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
Switching. To a ![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_down_emote.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
for Mademoiselle then
Ah well, time for another The Bill EP. And what is the candidate other than a serial child sex offender? I mean, what are the odds? This disgusting piece of work is from Closing The Net, a series 24 (2008) episode.
Sun Hill investigates the suicide of a local teenage girl, whom it seems was being groomed online. Further investigation uncovers an online pedophile ring, and this leads them to a supposedly “reformed” pedophile called Peter Williams (played by David Schofield, aka Ian Mercer). As should be abundantly clear, Williams is anything but a reformed character and is actually the worst child abuser I’ve seen on the show yet.
What has he done?
Williams, already arrested and jailed for multiple child sex offenses, pretended to reform (even becoming engaged to a woman so he could use her as cover) but was in fact the runner of an utterly horrifying online child pedophile site called Sunshine In Our Lives, which spanned the entire width of the UK and beyond. Boasting over 100 members. The website is used to livestream child rape, with at least two broadcasts being made every day for months.
After the police arrive at his door, Williams worked hard to avoid suspicion by selling out one of the website’s members to the police and posing as a “samaritan” wracked with guilt about his former offenses and only wanting to atone. At the same time, Williams assisted in the abduction of a 10 year old boy and promised the followers of the site that he would be raped live on camera to satisfy the depraved audience. However the team were able to track down the internet router that Williams was using (along with Williams himself). After being arrested, Williams took every opportunity he could to taunt the team and tell them that the child was going to be raped regardless. Sensing that DC Terry Perkins was himself abused as a child, Williams attempted to break him mentally by trying to convince Perkins that he himself was a pedophile, nearly giving Perkins a Heroic BSoD. His taunts were for naught however, as the team thankfully got to the child in time and Williams was sent right back to jail along with most of the website’s users.
Redeeming Qualities or Freudian Excuse?
Literally the only thing worth mentioning is that he has a fiance in his first appearance who fully believed that he was a reformed character. However it’s abundantly clear that the relationship was just a mask for him to cover the fact that he hadn’t reformed in the slightest. When his fiance leaves him, he pretends to show emotion about in in front of DC Terry Perkins but he ONLY does this when he’s transparently attempting to manipulate the investigators. Other than that he shows no emotion about it whatsoever.
Heinous Standard?
Hands down the most prolific child abuser i've seen yet on the show, who runs a website with over a 100 members where children are abused everyday. He is somewhat unique in that while he himself doesn’t actively participate in most of the rapes he’s fully responsible for giving it a platform and enabling it, and is literally the only pedophile shown in the episode to have no humanizing or mitigating qualities whatsoever. We also see first hanbd the trauma inflicted on the websites victims, as the girl from earlier commits suicide due to what Williams enabled and several families are shown coping with the aftermath of their child being abducted and abused. If it wasn’t abundantly clear, an easy, easy pass.
Conclusion?
Keep the creep. I swear David Schofield has something stipulated in his contract that he has to play the most repulsive creeps possible, as this is about the fifth Hate Sink I’ve seen him play.
Edited by Atlantis1930 on Aug 16th 2023 at 10:25:23 AM
Goku Black
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
Williams
Williams
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
That's a yes, but can we get a comparison...seems like we have a LOT of child molester keepers; almost makes me wonder of some need to be cut. This dude's an easy keeper, and Mawdsley can stay, but...
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Not the Eye
to Williams
Ok here's a list of all the child abuse candidates so far:
- Donald Blake: Serial Killer of children whose killed four and molested dozens. Easy keep.
- Martin Welsh: Head of a local child pornography ring. Has one (quite graphic) onscreen rape and is found with about 9 tapes total. It's also firmly established that he was the main supplier and abuser of the ring and has a victim count in the dozens. Keep.
- Peter Renshaw: Most prolific Serial Rapist in show with a triple digit victim count. Easy keep.
- Tony Collier: Independent child pornographer whose been doing it for a while and has managed to amass a large collection including multiple video tapes and an entire album collection. We don't see any victims onscreen but we see everyones reactions to the images and it's clear there utterly horrific. His victim count likewise is shown to be very high. Keep.
- Charles Mawdsley: Child killer and pornographer whose raped dozens and tortured two children to death. Easy keep.
Likewise, here's some candidates I actually ruled out due to heinous standard issues or redeeming qualities:
- Man who raped his own stepdaughter on camera multiple times and then sold the footage. Only had one victim.
- Child murderer from series 5. Didn't see anything on screen and we never get a sense of his personality or anything about him. May have kept otherwise.
- Reformed pedophile from an episode who has nothing to do with the crime.
- Another Serial Rapist of children who pretended to reform but carried on his activities. Had 6 victims (making him above standard) but didn't count due to redeeming qualities and remorse.
- Another child pornographer and killer from series 15, but was already dead before the episode began and had implied redeeming qualities.
How does that look? I do think these guys we have are the worst of the bunch.Plus they're a drop in the water compared to the massive episode count.
Edited by Atlantis1930 on Aug 16th 2023 at 10:08:36 AM
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Okay, wow, reading that, I guess they can all stay. Though Walsh and Collier are the ones just hanging in there.
The fact there are apparently 2400+ episodes helps.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
Yes to Williams and I just saw the new CM page image and it is the best thing I've seen in my life.
No to Mademoisselle.
Edited by PolarPhantom on Aug 16th 2023 at 2:12:19 AM
Showtime!
To Williams
Not the Eye
Have another marvel villain, courtesy of my buddy Miraculous.
What is the work?
Dark Ages (Marvel Comics) is 2021 miniseries by Tom Taylor. In alternate universe heroes of Earth united to stop return of destructive Unmaker, and thought they suceded, team assembled to battle it died and Earth was plunged into darkness. Now surviving heroes are left to pick up a pieces of ruined world. And they do it… suprisingly well.
Now Unmaker is personaliless machine corrupted by Darkness it absorbed. This guy on other hand.
Who is Apocalypse? What has he done?
Real name El Sabah Nur, Apocalypse is mutant supremacist and enemy of the X-men. He hears call of the Unmaker and unlike all others, he is intrigued. After battle with Unmaker in centre of Earth results in doctor strange opening portal that shuts down world’s electricity. While heroes united rest of survivors in thriving mega cities connected by telephats, Apocalypse took control of Europe and enslaved its people. He used Magneto as a living battery so he could have kidnaped scientists who he had Kilgrave brainwash work for on a way to reaweken Unmaker so he could inhabit its body and take its power.
Among kidnaped and brainwashed, were Reed Richards, Riri Wiliams and Tony Stark. When Quicsilver is send to Apocalypse’s headguaters in order to gather information, he had had Purple mand take control of Pietros’s mind and send him as an assasin. It results in Okoye and Human Torch being killed by still aware Pietro. When heroes assemble to stop him he sends Venom and Carnage (who have both possesed Miles Morales) after them. Needing Adamantium to reawaken Unmaker, he takes Cyclops to Wolverine and has Purple Man mind rape him until he opens his eyes and desintegrates Logan leaving only Adamantium skeleton.
When doctor Octopus points out to him that he will need to tear planet apart in order to free himself, Apocalypse simply says he sees no problem and rips him in two. Heroes face him and while he has Kilgrave unleash other captured heroes, he is killed and his control broken. Apocalypse is ready to take control of Unmaker, only for Sue Storm to put him in force field and Dracula, who is made aware of Apocalypse’s true plan, turn him into vampire and both get killed by Blade.
Reddeming Qualities?
In personality he is pre Krakoa Apocalypse with no mention of his family or anything else. He does apperently promise symbiotes ship to escape from Earth Before he destroys it in order to get them into his service, but it is simply to have them as assasins with no clarification if he had any intention to keep it.
Heinouss standard?
Unmaker is said to have destroyed whole galaxies, but it is super powerfull machine that needed Living Tribunal to bring it down. Apocalypse is just Earth born mutant, thought super powefull and eguiped with Alien technology, who enslaved whole Europe and plans to destroy whole planet for power by mentally enslaving scientists and turning Magneto into Living Battery.
Conclusion?
Yes
Apocalypse
Goku Black
Apocalypse
Apocalypse
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Yes to him.
Also, pending:
- Wrong Station: The General (Libraryseraph)
- The Patriot (1998): Floyd Chisholm (Lighty)
- Maskerade: Salzella (Lore)
- Jagged Alliance 3 (NTG):
- Billy (Ravok)
- Karl (Scraggle)
- Dragon Ball: Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle: Lucifer (Snowy)
Yes to Williams and Apocalypse. No to the Mademoiselle.
- The False Faces: Karl Ekstrom is a crooked German saboteur who murdered the sister of the film's Anti-Hero, Michael Lanyard, as well as her young son. Now working to sabotage the Allied Powers in the heat of WWI, Ekstrom swipes a canister from Lanyard containing valuable information about the Allied frontlines, murders his own ally so not to split the reward for capturing the information, then distracts from his theft by ordering a civilian ship bombed by a German sub, resulting in dozens of innocent casualties. At the film's end, Ekstrom advances on Lanyard's love interest, intent on having her for himself.
- While the City Sleeps (1928): Skeeter Carson is a gang leader and slimy Smug Snake responsible for a series of murders and robberies throughout the city. Nicknamed "Mile-Away" for his penchant for always having an alibi to his crimes, Skeeter works as an undertaker as a front for his criminal activities and cashes in on his own crimes by picking up the bodies of his gang's victims, subtly taunting the police the whole while. Skeeter murders his own girlfriend after she rats out on him, then after the girlfriend of one of his own mooks catches his eye, Skeeter sets him up to die in a hit so he can have his girlfriend to himself. Skeeter promptly tries to rape her as soon as she's in his clutches, and coldly shoots a cop who tries to stop the deed dead.
Showtime!
Writeup for the General
- Episode 21, "The Catcher": The General is the Catcher's vile ancestor. In life, he was on the side of a civil war supporting slavery and was infamous for his brutality, once having six hundred prisoners of war bayoneted to "save ammunition". When inadvertently summoned by his descendant, The General goes on a supernatural killing spree, brutally killing the descendants of his abolitionist opponents. When confronted by the Catcher, the General denies any familial bonds between them, and summons the tortured spirits of his victims to kill him, fully intending to turn the world back to his cruel, pro-slavery beliefs.
Holding this writeup back so I can put it in a tree with today's candidate.
Who is the Candidate
The Magician, the main villain of "Keep the Crows at Bay", an episode taking place in an unnamed fantasy kingdom.
What has he done
The Magician arrived at the King's Court one day, delighting the King with his magical performances. He seemed like a harmless performer, even as he wormed his way into the King's good graces. After healing the king from a horrible illness, he became the King's most trusted advisor. The Magician inducted the king into forbidden knowledge, and the King began backrupting his kingdom to fund the Magician's magical experiments. The kingdom's taxes were raised over and over, causing great hardship. While some at the royal court begin whispering of treason, the Lord Chamberlain decides to investigate himself, torn between loyalty and concern. He sneaks into the Magician's workshop, and finds it full of books on dark magic and horribly mutilated animals and humans.
This is when he's ambushed by the Magician. He's attacked and taken prisoner by one of the experiments, a man turned into the magician's mindless servant. The Magician talks about how his goal is immortality, and says while his servants have their bodies persevered, they are failures due to being mindless. He uses the Lord Chamberlain as a test subject, reducing him to a still-living severed head, trying to see how long he can keep him alive and cognizant with less of a body to worry about. All other nobles who oppse the King are drawn and quartered, and the Magician has a truly horrible hellhole prison constructed: a deep pit is dug, and anyone who displeases the magician, opposes his rule, can't pay the new exorbiant taxes, or can't work to his satisfaction is placed in the pit, fed just enough food to keep them alive while they slowly die from exposure, malnutrition, and illness. The Chamberlain is left to rot, and watch the kingdom he once served fall apart to serve the magician's goals.
Freudian Excuse/Mitigating Factors
None, the Magician is just an Immortality Seeker willing to do horrible torturous things to anyone to reach that goal. He doesn't care about the King or the kingdom, he just needs the influence and money that come from being the King's right hand, and there's no indication he'd fulfill his promises to make the King immortal.
Heinous Standard
Again, the fantasy episodes are all disconnected from each other in continuity, and many episodes have very small scale villains or none at all, just fucked-up supernatural events happening. The Magician, in contrast, destroys a whole country and both the "reduced to a severed head to slowly decay and lose your mind" and "left in a giant pit to slowly die" are some of the nastier, more visceral terrible fates I've ever seen. The Magician is also a powerful mage and has high noble standing, which lets him out-resource just about every other villain, except maybe the Purple Emperor from "In Constantinople", who has redeeming features and doesn't do anything worse than standard feudal emperor shit, just in the service of... something. He's fine
Verdict
from me. I'm not 100% sure when my next Wrong Station EP will be; there are no other qualifiers in the episodes I've relistened to so far, although I remember the villain of the three-part "The Haunting of the Lathe worm" being pretty bad.
Goku Black
magician
Not the Eye
to Magician
Ultimate Moral Compass
Magician
Unofficial Wiki Curator for Complete Monster
Yes to the Magician.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts
To Apocalypse and the Magician
Magician
Flip to abstain as well.
CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts