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
Someone mentioned Ursula (The Little Mermaid), uuggh.
She cares for Flotsam and Jetsam and goes all Mama Bear over their deaths, discussion closed, court is adjourned. *clock clock clock*
We've rejected everyone from Assassin's Creed, right? I suppose I can just throw up a blanket denial there.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I think the point is that the AC 'verse is such a Crapsack World that nobody is heinous enough to stand out from the pack.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"We definitely discussed a few Iron Man villains (and Loki ad nauseam - go ahead and throw Loki up in the most asked as well). I can't remember which, but I'd vote them all not counting. Stane doesn't do anything too heinous by the standards of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (going after ONE MAN and his ginger secretary to keep your position... versus blowing up New York).
@5937 My only real question about Larry Meeks would be whether or not he truly stands out amongst the slashers. I'm quite convinced by that write-up that he hits all of the other criteria, but we are talking about the World Of Darkness - it's among the crap-sackiest of Crapsack World entries. And we are talking about a splat specifically about Serial Killers - even excluding the truly monstrous examples from the main splats (like certain examples of the True Fae from Changeling The Lost), is Meeks truly that much head-and-shoulders above the rest? He could be... but it also sounds like this might be one of those cases where I vote no simply because he doesn't stand out from a crowd of very similar nominees.
@5939 Fair enough; when I saw the initial arguments, it looked like this was specifically a repeat of the sexism problem. Not that the entry wasn't problematic, of course, nor is the problem I thought it was non-existent elsewhere. I just got the wrong type of problem at first glance.
@5940 Seriously, I gave opinions to all the Ace Attorney examples in @3404
. To repeat, I want Engarde's entry reworded, but I would like to keep him.
@5942 There's a significant distinction between obsession and love - that's what keeps those two on the list. Also, regarding Bellatrix's marriage - while I haven't actually read Harry Potter yet, I would like to note that loveless marriages exist all over the place for a variety of reasons - political alliance, trying to get something that the other has, personal expediency, arranged marriage, and several others. Simply being married is not an indicator either way of Complete Monster status. Now, if they were Sickeningly Sweethearts in said marriage, then we have a disqualifier.
@5945 As much as many folks here (as responses show) would love to move Complete Monster back out of YMMV, I think we all universally regard it as the second-to-last step in the cleanup process (the last being to judge new entries as they come in once the cleanup is considered done, to make sure it never becomes a problem again). We've done more work than quite a few people ever expected to have done regarding the trope (remember when we used to get regular calls to axe the trope? I sure do). But there's still much more to be done to even think about moving it out of YMMV.
Also, to be fair, given how much problem this has been in the past, even once we do get this effort completed, I imagine the mods would probably want to be convinced to move this out of YMMV. Even considering that at least two mods (Fighteer and lu127) are semi-regulars in this thread and may be sympathetic to the idea, I know a lot of effort and persuasive discourse will be needed on a lot of mods before we can perform such a move. We will have to eloquently not only show that we have solved the problem, but that we will keep the problem from arising in the future.
I'm not even at the stage where I'm practicing my arguments yet. So I think all such talk is extremely premature.
@5948 You're not bringing up any new information, and you're missing the crux of the arguments against their inclusion. Please reread @4368, which really has an excellent blow-by-blow as to why neither qualifies. A much more truncated version is my agreement to those in @5201.
@5953 Let me echo Fighteer on this one. Really, people? Heck, even before you get into the whole problem with a Player Character on the list (it's in the FAQ for a reason), you have to keep in mind that the Pyro is canonically so insane that he doesn't even realize that he's killing people (in other words, seriously, watch Meet The Pyro... took Vale long enough to actually make/release it, not that Valve being slow on a release is a surprise to anyone). At absolute most, you could claim the Pyro is Obliviously Evil, which is an auto-disqualifier.
@5957 I could theoretically see keeping the Mr. Freeze entry for the Adam West Batman if someone came in here and gave an absolute knockout argument for his inclusion. Until that day comes, cut him. Siren is easier; simply cut her completely (really no different than what other villains try, and she certainly doesn't stand out from that show).
For the Goosebumps examples, most of those need to be cut, because they're simply stubs with no explanation. Menace is the only one I might consider, but even that would require a rewrite (what the hell is PP?). Cut the whole thing; if the troper who put that in can come here and argue for inclusion, I may reconsider.
@5961 A rewrite on Carnage would be in order, because I remember him quite well; he qualifies. I think I'd have to do more delving into Norman Osborne; various adaptations are mixing in my head, and I'm starting to be fuzzy on just which things the comic version did and didn't do (I nearly gave him credit for loving both his son and Peter, until I remembered that was just really good acting from Willem Dafoe in the first Sam Raimi movie).
@5972 Fighteer did already put a blanket ban on further Disney villain discussion in the OP. That said, Scar has come up way more often than I like (Ursula, thankfully, hasn't).
@5974 All My Little Pony villains are already on the list.
@5982 I don't find anything to show us discussing Obadiah Stane, actually. I think he fails the heinous standard. For the other example on the page for YMMV.Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think Red Skull ought to be cut for lack of onscreen actions. Yes, he's evil, but we don't see him actually do all that much. He's doing a bit of the Orcus on His Throne routine.
edited 21st Dec '12 9:04:44 AM by 32_Footsteps
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.The Red Skull is one of the few I could see qualifying. At the very start of the movie, he has a village slaughtered, personally kills the Priest who was keeping the Tesseract from him, later we see his PO Ws have been mistreated and he uses them in wartime experiments, and he attempts to blow up New York and multiple other major cities, including berlin, and outright murders men from his own side when they object.
Again, in terms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the worst thing depicted on screen is an insane melee in the middle of New York that's shown to cause numerous casualties afterwards, with memorials and news coverage treating it like a terrorist attack. Red Skull is heinous, but not to that standard. Not yet, anyways, we probably have something like twelve Marvel movies coming down the pipeline for him to meet the qualifications in.
However, Skull was just barely stopped from doing far worse to New York and possibly dozens of other cities besides. And I think the Skull qualifies for what he does in Captain America by that one's standards. Captain America as a film stands pretty well on its own, and even if he might not have achieved the same bodycount as the Chitauri (we have no idea if the Skull's village slaughter had more or less casualties than that),but it sure wasn't for lack of trying
edited 21st Dec '12 9:26:58 AM by Lightysnake
@ 5979
Yeah, we have rejected almost everyone except Majd Addin. I think that he is a very clear example and we already had a consensus on him back on page 40-something.
—>"Of course not, I killed them because I could. Because it was fun! Do you know what it feels like to determine another man's fate? And did you see the way the people cheered? The way they feared me? I was like a god, you'd have done the same if you could, such power!"
Honestly, I see nothing to disqualify him. Now, I can understand why Borgia doesn't belong. Borgia's victims are mostly his enemies, while Majd Addin executes mass of innocent people just for kicks.
edited 21st Dec '12 9:41:34 AM by Krystoff
I think they make enough of it in the film itself, though. Now, if we judge it by Captain America alone, the Skull passes with what I would call flying colors. I don't think one should be forced to see the other movies to see if the Skull qualifies. It's not like these movies are one cohesive storyline, but rather than thy just take place in the same cinematic universe.
Here are the Skull's crimes, though:
1. The mass slaughter at the film's start, complete with prsonal murder. As I said before, this might already push him over the Chitauri body count
2. Having PO Ws experimented on, and killed.
3. Attempting to vaporize almost every major city in the Allies and the Axis powers. He genuinely attempts this, and targeted New York out of seemingly nothing but spite for Cap at the end,and proceeds to murder other Nazis when they object.
I'll leave off really generic villain things like killing his own men out of frustration. But I see this guy as far more heinous than Stane, General Ross, Abomination, or Loki. the Chitauri bodycount would be absolutely eclipsed by the S Kull if Rogers hadn't stopped him
What did we conclude with respect to Loki? Well-Intentioned Extremist, insufficiently heinous, or both?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The entirety of Thor is a long Break the Cutie / Break the Haughty moment for Loki, and his actions there wildly offset his actions in The Avengers. There are also a huge amount of theories suggesting that Loki wasn't working out of his own free will in The Avengers, not to mention that The Other threatens him with a Fate Worse than Death should he renege on their "deal". I'd also say falling through a wormhole kind of... makes you go... a little too crazy to really think through what you're doing.
edited 21st Dec '12 9:45:41 AM by LargoQuagmire
depends on the film. In Thor, he's a clear well intentioned extremist and is more the Tragic Villain. In The Avengers it's pretty clear he's just a pawn of Thanos, and had his mind too warped, plus insufficiently heinous actions.
The Skull? No Freudian Excuse (it's made clear he was twisted before he took the super soldier formula), utterly heinous and the only reason he doesn't kill a significant portion of the earth's population is him being stopped in the 11th hour
edited 21st Dec '12 9:46:54 AM by Lightysnake
So he fails moral agency? Sympathetic justification? I want a simple reason to put in the list.
edited 21st Dec '12 9:46:58 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'd say Loki passes moral agency just barely. He's been twisted, but he's still doing it himself. He's just a pawn in a larger game. In thor? Too sympathetic, Well-Intentioned Extremist
The Avengers? Not heinous enough
edited 21st Dec '12 9:47:55 AM by Lightysnake

Dear god.
The worst thing about this wiki is that it lacks the function to keep track of when people add this stuff. It'd be awesome if we could set up a macro that alerts us whenever a banned character is mentioned in the same sentance as Complete Monster in the right work. Or sends us an alert whenever a new instance of Complete Monster is first ended on a page (but not the second or third times).