During the investigation of recent hollers in the Complete Monster thread, it's become apparent to the staff that an insular, unfriendly culture has evolved in the Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard threads that is causing problems.
Specific issues include:
- Overzealous hollers on tropers who come into the threads without being familiar with all the rules and traditions of the tropes. And when they are familiar with said rules and traditions, they get accused (with little evidence) of being ban evaders.
- A few tropers in the thread habitually engage in snotty, impolite mini-modding. There are also regular complaints about excessive, offtopic "socializing" posts.
- Many many thread regulars barely post/edit anywhere else, making the threads look like they are divorced from the rest of TV Tropes.
- Following that, there are often complaints about the threads and their regulars violating wiki rules, such as on indexing, crosswicking, example context and example categorization. Some folks are working on resolving the issues, but...
- Often moderator action against thread regulars leads to a lot of participants suddenly showing up in the moderation threads to protest and speak on their behalf, like a clique.
It is not a super high level problem, but it has been going on for years and we cannot ignore it any longer. There will be a thread in Wiki Talk
to discuss the problem; in the meantime there is a moratorium on further Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard example discussion until we have gotten this sorted out.
Update: The new threads have been made and can be found here:
Please see the Frequently Asked Questions and Common Requests List before suggesting any new entries for this trope.
IMPORTANT: To avoid a holler to the mods, please see here for the earliest date a work can be discussed, (usually two weeks from the US release), as well as who's reserved discussion.
When voting, you must specify the candidate(s). No blanket votes (i.e. "
to everyone I missed").
No plagiarism: It's fair to source things, but an effortpost must be your own work and not lifted wholesale from another source.
We don't care what other sites think about a character being a Complete Monster. We judge this trope by our own criteria. Repeatedly attempting to bring up other sites will earn a suspension.
What is the Work
Here you briefly describe the work in question and explain any important setting details. Don't assume that everyone is familiar with the work in question.
Who is the Candidate and What have they Done?
This will be the main portion of the Effort Post. Here you list all of the crimes committed by the candidate. For candidates with longer rap sheets, keep the list to their most important and heinous crimes, we don't need to hear about every time they decide to do something minor or petty.
Do they have any Mitigating Factors or Freudian Excuse?
Here you discuss any potential redeeming or sympathetic features the character has, the character's Freudian Excuse if they have one, as well as any other potential mitigating factors like Offscreen Villainy or questions of moral agency. Try to present these as objectively as possible by presenting any evidence that may support or refute the mitigating factors.
Do they meet the Heinousness Standard?
Here you compare the actions of the Candidate to other character actions in the story in order to determine if they stand out or not. Remember that all characters, not just other villains, contribute to the Heinousness Standard
Final Verdict?
Simply state whether or not you think the character counts or not.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 31st 2023 at 4:14:10 AM
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Um do we ever get an explanation for why she's trying to end the world? Does she gain something from helping Kali (which is yet another misunderstanding of her role in Hindu beliefs) or does she just want the world to end out of sadism/hate?
SCP 29 is one of those cases where I have to down vote based on the almost complete lack of information regarding the character and its motivations. She basically has only homicidal tendencies and wants to kill a bunch of people. We know nothing regarding personality or motivations, so I'm going vote
for being a Generic Doomsday Villain.
The heinous standard for the SCP Foundation is extraordinarily high. The Foundation itself will resort to brainwashing, murder, torture, and other horrifying acts to ensure that the world will keep spinning. And they're technically the good guys. End of the world threats are common (although most of these are caused by objects & memetic agents rather than individuals) and takes a special kind of SCP to qualify as a Complete Monster.
Not every SCP is a horrifying abomination, as some can be safe and downright whimsical. But the majority of the first 1000 SCPs are horror-themed, so there is going to be a large heinous standard to bypass.
Sort of
. He claims he's this, sometimes. Word of God says that he's responsible for casting Adam and Eve out of Eden, so there's that.
edited 7th May '16 5:57:07 PM by chasemaddigan
The vast majority of the foundation are assholes. They recruit death row inmates with the false promise of letting them go if they survive for a month. Most of the D class end up dying horrible deaths, and the foundation regularly uses them as guinea pigs. Even if they do survive, instead of keeping their promise, they execute them. They have done many things from driving a species of whale to extinction
to perpetuating oppressive dictatorships
to literally collaborating with the Nazis
. They also keep a [[scp-wiki.net/scp-042 Pegasus that lost its wings]] locked up. It is suicidaly depressed, but they forcefully keep it alive and use electric fencing to make it stand. When someone tried to break it out, they executed him. They execute people just for showing sympathy.
@Austin: Drip's grandmother. I'd say Cersei but I'm starting to like her more, or at least sympathize with her.
edited 7th May '16 7:16:52 PM by Tyk5919
I write stories and shiz. You can read them here.Not to keep beating a dead horse, but since I'm once again planning an effort post on her I might as well mention Sol Seraph, Fluttershy's mother in this
.
So, seems like Crossford and Vasher are unanimous
. I'll do there entries, along with the tweaking of the Ripper and the others, tomorrow. 20 new entries this week
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Yeah, I move the entries from there to a file in Word.
Now that you mention it, he probably would've been.
edited 7th May '16 8:03:40 PM by ACW
Vasher sounds almost like a wasted character, actually, seeing as he's done away with in one episode. Wouldn't he make a good Arc Villain?
I've got a proposal from a series that I just finished reading, and I'm rather on the fence about him, mostly because the final book is frustratingly vague on both the full extent of his crimes and whether or not he has genuine concern for another character. The character is Thrane, and the work is The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga.
First, Some Series Background
A basic idea of the premise of The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga is pretty essential to understanding the potential scope of Thrane's crimes. Basically, the series opens with a fairly straightforward fantasy plotline - The Kingdom of Donderath is fighting a war with the neighboring, aggressive nation of Meroven and its mad king, Edgar. Both sides are heavily using magic in the war, and indeed, magic is essential to the standard of living of nations across the world (people with one or two magical abilities are extremely common, though truly powerful mages are more rare). However, about a third of the way through the first book, Edgar's mages do something that pushes their powers far beyond what they could sustain, and the Background Magic Field sort of... breaks. A firestorm envelopes most of the continent, and with its passing most magic ceases to function (including the abilities of mages and the infrastructure on which both nations depend) and rips in the fabric of space allow strange monsters into the mortal world. In the resulting chaos, warlords, the few surviving mages, and vampires (whose Blood Magic abilities are innate and remain functional, so long as they keep themselves fed) vie for control. The series follows a group of heroes struggling to rebuild civilization in the wake of the Great Fire.
With that out of the way...
Who is Thrane?
Thrane, aka Hemlock ("like the poison", he'll helpfully point out) is an extremely ancient and ruthless vampire and the last, most powerful member of The Big Bad Shuffle the series' chaotic backdrop has going on. He's a Hidden Villain for most of the series, which deal chiefly with a less powerful vampire named Pentreath Reese and Reese's mortal ally Vedran Pollard splitting the role of The Heavy; after Reese is defeated and imprisoned, Thrane - revealed as Reese's vampiric sire - shows up after a decades-long exile to take command of his operation. It turns out that Thrane has spent the last seventy-odd years Walking the Earth and sowing chaos, and has recently raised proxy warlords in the remains of every major nation. A Social Darwinist to the core, Thrane believes that the strong - meaning the vampires, and most importantly, himself - have the right to rule over "lesser" mortal beings, and he intends to set himself up as ruler of as much of the world as he can seize.
What has he done?
Thrane is profoundly arrogant and brooks no dissent - at the end of the third book he breezes into Reese's base and takes charge like he owns the place, barely pausing long enough to explain who he is, and generally treats his mortal minions like dirt (much to the displeasure of the aforementioned Vedran Pollard, a nobleman who hates being forced to wait on the vampire lord hand and foot). In one scene, Thrane is meeting with several other vampires to offer them an alliance; when one of them dares to ask what he is going to get out of this, Thrane decapitates him and leaves the corpse in the room for the remainder of the meeting (nobody else dares offer an opinion). Though vampires are fully capable of surviving on animal blood in this series (and even those who don't eat that way tend to spread their feeding out between multiple humans to avoid deaths - humans will tolerate vampires so long as they stay out of the way and don't kill people), Thrane considers this beneath him, and keeps a stable of human slaves in his manor solely for the purpose of being slowly drained to death. He's eventually revealed to have backed a number of cruel warlords, most obviously Nagok, and is apparently prone to presenting himself as a god to manipulate gullible mortals. Most of Thrane's fellow vampires despise him, believing that his wasteful cruelty will only bring destruction down on himself and anyone associated with him, and they dig up a cursed dagger that can instantly destroy a vampire, his progeny, their progeny, and so on, just so they can use it on him.
The worst he may have done, however, is left somewhat ambiguous (one of the things I mentioned being annoyed about). See, Thrane was in Meroven just before the Great Fire hit, and several characters who know him theorize that he was actually The Man Behind the Man to King Edgar, and actually arranged the Great Fire in order to throw the world into chaos and, by removing the two things about humans most dangerous to vampires (magic and large-scale organization) to set himself up as an eternal Evil Overlord. If so, then Thrane is responsible for the complete collapse of civilization on at least three continents, and all the deaths from the Fire, the magical beasts, and the warlords that arose since then - giving him a bodycount ridiculously far in excess of any other villain in the series, and pretty impressive even by the standards of fantasy villains in general (at least, those restricted to one planet). However, Thrane himself - the only one who knows everything he's been up to - never confirms this, so while evidence points towards him being responsible, it's never stated with 100% certainty.
Any Redeeming Factors or Freudian Excuse?
If Thrane has any sort of Freudian Excuse or tragic past, it's never elaborated on; the most we get of his origins is that he was some sort of barbarian warrior in life and never grew out of that mentality in centuries of undeath, which doesn't really cast him in a good light. Whether or not he has any redeeming qualities is another matter. As mentioned previously, he's the vampiric sire of Starter Villain Pentreath Reese, and he shows up in Donderath at least in part to avenge Reese's defeat. Personally, I don't get the impression Thrane cares about Reese as a person - he just takes it personally that someone who would be, by vampiric standards, his "son" got his ass kicked by a bunch of mortals as a pride thing - but unfortunately we never actually get to see Thrane and Reese interacting directly on-page, leaving their relationship a bit fuzzy. Thrane does go out of his way to free Reese from the oubliette where he got imprisoned after his defeat, but as he gets to remove enemies (the vampires guarding the prison) and gets Reese as a Dragon out of it, I wouldn't really call it a selfless act.
Also, vampires are not Always Chaotic Evil in this series. They do tend to be arrogant and rather callous of mortals, but that seems to be the result of an immortal lifespan plus the need to feed on blood rather than inherent nature. The vampire lord Lanyon Penhallow (Pentreath Reese's Archenemy and no fan of Thrane) is one of the heroes' main allies, as are his "brood" of sired vampires, and others who are rather more lukewarm but still not actively malicious are also around. Thrane's ruthless and bloodthirsty (pardon the pun) nature is all his own.
Heinous in Story
Assuming Thrane is responsible for the Great Fire, he is directly or indirectly responsible for almost every death and catastrophe in all four books and exceeds every other villain to a frankly laughable degree. Even if he's not, as The Man Behind the Man to various warlords and a would-be vampire king whose brutality shocks even his "allies", he's still pretty bad. Either way, I'd feel comfortable saying that he establishes himself as the standout here.
Verdict
The problem with Thrane is that there are two major questions about him that aren't really answered. Personally, I do think he caused the Great Fire and don't think he cares about Reese as anything but a particularly useful accessory, but there's enough wiggle room that I could see someone else drawing the opposite conclusions. I'd give him a tentative
, but I'd like some other opinions.
edited 7th May '16 7:55:29 PM by MasterGhandalf
Hmm. It sounds like Thrane is bad enough to qualify whether he caused the Great Fire or not, and in general we don't assume that a character cares about another if there's no actual evidence to suggest they do. I'll provisionally support his inclusion.
Must you?
