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
The finale is supposed to be a crossover with the various heroes from these universes as they fight Ultron (this is not a spoiler. It's literally in the trailer).
So i'd probably wait till the end to ep every possible together.
Edited by miraculous on Sep 15th 2021 at 3:18:04 AM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."As one of the people reserving discussion I myself would wait. Skull and the Collector are as dead as dust right now and their episodes are far older than two weeks old, but I'm more concerned about the actual heinous standard. It's not fair to just measure each episode by a separate standard if they're all going to connect in the end.
welp idk if i'm doing this right but idt john dee belongs on the sandman page at all, once the ruby is destroyed he seems like he genuinely regrets what he did to some degree and even apologizes, and dream said the ruby was too powerful for humans to use and damaged his mind
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheSandman
Edited by kyeo on Sep 15th 2021 at 3:59:57 AM
Just gonna get right into it.
What is the work?
La-Mulana is a game released by Japanese indie devs Nigoro as a throwback to brutally hard games of the past that challenges players both in standard 2D action and platforming as well as mind boggling puzzles. It stars Lemeza Kosugi, a Japanese-American expy of Indiana Jones, as he explores the titular ruins, which turn out to be infested with monsters and beings from various religions and folklore and also deals with the origin of all life on Earth. It eventually turns out all the puzzles and traps in the ruins were devised by the previous generation of humanity for the express purpose of finding someone who can destroy the ruins, which turn out to be a living being...
Who is she?
The Mother is the true form of La-Mulana and the origin of all life and culture on Earth. In truth an alien who crash-landed on Earth and became desperate to escape, she gave birth to a race of snake people later known as the First Children and tasked them with figuring out how to get her back into space. Needless to say, they failed and fell into civil war. The Mother's response? Create the Second Children, a race of giants immune to the Sky People's brainwashing, to kill off as many First Children as they can and take over the job of getting the Mother to space.
From here on, it's more of the same: a group of Children is born, they fail to get her back to space, she eventually loses her patience and wipes them out, rinse and repeat. Eventually, her ability to directly create life weakens, but conveniently, the Fifth Children created a giant machine that can create life from clay dolls. This machine is ultimately what makes the Sixth Children, but there turns out to be a catch. You see, the reason none of the children actively went against the Mother? She instilled in them an unconditional love that they cannot fight back against; even if they wanted to fight back, they mentally and physically couldn't go against the Mother. This forced love is still present in the Sixth Children, but as they weren't born directly from the Mother, it's far weaker.
As a result of this weakened hold, some of the Sixth Children eventually realize the Mother's dream is impossible and she's in denial over it, instead preferring to repeatedly create and annihilate more Children. As a result, this group decides she has to go, but even coming to this conclusion is too much for many of them to physically handle. As a result, they use the machine to create the Seventh Children, who would be able to advance the plan further by setting up La-Mulana as a testing ground and act as a template for the Eighth Children - modern humanity, who would be born completely free from the hold the Mother held over all previous Children and from whom one able to solve the traps and monsters of La-Mulana would be born. By the time the game starts, the Mother is only a few years away from destroying humanity, but is ultimately put down by Lemeza at the end of the game, and her cycle of repeated genocide is over...
Except nope, she's not done! La-Mulana 2 reveals that she made a second set of ruins known as Eg-Lana to both imprison the few survivors of the previous Children stuck in civil war and to act as a backup body in case someone managed to kill her. At its core is a being known as the 9th Child, which is actually just a reborn Mother who cast aside her desire to return to space and only desires to kill everything on Earth as revenge for the death of her original self. By the end of the game, the 9th Child is ready to go and we get a taste of what the end will be like: the 9th Child will lead an army of white wisps known as Jotun to swarm and murder all life on Earth. Lemeza's daughter Lumisa ultimately kills the 9th Child, definitively ending the Mother's reign of terror.
Heinousness?
Easily passes. The Mother repeatedly creates entire species as slave labor for an impossible goal, then when they fail, she commits genocide on her own children. While civil war is also a factor in many of these races falling, in every case except the Second Children, these wars are treated as secondary factors in their decline to the devastation the Mother causes. Offscreen Villainy is averted in that La-Mulana and Eg-Lana are explicitly the ruins of where the previous Children lived, and the endgame of the second game has Eg-Lana go through the beginning stages of a new apocalypse that will eventually spread to the surface. No one else comes close to her.
Mitigating factors?
Many of the Seventh Children that are still around treat having to kill the Mother as a tragedy that had to happen to end her delusions and stop her genocides. The problem? They don't have agency on the matter. That unconditional love the Mother put in her Children, while weakened in the Seventh Children, is still there; they're flat-out incapable of framing their actions any way other than a Mercy Kill. While being trapped on an alien planet with no way home is a genuinely horrific fate, there's no indication that she went insane from it, and the sequel throws away any sympathy she may have garnered by revealing she willingly let herself be reborn as a pure Omnicidal Maniac on the off chance her Children dared to defend themselves.
Verdict?
. Again, as awful as her situation is, it comes nowhere close to justifying the immense death and destruction she causes to escape it, especially with the whole 9th Child thing.
Mother sounds like a Keep!
As for Dee? I think he's fine, he was a supervillain before the arc and continued to be a supervillain after, his mind being "affected" by the Ruby isn't really gone into enough for me to want to disqualify a sadistic bastard like him. And his "apologizing" comes after Dream has shown him his godly powers and threatened his life, Dee is just blubbering apologies to try to avoid Dream paying him back. When he has all the power, Dee is shown to be an arrogant sadist who enjoys what he does, it's no coincidence that as soon as he's left powerless is when the "pathetic, pitiable man sorry for what he did" comes out.
Edited by Ravok on Sep 15th 2021 at 4:43:39 AM
No! That is NOT Solid Snake! Stop impersonating him!Can someone fetch me the exact line in Sandman describing the Ruby's effect on his mind? I honestly don't remember ever thinking that was a problem on my first readthrough, but my first readthrough was ages ago.
I'm abstaining on the Mother. There's a lot of conflicting details on the trope page (which appears to be one of the only reliable sources of info on the character) and the EP, so I'm unsure A. exactly how nasty the And I Must Scream is portrayed in game and B. where the Mother ends and where the 9th Child begins (the character page describes it as a "copy" of the Mother's soul, ala Other M's Ridley).
Honestly, her fate isn't really gone into much detail. It's mentioned she's trapped on Earth with no way to get out.
As for the 9th Child? The game does imply it's the Mother herself as, after the 9th Child is killed, there's a scene of a fiery version of it rising to space, implying that in the end the Mother got what she wanted, but even still, unlike Other M Ridley who was cloned by outside forces, the Mother herself explicitly set the whole thing up, so either way she's fully culpable.
Edited by finalsurvivor1 on Sep 15th 2021 at 7:54:07 AM
I’m not too concerned about Dee with what Ravok’s said unless there’s more to the story. Let’s be careful about when we label someone “genuinely remorseful”, as is this looks like twisting a Dirty Coward and taking what are almost certainly lies at face value.
Abstaining on Mother for now.
Edited by 43110 on Sep 15th 2021 at 7:53:56 AM
tentative abstain to Mother unless something comes up that makes me think
I'll wait till I see a specific passage, but so far Dee still looks like a keeper since it looks like he's less apologizing and more like he's trying to weasel his way out of the situation.
Edited by nwotyzal on Sep 15th 2021 at 5:03:34 AM
Abstain on the Mother. Her character page does point out that her habit of offing her children is a bit overeactive, but it also says that she's in genuine denial about "returning to the sky" and that the whole game is a lead up to a Mercy Kill.
Hmmm...taking a glance at the comic to refresh, the line about Dee in regards to both mental state and remorse is as follows:
Dream: I could. Perhaps I will.
Dee: I'm—I'm sorry.
Dream: I don't doubt it, not that it matters. You should never have used my ruby. It was not made for mortals. The damage to your mind must have been considerable.
Dee: You mean...after what I did...you're not going to do anything?
Dream: Of course I am going to do something, John Dee. I'm going to take you home.(Returns him to Arkham Asylum)
Dee: Goodbye. I think I'm sorry about. About what I did. You know. Sorry.
So ehhh I still don't buy the mental degradation. The apologizing, I will say, does have a bit more "oomph" to it than I recall, but it still feels...very cowardly and not genuine given not 10 minutes before he was gleefully bragging about his new reign of terror in which he'd kill anyone who he "didn't like" at the drop of a hat.
Also gonna switch to an abstain on Mother taking a look at the trope page myself.
Edited by Ravok on Sep 15th 2021 at 5:04:54 AM
No! That is NOT Solid Snake! Stop impersonating him!i mean you can criticize the writing all you want but that's kind of not the point? he does apologize and dream, and by extension the comic, heavily implies that he probably only did all those crazy things because the ruby warped his mind. once it's destroyed he becomes a completely different person who appears totally docile in nature. regardless of whether it's convincing writing or not, that should strip him out of consideration for complete monster status
also igss the question is are we concerned with every depiction of the character throughout comics or specifically how he was written in sandman since it's on the sandman ymmv page, not dc comics in general or w/e
Edited by kyeo on Sep 15th 2021 at 5:11:24 AM
Pinging ~beneficii. I think Blue got enough votes for a writeup.
BTW, I plan to see Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms tomorrow. I saw Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge today...I think Quan Chi still keeps.
Edited by ACW on Sep 15th 2021 at 8:10:17 AM
No, he actually doesn't apologize and become a "different person" once the ruby is destroyed. He still cheerfully brags his intent to rule the world and kill anyone he doesn't like after the ruby is gone. The apologies don't come until after Dream reveals he's still alive and all-powerful again, literally holding Dee in the palm of his hand. Dream is also functioning on a way weirder moral scale than a normal person, him being willing to just return Dee to Arkham isn't an indicator that the narration and the audience should forgive him. Even when Dee doesn't have the ruby in-hand, he still cruelly executes an innocent woman just for fun after tricking her into thinking he's a nicer person than he really is.
Maybe the apology is, somehow, someway, genuine, and we can debate that. But I don't think the state of Dee's mind or agency because of the ruby is a factor at all, personally.
Edited by Ravok on Sep 15th 2021 at 5:15:04 AM
No! That is NOT Solid Snake! Stop impersonating him!

Hollered. Let's move on.