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 conversation seems to have moved on, but I have to say I'm strongly leaning towards a
for the TV Reverse-Flash. He doesn't seem to particularly go out of his way to be evil that much, and how fake his humanizing traits are seems somewhat ambiguous. A bad guy, sure - but a Complete Monster? I dunno.
So I've been rereading some of my nineties Superman comics and I've got somebody I want to talk about. This is going to be a case study in "how brief an appearance is too brief" but I thought it was worth bringing up. Meet Bertron.
Who is Bertron? What has he done?
Bertron is a Mad Scientist from an unidentified alien species who appeared in a single flashback in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey #2. 250 000 years ago, Bertron landed on prehistoric Krypton with a team of scientists, genetically engineered a baby, and threw it outside where it was eaten alive by predators literally seconds later. Bertron had the remains brought inside, cloned a new baby, and threw it outside the next day. Rinse, repeat.
This process goes on for somewhere around a century. Every day Bertron engineers a new child, based on the data obtained from the last one, then pitches it out into the world to be killed by predators or Krypton's toxic atmosphere. Each child is engineered to have the memories of the last one, and are wired with a (totally BS) Lamarckian genetic code that causes them to adapt to the environment they encounter. Each child survives a little bit longer than the previous one, until finallly, towards the end of Bertron's time on Krypton, they are able to survive for days, and then months.
The final version of the child lasts for two years, and actually manages to grow to adulthood. Left a mindless berserker that instinctively destroys all life it comes into contact with, the grown-up science project murders every living being on Krypton, including Bertron, then makes its escape to another world where it will gain the name Doomsday.
Are his actions heinous by the standards of the story?
Depending on how you want to look at it (the joy of sci-fi cloning) Bertron either murdered thousands of children, or murdered the same child several thousand times. It doesn't give him the highest bodycount of any Superman character (hi there, Brainiac) but it does make him pretty damn unique, and not in anything approaching a good way.
Bertron also has to take at least some of the blame for what Doomsday became. His goal was to create an ultimate life form that would be able to slaughter anything it encountered, growing more adaptable and indestructible with each battle. The millions—if not billions—that Doomsday has murdered across the face of the universe are therefore on him, at least in part (because the results of this experiment were pretty predictable).
Pass.
Does he have any redeeming qualities?
No. His subordinates express some concerns about the project, both pragmatic and moral, but Bertron consistently overrules them. He doesn't care at all about the people he works with, replacing them when they grow old, and while he takes pride in what he has made Doomsday into, he clearly doesn't give a damn for the monster itself.
Pass.
Freudian Excuse or other mitigating factors?
For a brilliant geneticist Bertron's remarkably dumb. He somehow couldn't figure out that Doomsday might be mad at him for having put him through "thousands upon thousands" (Bertron's own words) deaths. This might qualify him as Obliviously Evil, except that it is repeatedly pointed out to him by others on the team that what they are doing is morally wrong. By death 1000 or so Bertron is fully aware that the rest of the universe would consider what he is doing utterly perverse, yet continues on in his quest to create "the ultimate lifeform".
Pass.
Other concerns?
Bertron's a one-shot character from a flashback in a not-very-well-written story. It's possible that he's too minor to include. I don't agree though—however briefly he appeared for, his actions continue to inform Doomsday's motives to the modern day.
Final verdict?
One appearance or not, Bertron's one of the more sickening mad scientists in the DC Universe, and is responsible for creating a creature that caused untold numbers of deaths across the known universe. That's on top of the fact that said creative process involved murdering a child "thousands upon thousands" of times. I say he passes.
Your thoughts?
to Bertron, especially since there was no altruistic reason for creating Doomsday.
Speaking of which, anyone who hasn't should watch the Youtube video The Death and Return of Superman
, which is about that whole story, and is funny and entertaining.
edited 21st May '15 5:10:15 PM by Camberf
Krona's also an Oan. He's possessed of vast psychic powers, and nigh-immortality, and had the resources available to him to build a machine that could observe (and influence) the beginnings of the universe.
Bertron possesses no powers beyond a longer-than-average lifespan, and no apparent resources beyond his lab and associates. He also has nothing approaching Krona's intellect.
Essentially, Krona's several orders of magnitude worse than Bertron because he's several orders of magnitude more powerful than Bertron.
One baby every day until they start lasting longer than one day, which only starts to happen near the end of his lifetime. Process went on for about a hundred years. Even if we assume that "Near the end of his days" means the last decade or so, that still leaves one baby a day for ninety years. 365 babies a year for ninety years. That is 32580 babies. That's one of the worst cases of mass infanticide I have ever heard of. I already said that killing a baby is the one thing that would convince me to not even bother waiting for the character's arc to end, since I believe that killing a baby will almost certainly instantly make you a Complete Monster, as I have never known a character to be redeemed after that. Berton killed tens of thousands of babies, not to mention he wanted to create a being that sought to destroy everything in it's path. ![]()
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Not sure about Bertron. That's pretty heinous stuff, but as you say, he's kind of pushing the limit on how much story presence someone needs to qualify. I guess I'll go with a tenuous vote for inclusion.
He's pretty much one of our basic go-to examples for explaining what a Generic Doomsday Villain is, so no.
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He was already voted down, on the basis of possessing no personality or motivations whatsoever. He has less characterization than some Slasher Movie villains.
edited 21st May '15 6:52:04 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
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And both are ultimately done in by it, too.
Speaking of characters like this, did we ever reach a consensus on Zenoc Quah from Legacy? I've just heard about him by word of mouth but he sounds really nasty.
edited 21st May '15 6:53:55 PM by HamburgerTime
Wow, the Bone Collector is Leland Orser? I know him best as the dweeby Chief Surgeon on ER.
Just a heads up, should we rewrite Tigerclaw/star to include his constant torture of Ravenpaw in Into the Wild? He tries to kill him several times and when that fails, tries to brand him a traitor so he'll be exiled. And that's not going into pretty much making ThunderClan his Clan by trying to stir up hatred for Yellowfang and such.
Also if we use that new rule that a page must have more than five entries in order to warrant a page, we could potentially cut Ace Attorney or Visual Novels and merge them with Video Games.

Ah. Now, if we count voices, Hamill probably holds the record:
edited 21st May '15 12:17:35 PM by ACW