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 problem I had with Not Important was how narmtastic his dialogue, design, and overall game were but that doesn't justify voting down so I voted him up. The problem everyone else had was with his apparent lack of personality, but he has more personality than Michael Myers but Myers is still the poster boy for the Complete Monster trope.
Think you're tough because you made it through Lord of the Rings? Real men survive The Silmarillion.He's played completely straight, not in a parodical way for humor like Postal. As for Narm, I think that may be coming from people feeling that the premise is inherently ridiculous more than the quality of the writing itself. We have characters from stuff like Manos: The Hands of Fate and Las Vegas Bloodbath, and Hatred doesn't even exist in the same universe Narm-wise as those.
edited 4th Jun '15 8:59:03 PM by Camberf
Not to be difficult but an arguable difference between those is that the people who made Manos thought they were making a good movie, and happened to fail spectacularly. Conversely, if Hatred is a deliberate parody that's a strike against.
All that said, if the votes stay as they are now, he should likely go up.
Here's the other candidate I've been meaning to propose a while ago. He's the main antagonist from the film Alex Cross. Keep in mind, this is only in regards to the film, not any of the novels from the book series.
"Picasso" is a sadistic assassin hired to eliminate Giles Mercier and his associates Fan Yau Lee and Erich Nunemacher. After being invited to Fan Yau's house, he proceeds to sedate her with a paralyzing drug called TTX. Afterwards, he murders all of her bodyguards and tortures her to death by cutting off all of her fingers in order to extract the password for her laptop. He later goes after Nunemacher, but fails to kill him due to Alex Cross and his partners Monica and Tommy interfering. As punishment for their interference, Picasso breaks into Monica's apartment and tortures her to death, shortly before sending a photo of her body to Cross' cell phone. Picasso then murders Maria, Cross' pregnant wife, and later calls him after her funeral, telling Cross that the only reason why he killed her instead of him was so he could make him suffer. Picasso then goes after Giles Mercier; he boards a train, killing three passengers in the process, before taking out a rocket launcher and firing it at Mercier's convoy. He ends up killing Mercier (who is later revealed to have been a double), Nunemacher, the police chief Brockwell, and at least half a dozen police officers. During Picasso's final confrontation with Cross, Picasso attempts to inject Cross with the TTX drug, ready to torture him to death the same way he did Fan Yau and Monica.
Redeeming Qualities?
None. His only "redeeming" quality is that when he fights a man in a kickboxing match, he doesn't straight up kill him. He only breaks his arm. That's about it.
Implied, but nothing is confirmed. It's clear that Picasso is unhinged, possibly due to some form of trauma or something that happened in the past. Cross himself believes that the man's sadistic actions are his way of striking out against his mother or his father, or his hatred of the world. But since no one even knows his real name, and since Picasso never opens up about his personal life, we know nothing about his backstory. He does at one point tell Cross that he also killed his wife because he insulted him with his "psychobabble" and couldn't keep his mouth shut. But seeing as how he openly asked Cross to analyze him after sending Monica's photo (which Cross proceeded to do), this doesn't make any sense.
Is he heinouse for the movie's standards?
I believe so. But for the sake of argument, it's best if I list all the important villains the movie has to offer.
There's a criminal Alex Cross and his partners chase in the Action Prologue. After he's caught, we later find out that he's a rapist (possible Serial Rapist) via newspaper clipping, and we see one of his possible wounded victims being wheeled into an ambulance, thanking Cross for saving her. Other than that, we know nothing about him and don't see any of the rapes and/or murders he commits.
There's Daramus Holiday, a criminal who killed two people (off-screen, and before the events of the movie take place) and let his niece take the blame for said murders. His niece is not a criminal though.
There's Picasso. His crimes are all listed above. By the end of the movie he's killed at least a dozen people, many of whom were innocent and/or cops.
Now here's where the dividing part comes in. Giles Mercier is a billionaire who embezzeled money from his Detroit fund after facing financial issues. In the end, it's revealed that he hired Picasso to kill Fan Yau (his CFO), Nunemacher (his COO) and a double posing as Mercier, later revealed to be one of his assistants. He wanted the world to believe that he was dead so he could flee the country. And since Nunemacher and Fan Yau were aware of what he was planning, he needed to have them killed too. Mercier himself does not kill anybody. Mercier, from the way he sounded after Cross figured out he was behind everything, did not order Picasso to murder Cross' wife or Monica. However, it's safe to say that while he only ordered Picasso to kill three people, he showed little to no sympathy over the dozens of bodies that Picasso left behind; he was only openly upset over the death of Cross' wife, not Monica, not Brockwell, not the police officers, etc. One could argue that Mercier is just as bad as Picasso, if not worse. While it's clear that Mercier did not mean for so many people to be killed, it doesn't change the fact that he hired Picasso in the first place.
Also, in regards to the TTX drug, it paralyzes the victim, but leaves them conscious, so they can see, hear, and feel everything being done to them. Picasso, before torturing Fan Yau, tells her that pain fascinates him, so he more than likely chose to drug her and Monica for no reason other than to satisfy his sadism, when he very easily could've given them a quick death.
All right, that should cover just about everything. If anyone else has seen the film, feel free to share your thoughts or ask questions.
Keep or scratch?
I write stories and shiz. You can read them here.Yeah I heard about Picasso from Alex cross. I have really seen the movie before but after reading his passage I would give him a
Reading tropes such as You Know What You Did
I'm gonna go
for...what the hell are we calling him? Not important...making the tally 18:11. Now I read the argument of being a GDV or parody. Well let's discuss that a little.
In a Sadist Show characters cannot qualify, period. Would you say the game is an example of this? I would vote no, a parody of the hard edge neckbeard /b/ whatever culture, maybe, but not something that sees Family Guy and thinks, "I'm gonna top that."
Does the character need depth? Ain't No Rule, I'm serious, see for yourself, is there a rule listed that a character needs to be deep or have a lot of character, personality, to qualify? Nope. Should it be added? Ditto for PC not qualifying.
Now let's look at some examples.
- Return of the Jedi: The non-canon novelization has its version of Moff Jerjerrod. Portrayed as an arrogant, self-important Sociopathic Soldier who joined the military for the violence, Jerjerrod saw the Rebel Alliance as something smaller and weaker than himself that he could bully with impunity. As commanding officer of the second Death Star, Jerjerrod was an enthusiastic participant in Emperor Palpatine's plan to exterminate the Rebels, viewing it as an exercise in total annihilation; his one regret was that the end of the Rebellion would mean the end of the war he loved. When the Emperor and Darth Vader were slain, Jerjerrod, enraged at the Rebels for fighting back, ordered Death Star II to obliterate Endor, intending to butcher not only the Rebels and the Ewoks, but his own men, and every other sentient lifeform on the moon, out of a desire "to incinerate something green and living, gratuitously, meanly, toward no end but that of wanton destruction. A small act, but deliciously satisfying." A petty, sadistic man with a big gun, Jerjerrod was among the cruelest and most vindictive officers the Imperial Navy had to offer.
- Mulan: Shan Yu views the Emperor of China having built the Great Wall as both an insult and a challenge. As a violent Blood Knight, Shan Yu leads his horde of Huns to invade, relishing when China knows he's there. After capturing two Imperial spies, Shan Yu releases them with a message for the Emperor- but has one of his archers kill one anyways as you only need one man to deliver a message. Shan Yu later ambushes the armies of General Li at a village, resulting in a mass slaughter, not only of the soldiers, but every civilian as well, with no children spared either. Even after his army's downfall, Shan Yu attacks the Imperial Palace with his remaining men and takes the Emperor hostage, furiously trying to kill him when he refuses to kneel to Shan Yu.
- Golden Eye: Xenia Onatopp, a psychotically sadistic Russian assassin working for the Janus Syndicate, has the dubious honor of being the most depraved Femme Fatale Bond has ever come across. Initially seen as a charming, elegant woman, Xenia reveals her true nature when in bed with her target, she kills him by crushing him between her thighs to suffocate him, getting clear sexual ecstasy from the murder; she later tries to kill Bond the same way. She steals his security clearance and murders several innocent sailors before eluding Bond. Later, when Xenia arrives in a Russian facility, she massacres all the techs with machine gun fire, getting very visibly aroused by the killings. Even her partner for the mission looks a bit stunned at it. Xenia has one of the largest body counts for a Dragon in the franchise, and unlike the majority of her male counterparts, Xenia is in it for money and thrills. She has no issue helping to use the Goldeneye satellite to plunge England into the dark ages as long as she gets rich from it. The fact that her gives her the ability to express her sexualized love for killing is just another perk.
- Tomorrow Never Dies: Elliot Carver is a media mogul and head of the Carver Media Group Network. The actions of himself and his group range from releasing software with bugs in order to require constant updates, releasing stories about mad cow disease involving a British beef baron who lost money to Carver in poker and keeping those stories running after getting paid by the French, blackmailing the President to sign a bill only to release the tape anyway, and causing "floods in Pakistan, riots in Paris and a plane crash in California". His latest and most heinous project involves sinking a ship and killing the survivors, sinking a Chinese jet, and attempting to use a stolen British missile to destroy Beijing, leading to World War III; all of this is so he can gain exclusive broadcast rights in China. When James Bond investigates this, he murders his wife when she gets too close to Bond and orders the brutal torture of Bond and Wai Lin by his dragon, Torture Technician Richard Stamper. Already a wealthy man, Carver is willing to cause millions of deaths just to satisfy his Greed.
- 8 MM: We have The Sociopath and Sadist Malevolent Masked Man Machine. Machine takes part in snuff films to feed his depraved appetites and he is the one who rapes and murders an innocent woman on camera. When the tape is investigated, Machine is willing to kill more people, and commit more rapes on camera. When he tries to kill the hero, he even gleefully whispers while strangling him how hard he's getting from the violence. Machine has no Freudian Excuse or reasoning for his action and he serves to show how a monster can come in the most innocuous of guises, particularly when you see under the mask that Machine is actually a bald, chubby, harmless looking man named George who asks "were you expecting a monster?"
- Cliffhanger:
- Delmar is the most sadistic terrorist in Qualen's gang. Unlike Qualen, who is motivated by greed, Delmar is a Terrorist Without A Cause. When two teenagers are there to do base jumping, Delmar chuckles when his fellow terrorist, Kynette, shoots one of them and hands Kynette over a weapon to kill another one. In a later scene, Delmar sadistically guns down Frank, who was trying to help him and other terrorists, thinking they were people in need. He later tortures Hal using him as a soccer ball in order to practice his kicking technique.
- The Rock: Captains Frye and Darrow try to extort money by threatening San Francisco with Deadly Gas. While their superior Anti-Villain General Hummel wants to distribute the money to families of soldiers whose deaths went unrecognized and without compensation, they only want it for themselves. When it becomes apparent Hummel is bluffing, they act swift to remove Hummel from command and eventually kill him while proceeding with the attack. Even when it becomes apparent they've lost, Frye and Darrow try to send a rocket at the city armed with poison gas to kill every civilian they possibly can and attempt to kill the 81 tourists they have locked in Alcatraz to ensure a lack of witnesses. Their whole motivation for this is as Darrow sums up himself: "I want my fucking money!"
- Angel:
- Marcus from season 1's "In the Dark" is hired by Spike to extract information from Angel on the whereabouts of the Gem of Amarra, a magical ring that gives Vampires complete invulnerability from harm and their usual weaknesses, such as sunlight. A man obsessed with the "art" of torture, Marcus is rumored to have inspired some of the more favored and gruesome techniques used through history. Serenely, playing Mozart in the background, Marcus falls into a rhythm of torturing Angel, impaling him with hot pokers then asking Angel what he truly wants. When Angel refuses to answer, the cycle begins again, each time with Marcus hoping to truly break Angel and lay his soul bare. He also burns Angel with sunlight and forces him to suspend himself in the air with his chains in order to avoid being incinerated. Marcus is also a pedophile who specializes in feeding on and molesting children, and, after Marcus betrays Spike and takes the ring for himself, the first thing he does with his newfound invulnerability is attempt to murder a group of boy scouts, only being stopped due to the timely arrival of Angel.
- Billy Blim from season 3's "Billy" appears to be a normal young man, but he is actually a demon filled with an extreme power of misogyny and had the power to turn any man he touched or who came in contact with his bodily fluids into someone extremely savage and brutal toward anyone female. He had no real reason to be doing this; rather, he appeared to do it only for his own sheer amusement. The fact that the normally very cold and amoral Lilah took him out says volumes as to how horrible he was.
- Arrowverse
- From season 2's "Broken Dolls," Barton Mathis, best known as The Dollmaker, is an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who enjoys targeting young women. After kidnapping them, the Dollmaker murders the girls and preserves the corpses by injecting them with chemicals. The Dollmaker has a particular grudge against Quentin Lance, the cop who put him away the first time. After his escape from prison, Mathis calls up Lance and forces him to listen as he kills a girl; later, he attempts to do the same to Lance's daughter Laurel.
- General Matthew Shrieve, the Big Bad of the flashback sequences during season 3, initially appears as a reasonable and helpful man, who frees Oliver Queen and the Yamashiros from A.R.G.U.S services, after they stop the Omega virus from being sold on the Black Market. However, he takes the virus for himself, before usurping Amanda Waller as head of A.R.G.U.S, and sending a squad of soldiers to attack Oliver and the Yamashiros, including young Akio. Shrieve sees China as an economic threat, so he plans to release the virus onto the public, and so distributes more of the virus, under the pretense that it's a vaccine. Akio is infected, so Oliver and Maseo confront Shrieve for a possible cure. Shrieve personally gives them the medicine before revealing that it was insulin for his diabetes and it was a ruse to get them killed.
I think that's enough to get my point across, perhaps these works need another viewing but most don't seem to have the character needed if we are arguing that we need to know their whole childhood, backstory, they have to be the feature villain in every episode, ect.
Currently reading up My Rule Fu Is Stronger than YoursActually, Xenia has quite a bit of personality; she's CLEARLY getting off (literally) from killing.
Reading tropes such as You Know What You Did
Hmmm, I dunno. That seems to be the beginning, middle and end pf her characterization. Not exactly Tales of Brave Ulysses.
Currently reading up My Rule Fu Is Stronger than YoursSeriously? Xenia Onatopp as CM? No way. She just kills people in a creative way and enjoys it; that's so unremarkable by the standards of CM that it is kind of ridiculous. ![]()
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We voted on her pretty unanimously.
Xenia has one of the largest body counts of a Bond dragon or henchwoman, and she's a sexual sadist who gets off on hurting her victims as much as she can while killing them, while also going fully along with a plot to use the Goldeneye in a way that will kill a ton of people so she can get rich with Trevealyn.
You don't need much personality or depth to quality, but you need a personality. It's why Malekith from Thor the Dark World can;t qualify as he has none.
Here's my new to-do list:
Write up Mr. Abney
To propose:
Richard Mann from Lisa Gardner's The Third Victim
Jim Beckett from Lisa Gardner's The Perfect Husband.
Pinhead/The Hell Priest from Barker's Scarlet Gospels.
And maybe a couple examples from the manga Tokyo Ghoul.
Who would the thread like to see me handle first?

edited 4th Jun '15 7:31:11 PM by nrjxll