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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:

     Previous Post 
Complete Monster Cleanup Thread

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. "[tup] 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

AustinDR Lizzid people! (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Tyk5919 Your friendly neighborhood stank goblin Since: Mar, 2011 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
Your friendly neighborhood stank goblin
#145652: Jan 24th 2019 at 8:04:42 AM

[tup] for Captain von Berkow.

I write stories and shiz. You can read them here.
ElfenLiedFan90 Me in a nutshell (Coping with Depression) from Jakarta,Indonesia Since: Aug, 2017 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free
Me in a nutshell (Coping with Depression)
#145653: Jan 24th 2019 at 8:06:05 AM

Sure to the Captain

"Making screw-ups and mistakes was I ever really good at. Because everything I touch went to hell."
futuremoviewriter Since: Jun, 2014
#145654: Jan 24th 2019 at 8:12:42 AM

@Lighty It’s done. I tried and it failed, so that’s it and no more to do. I bring up the Firestorm villain because if he wasn’t already up, I would have tried to get him approved. I have a string of candidates planned, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like to find more.

Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#145655: Jan 24th 2019 at 8:16:07 AM

Okay. I encourage proposing another then.

11111001011 11111001011 from Peachtree City, GA Since: Dec, 2018 Relationship Status: Abstaining
11111001011
#145656: Jan 24th 2019 at 8:58:42 AM

I deleted the unapproved entry from Shortland Street, but came across this link:

  • Hand Wave: Zac Smith was certainly never a sex offender during his first two runs on the show. So you'd think there'd be some explanation as to why he suddenly became a Complete Monster in his third run. You'd be wrong. All that we got in the way of an explanation was Rachel Mckenna telling Sarah Potts that "you can know someone for a while without actually knowing them," then never mentioning him again.

Help me!
chasemaddigan I'm Sad Frogerson. Since: Oct, 2011
I'm Sad Frogerson.
#145657: Jan 24th 2019 at 9:14:49 AM

Another unapproved Complete Monster pothole I took care of, this time on the Nightmare Fuel page for Thief II: The Metal Age. This one refers to Sheriff Truart:

  • In "Blackmail", there is a hidden basement containing a rack and (depending on the version you're playing, a dead or decidedly un-dead) corpse. Just what the hell was Truart up to?

I have no familiarity with the game, so anyone who cares to weigh in, feel free to do so.

miraculous Goku Black (Apprentice)
Goku Black
#145658: Jan 24th 2019 at 9:17:22 AM

Ask lighty? He was the one who got the Big Bad of that Game, Father Karras approved as a CM.

Edited by miraculous on Jan 24th 2019 at 9:18:51 AM

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
Lightysnake Since: May, 2010
#145659: Jan 24th 2019 at 9:18:16 AM

Truart doesn't keep. He has little chance to do much, is far inferior to Karras and The Hag (or even to Constantine from game 1), and is disposed of pretty quickly. Nasty implications do not a CM make.

11111001011 11111001011 from Peachtree City, GA Since: Dec, 2018 Relationship Status: Abstaining
11111001011
#145660: Jan 24th 2019 at 9:29:20 AM

About my pothole from Shortland Street....

Help me!
AustinDR Lizzid people! (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Lizzid people!
#145662: Jan 24th 2019 at 9:30:26 AM

Burn it and PM the user.

MovieFan2000 Since: Jan, 2016
G-Editor The 47th President Since: Mar, 2015 Relationship Status: Above such petty unnecessities
The 47th President
#145664: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:27:02 AM

[tup] to Berkow.

Funny there's a TV show that just came on FOX earlier this month called The Passage if anyone here is interested in reserving the work?

My sandbox of EPs and other stuff
futuremoviewriter Since: Jun, 2014
#145665: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:35:21 AM

These two weren't really discussed already (not in depth anyway), so here we go:

What is the work?

Under Siege is a 1992 action movie (and probably one of the best the infamous Steven Seagal ever did, but I still really like the sequel despite its flaws) that was pretty much the first to do the Die Hard on a Boat scenario. It focuses on former Navy SEAL Casey Ryback (now a cook) on board the soon to be decommissioned battleship the USS Missouri . He’s content with the fact that he’s no longer an action guy and loves his passion for making food, but when an unforeseeable crisis at the worst time happens and he’s the only one with the skills and the position to do something, well, he obviously has to.

Who are they and what have they done?

William Strannix is a former Navy SEAL turned CIA agent hired by director Tom Breaker for his expertise in high stress situations and Commander Krill is a high-ranking officer on board the Missouri. After Strannix has performed successful missions where he's either taken out or taken over enemy ships, he goes rogue and murders agents sent after him when he begins to be perceived as a threat. Along with his men and the inside help from Krill, he hijacks the Missouri and takes almost everyone on board hostage. When one hostage attempts to fight back and is killed by one of Strannix's men, Strannix murders a random hostage next to him and warns of doing the same thing again if other attempts are made.

In addition to Strannix and Krill having a jet that's doing a flyby blown up, they later on have a helicopter with a rescue team blown up too and while Krill at first wants to take care of the locked up Ryback himself along with his guard Pvt. Nash, Strannix has two of his men sent down there and they gun Nash to death before Ryback kills them. Krill abuses the crew even before the hijacking and after it begins, personally murders the captain himself.

Strannix has a satellite control station blown up and readies the nukes on board to be handed over to his allies from North Korea, something Krill is all too gleeful to help him do. To lure out Ryback, Krill has the room with the trapped crew flooded with the intention letting them all drown. He displays this on video to Ryback while taunting him and one of the men shoots and kills a hostage too to add insult to injury. Krill also drugs Playboy model Jordan Tate as well to get her out of the way. The last resort for the army will be to have to send in multiple jets to blow up the ship and kill everyone on board if all else fails.

Eventually, before Strannix loses his shit and fires two nukes towards Honolulu (which Krill more than approves of: “I’m gonna go make Honolulu glow in the dark!” “Outstanding!”), Krill is killed when Ryback and his allies are able to use the cannon to bomb and sink the North Korean sub. As the rest of the terrorists are taken out and a fighter jet takes out one tomahawk successfully, Ryback confronts Strannix who has destroyed the computer system and tries to force Ryback to watch as Honolulu is destroyed. Ryback fights Strannix and kills him by stabbing him in the head and shoving him head first into a computer monitor. Ryback and his allies then use the disc and code provided by the military to stop the last tomahawk.

Heinous standard?

The argument against them before was that they were too comedic, but I think they're darkly funny. You can still take them seriously. Krill dresses in drag one scene, but it's mostly an isolated incident. It doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things.

Travis Dane from the second one counts (kills his former colleagues after getting their codes, for money, he uses a computer-controlled satellite laser to bomb China, a plane just for one passenger and two fighter jets that try to stop him and attempts to bomb the Pentagon to activate the nuclear reactor all for money), but I think they're on par with him because their crimes are pretty similar and at least on par. With Strannix, he has the cruelty of killing a random hostage when one next to them tries to fight back. He mentions that he sent the fingers of an agent trying to take him out for going rogue to Breaker. He's planning to give over nukes to North Koreans he's allied with, blows up a satellite station and then fires two nukes towards Hawaii. While Dane does more, Strannix is ambitious in what he does do and plans to do and doesn't lack the follow through (it's just that he's not successful). He also has a style that is of his own making and Breaker brings up how he's very good at hijacking and sinking ships or subs, so there's a clear history there too. He also stands by and jokes about Krill drowning the trapped crew just to try to trap Ryback too. Strannix trying to force Ryback to have to sit down and helplessly watch the nukes hit their target is harsh too.

Krill is easily worse. He not only has the attempted drowning of said crew, but just the fact that he was nasty in general before that. His only reason for being so harsh before the hijacking? The captain called him out on being so harsh and Krill didn't like that. Not to mention his killing of the captain is incredibly personal, taunting Ryback about not being able to save the crew while one of them is shot on camera and having full awareness of Strannix handing over the nukes and trying to annihilate Hawaii just add to his rap sheet and make for a pretty petty and cruel manifesto. Krill drugs Jordan rather than kills her, but aside from the fact that that's still not good, it just seemed to be the easier and more inconspicuous choice at the time.

Redeeming qualities? Mitigating factors?

Strannix potentially cares about his men and he and Krill may have a Villainous Friendship (he has cute codenames with the North Korean sub). Strannix threatens one later for saying that fixing their computer is not possible after the system has been disrupted. There's a point when Ryback has eventually killed so many of his men that he's either numb to it or begins wishing that he'd gotten Ryback on his side beforehand. His reaction to Krill's death is what makes him spiral the worst, but this could be not because he cared about Krill, but because the nukes were on the sub and he not only lost them, not lost his way out too. He also warns everyone in the room when Ryback's microwave bomb goes off too. Take from that what you will. When he thinks his men are about to fall into a trap (which they do), Strannix demands/warns them not to pursue Ryback and comments afterward with "This guy's a pain in the ass". They may have both cracked under the pressure of the job, but wouldn't their reaction be to get away from it and not look back?

Krill seems to get along fine with Strannix and his men, but he's way more interested in not only the power he's gotten, but the power he could get too (he's more shocked about the microwave bomb than upset by the damage it causes). His disdain towards Ryback even before the hijacking was jealousy in that the captain seemed to have more respect for a seemingly insignificant cook than for him (it becomes clear why to him when he reads Ryback's file and is only more frustrated because of it). Strannix seems to have the motivation of he became too much to handle and was threatened for it, so he'll now purposely be too much to handle to threaten them for it. Krill is a power hungry control freak who is now gonna screw over almost everyone just for denying him what he craved. Krill is territorial too: "Your ship? You wouldn't have this ship if not for me."

Verdict?

Tentative [tup].

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Jan 24th 2019 at 3:05:13 AM

SkyCat32 The Draftsman of Doom (Five Year Plan) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
The Draftsman of Doom
#145666: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:46:32 AM

I read the trope page for Under Siege... at least Strannix is supposedly affably evil. I’m abstaining on Strannix and Krill.

MasterJoseph Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object from Not telling. Since: Mar, 2018 Relationship Status: All I Want for Christmas is a Girlfriend
Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object
#145667: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:50:42 AM

[up]One question while I wait for others to weigh in.

Have you actually watched the film?

IPP Wick Check created.
futuremoviewriter Since: Jun, 2014
#145668: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:53:29 AM

@Master Joseph Was that for me? Yes, I’ve seen both it and the sequel multiple times (it’s been a couple years for both though, but again, MULTIPLE times).

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Jan 24th 2019 at 10:59:08 AM

SkyCat32 The Draftsman of Doom (Five Year Plan) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
The Draftsman of Doom
#145669: Jan 24th 2019 at 10:56:35 AM

If that question was for me, no, I haven’t watched the film.

DemonDuckofDoom from Some Pond in Hell Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#145670: Jan 24th 2019 at 11:05:08 AM

[tup] Brekow

Waiting for other opinions on Strannix and Krill.

MasterJoseph Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object from Not telling. Since: Mar, 2018 Relationship Status: All I Want for Christmas is a Girlfriend
Frolaytia X Qwenthur of Heavy Object
#145671: Jan 24th 2019 at 11:07:12 AM

The question was for Skycat.

When I place this [up], it would refer to an above post.

If I place it twice, it would refer to a post two posts above it. It should be obvious for three and more.

If I place 1 or more [down], it refers to a below post.

Edited by MasterJoseph on Jan 24th 2019 at 11:07:49 AM

IPP Wick Check created.
SkyCat32 The Draftsman of Doom (Five Year Plan) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
The Draftsman of Doom
#145672: Jan 24th 2019 at 11:10:08 AM

Gotcha. I haven’t seen the film, so I’m still going to abstain.

futuremoviewriter Since: Jun, 2014
#145673: Jan 24th 2019 at 11:10:20 AM

@MJ What confuses me is that both statements were on different lines, but I had to bring up the how much I’ve seen the movie and how recently parts for clarity. Also, what is it you need help with on the Woobie cleanup and who else did you ask?

DemonDuckofDoom from Some Pond in Hell Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
emperors Messenger from another dimension. Since: Mar, 2015 Relationship Status: It's complicated
Messenger from another dimension.
#145675: Jan 24th 2019 at 11:20:02 AM

Yes to Brekow but for Strannix... I gotta say nay. Just doesn't strike me that much.

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