Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

Tamashiro

Yes to Irving and the Souls duo, now I'm following the crowd and switching to a no for the Yakuza baddie.

Oh, and the Souls duo? I'll just edge to a yea... the lack of interesting personality and how indirect their villainy is do give me some pause but that bit with the village is utterly horrible. Easily one of the worst crimes I've seen pass through this thread lately.

to Irving - not sure why he would be controversial at all, honestly. Yes, the protagonist being an assassin sets the heinousness standard fairly high, but he sounds awful all the same.

Irving and I've decided to the Soul duo as well.

I'm afraid I must Tamashiro now. He's a dick for sure, but if Mine ordered it? I don't think he has enough personal vileness to count, even with the bull thing and the thing with the abusive mother and traumatised daughter - OK, writing that stuff does make me almost reconsider... I don't wanna flip flop on this!

As for Mine, before anyone asks, he doesn't count. He has redeeming qualities and gets a Redemption Equals Death moment.

For Reinhardt, sounds familiar.

Any more votes on Dr. Lorenzo Cameron?

Irving/Reinhardt. I could swear we had a strikingly similar character, a "kindly" old man who murdered refugees trying to escape the Nazis while pretending to help them, in here before, but I can't recall his name.

edited 13th Sep '17 5:52:02 PM by HamburgerTime

to Cameron.

Heard joke once. After the Nazis went down and Berlin was experiencing horrible poverty, a woman was walking through the streets. Blind old man bumps into her, gives her an envelope, and asks her if she would please take it to an address for him. Says it will help starving people. Woman agrees, but as she walks off, she turns around and sees the supposedly blind old man running through a crowd, deftly dodging and weaving away. Now confused, the woman instead brings the envelope to local police. Days later, she returns to the station, where she is informed that the police raided the address and discovered a group of meat butchers carving up a person. They had been butchering and selling human meat to the starving masses for profit. As the stunned woman prepares to leave, she asks what exactly was in the envelope the old man gave her. Detective in charge tells her nothing was in it but a single piece of paper that simply read:

"This is the last one I'm sending you today."

Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on drum snare. Curtains.

Playing catch-up....'Yes' to Silver Horn, the Soul duo, Cameron, and Irving. Gonna say 'No' to Tamashiro.

Alrighty, got us a brand spanking new candidate here. This one took a LONG while to get to, considering how hard it was to track down and read the exact comics he appears in, so let's do it.

What's the work?

Battle Action Force was a 1980's British comic strip, based around a team of super goverment soldiers called the Action Force. The entire concept was loosely based on America's G.I. Joe comics.

Who is he?

Baron Ironblood is the Big Bad of the entire comic, and the archfoe of the Action Force. A power hungry madman who leads the terrorist organization known as the Red Shadows, Ironblood is obsessed with dominating all he sees, and is willing to do anything to achieve this goal.

What has he done?

Quick note: So as to avoid redundancy, unless I SPECIFICALLY say otherwise? Ironblood's plans get thwarted by Action Force. This will prevent too many counts of "Luckily, his plan is thwarted" and all that jazz.

Ironblood's origins are a mystery. Some say he was the son of a Swiss diplomat, others say he just popped up out of thin air. The first recorded account of a likely Ironblood showng was when a man calling himself "the Baron," serving in a war, slaughtered prisoners of war for fun, and later deserted the army and began instigating various attacks throughout the world.

Now then, in his first appearance in the story proper, Ironblood leads an assault on Ascendancy, a highly populated island, where he instantly guns down several people. Ironblood then broadcasts a message to the world at large that, if he is not paid four hundred million dollars, he will detonate a "super bomb" on the island, destroying it and wiping out its population.

Later, Ironblood takes over one of the Action Force's space stations so as to gain intelligence on the Action Force's members and kill them all. During this takeover, Ironblood murders anyone in his way, and plans to fling several of the remaining crew members out of an airlock for the lulz once done with his plan.

In another plan, Ironblood develops a deadly laser weapon with which he sets ablaze a large field in a plain, where he then informs nearby governments that if they don't pay him ransom, he will begin targetting highly populated cities with it.

Ironblood later invades a tribe of savages in a third world country who he tricks into thinking he is a god, after which he uses them to attack government soldiers, planning to use them to cause chaos and disorder throughout the country, then take advantsge of it to take over said country. When this fails, Ironblood simply tries to brute force his way into attacking and slaughtering his way into 4 major cities.

Bombing several oil barges, killing the dozens of workers on them in the process, Ironblood plans to use the oil shortage to blackmail several countries into subjugating themselves to him.

Ironblood invades the British village of Highland, murders the dozens of police and security there, and holds the entire place hostage while he makes new plans for conquest. While later fleeing a failed plan, Ironblopd dresses up dozens of his men as himself to draw fire while he flees, personally murdering several Action Force soldiers who try to stop him along the way.

Ironblood is also an absolutely horrendous boss. He runs brutal training regiments where seventy troops being reduced to only a dozen left alive is a regular occurence. While overseeing one of these sessions, Ironblood notices that a soldier was literally one second over the time slot for the course. Ironblood promptly shoots the man dead. In another event, when one of Ironblood's plans are ruined, he flings a freaking grenade into a group of his men who, as an aside, had NO responsibility for said failure, in a tantrum, then remarks when only two of them survive that the rest were "unworthy" of living.

Other instances of his awful employer status....Ironblood feeds his men to sharks, brainwashes them all into becoming fanatics who kill themselves rather than face capture, turns them into walking bombs that he uses as suicide bombers, and regularly kills them in the process of trying to kill the Action Force, such as locking them in the same room as the Action Force then pumping poison gas into it. Oh, and when one of his soldiers actually questions his habit of killing his own troops? Ironblood unsurprisingly shoots him dead.

Eventually, Ironblood, realizing that his plans constantly being thwarted is no good, decides to remake himself and his organization, and to this end, leaks the locations of all of his bases and locations of his soldiers, leading to them being slaughtered by the Action Force, thus ending the Red Shadows.

With his former organization destroyed by his own hand, Ironblood creates a new persona for himself, one based on a slithering reptile he has come to admire....Ironblood renames himself Cobra Commander, creates a new terrorist organization called COBRA, and painfully transforms one of his loyal general's faces into a metal mask, calling him Destro.

So.....yeah, the comic? Went from a G.I. Joe rip-off to a full-on adaptation, taking characters straight out of the Joe comics and making them their own while simultaneously turning some of their own characters into preexisting Joe characters, as seen with Ironblood.

Alrighty, so Ironblood Cobra Commander, with his new organization COBRA, tries many acts of terrorism in his plans for world domination, from bombing major cities to leading fullscale invasions, until finally, he organizes a successful invasion of London, where he brutally executes any innocents who resist as he institutes martial law. Cobra Commander ultimately plans to hold all of London as his hostage, threatening to start massacring civilians by the dozen if the Action Force interferes, and use it as his homebase as he organizes similar takeovers worldwide.

Cobra Commander later begins running horrific child experimentation camps, where children are kidnapped, brainwashed, and genetically experimented on until they become mutated slaves of COBRA's.

Cobra Commander also continues his trend of being an absolute asshat of a boss, feeding his minions to snakes for the pettiest of reasons, abusing his loyal Dragons even right after they save his life, and gunning down one of his soldiers for fleeing a battle to bring him good news.

Though sometimes forced to temporarily team up with an Action Force member or two when circumstances put them both in a deadly situation, Cobra Commander constantly tries to stab them in the back or betray them at every turn.

Oh, and Cobra Commander at one point sends his troops to assist a freaking Nazi regime in their plans to clone Adolf Hitler. Yuuuuup.

Cobra Commander's crowning moment of depravity comes when he plans to release a lethal plague into the atmosphere, wait for people to start dropping dead, then force the entire planet into servitude in exchange for the vaccination. Any who refuse his rule will be refused the cure and die.

In his final apperance, Cobra Commander just goes completely insane when one of his plans fails, grabbing up a machine gun, psychotically gunning down an entire room of his soldiers, then locking himself in said room with their rotting corpses, killing anyone who tries to enter the room, and later, when Zartan, one of his top agents, returns from a mission to locate Action Force's HQ, Cobra Commander calms down.....only for him to snap again when Zartan reveals he didn't actually learn the Action Force's HQ location, sending Cobra Commander into a frenzy once more, opening fire on everyone in sight while screaming "DIEDIEDIEIDIE!!!!"

And that's all, folks. Marvel OFFICIALLY bought the rights to the Action Force comic, and promptly incorporated it into their "canon" G.I. Joe franchise, so everything afterwards became canon in the American comics, where Cobra Commander does NOT count and Baron Ironblood doesn't even exist, so....yeah.

Finally, despite many of his plans being foiled before they could reach full fruition? Ironblood/Cobra Commander is still explicitly stated numerous times to have a bodycount that is easily in the thousands.

Freudian Excuse or other redeeming features?

Nada. Ironblood/Cobra Commander's backstory is never given an in-depth look so as to maintain his mystery, thus his only reasoning for his crimes is "I'm evil!!!"

No redeeming features either, unsurprisingly. Ironblood/Cobra Commander treats everyone, even his most loyal soldiers, as pawns and toys to be used then discarded at his leisure.

Any other issues?

There were these...REALLY weird 3 or 4 issues of the comic where Cobra Commander tries to....steal in-story Action Force comic books because they portray him as weak, and breaks the fourth wall to gloat in a very 80s G.I. Joe cartoon way. This is extremely goofy, and Cobra Commander is portrayed as a halfwit here, but besides this HELLA Big-Lipped Alligator Moment? He's played dead seriously, with only a VERY few moments of levity when he is beaten or acting like the Dirty Coward he is between his horrific mass murderings and the like.

With this in mind? I don't see it as disqualifying. If he was played this goofy throughout the comic, then absolutely I would think he didn't count. But considering it's like 3 issues in the middle of an 80+ issue series? I think we can just chalk it up to some weird backstage junk.

And while Ironblood/Cobra Commander does have that cheesy, over-the-top feel about him (See: Assisting Nazis in cloning Hitler), it doesn't in any way downplay his villainy. He's a very serious threat who also just so happens to be a cackling, over-the-top lunatic.

Heinousness?

Worst villain in-story EASILY, being behind nearly every evil in the story in some form or another, and with no one else approaching his level of evil.

Also well over the baseline as well.

Final Verdict?

Yet another....sort of....version of Cobra Commander for the Keep, I'd say.

edited 13th Sep '17 10:12:45 PM by Ravok

I've got one more to propose while I'm still up for tonight... follow that up with a book candidate and then I'll write up my load.

What's the setting?

Bridge of Dragons, a 1999 film starring Dolph Lundgren, a deliberate use of Anachronism Stew to invoke a sort of unique setting somewhere where "the past and future meet." Lundgren plays Warchild, a soldier in a nameless kingdom recently taken over by his superior General Ruechang, a cold, militaristic man who succeeded as regent in the wake of the death of the king in an unfortunate accident. The late king's daughter, Princess Halo, is due to marry Ruechang and take over as queen, but a sinister conspiracy is revealed... the death of Halo's father? No accident... and, of course, our regent played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa himself is to blame.

Who is General Ruechang? What has he done?

Leader of the court and army of the kingdom, Ruechang is a scheming, power-hungry man often called a butcher who covets the throne for himself. Personally murdering the good king himself, Ruechang takes over as regent and turns the kingdom into a militaristic hellhole where dissenters are either rounded up or slaughtered. Ruechang vies to exterminate a persistent rebellion that's popped up in response to his regime, and seeks to assure his rule by marrying the unwilling Halo... presenting a weak guise of a noble man who only wants what's best for Halo and the kingdom, but quickly slipping into fits of violence and physically abusing Halo whenever she gets out of line. Ruechang is first introduced in the wake of a decimation of a recent rebellion at the hands of Ruechang's finest soldier, Warchild, whom Ruechang raised himself after saving him from the work camps... not out of any altruistic reasoning, of course, but simply to made a blindly obedient soldier out of him. One surviving member of the rebellion defies and challenges Ruechang as he's being led off, and Ruechang calmly offers to let the man fight for his freedom, before effortlessly beating the man down and slowly cutting his throat open in front of his soldiers.

Ruechang's planned wedding with Halo ends up going awry as Halo tricks Ruechang into postponing the wedding and fleeing the kingdom to find the rebellion. Ruechang orders Warchild to track her down within a week in time for the wedding, leading to a wild ride that ends with Warchild and Halo growing a mutual soft spot for each other. Once Warchild brings Halo back to Ruechang, Ruechang takes his frustrations out by bitch-slapping her hard enough to send her flying to the ground, prompting Warchild to take Halo himself. Ruechang, of course, is not happy and resolves to find Warchild and crush the rebellion once and for all... ultimately, Ruechang finds the camp and enacts an all-out massacre, personally leading his troops into the fray to gun down not only the defendants of the camp, but innocent, fleeing men, women, and children as well. By the time Warchild comes back to the camp. it's in burning ruins with dozens dead. Ruechang personally defeats Warchild and nearly executes him then and there before Halo implores him to spare his life. Ruechang lets him walk free... before spitefully ordering his men to track down and murder him anyways. Warchild and a soldier sympathetic to him — being his former friend and all — fake Ruechang out by delivering a medallion Halo had gifted to Warchild earlier as "proof" the deed was done.

Once Halo shoots down Ruechang's latest attempt to manipulate her, Ruechang decides to smugly rub it in her face that Warchild is dead and offers "you can live a dream, or a nightmare... your choice" as he walks out of the room. Pertinent to mention here? Ruechang also likely plans on killing Halo herself once he's fathered an heir out of her. At the grand wedding where Ruechang plans to seize power once and for all, Halo poisons the ceremonial wine she and him are meant to drink to bring them both down, but a suspicious Ruechang decides to have Halo try it first. Fortunately? Warchild bursts in to save the day and publicly revealed Ruechang murdered the king, leading to a final battle which ends with Warchild killing the evil general with the blade of his own sword. All is well, the day is saved, Warchild gets Halo, and we're all left wondering what the hell this all had to do with bridges or dragons.

Any mitigating factors?

I'd say nay. Ruechang espouses a weak facade of decency and honor when dealing with the princess and governmental affairs, but these are clearly shallow and meant for the purposes of manipulation, and while he does seem to show a level of affection for Warchild at the beginning of the movie, it's clear Warchild is just a useful tool to him and he has no compunction ordering him murdered later. To Ruechang, everyone is either a tool to be used or a rebel to be put down; he has no loyalty to anything except personal gain.

As for heinousness? I say he just makes it. Ruechang has several bits of nasty personal cruelty that elevate him beyond generic villainy, from his assassination of the king, the abuse of his daughter, and a few cruel murders here and there, but what sells it for me is the utter massacre in the middle of the movie... up until now, Ruechang's villainy has mainly been relegated to people who have stood directly against him in one form or another, but once he starts coldly murdering innocent noncombatants who's only crime is associating with the actual fighting rebels? There's nothing else you can call him except a complete son of a bitch. Pass, I think.

Conclusion?

I'd say a basic keep, but a keep regardless.

Thoughts?

edited 13th Sep '17 10:21:26 PM by Scraggle

And 'Yes' to Ruechang.

Ruechang an Ironblood

HT, check my post. It's Akkermans from Zwartboek.

Ironblood.

Tagawa's, what, 4th or 5th CM? There was Funekei Yoshida, Shang Tsung, and I'm pretty sure there's at least one more.

edited 13th Sep '17 11:50:40 PM by ACW

to Ruechang, Ironblood and the Souls duo.

Yes to the above examples

Since a lot of people have proposed a number of villains from books based on comics...thought it's high time I get something like that in myself...from the Hellblazer novels by John Shirley.

The work is Hellblazer: Subterranean In this work...Tonsell-By-The-Stream, a sleepy little country own in England has vanished, devoured by the earth itself so it seems. Blackmailed, John Constantine, our main man, has to...investigate. And discovers a nightmarish situation under the earth, of which Tonsell was the first target...

Who is our Villain?

Iain Culley, the Gloomlord, was born centuries ago. A man of no consequence who dabbled into sorcery and alchemy. Culley eventually learn enough to entrap a powerful elemental spirit known as Lord Stone, imprisoning and torturing the spirit to gain its powers control over the earth. Culley forged his own subterranean kingdom below the earth.

What's Culley done?

Now...the subterranean kingdom Culley creates is utter hell. Using magic to enslave harpies and gargoyles, Culley keeps every human being as slaves, used to work and mine the place, with people brought from above to replenish those who inevitably wear out. Those deemed 'useless'? Are taken and thrown into the cooking pots to be fed to the rest. Worst still is the fate of those Culley uses to...power the underground city and restore his youth. They're entombed in the walls of a chamber, hooked up to specialized devices where their energy is sapped, but they're kept alive, in horrible pain, until they're burnt out completely while Culley restores himself. Culley's closest followers don't fare better and any hint of disloyalty is harshly punished. One of his nearest allies tried to use one of Culley's wives to get near to him...Culley murdered her horribly as a result.

It's further revealed Tonsell is just the start. Most of the people are dead, and Culley plans to expand his kingdom via using a plague he's working on...on the oceans, turning them into toxic miasmas. The end result is the remnants of humanity will flee underground, only to be enslaved by Culley while millions to billions inevitably perish on the surface. John, however, frees Lord Stone in the end who rampages to Culley, tears his arms and legs off and entombs him in his own devices after mercy killing the others there, save one who sold out Tonsell to Culley for pwoer (only for Culley to betray him and entomb him as well) to rot and be kept alive and imprisoned, with a comment that if he's bored, he might check back on him in 500-600 years...leaving Culley to scream and beg. All alone in the dark. Possibly forever.

Mitigating Qualities?

Not a single one. He has no altruistic qualities. At all. He carelessly breaks any promises he makes when convenient and has no loyalty to anyone or anything.

Heinous Standard?

It's Hellblazer. So it's dark. John Constantine runs into some of the worst beings imaginable. That said? Culley is only a human sorcerer, but the crazy stuff he gets up to is abhorrent. Massive amounts of death, slavery, forced cannibalism, And I Must Scream fates and intentions on killing millions upon millions to enslave the rest of the world...pass. Conclusion?

What say you all?

Culley. Don't know if it's in canon, but regardless, Culley seems as bad as the current qualifiers, except maybe the First, who's, you know, pretty much SATAN.

to Baron Ironblood, General Ruechang and Iain Culley.

Baron Ironblood, General Ruechang and Iain Culley.

Cameron Ironblood Ruechang.

Baron Ironblood, General Ruechang and Iain Culley.

Here comes Oda and Tohjo's writeup.

• Soul of the Samurai: Ryu Oda and Lord Gendo Tohjo are behind most tragedies of the game. The fiefdom ruler Tohjo wants to depose the Shogun and become the ruler of the land. He and Oda conspire to raid a Shogunate ship and steal the gold. Tohjo also has his minion Urabe create the parasite known as "Soul Bugs"- slugs that infect people and turn them into monsters. When Urabe fails to defeat Kotaro Hiba, Oda deems him no longer useful and leaves him to die. He also says he chose a new colony to use as hosts for the Soul Bugs: a village full of innocents to serve as a corpse army for Tohjo. The player is forced to kill them all. When Lin confronts Tohjo about the infecting of her brother Shin, he dismisses him as an useful tool whose strong will made him difficult to control. Upon reaching Oda at the real end of the game, he states that his plans can be resurrected as long as he's alive. Tohjo's ambition makes him disregard the bloodshed he causes as well as the vast domain he already rules. Oda uses him and his minions for his goal of ruling the world. Their greed and ambition cost the lives of many innocents.

All OK? Did I miss something?

edited 14th Sep '17 4:57:21 AM by MatLShini

The Gloomlord, Ruechang and Baron Commander Ironcobra.

Looks good to me.

BTW, I may have another 90s Marvel candidate by Halloween the end of this month (it's only September), and at least 1 or 2 more by the end of the year.

edited 14th Sep '17 10:05:45 AM by ACW

In regards to Tamashiro, he is acting on Mine's orders but it's clear that it's to him more an act of revenge that Mine's orders are enabling him to carry out rather than Just Following Orders. Keep in mind that Daigo Dojima, the head of the Tojo Clan and Mine's boss (and waaaaaaaaaaay up the chain, Tamashiro's boss), very explicitly said "don't harm Kiryu's orphanage." And the bull ring was all him.

Alright, I churned out a quick effortpost. Just finished the book last night. It's a lot of fun. Tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, but... you know... failed. The worst of the spoilers are in the "Mitigating Factors" since it discusses the climax of the book.

Who is he and what has he done? Molech, the Big Bad of the cyberpunk Black Comedy Futuristic Violence And Fancy Suits. Molech is a strong believer in social Darwinism and more or less the embodiment of toxic masculinity. A quick summation of the book's plot is thus: Zoey Ashe is the estranged daughter of Arthur Livingston, the richest man in a lawless city called Tabula Ra$a. When Livingston dies under mysterious circumstances, Zoey is summoned as the "key" to his inheritance. Since Everything Is Online in Tabula Ra$a (and almost everything is livestreamed to a network called "Blink" where millions of channels vie for attention), getting Zoey to the is basically turned into a competition. The major factions are Livingston's inner circle, The Suits, and Molech's faction. Turns out that Molech actually killed Livingston and stole technology he was developing to turn people into living weapons. However, the coding was flawed and Molech believes Zoey's inheritance includes "the gold," software that will make their implants work correctly. The rest of the book is spent with Molech trying to get his hands on the gold, and when he does, his reign of terror. He wants superpowers so that he can basically be a god, not just through his personal strength but by controlling who else can get superpowers, basically eventually sculpting the world in his image.

Heinousness? Hahahahahahahahah oh my. Literally the nicest thing I can say about him is that he never manages to follow through on any of his rape threats, but that's largely because he doesn't get the chance. He's introduced as The Ghost, just the leader of a nebulous group (that somehow has mysterious superpowers). Little is known of him, other than he's responsible for incredibly nasty things and he keeps sending monstrous hitmen after Zoey, a confused girl from a trailer park. When Zoey finds herself in the relative safety of Livingston's estate, Molech opts to instead send one of his men to stalk Zoey's mother, stay at her side the entire night, broadcasting the whole thing to Blink, culminating in him paralyzing her, and burying her alive and unable to move. Keep in mind these snuff broadcasts are common assignments from Molech; the first two attempts on Zoey's life were done similarly.

He's first seen onscreen in a video of Livingston's death. From Livingston's POV, we have Molech just pounding the bodies of scientists he killed, letting Livingston know he's taking the augmentations he's been developing. He mocks and belittles Livingston, and monologues for a while about his philosophy, which basically boils down to doing whatever he wants in order to feel "the juice" flowing through his system. Eventually he brutally beats Livingston to death and for good measure, blows up the block the lab was on.

When he finally gets the gold, that's when shit hits the fan. His first act is to destroy Livingston Tower with his built-in railgun. Our heroes escape, but untold people die. He then broadcasts that in seven days, he's going to go on a rampage and destroy certain targets in the city, including the security contracting force (because anyone unable to protect themselves doesn't deserve to live), a Church and a Mosque (so that people can see that there is no god other than himself), and finally Livingston's estate where Zoey is holed up. When he destroys the contractors' building, he feigns respect for their boss for fighting on the front lines with the men and when he departs, merely leaves him strung up for the men to cut him down. This turns out to be a ruse to get his men spread out in the city to converge on the base so that the bomb they left on him vaporizes them. Then he gets ahold of Zoey and beats her, only stopping from killing her because he thinks The Suits think he would kill her. So he choose to go to "Squattersville" and massacre the homeless people living there, primarily women and children, because they don't deserve to live because they're weak. And also to make a rant about how it's sexist to not kill women and children.

He gets distracted (big time) and in a rage goes to Livingston's estate, where he's let in by The Mole. Whom he promptly obliterates with a punch because why not? Then he rampages through the estate,

One entire chapter is dedicated to Zoey's belief in monsters. She believes that there's a monster in everyone. She sees it in their eyes whenever someone does something terrible that they suppress. She saw it when a bully hurt her. She saw it when her mother's boyfriend beat her and held her down on a hot stove after she reported him for filming her nude at age 14. But she doesn't see it in Molech. She sees Molech as the monster. It's not a part of him, it's what he is and he's embraced it.

Keep in mind, I've glossed over a lot of things to keep this "short." The violence he commits is frequent and visceral. No one comes close to him.

Mitigating factors? He has one, very small Freudian Excuse. As a kid, his father took him hunting, and wouldn't let him eat until they caught something. This did infuse a "kill-or-be-killed" attitude at a fairly young age, and he says that until he killed something he was a scared little kid. That said, upon killing something and experiencing "the juice," something was unlocked in him leading him down the monstrous path. And keep in mind that he's not being portrayed sympathetically while relating this story, since at the moment he's arm deep in an innocent man. Not mitigating in the slightest.

Another potential mitigating factor is Black Scott, his Dragon. Molech and Black Scott seem to have a relatively jovial relationship, bordering on Villainous Friendship. At the very least, Black Scott appears comfortable around Molech. However, any apparent friendship he might have is completely explained away by the fact Molech explicitly tells Livingston that he maintains his men's loyalty through fear and money, whereas Livingston stupidly maintains loyalty through friendship and money. Molech's men's loyalty is absolute because they know if they serve him, they will be rewarded and happy, and if they defy him, they will be horrifically tortured. This is an explicit contrast Molech brings up between the two and makes it clear that however their relationship may seem, it's a "friendship" based on fear and rewards, not affection.

Correlating to the Black Scott thing is he has a... weird admiration for black people. I honestly can't decide if this is a mitigating factor or makes him worse. He's jealous of black people for spending years as slaves because he thinks it made them stronger while white people grew fat and lazy. Make of that what you will.

The biggest potential mitigating factor is how seriously he's played, particularly in the final act. The book is a dark comedy, and even in the final act when he's rampaging through the city, there is humor. Long story short, he's an Attention Whore of the highest order and his ego is his biggest and possibly only weakness and the entire final act is spent on a Refuge in Audacity gambit to embarrass and enrage him. He's pelted with taco delivery drones, his own building is carved into a statue of him with a tiny dick, and the good guys hack the omnipresent feed to make him seem like he's actually their sidekick. That said, even while this is going on, he is still The Juggernaut and a terrifying physical presence. The main characters are tactically mocking him and making him into a joke, but he's still a terrifying physical presence and they're desperately running from him the whole time. It's legitimately hilarious and he's the subject of ridicule In-Universe, but he's still terrifying and crippling. The book is funny. There are some laughs at his expense, but he himself isn't really played for laughs, if that makes sense.

The Verdict: He's basically a loudmouthed MRA edgelord loser but with the monstrousness and ridiculous power to back it up. His views, his actions, and everything about him are thoroughly repugnant. I say he counts.

edited 14th Sep '17 7:20:10 AM by Larkmarn