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
Lighty was saying he wanted to do him early. How early doesn't matter to me personally though. I'm good with it being now.
Alright. 43 and I now finish our futu43 collab with this:
- Deadpool 2: The Headmaster of the Essex Home for Mutant Rehabilitation is a deeply prejudiced zealot who runs his orphanage like a conversion therapy camp for mutant children. The Headmaster constantly tortures them as a means of trying to force out their abilities, having abused Russell Collins to the point of leaving scars on his neck. Russell's deep-seated anger and mistrust caused by all this risks resulting in him burning the Headmaster and the orphanage to the ground, killing all the other kids trapped inside too and becoming the supervillain Firefist.
Again, special thanks to 43 for agreeing to work with me and enabling me to still be a part of this. It's appreciated. When I rewrote my old writeup, he helped edit it too. This is the version we got now.
Edited by futuremoviewriter on May 22nd 2023 at 1:02:46 AM
Gonna cover this, to get this out of the way
What's the Work?
Rosetta and the Well is a visual novel made by Atelier in Wonderland. The game follows Rosetta Halloway, a young woman, who, one day, encountered a sinister well, where she met a mermaid Galatea of the Well. As they strike a friendly conversation, with Rosetta telling Galatea about the world outside of the well, she doesn't know, that Galatea, who has been tired of being trapped in the well, wants her legs to be able to finally walk on the surface.
Full walkthrough of the game can be watched here:
The game has a twist villain, whom i gonna propose.
Who is Pygmalion?
A demon, who looks like a well and feeds on the life and essense of humans, Pygmalion's MO is using the body of it's previous victim (after making it look like a mermaid) to lure an unsuspecting human to the well, tell some sobbing story and convince them to "exchange" places with the "mermaid", after which it takes the victim inside itself and slowly feeds on their very being, until an empty vessel is remained, whom it makes to look like a next "mermaid" (twisting their legs around to make it look like a tail) and seeks the next prey.
Should Rosetta agrees to "exchange her legs for Galatea's tail to let Galatea walk the Earth again", Pygmalion will drain her soul and turn her into a "mermaid" and tries to use her to make her boyfriend it's next prey.
Should Rosetta reject the offer, Pygmalion will try to take her by force, using it's many hands to try to grab her. If Rosetta grabbed salt, she will melt it's arms and confront it, where Pygmalion will taunt and moke her, before she destroyed it and then buried the bones of it's victim, that her cat found inside it.
Mitigating Qualities?
None. The game presents it as a hungry sadist, with nothing suggesting that it lacks agency and the game makes a specific point in adressing that it's MO is really vile and it's only really doing what it does, because it enjoys it.
Heinousness?
While lacking in explicit bodycount, since it only had one clear victim before Rosetta, it's MO and the way it's slowly drain it's victims and turns them into "mermaids" makes it stand out, as well as the fact that it's explicitly desiring to continue it's "hunting spree" forever, with it's trying to repeat the process, should it succeeds in devouring Rosetta and it being explicitly told that countless people would have been devoured by it this way, if Rosetta wouldn't have stopped it.
Conclusion?
What do you think?
Edited by VeryVileVillian on May 22nd 2023 at 11:05:20 AM
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
I guess sure to Pygmalion, since there seems to be a pattern established.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Sure to Pyg
REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM, BUY GOLD BYEEEE! | She/Her
Not the Eye
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
to Pygmalion
"Cool. Coolcoolcool."
Sure to Pygmalion.
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread
to Chief Pyo and Oh Dae-woong, The Scarecrow, and Pygmalion.
RIP Ray Stevenson.
to Pyg
Looking forward to Ray Stevenson's movie EP Lighty (may Ray Stevenson RIP)
....Phenomenal
for the Project Wolf Hunting duo, Scarecrow, and Pygmalion.
Meanwhile, it's been two weeks since the release of Darkest Dungeon II, and I.... do not have a proposal from that game, but its predecessor.
What is the work?
Darkest Dungeon is a game where ruin has come to your family. In short, your ancestral estate has been overrun by eldritch nasties, ultimately stemming from the titular dungeon below the manor. Your task is to hire and manage teams of adventurers to drive them out. But facing the forces of chaos takes a serious toll on both mind and body and death is permanent, so don't get too attached.
Who is the Ancestor and what have they done?
The Ancestor is the man responsible for almost all of the game's horrors. Originally an old money nobleman type, he eventually grew tired of the life of mundane luxury and decadence and turned to more esoteric pastimes: dark magic, alchemic experiments, and of course, poking at the horrors from beyond the stars. His ultimate ambition was to unearth the source of apocalyptic eldritch power said to be buried beneath his ancient manor, the titular Darkest Dungeon, which he ultimately succeeded at, but he also took time to enact plenty of horrors upon the people of the local hamlet he governed along the way.
Among other things, he:
-Performed blood sacrifices to summon demons from another realm to possess the flesh of pigs, only to end up creating a massive, violent pig-man abomination and a horde of lesser variants thereof, which infested the sewers and began breeding out of control. Also, they exclusively eat human flesh, so he started feeding villagers to them.
-Took the failed attempts from the above ritual, massive amounts of dark-magic-infused dead hogs, and dumped those in the sewers too - where their lingering eldritch exposure caused them to fuse into a massive, horrific blob monster of meat. He knew this was happening and kept doing it.
-Hired the most bloodthirsty criminals and brigands he could find to "restore order" to the hamlet when the villagers started to become aware of his crimes and protested in the town square. They did this by slaughtering an unknown (but implied to be considerable) number of villagers and leaving the rest too terrified to act.
-Answered a plea for help from a struggling local miller by turning his farmstead into a site for a dark ritual, ultimately summoning a great comet to strike the land and unleash an eldritch horror that obliterated the farm and twisted every living thing in it, including the miller himself. The Ancestor sounds particularly proud when bragging about how he ruined this guy, specifically.
And there are more, almost every boss in the game has something similar, but listing them all would take far too long. They're all along the same lines, "the Ancestor did something terrible to the hamlet, sometimes for petty personal gain, often just because he could".
Then there's the thing he unleashed from the Darkest Dungeon itself, the Heart of Darkness. At the end the Ancestor reveals that he has become its herald after death, having lured the player to the hamlet so that the blood spilled from killing the various monsters, as well as the lives of the heroes who inevitably fall in the process, would feed and strengthen the Heart so that it could bring about the end of the world. Even when it's ultimately defeated, he claims that it cannot be truly killed and will one day reawaken to shatter the planet - and goads the player to suicide with this knowledge.
Redeeming/Mitigating Qualities
This is where things get tricky. In the opening of the game, the Ancestor claims to have been Driven to Suicide by the horror he saw in the Dungeon, and spends most of the game saying he wants the player to redeem their legacy by cleaning up the mess. If taken at face value, this would disqualify him hard. However, the revelations in the final dungeon more or less outright say he was lying about all that and his true goal was just to feed more lives to the Heart to hasten the apocalypse.
The complicated part is whether you believe that last bit's really him or not. In the final boss fight, the Ancestor's spirit appears to transform into the Heart, and some of his dialogue seems to almost be speaking from the Heart's perspective, leading to a popular theory that the Heart itself was simply impersonating him at some point, and nothing in the game conclusively debunks said theory. However, at around the same time, the Ancestor's narration claims that he had become an Avatar of the Heart to herald its arrival, which if taken literally could also explain these oddities while still being the real Ancestor himself. It's an Ambiguous Situation all around.
Heinousness
Oh boy. The Ancestor did everything wrong. He did everything wrong and the game goes out of its way to emphasize that at every turn. Every single horrific sight you see in the game, every twisted monstrosity, every mangled corpse, it can all be traced back to him somehow. As mentioned above, almost all the major bosses have backstories told before their fights about how the Ancestor did something terrible that caused them to be a problem today.
The only questionable aspect is the matter of Darkest Dungeon II, which operates on a much larger scale and takes place in the same continuity. When you see eldritch horror spreading on a worldwide level, "only" terrorizing one hamlet might seem like too little. I'd contend it still meets baseline, though, for three reasons. A: the individual horrors of the hamlet are highlighted far more, with each regional boss having a decently detailed story about how the Ancestor created that problem personally, a level of focus not given to most of the DD 2 baddies. B: the more localized scale is only because you get there earlier in the crisis, plenty of dialogue suggests that these threats could spread well beyond the hamlet if not beaten back soon enough. And C: the Ancestor can be traced back for some of the DD 2 threats as well, most obviously the Swine infestations in the Sluice (explicitly stated to be the same pig demons he created).
Final verdict?
The whole ambiguity over whether it's really him when he denies his redeeming qualities makes it a little weird. Personally I lean to the interpretation that it's him, in which case he's a seriously nasty customer, but I leave it up to you.
Edited by TheGrayFox on May 22nd 2023 at 2:03:38 AM
There remains a foothold out of this mire — now climb.
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
to the Ancestor. He's a seriously nasty customer (especially considering what he did to the poor Millar) but its to ambiguous if its really him or not at the end. Plus if memory serves me right several of his lines do imply some level of standards.
Yes to Pygmalion, but the Ancestor has been discussed and down votes before.
Think you're tough because you made it through Lord of the Rings? Real men survive The Silmarillion.
Bye
Pyo and Dae-woong, Scarecrow, Pygmalion
Blackburns, Ancestor
....Phenomenal
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Ah, has he? My apologies then. I didn't find anything with a cursory search but also I wasn't super thorough, so that's on me.
The wifi here sucks
Yes to the Professor, Scarecrow, Palpatine, Pygmalion, Pyo and Dae-woong
I'm leaning no on Maguire though. The issue I have with him is that it's established that not all of his photos are of his victims (the guy in his introduction scene was stabbed by someone else) which leaves his exact bodycount ambiguous.
Hope your prepared for an unforgettable luncheon
He still murders the guy himself, and he makes clear through his chat with the mobsters this is how he earns extra money. Remember he's an assassin prolific enough they're sending him after Sullivan
The wifi here sucks
Actually rewatching some scenes again, sure there. The guy has a lot of photos and what Lighty said is true, sorry.
Hope your prepared for an unforgettable luncheon
The Professor.
Harlan Macguire.
Another "What If" Palpatine.
Project Wolf Hunting duo.
Dr. Crane.
Pygmalion.
Scarecrow. That's an interesting one considering the Novelization and tie-in game versions of him were proposed to get around the main one not counting.
Pygmalion
Edited by Snowy66 on May 22nd 2023 at 5:29:02 AM
Caesar
Sure to Pygmalion, abstaining on the Ancestor.
- Titan A.E.: The Drej Queen leads her race of malevolent energy beings in a wholesale genocide of humankind out of a xenophobic hatred of humanity's capacity for imagination. After firebombing Earth into nothingness, the Queen hunts down any surviving humans over the course of many years, the Drej menacing anyone in their way as they hunt their prey. When she learns that young human Cale is planning to find Titan, a space station capable of reviving Earth, the Queen torturously captures him and jettisons his partner Akima into space, hoping to prevent Titan from being used. The Queen also makes a deal with treacherous human captain Korso to lead her to Titan so she may destroy it and seal humanity's doom, before going behind Korso's back and trying to accomplish it her own way so the Drej can shut him out of the deal.
A lot of the ancestor relies on Unreliable Narrator. While he could potentially count but we simply don't know enough about his past, how sincere he was, or how the Heart of Darkness affected his actions and morality
for now
Edited by Moroaica on May 22nd 2023 at 7:19:40 AM
Current mood: sick of your shit
Scarecrow. Been trying to get him approved for a while now.
Pyg
No to the Ancestor.
That said, I'm gonna collab with Lighty on a duo I think makes it from one of my favorite games: Red Faction Guerilla.
- The so-called "Butcher of Chryse," Gunnarsen—villain of the "Rallying Point" quest—is the EDF's "pit bull" and the one the EDF has running the town of Dust and its vast ore mining operations. Gunnarsen runs Dust through widespread slavery and indiscriminate torture and executions, but what makes him notable is his penchant for massacres.
- Years earlier, Gunnarsen put down a miner revolt in Chryse, a slaughter that left 300 people dead. He's intending to do a repeat of this incident in Dust, and in a particularly despicable way; he sends out an intercom message throughout the entire district proclaiming a ceasefire and that anyone who wants to protest can peacefully do so and even sign up for guaranteed medical benefits, increased wages, so on and so forth, going as far as to say anyone who doesn't sign up now waives all right to do so later.
- In this way, Gunnarsen intends to lure as many miners to this "peaceful" demonstration as possible—and then have his EDF goons massacre them all. "Rallying Point" is spent trying to stop his forces from doing exactly this to dozens of miners (and since the game employs Vulnerable Civilians, those miners will die if Alec Mason doesn't turn the tide). Ultimately, Gunnarsen decides to turn tail and run when his forces begin losing, resulting in a car chase that ends in his death.
- I've talked at length about the insane standard of this game (never mind the rest of the rest of the series). It's the reason why I stick by General Roth not counting, who's in the unusual position. Technically, he's the one behind all the atrocities on Mars. But he's also the bitch of the Earth Defense Council on Earth, and more importantly, Kobel, who swoops in as soon as he's able to go nuclear on the entire planet, a kind of insanity that even Roth balks at (if for understandably pragmatic reasons).
- Gunnarsen's in a sort of middle-lying tier that I think lets his stick out for where he is. He's basically a regular EDF goon on steroids; he has a well-established history of bloodlust that escapes Offstage Villainy (it's not just one of those things referenced by the manual, like Kobel; it's an event talked about a decent bit in-game, and there's quick flashes to his goons at work in Chryse during the opening of "Rallying Point") and he tries to repeat a similar massacre in Dust. Furthermore, he's also the one running Dust in the first place when the player first gets there, broadly putting all the torture and murder that's committed by the regular mooks under his jurisdiction.
- For a one-mission Boss in Mook's Clothing, Gunnarsen is second only to Roth in terms of body count (disqualifying Kobel's thwarted attempt at omnicide) and even beats out some other major villains in the series like Masako, the Final Boss from the first game, whose prior history of bloodshed was a lot murkier than Gunnarsen's.
- Nothing. Boss in Mook's Clothing, so he's not exceptionally well-characterized beyond being a one-note "evil fascist," but he gets plenty of dialogue (and particularly slimy, manipulative dialogue, too; everything he says is gross Blatant Lies about promising peace to the miners he's about to slaughter]] in the form of his intercom announcement.
So you mean he punches way above his weight like Brain Irons and Ghost Game Sealsdramon?
Yes to Crane, good work and all for the post on Stevenson's character, RIP to him.
WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY!