TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

Go To

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:

     Previous Post 
Complete Monster Cleanup Thread

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. "[tup] 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

AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
#35801: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:27:17 PM

RE: Gotham

Nobody qualifies yet.

RE: Antimatter!Brainiac

Will do that tonight.

Now, about the character I wanted to propose, The Wanderer...

Who is The Wanderer? What has she done?

Vitoria, aka The Wanderer is a Red Robin foe and serial thrill-killer obsessed with Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. When she was a little girl she was chased into the forest and bitten by dozens of Brazilian Wandering Spiders. Absorbing the toxin, she developed the ability to kill with a touch. Since then she has:

  • Murdered her mother for no apparent reason (save amusing herself) after emerging from the forest. Before anybody asks, her mother was not abusive, and the comic indicates that she loved her daughter and was glad to see her returned.
  • Starts wandering from country to country, murdering people at random for the entertainment. Her victims were men, women, locals, foreigners, anybody who caught her fancy. One of them, it turned out, was a League of Assassins target. When the League assassin who'd been sent after the target found out, he tried to recruit her. The Wanderer killed him, and, liking the thrill of the fight, decided to start targeting the League.
  • Recruiting a band of like-minded, spider-themed adrenaline junkies (Goliath, Funnel, Wolf, Sac, Widower, Recluse, and Tangle) to go after the League, resulting in the deaths of dozens of its members in increasingly gruesome ways (the stand out being their computer tech guy, who was taken over by spiders in the brain and then eaten alive from the inside out). Innocents like Red Robin and Tam Fox end up caught in the crossfire, something that none of them could care less about. Since Vitoria is in charge, and gives her band (dubbed The Council of Spiders) their marching orders, all this death is on her.
  • Following The Council's defeat by Red Robin, murdering the man who dug them out of the rubble and declaring that from now on they will target heroes as they make even better prey than assassins.

Are her actions heinous by the standards of the story?

The Wanderer and her Council have the highest bodycount of any of the villains within the Post-Crisis Red Robin run, running into the double digits onscreen. They're standouts within the book, and despite only being around for one arc, compare favourably with all but the very, very worst of the wider Batman franchise's villains when it comes to bodycount.

Pass, I think.

Any redeeming qualities?

None that we see. She murdered her mother, who loved her, and has no close connections otherwise. The Council of Spiders are her henchmen and allies, not her friends, and she shows no remorse when one of them—Recluse—is captured and, presumably, executed by the League. Her only motivation is boredom, and the only thing holding her group together is that they can murder more people together than they can alone.

Easy pass.

Any Freudian Excuse or other mitigating factors?

Not really. When Vitoria was eight she was chased into the forest by three drunken men who were presumably planning to hurt, rape, and/or kill her. That's when she fell into the spider-pit. As excuses go it certainly gives her a reason to want to kill those three men, and there's a reason why I didn't list their deaths among her crimes (it was self-defense).

There is absolutely no reason, however, for her to kill her mother, or any of the other people she's slain since. One isolated trauma doesn't justify becoming a mass murderer who kills out of boredom, or even really explain it for that matter. In the very arc I'm describing Tamara "Tam" Fox is put through a half-dozen horrible traumas (including Sac threatening to have his spiders eat her alive) yet comes out no less moral a person than when she went in.

I'll also note that as supervillain excuses go, hers is very weak, and we've put up people who have suffered far worse traumas. Hell, Junior of Secret Six infamy suffered systemic rape and abuse at the hands of her child molesting, cult leader father, to the point where she mutilated herself to be as ugly outside as she felt inside, and we still put her up. Vitoria hasn't suffered close to that level of abuse, and her reasons for what she does are far, far pettier. She murders to entertain herself, and that invalidates any excuse she might have.

Pass.

Final verdict?

Vitoria/The Wanderer is a mass murdering serial thrill-killer with no redeeming qualities, a double digit bodycount, and a Freudian Excuse that is insufficient at best, and completely worthless at the worst. She's the worst antagonist in the Red Robin book, and, I think, a solid contender for the list. Every body else's thoughts?

Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#35802: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:38:40 PM

Here's my issue. Vitoria goes into the pit a normal, terrified child, and comes out a lunatic mass murderer.

Robin raises the possibility what happened in there absolutely broke her and snapped her mind, which is entirely probable. When she comes out, Vitoria immediately goes on a killing spree with a huge grin on her face, but she just encountered the trauma of being attacked and savaged by dozens of Brazilian Wandering spiders. The comic states she was bitten over three hundred times. That she snapped to such a degree is not only understandable, but almost expected. Junior is different because she didn't snap. She purposefully chose to become a monster and knows it's wrong but absolutely refuses to repent. What makes Junior so awful is her endless goal to inflict pain on everything around her solely because she wants to.

There's also a huge difference to me between Tam and Vitoria. The latter was a terrified 8 year old bitten three hundred times by the deadliest spider on the planet. The venom presumably warped her mind to a hideous degree. Tam was at least a young adult.

LogoP Party Crasher from the Land of Deep Blue Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: You can be my wingman any time
Party Crasher
#35803: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:41:45 PM

[up][up] The fact that she straight-up murdered her mother after emerging from the forrest seems a little odd. Are there any hints that the poison which gave her the ability to kill people with a touch altered her mind somehow? Like, made her predatory or spiderlike or something like that? Or that the experience in that pit broke her mentally?

Edit: Wow [nja]

edited 18th Feb '15 5:42:28 PM by LogoP

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Camberf Since: Jan, 2012
#35804: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:49:01 PM

How much do we know about who she was before she fell in the pit?

edited 18th Feb '15 5:49:39 PM by Camberf

Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#35805: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:49:12 PM

More than hinted, it's flat out shown. Vitoria emerges from the pit with a terrifying grin and immediately sets about murdering.

All we know about her was she was a perfectly normal kid. She's shown fleeing from her pursuers in terror and sobbing in fear when the spiders come for her

edited 18th Feb '15 5:51:05 PM by Lightysnake

AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
#35806: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:55:38 PM

Here's my counter to that: Red Robin says "Maybe she snapped. Maybe she didn't know what she was doing. Or maybe she just liked it." He says the last part, as we zoom on her grinning an enormous Slasher Smile, which would suggest to me that the narrative wants us to go with Option #3.

Additionally, the suggestion that she "just snapped" doesn't hold up when we see her behaviour as an adult. She's entirely rational (or at least as rational as any sociopathic mass murderer can be) and in control of herself, and flat out states that her motives are not fear, or anger, or even some sort of predatory need, but boredom. That's her own admission and I see little reason to doubt it.

She's not insane by any standard, hell she's not even insane by comic book standards. She has no remorse, no regret, and under the logic you're using—and god I hate to bring this up—we'd be cutting The Joker, who also suffered from one traumatic incident (falling in acid) and then randomly emerged as a mass murderer.

edited 18th Feb '15 5:58:11 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

bobg Since: Nov, 2012
#35807: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:56:54 PM

I would like to reopen discussion on Sonic Exe. When the monster from the creepypasta was brought up, it was dismissed because it did not have much of a rap sheet. However, recently, a sequel was written, along with an official biography for te monster. I'll start off by going over the monster's backstory before I get into the sequel. The monster is named X. X willed himself into existence in his own dimension. X used his powers to create seven different versions of himself, each representing a different emotion. X and his seven minions used their magic powers to corrupt a human into creating a hacked game of Sonic. Once the game was finished being played, a portal would open, allowing X to rip the player's soul out of their body and take it back to his dimension for eternal torture. The sequel has a detective named Derrick looking over the murders (of which we are told their are thirty one counting Tom and Kyle. Derrick meets with an ex member of the cult of X on Skype. Cole had betrayed the cult and X had killed him, now he was talking to Derrick from another dimension through Skype. Cole confirms that all the characters in the game are actually X's previous victims, and he is giving the player a taste of what's in store. Cole also reveals that X plans to permanently cross over to the real world one day, and make all of humanity his slaves as he tortures them for all eternity. X finds out that Cole has been talking to Derrick, so he brutally punishes him offscreen. Derrick tries to retrieve the disk and destroy it, but he gets captured by the cult of X and gets sacrificed to X.

edited 18th Feb '15 5:57:13 PM by bobg

jjj
SophiaLonesoul Since: Apr, 2012
#35808: Feb 18th 2015 at 5:58:05 PM

[up][up][up] You could also look at it like she was a perfectly normal little girl until she killed in self defence and found out she liked killing. There are more possible explanations for her behaviour than just "the spider venom made her change". Unless it is specifically discussed that the spider venom is to blame for her current behaviour I don't think it counts as a Freudian Excuse. Being threatened by three men doesn't cover murdering anything she comes across. I think that she is heinous enough to count and doesn't have redeeming qualities.

edited 18th Feb '15 5:59:22 PM by SophiaLonesoul

AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
#35809: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:00:17 PM

[up]Exactly. Suffering one traumatic incident at the moment that you became a supervillain is actually a fairly standard origin story. We don't cut Norman Osborn because the Goblin Gas was effecting his brain. We don't cut The Joker on the basis that the acid bath drove him mad. If there's no reason to discount them (and I don't think there is) I'm not sure why we should discount her.

Again, she herself states that her motives are boredom. I see no reason to disbelieve her.

Camberf Since: Jan, 2012
#35810: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:02:22 PM

Okay, so after she got bitten, did she immediately get a slasher smile, or was it only after killing the rapists? Do we see her at all in between her getting bitten and killing them?

I ask because there's no way she could've known that the spiders would give her that power right? So if she went immediately crazy before even knowing that she could kill the guys, that would seem to imply that something did snap in her. If it wasn't until after, then you could assume that the evil was always in her, and only came to the surface when she had the ability to hurt people.

edited 18th Feb '15 6:02:51 PM by Camberf

LogoP Party Crasher from the Land of Deep Blue Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: You can be my wingman any time
Party Crasher
#35811: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:03:47 PM

Alright, unless the narrative gives us a reason to think otherwise in the future, Complete Monster she is [tup]

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
bobg Since: Nov, 2012
#35812: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:06:35 PM

Wait, she got bitten over 300 times? How did she even, like, survive?

jjj
Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#35813: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:07:42 PM

She didn't kill in self defense, though. She flat out stalked out the men who chased her into the pit and killed them not in self defense.

The idea of her snapping and then enjoying killing aren't mutually exclusive, either. As for the sequence of events: Vitoria is not willing to get bitten. When she falls in and the spiders crawl at her, she's showin crying, and saying "no" multiple times, then screaming.

She immediately emerges from the pit with a Slasher Smile after.

The reason the Joker is different is that Vitoria as a child driven to madness. the Joker varies between ruthless criminal driven crazy, poor everyday joe driven crazy by one bad day, eternal Boogeyman of Gotham and everything else. He has a choice. I don't think the same holds for someone who was a ccrying child before a trauma and a gleeful serial killer the second it ended.

Camberf Since: Jan, 2012
#35814: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:14:09 PM

Do we have versions of the Joker listed who were normal and turned evil from falling into chemicals?

LogoP Party Crasher from the Land of Deep Blue Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: You can be my wingman any time
Party Crasher
#35815: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:16:58 PM

The one from TheKillingJoke. Maybe

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Camberf Since: Jan, 2012
#35816: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:18:38 PM

I don't think so, he's usually brought up as one of the more sympathetic versions of the character.

Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#35817: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:29:26 PM

The Joker's origin is very seldom explored. Even he himself doesn't really know it. Whoever he was is irrelevant, the accident wiped that man away.

AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
#35818: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:33:25 PM

Two votes for Vitoria/Wanderer (Logo P and Sophia Lonesoul) plus my own. Will keep count and write-up Antimatter!Brainiac later tonight.

[up]I agree with this, but I think we could say the same thing applies to Vitoria. The innocent little girl is gone. What's there instead is a psychopath who kills to entertain herself.

If she murdered people because she was paranoid, or even enraged, I think you would have a point about Freudian Excuse, but she doesn't. She does it because she's bored, and discloses this fact quite cheerfully.

@Camberf

She walks up to the three guys almost stonefaced, with a hint of a smile. They touch her and die. She goes home and kills her mother with a full Slasher Smile.

@bobg

How did Joker survive his chemical bath? Or Dr. Octopus his radiation blast? Supervillain and superhero origins are pretty full of stuff like this.

edited 18th Feb '15 6:34:48 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Camberf Since: Jan, 2012
#35819: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:36:51 PM

So do we not consider it a disqualifier if some sort of toxin or radiation fucks with a character's brain and turns them into someone completely different?

edited 18th Feb '15 6:37:33 PM by Camberf

Nikkolas from Texas Since: Dec, 2009 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
#35820: Feb 18th 2015 at 6:46:21 PM

I'm continuing my King Spree and I'm back with another objection to a Stephen King CM. It also plays into my earlier objection but I'll get to that.

"Insomnia: Atropos is one of the entities responsible for cutting the life threads of the mortals whose time has come. But unlike the other entities like him, Atropos absolutely despises humans for being such short-lived creatures, and takes great pleasure in ending their lives. So in addition to doing his job, Atropos goes after people whose fate isn’t decided and causes them to die horribly, which he has done enough times to fill a cave with trophies of his victims. When his boss, the Crimson King, wants him to kill a young boy before he grows up to oppose his plans, Atropos uses this opportunity to harm as many people as possible. He proceeds to corrupt a nice family man called Ed Deepneau into becoming a wife-beating extremist. Under Atropos' manipulation, Deepneau gets together with like-minded maniacs and assault a woman care center, where they murder dozens of people, as a distraction for his real plan: to have Deepneau crash with a plane full of explosives onto a pro-abortion rights rally that the kid will be attending with his mother, killing them along with the other two thousand people present. Along the way, Atropos has several of the protagonist’s friends killed just to piss him off, and taunts him about it. Finally, when his plans are foiled, Atropos tries to kill Deepneau’s six-year old daughter (who the hero befriended) just to get back at him for humiliating him in front of his boss."

Reason to remove: Lack of agency.

My proof:

"Lachesis: “Under ordinary circumstances we don’t interfere with Atropos, nor he with us. We couldn’t interfere with him even if we wanted to. The Random and The Purpose are like the red and black squares on a checker board, defining each other by contrast. But Atropos does want to interfere with the way things operate. Interfering is, in a very real sense, what he was made to do.”

Clotho: “First you must understand that the things which are happening, while unexpected and distressing, are not precisely unnatural. My colleague and I do what we were made to do, Atropos does what he was made to do.”

The beings making these comments are pretty much the same "type" of being as Atropos, just they serve an opposing force.

Also this part of the CM entry: "But unlike the other entities like him, Atropos absolutely despises humans for being such short-lived creatures, and takes great pleasure in ending their lives."

is a lot of BS. The entry makes it sound like we see others like Atropos which isn't right. Clotho and Lachesis are servants of the Purpose while Atropos serves the Random. These are fundamentally opposed concepts so of course the creatures made for them are nothing alike. We see nothing to suggest Atropos being vile and despicable isn't just inherent in the Random.

Stephen King's cosmology, as far as I can make out, operates on Order Versus Chaos with Chaos Is Evil. Due to Canon Welding, I'm pretty sure free will and agency don't even exist for the most part in any of his books.

Ralph: [Did we ever have a choice? Did we really?]

Lachesis, very softly: [We told you so, didnt we? For Short-Timers there is always a choice. We find that frightening but we also find it beautiful.]

Atropos is a Long-Timer and no more possessing of free will than Clotho or Lachesis. Even the idea Short-Timers possess free will is BS to me. I just read Pet Sematary before this and guess what? Insomnia shows that Gage's death was a product of the Random. In PS, the driver who killed Gage was a good guy who never drank or did anything wrong. Some force just grabbed hold of him and made him run the boy down. Free will my ass.

My point is, Atropos, IT, they are what they were made to do and they play out the parts they were designed to play. They never had any choice in the matter.

SophiaLonesoul Since: Apr, 2012
#35821: Feb 18th 2015 at 7:20:25 PM

With regards to Vitoria/Wanderer, even if the venom did alter her brain she still has the ability to choose the actions she takes otherwise she wouldn't be able to decided to target specific groups. She is actively choosing to kill people because she is bored.

VeryMelon Since: Jul, 2011 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love
Hodor2 Since: Jan, 2015
#35823: Feb 18th 2015 at 7:55:55 PM

[up][up] I disagree, but at the same time think she could count. I'd actually treat it as akin to a case of Split-Personality Takeover- like I'd view it as the girl being a normal/good person and the Wanderer as another "person" that took over after she was bitten.

Klavice (Elder Troper)
#35824: Feb 18th 2015 at 8:12:22 PM

Alright, looks like it's nearly 100% approval for Dickson.

But just in case anyone wants to vote on him...

[1] And [2] ^Discussion on Dickson's non-existent APV moment.

"Dickson starts the game off as a seemingly helpful mentor and father figure to our protagonists, particularly Shulk and Dunban. This all changes after Shulk refuses to kill Egil after defeating him. Dickson shows up and shoots Shulk in the back, releasing his master Zanza, the true Big Bad. He then reveals that he's Zanza's disciple, and never cared at all for the people of Bionis, acting only to ensure Zanza was properly revived - then assist in his wishes to kill off everyone so he can enact the destruction/reconstruction of the world. Dickson tries to finish off the party with an army of Telethia, gleefully asserting that he's not brainwashed when they propose he is. When the High Entia army shows up to save the heroes, he and fellow disciple Lorithea convert them all into mindless Telethia, including Melia's brother, Kallian, whose remarks to his sister whilst transforming they promptly mock. Shortly after this, Dickson arrives in Colony 6 (now the residence of the surviving people of Bionis) with more Telethia, hoping to exterminate them all. He further taunts Melia, mocking her brother by proposing he might be her boyfriend in the next life. Ultimately, he reveals his motivation for his actions is that he wants to have the powers of a god in the next world. Thus, he willingly helps Zanza's atrocities with a sadistic smile on his face, no regrets or remorse, only feeling fear when it's hinted Shulk might be stronger than Zanza."

^Dickson's current writeup.

Also this is a small issue, but could someone change Lorithea to "Lorithia"? I saw Chuggaa's playthrough of the game with subtitles on and her name is specifically spelt "Lorithia".

Also should we consider Lorithia herself too? She was the one who started the High Entia transforming into Telethia and she also merged with Kallian just so Melia could kill her brother.

edited 18th Feb '15 8:14:17 PM by Klavice

AmbarSonofDeshar Since: Jan, 2010
#35825: Feb 18th 2015 at 8:15:48 PM

[up][up]That's not a bad way of looking at it, and would certainly be akin to some of the other supervillain examples we've got.

@Camberf

If they've been turned into somebody completely different we can judge the new person can we not? My personal opinion is that what matters is how it's played. So if a series tells us that a character has been brain damaged and has no moral agency, then I wouldn't want to put them up (see Kazuo from Battle Royale for an example of that). In this case, though, it's not played like that. She's not portrayed as a damaged person who can't make choices, or a mentally ill person, or anything of the sort. She's played as a bored psychopath who alleviates the dullness of life by murdering "exciting" targets.


Total posts: 326,048
Top