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
Oh alright, my bad.
Yes to Star's duo and Bavorsky with his death of the year.
Now this guy's been dead for two weeks so let's go back to Riverdale and hate ourselves some more.
Who is the Trash Bag Killer? What has he done?
Or "TBK" for a work pretending to be a true crime show when it feels like it (I'll be calling him the killer so I don't cringe to death). The killer has racked up a bodycount across three states with the nasty MO of carving off chunks of women's flesh to cauterize and repeat until they expire, putting the body parts in... trash bags! afterwards. Kidnapping FBI Agent Betty (sure, let's give everyone jobs the characters could never do), he reveals he killed the girl she chased him to save and gets ready to maim her until she coaxes him into letting her go by cutting up the corpse of his other victim, the killer satisfied with allowing what he believes is a budding murderer off into the world.
Throughout his tenure on the show he periodically torments Betty, at one point kidnapping a former colleague of hers to slowly cut the man apart before killing him and stuffing his head in a trash bag for her to find. He also tries to neutralize superpowered Archie with his kryptonite knockoff but is beaten back by his dog who's also got superstrength (Ask if you wanna know more!)
Anyways, the killer winds up facing down with Betty by breaking into her house as she tries and fails in a million ways to lure him out and he invites her to dine with him... in an incredibly anticlimactic end she tells him off and shoots him dead.
Heinousness?
No superpowers, just an ordinary killer and his edgy grizzly MO and implicitly large body count more than make him stand out, for the realistic villains he's by far the worst murderer the show's ever written.
Mitigating factors?
Not really, he's weird with women but sparing Betty was done in the hopes of grooming another killer. It's once speculated he's got a daughter but likewise this assumption—never actually proven—is just used to emphasize another pet project on how to make another killer.
Verdict?
Literally the least strange keeper it's brought.
Trash Bag Killer
I've been watching this season. The superpowers made me curious . Is Mind Control supervillain Percievel Pickins next?
Edited by miraculous on Jun 27th 2022 at 2:12:29 AM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Also is this like the first Fictional Serial Killer we have up based on Patrick Kearney?
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Mephistopheles, Ramsay, Dodgson, Gomez, Wraith, Nassana, Zodiac, Zola, Shiva, Silhouette, Hirikones, Ganondorfs, Scythe, Barovsky, Trouvaille, Trash Bag Killer.
Zeena, Fecto, Rastapopoulos, Nathaniel.
to Dr. Trouvaille and the Trash Bag Killer (Riverdale’s edgy Narm strikes again)
-exhales very deeply-
See...when shows like this keep getting renewed and movies like Jurassic World Dominion keep getting made and keep making billions of dollars and movies like Morbius become popular for no reason besides memes, I start getting pissed off. Because we're at a point now where the Hollywood industry is trying to make their shows and movies bad and banking off the Internet enjoying how bad it is. And I fucking hate that.
Anyways,
for Trash Bag Killer.
Very amused Yes to the Trash Bag Killer, always happy when this one pans out for you, bro!
Will do my pending right now in a jif, but first, Scrags has brought us a couple of "classic literature baddies that have somehow been overlooked" lately, how about I add to the pile?
What's the work?
East of Eden is a brilliant masterwork of literature by John Steinbeck, regarded as a classic for good reason in its generations-long tale of familial drama and period piece thrills, following the Hamilton and Trask families through all manner of issues, many of which are brought about by the villainous Cathy Ames.
Cathy herself is a horrid monster who nonetheless is complex enough to miss this trope, buuut there's an early character I think does enough in his limited pagetime to count:
Who is Mr. Edwards? What has he done?
A brutal whoremaster who runs a variety of brothels across the country, Mr. Edwards oversees dozens upon dozens of women in the prostitution business. He preys on poor, downtrodden, naive women to recruit them into his business, turning them into product to sell to paying clients while keeping the women fed and clothed. Any woman who acts out of line to Edwards' strict iron fist is personally stripped and whipped to near-death by Edwards to make an example to others; in one instance, Edwards violently beat an entire group of his women for trying to convert to a pure, religious life. If the women repeatedly disobey him, Edwards either throws them out on the street homeless, or uses the bribed police under his thumb to specifically single out those women as vagrants to be locked away in prison.
If any of his prostitutes become pregnant, Edwards forces them to choose either being thrown out on the street, or having the baby aborted. Most of the women who choose the latter are so violently mistreated during the process that they die, to Edwards's lack of concern...and naturally, Edwards constantly shuffles around which women are in which brothel across the country, constantly transporting them to different locations. Why? Because most of the women in Edwards's employ have sexually-transmitted diseases that Edwards keeps hidden from clients, knowingly spreading the diseases while moving the women around so the infected clients never find anyone to hold responsible.
Edwards has a proper place in the story when Cathy Ames in all her manipulative glory approaches and—turning the tables on the whoremaster—seduces Edwards into falling for her, Edwards beginning to shower Cathy in money and jewelry galore.
Despite his intense feelings of love for Cathy...Edwards full-well realizes it is a severe weakness to feel such things, and begins scheming to find the true reality of Cathy to free himself from her seductive wiles. Edwards eventually discovers Cathy's past of her parents dying in a "mysterious" fire, and quickly deduces her hand in it. Edwards then blackmails Cathy with the information, planning to viciously whip her into submission then whore her out for the rest of her life until she's no longer useful, at which point Edwards will discard her like any of his other women.
Ultimately though, Edwards's own passionate rage gets the better of him, and instead of merely whipping Cathy, he brutally, horribly delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to her, clubbing her with a rock in an attempt to murder her and leaving her broken body for dead. Edwards afterwards "he went back to his business and never again let the insanity of love come near him. A man who can’t learn from experience is a fool, he said." Edwards would, many decades and dozens more women under his thumb later, die from choking on a chicken bone, a twisted irony that represents how despite his great wealth and riches, he was killed by such a simple thing.
Mitigating features?
Zippo. Edwards has a wife and children but he is never shown to distribute anything resembling care to any of them, the story making it pretty well clear that Cathy is the first and only person Edwards has felt such deep care for in his life. And despite said care for Cathy, that makes him weak and sick and even cry to himself at one point, Edwards grows to see it as a weakness, twists his love for Cathy into a weapon in a plot to force her into prostitution, then culminates in him viciously beating her to apparent death and—despite in the moment being noted to have some semblance of shock at what he did—is noted to have later come to respect himself for it and never again let the "insanity of love" come near him.
Heinousness?
Cathy herself is...really damn terrible and behind a lot of vile stuff, from murdering her parents to framing two schoolboys for rape in her past, but Edwards, for the bit character he is? Is established as a really, really brutal pimp and victimizer of women with dozens of victims under his boot that he regularly beats horribly, spreads sexual diseases around with, puts through nasty abuse under threat of reducing them to homelessness or imprisonment, and for all her nastiness, Edwards planning to force Cathy into sexual slavery is an even further bit of depravity that pushes him.
Final Verdict?
I think Edwards passes.
Edited by Ravok on Jun 27th 2022 at 3:04:34 AM
No! That is NOT Solid Snake! Stop impersonating him!
