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
I'm gonna
Alexis's mom. Willingly making your daughter think she was raped by her own father, and getting said father arrested and murdered? I'd say it's heinous enough for what appears to be a realistic setting. Edgar being murdered may not have been intentional, but from my understanding, paedophiles being the lowest on the prison pecking order is fairly common knowledge, and thus a foreseeable consequence. Correct me if I'm wrong, Lighty, but wouldn't that qualify as murder for legal purposes?
Having read that Creepypasta, I can attest that it's nothing like that other dreck we've disqualified (Story itself isn't extremely good, IMO, but at least it's not "Evil Mom does evil things to daughter for reasons"). It's more of a....psychological horror-thingy that has a Bittersweet Ending, with emphasis on the Bitter.
Anywho, as for the candidate, I've gotta give her a
for various reasons.
- She remarried, and that relationship seemed completely normal for the most part.
- Honestly, besides the Mind Rape thing, she seems to treat her daughter pretty well. Like, the only reason she even tried to get rid of the father was so that she could keep her daughter fully, and once she has her fully, she treats her like a normal mother (If Alexis' memories serve her right).
- Finally, the biggest one, heinousness. Now, what she did to her daughter was HORRIBLE. MEH for sure. However.....that's it. One crime. Personall, for me, unless it's repeated (ALA a Serial Killer and/or Rapist), one crime, regardless of the repercussions it has, isn't enough to make a CM. And ultimately, the only crime she committed was Mind Rape, along with some well-placed lies.
Oh, and as for works that I'm surprised don't have a CM:
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, if only because it seems to have everything else.
- Kirby series (not including the anime), because it's a prime example of Vile Villain, Saccharine Show. I guess too many of the final bosses fall under GDV.
You mean the TV series where our main character spends valuable time putting a grenade in a fridge, and then neatly putting it in an egg tray?
@ACW: Completely skipped over that. Clearly I have acute vision.
But yeah, Kirby isn't really a series that's strong - or even consistent - with characterization. One moment, say, Meta Knight's attempting a tyrannical takeover over Dream Land with his giant airship and attempting to directly kill Kirby. The next, he's chilling in a field reading a book. This applies to all of the characters (Kirby himself not excluded) and even though some of the recent games have been featuring some more dialogue, it's still pretty inconsistent (the villain of one of the games, Magolor, magically appears in the next game after having explicitly died, and he's good for some reason). The strongest characterization a Kirby villains ever gotten is the Big Bad of the upcoming game (who I won't dare talk about further than that due to the fact it's not even out in the West yet).
So, yeah. If a Kirby villain ever gets any modicum of development, they'll usually end up having a reason for being evil or they'll undergo a Heel–Face Turn (Marx really being the only exception). Out of Nintendo's roster, I'd say it's the least likely to have a for-sure Monster.
edited 31st May '16 8:55:40 AM by Scraggle
I gotta bring up The Witcher. Now, before I get people annoyed at me for bringing up too early, I am NOT bringing up Blood and Wine DLC. I haven't even played it yet. But what I noticed that on the third game's YMMV page, two more villains have been added as C Ms. The other 3 (Eredin, Whoreson Junior, and Hubert Rejk) were universally agreed keeps. The other two however, not so much. They are:
- In the same quest, there's also Reverend Nathaniel Pastodi, the one the Concerned Citizen frames for his crimes. He's an easy frame-up, after all - he was Novigrad's head torturer for years before the Church of the Eternal Fire took over, after which he donned the frock of a cleric and was given supervision of the city morgue. He particularly enjoyed torturing women, and he pays to burn prostitutes with a hot poker just because that's what gets him off. Even when Geralt finds he's not guilty of the Concerned Citizen murders, he can still kill Nathanial, and Dandelion notes that this time, he takes no issue with Geralt being judge, jury and executioner.
- Morkvarg in the side quest "In Wolf's Clothing." A pirate who raped and pillaged from coast to coast, he murdered the priestesses of Freya in their own holy garden and then laughed, and in his journal he mentions that there wasn't much treasure, but plenty of "good entertainment." The head priestess cursed him with lycanthropy and a hunger that can never be sated, as food turns to ash in his mouth. Even his former crew think he had it coming. If Geralt lifts the curse and turns him human again, he makes it clear that he's totally unrepentant and plans on taking up his old hobbies as soon as possible.
Now, Nathaniel is an easy cut because he fails the heinous standard while Morkvarg… never actually played a quest with him but from what I read it sounds like too much of it is offscreen.
Welcome to the world of greatest media!Regarding Alexis' mom: Even though she didn't openly abuse her daughter, I still wouldn't count that as a disqualifier. She still mind raped her just to keep up the illusion that her ex-husband was an evil pedophile. Her daughter was traumatized for years, and endured great mental pain, yet she just allowed it to happen and even continued to lie after she'd been found out. With that in mind, I don't think she really genuinely cared for her daughter and just saw her as something she wanted and didn't want to share. You take care of your stuff, don't you? Granted, that's just an assumption on my part, but it's an assumption I made using the existing characterizations. The mother's shown to be an amoral, sociopathic liar after all.
Her second marriage...okay, that's a fair point. I personally don't see that as a disqualifier, but maybe it's a bit too ambiguous. Her and her second husband don't really share any scenes together, so it's hard to say whether she genuinely loved him or not.
Heinousness may be an issue, I admit. I didn't think it would when I was doing the effortpost, but I still see the reasoning behind that.
Overall, I still believe she counts, though I will acknowledge that the opposition makes some fair points.
edited 31st May '16 10:21:43 AM by rosewood47
Do we wanna give DC Universe Animated Original Movies its own page? There are 10 now, and Lorraine + Black Adam will be an even dozen.
Until the DC animation page gets too big for the system to handle, I would rather keep all the DC animation examples on one page.
Also at the risk of opening Pandora's box, this renewed talk of Creepy Pasta, I wouldn't mind trying to set line between bad works that we still want to examine and works that are so trashy we don't want to bother with them.
The villain I suggested, Camilla, is from a bad 1990 horror film, but you could argue that film is not exploitative then Human Centipede, but that all depends on where we set that line. We allowed an example from Cannibal Holocaust which was a banned movie at one point (though I saw it and generally found it ridiculous). So there is a line somewhere between works that are bad, but worth examining and works that are so trashy that they are not worth our time.
I think this separate from the fan fiction question, which can involve twisted versions of beloved characters, which has an extra dimension to it, I am talking about original works.
edited 31st May '16 11:44:23 AM by Overlord
Checking DC Animation, the page has 13 entries in total, not counting the DC Universe Animated Original Movies.
Why so serious?

We back on the subject of Creepypasta? Wonderful. Utterly wonderful. Patient 88 is an old shame of mine now; the only reason I originally advocated for it to be kept so long ago was because it technically wasn't mindless Torture Porn. It's still a godawful, amateur story reminiscent of about a thousand "supernatural killer origin story" in the vein of Jeff that are exactly like it.
Anyways, not convinced the candidate brought up counts.