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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Sorry. Didn't mean any offense.
Also, having seen the movie Cut, I'm gonna have to go ahead and kinda disagree with Brad's inclusion. First of all, while he and Scarman are, indeed, played by the same actor, last I checked, they're two separate characters. There was never anything in there about him deliberately cursing the film, but rather, that his murders unwittingly caused it to be cursed, and Scarman is brought to life through the creative energy used in the making of the movie. Second, that calls Scarman's agency into question. Being the movie's villain who was literally written to be the villain In-Universe, it seems pretty safe to say that he's Made of Evil. Third, it follows the same formula as Halloween (1978), what I call the "stalk-and-slash" formula where the characters all get killed off one by one while nobody else notices until the end.
Now, I could be wrong, but pretty much every slasher after Halloween that follows that same formula is more or less disqualified (i.e. Uncle Sam, The Mutilator, The Prowler, Puppet Master). Not to mention that while I'll admit it's been a while since I've seen it, none of Scarman's kills are anything special, apart from a couple beheadings that still don't especially stand out.
In conclusion, I'm gonna have to say ... cut.
Edited by Stellarvore on Feb 18th 2020 at 9:15:36 AM
Looking at the EP, I admit that I either forgot or never noticed that he and Brad had matching wounds. Really, my biggest issue is the "he curses the film" thing, because there was no real suggestion that he ever did, let alone anything to directly suggest he and Scarman are one and the same, apart from the reasons Pure mentioned. It was all too vague in the context of the movie.
I'll admit I also have similar doubts about Robert Bowery from Child Eater, having seen that one, too. Mainly due to his confusing backstory that Jackie duly noted, as well as the mention that he (Bowery) went mad. Though maybe I'm just nitpicking with that one. I really wanted to propose him, but decided against it at the suggestion that he was insane and/or potentially corrupted by a Greater-Scope Villain.
On a tangent: Wait wait wait ... there was a candidate named "Fuckpig" who WASN'T the character from Mandy (2018)?
Edited by Stellarvore on Feb 18th 2020 at 11:14:45 AM
I'd say chop Brad.
...there was another Fuckpig?
Anyway, busy day today. I have, to start, a comic series Lighty and I are tapping that'd been surprisingly untouched. Which is strange, considering the series already has its own Monster page...
Yes, tonight, we're looking through the Hellboy comics, arguably the flagship character of Mike Mignola, and by extension spin-offs like BPRD and Abe Sapien. The only major villain from the comic right now is Nimue, the Queen of Blood, and rightfully so, but there's a slew of others in the comic probably worth their own posts.
I'll begin with one of the comic's most recurring and major antagonist, and probably the most obvious new keeper: Herman von Klempt.
Who is Herman von Klempt? What has he done?
A literal Nazi head in a jair whose body was destroyed in a castle-annihilating experiment of which von Klempt was the only Nazi survivor, von Klempt—always a wicked mad scientist in the making who took apart the family cat—is one of Hellboy's and the BPRD's most persistent foes from the Nazi era. von Klempt's first appearance was in Hellboy's very first comic (which chronologically takes place in 1959), before Hellboy even got his own ongoing title, where von Klempt used his signature army of robot gorillas to kidnap young peasant girls and kill them by extracting their spinal fluid.
In BPRD 1946, Hermann von Klempt and his army of gorillas are found resurrecting an old Nazi project devised by Heinrich Himmler called "Operation Vampir Sturm." What this entails is von Klempt firing a missile full of frozen vampires right into America's epicentre, allowing a storm of vampires to slaughter the entire nation and destroy all of America. Foiled in this plan, von Klempt tries again in 1952 when he reduces hundreds of people in an old prison, inmates and guards, to nothing more than raw fodder for his experiments. von Klempt's experiments in creating super soldiers with them kill enough people to leave a mountain of skeletons underneath the prison and von Klempt intends to use his superhuman army to throw the world into total war and resurrect the Third Reich.
In his nastiest appearance, the Conqueror Worm miniseries, von Klempt is again brought back again from defeat by his old comrade von Kroenen and made a reluctant ally of Rasputin's attempt to destroy the world, von Klempt's callous disregard for Rasputin's authority nearly cost him his life. After this, sixty years after his body was initially destroyed, von Klempt sunk into a rut of existential despair until he was convinced by Rasputin to find a new purpose in life; to cause the apocalypse.
von Klempt enlists the services of his neo-Nazi daughter Inger and has her raise an Eldritch Abomination called the Conqueror Worm, before having it twist all of Inger's men into reptilian abominations with mutative gases and devour them all. von Klempt gleefully attempts to unleash the Conqueror Worm to devour all humanity, and even reveals the mask he gave to protect his daughter Inger from the Conqueror Worm's gasses was only to slow the effects, resulting in Inger slowly and horribly mutating anyway. Why? All so his granddaughter can witness the perfect apocalypse von Klempt has created.
von Klempt is again defeated, and doesn't reappear become a major antagonist again until the recent BPRD series, where von Klempt gleefully joins one last apocalyptic scheme and unleashes demons to kill as many people as he can before Rasputin returns from the dead and seemingly destroys him.
Any mitigating factors?
Zip. Hellboy has a very high standard, I grant, but von Klempt is near the top of it. The frequency of his appearances, his constant attempts at mass murder and his eventual apocalpytic designs, mixed in with a complete lack of any redeeming factors that nip other Nazis like Kroenen (who, for starters, genuinely cares for von Klempt—a sentiment von Klempt doesn't return in the slightest, to the point he barely reacts when Kroenen is burned alive) means he's one of the most cut-and-paste keepers in the comic.
Conclusion?
Kind of shocked he's not already up. Keep him.
Edited by Scraggle on Feb 18th 2020 at 10:54:16 AM
Not another candidate by that name, no. Just thought that the character from Mandy was the only character named Fuckpig.
" What this entails is von Klempt firing a missile full of frozen vampires right into America's epicentre ..."
A Rare Sentence indeed. Yes to von Klempt.
Edited by Stellarvore on Feb 18th 2020 at 12:02:25 PM
One more for tonight from Hellboy. From the Soul of Venice one shot, we have Romulus Diovanni.
Who is Romulus Diovanni? What has he done?
Diovanni was an infamous 13th century nobleman with a reputation for debauchery, to the point he made the Marquis de Sade look tame. Diovanni befriended a vampire who was interested in Diovanni's tastes, but Diovanni proved to be too much even for the bloodsucking monster. When Diovanni asked to become immortal through the vampire's bite, he was turned down, so Diovanni captured the vampire and slowly tortured him for years on end, before eventually killing the vampire and drinking his blood.
Diovanni was transformed into a vampire lord himself, and massacred the ever-loving shit out of hundreds of people until he was supposedly killed by the Knights Templar. Diovanni lived on for almost six-hundred years afterward, driving everyone who went into his house into insanity and seeking the soul of Venice's protector god Cloacina. Diovanni eventually captures Cloacina, polluting Venice's canals, and tries to feed her to the demon god Shax in order to control his legion of demon and have them sweep over the entire world to hand it over to Shax. Shax rejects Diovanni's offer, and the BPRD use that opportunity to free Cloacina's soul, which proceeds to vaporize Diovanni.
Any mitigating factors?
Diovanni's pretty nasty for a one-off vampire. Vamps in Hellboy run the gamut from nasty bastards to sympathetic and even mostly-sane vampire BPRD agent Simon Anders once lost control of himself and killed a hell of a lot of people, but Diovanni packs in a lot of evil for only a few pages, and his ambitions are nasty enough to kick him over the high baseline. There's another vampire lord Lighty'll take, but Diovanni's bad enough to compare.
Conclusion?
Keeper.
Yes to him, too. Funny I was just in Venice last month. Also, he's one letter off from a certain other depraved vampire CM.
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
Herman von Klempt and Romulus Diovanni, who will now join Queen Nimue in CM status.
By the way, Nimue apparently being driven insane by the Greater-Scope Villain is, I guess, probably not mitigating somehow, but I am curious as to how.
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.Writeup time.
- My Bloody Valentine 3D: Harry Warden, the original Miner, is a lot more violent and brutal than his counterpart in the original film. Already a thoroughly unpleasant man from the beginning, Warden murdered his fellow miners to conserve his own oxygen after an explosion in the mine, butchers the patients in a hospital, and slaughters a number of partygoers at the mine all while making his way towards Tom, who he blames for the explosion. His attempted murder of Tom traumatizes the latter, inspiring him to go on another Valentine's Day killing spree years later while seeing Warden committing the murders.
- Venom: Countess Bathory lured young peasant virgin girls into her castle "to live a noble life", offering them endless feasts and hospitality. Upon nightfall, she takes the girls to be tortured so that she can collect their blood to bathe in, in order to prevent herself from aging.
I feel like the second writeup is a little weak, but the song's brief and there's only so much I can write about her that hasn't been said before.
to Klempt and Romulus, as well as Bathory
Would anyone mind if I reserved the upcoming Ratched show, based around the character from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Getting her approved was one of my prouder moments on the thread, and I would like to head up discussion on this interpretation of her as well if that is ok with all.

Yes to Bathory and the Skinwalker. I’m not sure an EEHS/EEHLO cleanup is necessary. Are the tropes really such a mess? Can’t tropers just use figure out when misuse is happening and delete it with a message explaining why? Not everything needs to be backed by an approved thread.