anything."
to the
piece of work. I think that's a good example of For the Evulz being legitimately scary.
Also... Scraggle if my memory serves can't you technically post the writeup for Philip right now (if it's done?)
Edited by ForgoLight on Apr 25th 2023 at 12:15:35 PM
"Us weirdos have to stick together!"Oh I didn't see that. I guess missed him in the thread. My bad! And it looks great! I just have one question. Shouldn't we also add in his whole assimilation of the Titan's heart to try and finish the task of killing all life on the Isles? I mean it is genocide number 2... And I know that his writeup is already long out of necessity but that shouldn't be too much of an add on.
Edited by ForgoLight on Apr 25th 2023 at 12:23:30 PM
"Us weirdos have to stick together!"Hello everybody! I have a question for you all. @Scraggle has already crafted a splendid writeup for Emperor Belos aka Philip Wittebane however I felt something was missing. In his writeup Belos' atrocities end at "Thanks to Them", however as I said above, Belos pulled one more genocide attempt in the series finale where he was finally killed. To me it feels like it suggests his defeat was in "Thanks to Them" and not "Watching and Dreaming". I did my best to keep the addon as short as I could. Here it is!
- Emperor Belos, the manipulative Evil Overlord of the Boiling Isles, started off as nothing more than Philip Wittebane, an orphan-turned-Puritanical witch hunter. When his beloved elder brother Caleb Wittebane left to the Demon Realm with a witch, Philip crossed worlds and tracked him down, only to find Caleb in love with the witch. Unable to reconcile with his brother's "betrayal," Philip murdered Caleb, then fled into the Boiling Isles and devoted the rest of his life to devising a realm-wide genocide. To do this, Philip tracked down the godlike Collector—tricking, betraying and killing off a slew of witches and demons in the process—and slowly built himself up as the Demon Realm's Dark Messiah. In one instance, Belos wiped out an entire city, then tested a prototype of his Coven sigils—the method with which he seeks to enact his "draining spell" to wipe out all life on the Isles—on the survivors, leaving them for dead when the process left them comatose. As overlord of the Isles, Belos engages in a variety of atrocities, from duping all of his loyal followers into a scheme he knows will kill them all, to consuming the souls of thousands of Palismen and keeping them in writhing torment within him. Even his love for Caleb has become nothing but a twisted abstract; Belos creates "Grimwalker" clones of Caleb he seeks to mold into a servile accessory, murdering them so often that a chasm has been clogged with heaps of their decaying corpses. Belos subjects the current Grimwalker, Hunter, to an agonizing and scarring possession and forces him to kill his own Palisman, Flapjack, out of nothing but cruel spite. Returning to the Isles on final time, Belos takes control of the Titan's heart, trying to consume the isles himself. In the end, Belos cares for nothing and no one except "his need to be the hero in his own delusion."
- Emperor Belos, the manipulative Evil Overlord of the Boiling Isles, started off as nothing more than Philip Wittebane, an orphan-turned-Puritanical witch hunter. When his beloved elder brother Caleb Wittebane left to the Demon Realm with a witch, Philip crossed worlds and tracked him down, only to find Caleb in love with the witch. Unable to reconcile with his brother's "betrayal," Philip murdered Caleb, then fled into the Boiling Isles and devoted the rest of his life to devising a realm-wide genocide. To do this, Philip tracked down the godlike Collector—tricking, betraying and killing off a slew of witches and demons in the process—and slowly built himself up as the Demon Realm's Dark Messiah. In one instance, Belos wiped out an entire city, then tested a prototype of his Coven sigils—the method with which he seeks to enact his "draining spell" to wipe out all life on the Isles—on the survivors, leaving them for dead when the process left them comatose. As overlord of the Isles, Belos engages in a variety of atrocities, from duping all of his loyal followers into a scheme he knows will kill them all, to consuming the souls of thousands of Palismen and keeping them in writhing torment within him. Even his love for Caleb has become nothing but a twisted abstract; Belos creates "Grimwalker" clones of Caleb he seeks to mold into a servile accessory, murdering them so often that a chasm has been clogged with heaps of their decaying corpses. Belos subjects the current Grimwalker, Hunter, to an agonizing and scarring possession and forces him to kill his own Palisman, Flapjack, out of nothing but cruel spite. In the end, Belos cares for nothing and no one except "his need to be the hero in his own delusion."
Edited by ForgoLight on Apr 25th 2023 at 1:16:45 AM
"Us weirdos have to stick together!"

Hey gang, here's a candidate from a game I'm kinda surprised hasn't been discussed yet.
What’s the Work?
Phantasmagoria is a 1995 PC FMV Adventure game by Sierra, written and designed by Roberta Williams. If you're expecting something lighthearted and cutesy like Williams's other games, look elsewhere. And while everyone's more familiar with the second game, this one's a bit... different.
A horror game taking heavy inspiration from works like The Shining and other classic horror literature, the plot involves best-selling author Adrienne Delany moving into her new home with her photographer husband Don Gordon. Their new pad, the castle-sized Carnovasch estate, formerly owned by stage magician Zoltan "Carno" Carnovasch, ends up housing many dark secrets, including the cruelty of the evil Carno's actions. Through the dated graphics, cheesy acting, and goofy soundtrack, lies a wicked foe...
Who is not named Carno, but instead...
Who is He?
The demon, an entity so evil it has no name, is a being from the Dark Realm that has haunted the Carnovasch estate.
What has he done?
Summoned by Carno after taking an interest in the black arts, the demon would take possession of Carno, turning him from a Nice Guy to a raging misogynist. Through Carno, the demon would go on to kill his wives in a variety of cruel, ironic ways.
Having murdered Carno's beloved 2-year-old daughter Sofia, the demon killed Carno's first wife Hortencia by shoving dirt into her mouth until she suffocated; Carno's second wife Regina was killed by the demon force feeding her animal entrails through a funnel until she too suffocated; the third wife Victoria was killed by the demon slamming her face into a wine bottle during an argument, with the bottle going right through her eye.
When Carno's final wife Marie and his assistant Gaston devised a plan to kill him, it instead left Carno physically scarred and the demon seeking revenge. The demon would knock out Gaston and slowly torture him to death, then hooked Marie up to a contraption that twisted her head 180 degrees, but Gaston's able to use up the last of his energy to impale a pipe through Carno’s body, with the demon escaping the dying Carno. Carno's young protege Malcolm would seal the demon inside a spellbook, never to be woken again... well, until Adrienne accidentally awakens it in present day.
With its presence having already caused several "accidents" to those who’ve attempted to renovate the mansion, from a guy getting his arm chopped off, to a man breaking his neck and becoming paralyzed for life, the released demon would go on to possess Don. The demon uses Don's body to not only verbally abuse Adrienne and everyone around them, but also rape her as well. Through Don, the demon later murders a phone repairman named Mike, and even kills the two farmers Harriet and her dimwitted son Cyrus, even scalping Harriet and wearing her hair as a wig.
Growing obsessed with Adrienne, with hopes of chopping her head off, the demon entraps Adrienne inside a pendulum contraption, and comes so close to activating the machine, only for Adrienne to distract the demon long enough to tearfully activate the machine herself and kill Don. But with Don's demise only expunging the demon from his body, Adrienne eventually exorcises the demon, leaving the Carnovasch estate as its only survivor.
Redeeming Qualities?
None.
Heinousness?
While the two Phantasmagoria games are only slightly connected (Adrienne's new book is referenced in the sequel, and that's the only thing connecting them), and Paul A. Warner is definitely still evil enough, I think a case can be made for the demon.
The demon loves killing people in the cruelest ways possible, drawing out their suffering for its own pleasure. It's able to turn Carno into a Bluebeard who murdered his own baby daughter, and Don into a serial killer and rapist, each with a decent sized body count and heaping helpings of sadism.
Plus the work shows that this demon is not one to be trifled with, as some even call the demon "evil itself". And let's just say, it lives up to that moniker.
Conclusion
Keeper
Edited by therealjackieboy on Apr 24th 2023 at 4:05:45 AM
It's Spooky Month!