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
@15988 I'm not saying that the character is lying about feeling remorse - I'm saying that he never actually says that he feels remorse. He acknowledges that what happened to him is meant for him to feel remorse for his actions. But there's a difference between acknowledging that something was done so that he would feel sorry and actually feeling sorry due to what was done.
Reading the lyrics, it reads like someone trying to use Weasel Words to sound like they're being remorseful when they're actually not - like some snotty 5-year old who's apologizing solely because their parent made them.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.Alright then. How well-written do the Sergio Leone entries look? Should they go on the Film Sandbox?
- Given the general level of cynicism in Sergio Leone's films, it's not surprising that he's had a few of these. In chronological order we have...
- Ramon Rojo (portrayed by Gian Maria Valonte) from A Fistful Of Dollars just seems to enjoy being evil. In his first appearance, he and his gang brutally massacre a Mexican army unit to steal their gold. He kidnaps a woman and forces her to live with him, claiming that her husband was cheating him at cards. He slaughters the rival Baxter family (including their Evil Matriarch leader, which would have been incredibly bad at the time) as they try to surrender to him, tortures Joe for helping the woman he kidnapped escape, and, towards the end, has Silvanito tortured when he thinks he might be hiding Joe and is about to hang him when Joe interrupts. That's in addition to being an Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy regarding his skill with the rifle, an extreme Jerkass in his interactions with, oh, pretty much everybody, and the brains of a gang of illegal rum-runners who keeps a stranglehold on the life of a small town.
- El Indio (also Gian Maria Valonte) of For a Few Dollars More is the classic Mexican Bandito turned Up To Eleven. He forces one of his victims to watch his family being slaughtered, than offers the man a chance for revenge, but rigs the duel — and continues to rig his duels throughout the film. He betrays his gang, so that he can keep the loot from their robbery for himself and is eventually revealed to have raped Colonel Mortimer's sister, driving her to suicide. He tortures both Mortimer and Monco for kicks, before using them as pawns to massacre his own men, and shows absolutely no remorse when Nino, the one man he'd intended to keep around, is killed in front of him. On top of that, he's an arrogant, Ax-Crazy drug-addict, whose connection to reality is tenuous at best. In many ways, he's the exact opposite of Angel Eyes and Col. Reza (below) while still having utterly no redeeming qualities: where the latter are emotionless and almost inhuman, Indio is animalistically alive, if in a spectacularly negative fashion.
- Angel Eyes/Sentenza (Lee Van Cleef) from the original cut of The Good The Bad And The Ugly is a sociopathic mercenary whose only concern is making as much money as possible. In the opening scenes of the film, he tracks down and murders a man at another's behest. When his victim offers him money if he will spare his life, Angel Eyes replies that "Once I'm been paid, I always see my job through to the end." He kills the man and his son, takes the money, and reports to his employer...whom he promptly murders, since he wants to keep the gold he's found out about for himself. He proceeds to beat the information about the location of the gold out of a hooker, an act that while bad today, would have been completely reprehensible by the standards of the 1860s, when the film is set. Later on, he has Tuco tortured — and is implied to have done the same thing to countless Confederate prisoners at the camp — and watches with absolutely no emotion on his face. While this is going on, he has his men force the POWs to sing in order to cover up the sounds of their friends being tortured. He's less a character than he is Greed in a trenchcoat and cowboy hat. He's so bad that the other two main characters — no saints themselves — both agree to shoot him in the three way Mexican Standoff that ends the film, despite their extreme distaste for one another. Cold-blooded and without remorse, Angel Eyes will cross any lines, and commit any crime as long as he can make a profit doing it.
- Frank from Once Upon A Time In The West is a former bandit turned enforcer for the railroad company. During the film's opening sequence, he and his men gun down the entire McBain family, with Frank shooting down the last survivor, a small boy, himself, before nailing a duster to the door so that local bandito chief Cheyenne will be blamed for the crime. When he reports back to his boss, Mr. Morton, Morton says that he only wanted the McBains scared. Frank's response? "People scare better when they're dying." When Morton tries to cut a deal with McBain's newly arrived widow (ex-Hooker with a Heart of Gold Jill), Frank sabotages the plan, takes Jill hostage, has his way with her, and forces her to sell her land at an auction, positioning his own men there to intimidate the bidders. The arrival of Harmonica, the film's protagonist, ruins this plan, and sets the stage for The Reveal of Frank's worst crime. When Harmonica was a boy, Frank made his older brother stand on his shoulders, and put a noose around the brother's neck. When Harmonica collapsed from exhaustion, his brother was hanged. To add an appropriately sadistic touch, Frank placed a harmonica between the younger brother's lips and instructed him to "play your ever lovin' brother a tune." No reason is ever given for his actions, and Frank has ultimately gone down in film history as one of the most vicious villains of his era.
- Colonel Günther "Gutierez" Reza (Antoine St. John) in A Fistful Of Dynamite is a silent villain who, throughout the movie, doesn't express a single emotion. He tortures revolutionary suspects promising them freedom ONLY if they pick out other members from the crowds to be arrested. He than forces them to watch as their selections are executed by firing squad with the same, never changing look of mild satisfaction on his face. He's also the man responsible for the deaths of Juan's children, singlehandedly causes the film to shift from Black Comedy to serious drama, leads an army that seems intent on killing or imprisoning everyone they meet, and in the climax, guns down Mallory from behind. This, coupled with his Implacable Man status makes him utterly terrifying.
edited 29th Aug '13 11:05:27 AM by TVRulezAgain
Heh, I agree. I think five big entries should qualify him.
I'll tally up the other votes for the entries I proposed soon, but here are a few other thing to bring up:
Firstly is the Lethal Weapon series
- Wah Sing Ku in Lethal Weapon 4, played massively against type by Jet Li, has to be the most evil villain of the series and truly enjoys watching people suffer. A ruthless Triad leader, he crosses the Moral Event Horizon early on by burning down Murtaugh's house with Riggs and Murtaugh inside, all with a smug grin on his face. He later kills the Affably Evil Uncle Benny as well as an innocent man and his uncle to just to prove how evil he is. Yet somehow, people like the sonofabitch.
Terrible entry in genera, and Wah Sing Ku also loves his elder brother. His main goal is to free his elder brother from prison, and when said brother is mortally wounded, Wah Sing Ku is genuinely horrified and holds him while he dies.
Other villains in the franchise would be the villains of the first three films, and in the case of 1 and 2, their Dragons as well (Mr. Joshua and Pieter Vorstedt respectively). I'll post more on them for discussion later, but Wah sing Ku should go.
The character is from The Last Of Us from the latter third of the game. his name is David.
Occasional Exister and I had been pondering, so we thought we'd leave it to the forum here. The game concerns a post-apocalyptic US that's overrun with 'the infected with pockets of survivors, communities and roving bands of marauders. The leader of one of these groups is David. You first encounter his bandits in a fight, but only meet David later as a friendly, affable man who helps out the teen heroine Ellie. He later reveals himself as quite a bit darker.
David is a cannibal and we see rooms in his hideout that are full of butchered corpses, with David himself doing the butchering at one point. He's also violently unstable and at the end of his first with Ellie, he strangles her and attempts to rape her. His previous nice guy facade also becomes creepier when it's also revealed he has a thing for young girls, his men referring to Ellie as David having found 'a new pet'
Having played The Last Of Us I'd give David a keep. He's the most personable heinous individual with a personality in the game whereas every other faction or faction leader a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a bandit, not counting the mindless infected.
I'm on the fence about David. On the one hand, he's definitely the most heinous person. However, the cannibalism seemed to be an act of desperation. Also, most of his group seemed aware of the cannibalism. He also never acts irrationally until Ellie bites him. Ellie is a carrier of the infection(although she is immune) and I kind of assumed that his increasing instability was because he was infected. Not sure if that was really the case though. I could see him qualifying, but right now I'm not sure.
David actually begins growing steadily more unhinged before that. The cannibalism thing is something he apparently started for the group, but I can't say it's desperation as he pretty much ignores a perfectly good forest full of animals (and a buck Ellie killed) in favor of it. He's much more psychotic than
Also, he seems to become more unhinged, but we see no sign of infection on him. It seems more he sheds the veneer of a civilized man and reveals himself as the savage he always was. Plus, his whole sexual predator thing isn't new, judging by what his men say.
No worries. if nobody objects, I'm also gonna switch out The Kurgan and Henry Lee Lucas writeups with my old ones.
For the Deliverance hillbillies, I still vote keep. I think they commit the requisite heinous acts that are played seriously. I don't think we typically look at how one is characterized in that sense
I just found out that in Hobo with a Shotgun, the Drake actually does care about Slick, and when Slick dies they comfort each other. I don't know if Ivan cares about the Drake but apparently he's upset about being The Un-Favourite.
An update on Tayama, whom I first described here
. I played to the end of his arc in the game (and if you want to know, his end is very satisfying) and I'm switching my vote from "maybe no" to "definitely no." He gets a Motive Rant right before he dies, and he sounds completely and utterly sincere that he's helping keep the peace. The voice actor uses a sincere tone, and all his plans had been sunk at that point so he'd have no reason to lie. I really hate having to leave him off, as he's easily the most loathsome person in the game (to put that in perspective, right after his death we're introduced to a quartet of Omnicidal Maniacs. They're about five hundred times more sympathetic than him), and if there were any indication whatsoever he didn't actually believe his own rhetoric (see also: Beckett) I'd vote to include him in a heartbeat. Any other opinions?
Where are we on other SMT monsters, by the way? IIRC we'd narrowed it down to Captain Jack from Strange Journey, Scheffield from Digital Devil Saga (which I haven't played) and maybe YHVH pending discussion of whether his only-mentioned-in-supplementary-materials Freudian Excuse holds water or not, but never got further than that.
edited 29th Aug '13 8:09:55 PM by HamburgerTime
I'd say the Leone entries look good, but since I put a lot of work into rewriting them that would be a biased opinion. I'd say that all five characters hit our criteria, and since they aren't all in continuity with each other (A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good The Bad And The Ugly may share a verse, but even that isn't clear) there should be no issues of that sort.
Sounds like a cut.
Going to agree with Exister on cutting the two characters from Deliverance. Not sure about Malekith now.
I have to protest a few things there...namely Malekith is most certainly nowhere near close to the level of power Mephisto and his ilk have (Mephisto has been shown to fight Galactus to a standstill.) He's most certainly as bad as he can be for his level, especially as he uses stronger beings like Surtur as weapons and is happy to unleash them upon everything else that lives as long as he profits. Combine that with him willing to operate on a far more personal scale?
For The Last Of Us I vote cut on David for a lot of offscreen villiany and implied pedo-ness. The guy has some creepy vibes but it's never outright stated that he plans on raping Ellie, which leaves the canibalism thing which is offscreen and more about desperation since it is winter, with no steady supplies and you come across one buck so it's not like there was a forest full of creatures he was just ignoring (it should be noted that you run into him while he's hunting for animals, and he trades medicine for the buck and after killing Ellie's horse tells her he wont let any of it go to waste, so it's not like they're eating people instead of other animals).
So what's left is trying to kill Ellie and Joel (which there is a whopping total of one faction that doesn't attempt to do it in the entire game). The only reason we can even consider him is because he's the only villian with a name.
Yeah, David doesn't really stand out to me as particularly heinous, at least not onscreen. Especially when you think of how terrible characters can be in post-apocalyptic situations, and you see firsthand earlier when those bandits gunned down those innocent civilians for no reason but to see what they could steal from them. Also, everyone keeps telling me that he tried to rape Ellie after their confrontation, but it really looked to me like he was just trying to kill her, I don't doubt that he's probably a pedophile, but still. In a game like The Last Of Us, with a protagonist like Joel, you'd need to be a whole lot worse than David to stick out in my mind.
Actually, it was confirmed in the boss fight with Ellie, when he was strangling her, he was attempting to rape her. It's also why Elli seems so distraught after, given she killed multiple people without any pause.
Also, the cannibalism stops being offscreen when you see human bodies being chopped up and a room full of human corpses
edited 30th Aug '13 12:07:39 AM by Lightysnake
Errr.....yeah I did not get that vibe, and Word of God is worthless. Way I saw it he was just trying to kill her since if you fuck up in that boss fight he just shoves a machete straight through her chest. So unless it's confirmed in game, then him trying to rape her is just conjecture.
Ellie may have killed many people by that point, but that was when she hadn't been kidnapped, stalked, and badly beaten.
As for the cannibalism, those corpses were already corpses by the time we see them. Conversely we see a different group gun down civillians for no reason but to loot the bodies.
Word of God on a character being a CM is worthless. Word of God to clarify something ambiguous is not. If the argument is "in this scene he's trying to rape her" and word of god says that's what's going on, how is that useless? We usually allow for a clarification, just not when it's used as an argument on its own.
Also, she was killing David's men precisely after having been kidnapped, stalked an nearly slit open by David and James. She didn't show any issue after she killed James or David's other men. And look at Ellie's dialogue. She screams at Joel "don't touch me" when he gets close, and when he comforts her, she begins crying and says "He tried to..." It's pretty clear what he was trying to do and Ellie's trauma over this, but not the absolute legions of people she has seen die (and killed) by this point drives that home. Add that to his men commenting about David's proclivities, referring to Ellie as his 'newest pet,' his standing orders to capture her alive.
Furthermore, add that David has a clear chance to kill Ellie, but instead knocks her onto her back and places himself over her in a compromising position. with Word of God in the mix, I don't exactly view this as ambiguous.
We also see said corpses hanging with ledgers concerning the meat they'd caught, and David chopping up a corpse. That's not just Offscreen Villainy in my view here.
edited 30th Aug '13 1:30:37 AM by Lightysnake
@15990 I think the beginning of Angel Eyes' entry has to be reworded - the way it currently stands, it almost sounds like he has standards (i.e. once he's bought, he stays bought), even though that's not actually the case. There's also quite a bit of cruft in various entries about how reprehensible actions were in the setting - the entries in question (particularly for Ramon Rojo and Angel Eyes) stand up just fine without them. We can also remove the implications of torturing the Confederates (not definitively shown), especially as torturing Tuco is a qualifying act on its own.
Beyond those suggestions, I have no problem with any of them.
@15991 No, we don't need a new page just for Sergio Leone. The rules for a hard split to set up a subpage are not only "there are enough examples for it to exist on its own." There also needs to be a determination that the page is so large that it would cause problems (such as not displaying the text properly) if the split does not happen. We need a mod's guidance - at the moment, I do not believe that Monster.Film is large enough to require a split, even with the above Leone entries added.
@15992 You forgot to mention that Wah Sing Ku didn't do anything that hadn't already been tried (compare and contrast Arjen Rudd's orders and deeds in the second as well as the various things Jack Travis ordered in the third). So on top of genuinely loving someone, Wah also should be eliminated for being overshadowed within his own series.
I'd really only put Arjen Rudd forward as a candidate in this series - Peter Vorstedt comes close, but everything he does is under Rudd's orders, so all of those crimes should go on Rudd's plate. Everything else in the series pales compared to him.
For David from The Last of Us, I think I need a description of just what is actually shown versus what is just implied (particularly as desperation is a sufficient mitigating factor for cannibalism). Based on some of the responses, I think you're overselling just what is actually shown.
@16001 I concur with the vote to cut.
@16003 Malekith doesn't go after some of the biggest hitters on the Marvel power scale, but based on the deeds he is shown as having a reasonable chance of pulling off, he at least belongs on their scale. Keep in mind that one of his traits is being a schemer and at least theoretically a clever planner - regardless of whether or not he had the power to go toe-to-toe with Mephisto, he'd avoid doing that by his nature.
There's also the fact that, again, all of his deeds are fairly standard for where he is on the scale - even manipulating Surtur (who is on the same scale) is closer to Summon Bigger Fish than anything else. And that still is besides the fact that there are multiple villains on lower scales within the Marvel 616 universe, and thus the same continuity, that act much more heinous than Malekith. Just to throw out a few already on the page, Red Skull, Norman Osborn, Apocalypse, Sabretooth, and Wolfgang von Stucker all manage to be much more sadistic, cruel, and merciless than Malekith pulls off, and all on a lower power scale than him.
Mind you, I'm fairly confident that this is intentional - I think Marvel deliberately makes Malekith out to be a pitiful shadow, in every way possible, of what other villains do better (or even his own people - check out how vastly more effective Alflyse was when she took over Svartalfheim). It makes sense to me that he'd fall short on this scale, too.
@16008 Wrong. Word of God is not considered for this trope, regardless of what the Word of God is about. In fact, Word of God clarifying what happens in a scene is a prime violation of Show, Don't Tell.
edited 30th Aug '13 6:36:09 AM by 32_Footsteps
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.If there are no further objections, I'll put up the revised Warner entry from Phantasmagoria 2.
Is Commodus ready to be called? The debate sort of stopped after he was still with a 3:1 vote for keep.
I've gotten one response to a motion
to cut all the villains in Con Air. Can someone provide further judgment?
Some of the Disney examples could use a rewrite to get rid of the natter. Since Word of God isn't regarded as more than a suggestion for monsterdom, I also don't see what the reactions from the director and merchandise clerks add to the Lotso entry (the earlier argument for his inclusion
also used Word of God too much, but that's another debate).
The Star Trek: The Next Generation page acquired another example that didn't go through the thread. Probably best to put up a commented-out notice next time.
- Ambassador Alkar from "Man Of The People" - He psychically links with an empathic woman and pours all of his "unpleasant" emotions and thoughts into them, causing drastic changes in their personality that manifest as what Deanna calls "malevolent evil" - which says something about the quality of thoughts he has. The process overwhelms the victim's brain with ridiculously high levels of neurotransmitters which not only cause insane physiological stress - eventually causing multi-organ failure - but psychological hell as the empath suffers under the strain of his psychic waste. The process is so psychically and physically tortuous that it actually artificially ages them at an accelerated rate. The victim is not even able to identify that something is wrong or ask for help as their mind is drastically distorted and subverted, causing them to act in ways that would ordinarily horrify and disgust them. Within a few years they die from the accumulated stress, their minds twisted evil and senile. Meanwhile, Alkar is a perfect center of calm and serenity while he presides over diplomatic disputes and is lauded by his peers, pitying his "receptacle" and pretending to others that his victim is his elderly mother. When confronted by Picard about doing the same thing to Deanna, killing her in days due to her strong empathic skills, he explains quite calmly what he has done and feels perfectly justified in doing so in order to 'do his job', feeling insulted that he be asked to stop his Mind Rape considering how he is risking his life trying to settle diplomatic issues*, and that Deanna's life, and that of his other "receptacles", are a small price to pay. What is truly terrifying is that he is a serial killer who is pouring all his evil into the minds of his victims, forcing them to suffer his thoughts while he murders them in complete peace and tranquility. He feels no compulsion or urge to kill, he just rapes their minds for years and murders them as a simple matter of course without lifting a finger. Then others comfort him for his loss.
Other than the wordiness, he's a likely disqualifier for redemptive motives. If he was doing that solely for kicks or to benefit only himself he'd probably pass. He's draining those persons to better settle difficult and dangerous diplomatic disputes, and given how the entry is worded these are likely to solve wars and the like to prevent more suffering. The entry is also poorly phrased in regards to what his peers think of this, leaving it ambiguous whether only he is responsible or if it is covered up in conjunction with his colleagues. If the latter, it's more of a horrifying institution than a personal crime of the ambassador. With this in mind, I support a cut.
You've got roaming bands of armed, aggressive, tyrannical plumbers coming to your door, saying "Use our service, or else!"![]()
I support cutting the Con Air examples.
On Tayama, it sounds like he is a very dark Well-Intentioned Extremist and thus doesn't qualify. YHVH probably needs to be discussed in more detail. Is there anything in the games themselves that hints at his Freudian Excuse?
edited 30th Aug '13 8:11:06 AM by TommyFresh

edited 29th Aug '13 7:33:42 AM by Camberf