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
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Yeah, originally I would do them a few days after doing the tweaking, or someone else would, but then I just decided to streamline it and submit one weekly batch every Monday morning or so.
As for Shou, he hurts a kid (his own daughter), and it seems how he kills them is rather...unpleasant.
edited 25th Dec '15 12:26:35 PM by ACW
to Brinkley, Jackson, and the Unnamed gang leader.
I guess you still have a Complete Monster, even the character seems dull due to a bad performance by an actor.
There was an really bad episode in the Original Series of Star Trek, that featured an evil energy being that forces all the adults on a Federation colony to kill themselves and turns many of the children on the colony into his minions. He seems intent on doing this on a much larger scale on a Federation planet with millions of inhabitants on it. The villain of the episode is being played by a trial lawyer, rather then a actor, who gives a really bland performance. I could an effort post on him.
Merry Christmas everyone.
I've just got two wonderful copies of The Killing Joke and the Death of the Family collection; perfect tribute to Gotham's greatest Monster. Cheers to all this holiday.
Anyhow, I'm voting to cut Lugae for reasons cited above.
edited 25th Dec '15 2:27:06 PM by Scraggle
So, I have read The Legend Of Spyro A New Dawn, and I would like to say that Empress Tyrania is a definate keep. Here is an effort post:
Who is Tyranie and what does she do?
Tyranie is a gargoyle who commeted three genocides, one of which was of her own kind. She killed off her own race so she could replace it with artificial gargoyles and rule as empress. She is introduced by telling one of her minions to clean her torture chamber of skellitons to make way for Spyro and Cynder (who she plans to capture), stating that she Loves the Sound of Screaming. She later kills one of her minions after he gives her a report for fun. We later see that she has a bunch of slaves and that she created her gargoyle in charge of running the slaves to be cruel so they would suffer. She later kills a bunch of her minions (again for fun) and sends the rest to try and conquer the dragon realm. When the heroes confront her, she slowly kills Embers father while Ember is Forced to Watch, planning to kill Ember, Spyro, and Cynder next. She also plans to kill any dragons too weak to be used as slaves.
Does she reach the works heinous standard?
Yes. The Big Bad, Deadlock, is a well written Anti-Villain with a strong Freudian Excuse, who is A Mother to Her Men and eventually makes a Heel–Face Turn. The author actually stated that Tyrania was intended as a foil to Deadlock. While Deadlock loved her soldiers like they were her own children, treated her prisoners decently, and had a Freudin Excuse, Tyrania kills her minions for fun, tortures her prisoners, and commits her crimes with her only motives being power and fun, laughing like a loon the whole time.
jjjI'm still wondering what sets Tucker and his experiments in FMA apart from Lugae and his experiments in FFIV aside from the fact that Tucker's own child was a victim. Both are low-on-resources Mad Scientists who manage to accomplish sufficiently heinous and twisted evil within their own secluded scales. The big difference I'm seeing is that Lugae got something of an Alas, Poor Villain from the heroes who killed him whereas Tucker just got killed by a guy to punish him, though who prayed for his soul anyway.
And Lugae showed no semblance of remorse or regret on-screen when he was living - the line about regret in his heart was said about Lugae when he's dead, after he's died. We discussed the possibility of the soul of one who was a CM in life moving beyond CM status in death (Vorbis, Zouken Matou, possibly Peter Pan) and I fail to see how this is different. And if the line was meant to be about Lugae while he was alive, it came off as hollow since we're simply told this but shown nothing of the sort from the man himself.
edited 25th Dec '15 4:42:13 PM by ANewMan
IIRC Scar just prays for the soul of Tucker's daughter, who he mercy kills.
I don't believe he prays for Tucker- both because of Tucker's actions and because at that point, Scar was just killing any and all State Alchemists he could get his hands on, regardless of whether they had done anything wrong (although everyone he killed probably deserved it).
Tyrania
I will never support cutting Shou Tucker. He turned his own kid and dog into a chimera, with his methods resulting in a Fate Worse than Death. He's also a one-shot villain and a low-level government official, so he should be assessed on that scale.
edited 25th Dec '15 4:57:03 PM by DemonDuckofDoom
He's also a one-shot villain and a low-level government official, so he should be assessed on that scale.
I know that and I agree - I'd never want Tucker cut either, but since we're also judging Dr. Lugae on his own scale and saying "he probably wouldn't qualify even if there weren't worse villains in the game's setting", it raises some questions about these standards elsewhere. I don't think it's valid grounds for cutting an example, so Lugae should only be judged based on whether or not we feel the remorse we're told he had in his heart is mitigating enough. It just personally isn't for me since we don't get even any hint of an "I regret having done this" or "I'm remorseful over that" from the character himself on-screen.
Well a few things on the Lugae v. Tucker argument.
1) Lugae experimented on two people he didn't have any relationship with, whereas Tucker turned his wife and young daughter who loved him into monsters trapped in a permanent states of agony.
2) Tucker never showed remorse for his actions, in fact he acted whiny and self-righteous about the whole thing once he was caught. You said that one of the characters directly felt remorse coming from Lugae. Even though the game doesn't confirm remorse for what, it's still ambiguous enough that it could be a redeeming quality from him.
3) Dr. Lugae was Golbez's chief strategist and answered directly to Rubicante, two of the most prominent villains in the game aside from Zemus. Sure Tucker was a State Alchemist but he had relatively little power in the grand scheme of things. If we're doing comparisons from Fullmetal Alchemist and Final Fanrasy IV, Lugae's power and resources are more comparable to Doctor Gold-Tooth, a man who managed to be leagues more heinous than Lugae with what he had. Tucker was just some nobody with barely any intellect or talent but still managed to achieve some nightmarish evil by himself. I would totally expect Lugae to be able to do more evil with what he has.
edited 25th Dec '15 5:23:43 PM by OccasionalExister
to Tyrania.
to Lugae.
So I guess I do an effort post on the Star trek villain I was talking about (that was a bad episode, the things I do for this thread.
)
Who is Gorgan? What has he done?
Gorgan is an evil alien energy creature, who is the last surviving member of a race of marauders, who were destroyed by those whom they had victimized. Gorgan lay dormant for centuries, till a small team of Federation scientists set up a colony on the planet. Gorgan is freed and manipulates the children into becoming his minions and uses his mind control powers to show the adults their greatest fears, until they all commit suicide (its not a big team, its only 10 adults on the team). The Enterprise investigates, notices the dead adults and see that the children are unharmed, so they take them aboard the Enterprise. The children summon Gargon (who is pretending to be a "friendly angel"), who says their objective is to reach Marcos 12, a Federation colony with millions of people on it. On Marcos 12, the children will become their allies, everyone else will be killed. The children use the mind control powers to force the Enterprise crew to go to Marcos 12 and force any crew member who disobeys to see their greatest fear. After a bunch of failed attempts to stop the ship from reaching Marcos 12, Kirk manages to summon Gorgan. Kirk shows the children tapes of them playing with their parents on the planet and then shows them footage of their dead parents, which of course saddens them. The Gorgan becomes enraged with the children, saying he will kill them if they don't obey. Kirk convinces the children to reject Gorgan, which somehow gets rid of him.
Is he heinious by the standards of the work?
Well Star Trek TOS does have an high bar, featuring villains like Malakon, a racist, genocidal psychopath, Captain Tracy, a insane Star Fleet captain that promoted death and slavery on a backwater planet, the Salt Vampire that killed any human it came into contact with, Redjac, an alien Serial Killer. The Gorn and the Romulans have destroyed Federation outposts that they see as threats to thier territory.
However Gorgan, was planning to kill millions on a planet, has a decent body count and seemed to intend to ultimately do the same thing to the entire universe.
Any Freudian Excuse or other mitigating circumstances?
Does bad acting count as a mitigating circumstance?
Seriously though, no Freudian Excuse or other sympathetic qualities. I think by the time he was hurling death threats at the children, we can determine he did not care about them and only saw them as pawns.
Is he energy creature and those beings morality can be hard to determine. However other energy beings have shown to have to moral agency in this universe.
I don't know if you can argue he is Made of Evil or not, it seems like the children rejecting him seems to have gotten rid of him and while the children reject him, he loses his more pleasant form and becomes uglier, however there is no direct evidence he is Made of Evil.
Final Verdict?
I think he could count, bad acting aside.
I will do an effort post on Malik, the Enterprise villain I mentioned before, in the coming days.
edited 25th Dec '15 9:09:19 PM by Overlord
Gorgan (I guess I'm not the only one who watches SF Debris
).
Gorgan
As for Lugae, well I will agree he doesn't count because he fails heinous standard. But I wouldn't say he wouldn't count anyway. If other villains who count would not exist, Lugae would qualify very easily. He makes very good use of his limited screentime.
edited 25th Dec '15 8:37:19 PM by emperors
Welcome to the world of greatest media!BTW, I think I'll do the Star Wars stuff (thanks Scraggle) and SCP stuff tomorrow, but here's the stuff for Monday:
- Darkseid: Born Prince Uxas, he is one of the New Gods, is the ultimate God of Evil in the DC Universe, and is the Trope Codifier for Dystopia Justifies the Means. As Evil Overlord of Apokolips, Darkseid subjects its denizens to hellish conditions with the overwhelming majority of the population ill-treated slaves. His Elite fare no better as Darkseid is all too willing to subject them to hideous tortures or obliteration should they fail him. Darkseid detests all that is good in the universe and seeks to extend his influence everywhere he can. While he once loved someone, his mother, Heggra, wanting to make him evil killed Suli, helping turn Darkseid into the Galactic Conqueror we know him as (but not before he had Heggra poisoned). During Final Crisis, Darkseid is dying, and so wants to destroy the multiverse and all life in it as a final gesture. He kills his son Orion to gain dominion over Earth. Once there, he enslaved the minds of everyone he could touch, turning them into savage parodies of themselves, intending to as he said "murder their souls and take them to hell without end." His ultimate motive is to use the Anti-Life Equation to Rob everybody of free will and turn them all into mindless zombies who worship him as a god while he tortures them eternally, all for fun. Just as bloodthirsty and monstrous as any of those who serve him, Darkseid combines urbane sophistication, limitless cruelty and insatiable drive for power, and is the one single villain that all the heroes despise and fear.
- 10 To Midnight: Warren Stacy is a handsome young Serial Killer with an intense hatred for women. He murders Betty, a co-worker he had gone out with once in the past, along with her boyfriend, by stabbing them both to death in the woods. Later, while breaking into Betty’s apartment to steal her diary, he kills her roommate when she comes home. Finally, he stalks and makes obscene phone calls to Detective Leo Kessler’s daughter Laurie, and at the film’s climax, murders all three of her roommates before chasing her down the street with a knife, all while in the nude. When confronted, Warren shows no remorse and promises Kessler that he'll come back.
- Children Of The Living Dead: Abbott Hayes was a vicious Serial Killer and Serial Rapist in life. Upon being murdered in prison, Abbott returned from the grave as a hyper-intelligent Flesh-Eating Zombie. Leading a horde of zombies in an attack on his home town, Abbott was forced to go into hiding after the outbreak was contained, but not before killing Deputy Hughes. Fourteen years later, Abbott resurfaces, intending to restart the outbreak. Abbott kills and infects those around him, transforming them into his new zombie horde, and leads them in a brutal assault on the town, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people. Whereas the other zombies were mindless flesh-eaters, Abbott shows clear intelligence and awareness, and sought the death of all who lived.
- Dirty Harry: Charles Davis, better known as The Scorpio Killer, is a psychotic madman who kills for money, but mainly for his own amusement. After sniping a swimming woman, he demands $100,000 in payment or he will continue his killing spree. After he is foiled in another killing attempt, he murders a young boy and then makes an attempt to kill a priest, killing a police officer in the process. He then kidnaps a 14-year-old girl and buries her alive, demanding a ransom in exchange for her life. When Harry Callahan arrives with the money, Scorpio strikes him down and reveals that he was going to let the girl die anyways. The police find the girl, but are unable to save her life. Scorpio's final gambit is to hold a school bus full of children hostage, planning to kill them all. Upon being foiled by Callahan, Scorpio threatens to shoot a young boy fishing. He finally attempts to shoot Callahan before being shot dead. Cowardly and sadistic, Scorpio provides a contrast with loose cannon cop Harry Callahan, who, despite his methods, ultimately aimed to give criminals apt punishments when the bureaucratic justice system wouldn't.
- Hansel & Gretel Get Baked: Agnes is a vile witch with a predilection for murder and cannibalism. Agnes lures oblivious people into her household and subjects them to grotesque torture before sucking out their youth to replenish her own. She kidnaps Gretel's boyfriend, Ashton, and mutilates him horrifically, including tearing out his eye and eating it. When her dealer Manny warns her that a local drug kingpin is coming for her, Agnes kills him before doing the same to the kingpin and his henchmen. She kidnaps Gretel and her friend Bianca and later attempts to cook Gretel's brother Hansel alive. She succeeds in murdering Bianca before seemingly being killed by Hansel and Gretel. However, she survives and promptly murders a man to steal his car.
- In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: Gallian is an Evil Sorcerer who is defined by his belief that he is Above Good and Evil. Magically influencing the primitive, ogre-like Krug into becoming his soldiers, Gallian wages war against the Kingdom of Ehb. He attacks a local village, slaughtering or imprisoning its inhabitants, and personally kills Zeph, Farmer's young son. In the following bloodshed, Gallian's forces kill King Konreid. Gallian later discovers that Farmer's wife, Solana, is pregnant, and uses her as bait to lure in Farmer, who is actually the King's son Camden Konreid. He ultimately kills the magus Merick, declaring that madness will thus forth be known as power. During his final duel with Farmer, he taunts him about his son's death.
- Empire from the Ashes: Anu, from Mutineers' Moon, was once the Chief Engineer of the space station Dahak. He led a mutiny against the captain, and made sure the ensuing fight caused as much bloodshed as possible. Later trapped on Earth thanks to Dahak's automated defenses, Anu put thousands of his army into stasis, then used their bodies as vessels for him and his most loyal followers when their bodies wore out. Anu then began instigating many of history's biggest wars and atrocities, with people like Adolf Hitler himself having acted on Anu's orders. After Colin and an army of rebels start thwarting Anu's plans, Anu begins ordering the destruction of random cities on the off chance any rebel bases are located in them. When the rebels lead an assault on Anu's HQ, Anu activates automated weaponry, targeting friend and foe alike, and, when beaten, tries to detonate all of his bases' reactors around the globe, which would result in countless amounts of death and destruction across the world. Psychopathic, narcissistic, and bloodthirsty, Anu stood out as the most wicked villain in the series.
- Kingdom Hospital: Ebenezer Gottreich is the head of a mill which uses the slave labor of men, women and children; his brother Klaus is a sadistic and insane doctor at a hospital, where he performs torturous experiments on his patients. After the Civil War, Ebenezer's mill was a collapsing business, with the slave labor having revolted, and so he planned to save money by burning down his mill, and killing his employees. In the fire, hundreds of his employees are killed, mostly the children. Later, he has the survivors "treated" at his brother's hospital. When Ebenezer discovers one of the children, Mary, survived the fire, and witnessed his scheme, he has Klaus take her in. Klaus would later kill Mary in a lobotomy experiment, despite her insisting she never saw anything and promising not to tell anyone.
- Just Cause series:
- Just Cause 2: President Pandak "Baby" Panay is the oppressive and brutal dictator of Panau. Having usurped and assassinated his father, Panau's previous, benevolent, president, Panak immediate begins his regime by stripping away the rights of his citizens, and increasing his power in the military. If anyone questions his government, he has them tortured and killed. During the revolution, Panak has innocent civilians arrested, tortured and sometimes killed for minor offenses. When the prisons became full, Panak orders an Execution Day to put all prisoners to death. After a botched attempt to kill him, Panak retaliates by ordering a nuclear strike against Russia, America, China and Japan, whilst attempting to kill Rico Rodriguez, promising to make his suffering legendary.
- Just Cause 3: General Sebastiano Di Ravello is the brutal dictator of Medici, as well as a sociopathic Pyromaniac. Having usurped Medici's democratic politician Rosa Maunuela, in addition to starting a civil war, in which he had President Dante ripped limb from limb, Di Ravello also uses forced labor to mine the magnetic and explosive element of bavarium, to make super weapons for world domination; it is implied he wishes to do this to satisfy his pyromaniac needs. It is also revealed he was behind the coup that killed Rico Rodriguez's parents, as part of a deal he made with the Agency. When introduced, he orders one of his men to kill themselves for failing to stop the rebels, before ordering his army to raze the liberated town of Costa Del Porto. He later has Dimah tortured for not mining bavarium fast enough. When he has a a bavarium missile built, he decides to test it by launching it on another town. Exasperated by Rico's interfering with his plans, he beats one of his men to death and orders another attack and calls for the assassination of Manuela. Even when defeated, he has no remorse for his actions, only lamenting the end of his empire before deciding it's only fitting his legacy "ends in flames".
- Max Steel (2013):
- Miles Dredd is Max Steel's Arch-Enemy, and one of the most monstrous villains in the series. Having assisted scientist Jim McGrath in harnessing the power of TURBO Energy, Dredd betrayed and seemingly murdered his partner, though at a price: Dredd now craved TURBO Energy as a power source for himself. Creating the corporation THI, which specialized in black market arms dealings and chemical weapons, Dredd began relentlessly pursuing any form of TURBO he could find, and, when he learns Max Steel produces an unlimited supply of it, Dredd becomes obsessed with the boy, regularly trying to painfully drain him of his life energy. Believing Max to be a high school student, Dredd has an occupied high school set aflame to test his theory, and, when Max confronts him later, Dredd targets a school bus full of young teens during the battle. Dredd tries numerous methods throughout the series to destroy the highly-populated city of Copper Canyon, from draining the life force of the citizens, to launching a nuke at the city. Revealed to have made a deal with Makino to assist him in annihilating the human race, Dredd plans to betray his master, take over his armada, and conquer everything in his path once the Earth is destroyed.
- The aforementioned Makino is the most powerful and deadliest villain Max Steel has ever faced and The Man Behind the Man to Dredd. Creating the Ultra-Link species, Makino began absorbing entire worlds into himself, destroying the planets and all their inhabitants in the process. Makino uses Jim McGrath as a living battery to power his super weapon, the Alpha-Link. Having made a deal with Dredd, which involves Dredd assisting him in destroying the Earth, Makino immediately betrays his partner at his earliest convenience and tries to murder him. Capturing Steel, a former Ultra-Link, Makino tortures Steel to learn why he rebelled against him. While fighting Max Steel, Makino takes sick pleasure in beating him down and taunting him about the Earth's imminent destruction, and, when his plans are foiled, Makino makes one last attempt to murder Max and his long-lost father.
edited 28th Dec '15 7:40:41 AM by ACW
Suggestion for the Image Links page: Karl Rademacher
◊ from The Outer Limits.

Lugae has two confirmed kills in his entry and that's it. If that's all then he wouldn't even make the cut in a franchise without those kinds of characters.
If this is true, then maybe we ought to also give the ax to Shou Tucker from Full Metal Alchemist, given that his body count is just two humans and one animal, and he's in a series with far worse kinds of characters inhabiting it.