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
- Mickey Cohen is written as this in the film Gangster Squad where he is an utterly psychotic Jewish mobster whose brutality terrifies even other hardened mobsters. Cohen opens by throwing a group who are late in their protection money in their building, locking them inside and burning them with the building. A building he had been using as a base to imprison women, forcibly addict them to drugs and use them for prostitution. He furiously executes an underling with a power drill due to the man failing him and when his girlfriend opts to leave him, Cohen sends one of his men to throw acid in her face. He even has an emissary from the Chicago Mafia executed by having him pulled apart between two trucks and has no compunction in causing massive civilian casualties in his attempts to kill the members of the Gangster Squad.
Azazel rewrite:
- Azazel from Fallen is a sinister demon who likes nothing so much as destroying the lives and names of good men. When Detective Hobbes crosses him, Azazel sets about targeting him by possessing Hobbes' mentally handicapped brother and making him commit suicide. Azazel possesses others and murders others in their bodies, getting them convicted of murder and jumps out just before the execution, leaving the victim to face death for crimes they have no memory committing. Azazel destroys Hobbes' life and reputation and possesses people to continuously drive him mad from near paranoia. What's worse is Azazel has been walking the earth for thousands of years and his MO has never changed
Here's a preliminary Fantomas as well if more want to vote for him.
- Fantomas, the Villain Protagonist of the Fantômas series is a terrifying sociopath and Master of Disguise who holds all of Paris in terror as he could be anyone in the city and you'd never know it before he slit your throat. through the first novel, his activities are so extensive it is unclear if 'Fantomas' refers to a criminal network acting together, but by the end of the third, novel it is clear there is only one Fantomas. Known as the 'Man Of A Thousand Faces' and the 'Lord of Terror,' Fantomas commits murder after murder, for personal power, wealth or simply his own amusement. Not even his own children are safe as Fantomas uses his son and daughter as pawns in his schemes and even murders his own son's girlfriend to twist him to Fantomas's purpose. Fantomas routinely frames the innocent to face the guillotine for his crimes, and puts special emphasis in mentally tormenting the Hero Antagonist Inspector Juve. Fantomas also loves committing murder in elaborate ways: from strangling, stabbing and poisoning to more elaborate death traps such as chambers filling with sand, or even unleashing plague infested rats on an ocean liner. Alan Moore once summed up Fantomas well in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen "The Count had once been human." Fantomas was a thing. He had always been a thing."
edited 17th Sep '13 2:59:33 PM by Lightysnake
Okay that makes more sense.
I found this on the YMMV page for Nineteen Eighty Four:
Complete Monster: INGSOC is the Complete Monster of political ideologies, because it openly encourages all of its ruling class to be this for Dystopia Justifies The Means.
Permission to cut? I think this is the first time I've seen something that isn't even a living thing be labelled a CM.
edited 14th Sep '13 8:16:08 PM by TommyFresh
@16519: Two minor corrections to the Iago writeup - the correct spelling is Moor, not Moore. Also, putting italic markup inside a wiki link means it displays as quotation marks - it looks as though you're saying he "enjoys" this rather than he enjoys this. Also, one minor correction to the Richard III writeup - it should be "two young sons", not "two young son".
edited 14th Sep '13 8:06:23 PM by mlsmithca
@Occasional Exister
That's basically why I want to cut Haman. He may be the only person in the story to attempt genocide without a Freudian Excuse, but he's not the only one to attempt it, and he doesn't have any additional crimes to his name. Interesting fact by the way: in rabbinical tradition Haman, despite being a byword for anti-semitism, is actually given an excuse—he's one of the few surviving Agagtites, the descendents of the Amalekites, a tribe who were crushed by the Israelites. Their king, Agag, was spared by Saul, only to later be executed on orders of the Prophet Samuel, who regarded showing mercy to your enemies as defying the will of YHWH; Haman is effectively Agag's revenge. He is referred to as Haman the Agagtite in some versions of The Bible; whether the rabbis writing it would have expected their audiences to know what that meant, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
One other thing on the subject—having reread the Biblical passages where he appears, Haman's main helpmate in his attempted genocide is his wife Zeresh, who eventually tries to convince him to put the brakes on when things get out of control. We don't find out a lot about her, but Haman does seem to value her advice (since he asks for it in the first place, in a time period when asking advice from your wife would not necessarily have been a thing). One might infer from that, that he actually likes her.
Anyway, just two more things for us to take under consideration, in addition to the question of whether he qualifies as heinous by the standards of the story.
@Lightysnake
One more vote for Fantomas, coming from me. He already has an entry, by the way, on the YMMV page for his series.
I'm going to cut those lit examples that Lightysnake could not provide write-ups for, and the King Lear examples.
I don't think it needs another vote, but yes, definitely keep Fantomas.
RE Haman, I just checked out the Jewish Study Bible from the library, and one point they did make in terms of his heinousness is that it wasn't one of the usual cases of two tribes fighting over the same land- he was stigmatizing a population of citizens within his country and attempting to annihilate them for extremely petty reasons.
That being said, the fact that there is so much genocide going on in the Hebrew Bible makes me hesitate. Hell, in the Purim story itself, Esther gets dispensation from the King for the Jews to initiate reprisals and they kill 75,000 people, which seems a bit excessive.
Edit, edit, edit, edit the wiki@Hamburger Time
I actually remember you bringing up the Agagtite business. Jeez that was a lot of pages ago. Here's the link
(it took me forever to find) so that people can see the original discussion, and compare my position at the time versus my position now.
In any case, what's changed for me is that when we were having the original discussion, I thought that it was only in the apocrypha that he was referred to as an Agagtite. The version of The Bible I was using at the time didn't say that, and actually called him "Haman the Evil". That's what I get for using The Bible I got in Grade 9, when I was confirmed. Having gone through several of the other Bibles in my house (we have about fourteen of them. Like I said, grandfather was a minister), most of them reference him as an Agagtite. And since some research I've done reveals "Haman the Agagtite" wanting to kill the Jews is a little like "David the Holocaust survivor" wanting to kill Germans, yeah, my position has changed a fair bit.
I will admit that it's not just the "Haman the Agagtite" thing that's changed my mind. If that was all there was to it, I'd probably let it slide. What's settled it for me after rereading most of The Old Testament (which I remembered as being bad, but not near as bad as it is) is that he really isn't much worse than the Assyrians, or even some of the supposed heroes of the story. When you then throw in the possible Freudian Excuse, and the fact that he might love his wife, then I find that calling him a CM becomes a little bit shaky. Do I think he's the worst human being in The Bible? Yes I do. But I'm no longer sure that he's the worst by a longshot, and the possibility of an excuse, however slight, coupled with a possible redeeming quality, makes me a lot iffier.
As for how we got onto this topic...yeah. Only on the Internet, and even then I think this is one for the books.
edited 14th Sep '13 9:57:41 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
I think I actually know this one, about "Agagite" vs. "Evil:" it's actually that "Agagite/Amalekite" and "evil" were synonymous to the ancient Israelites. You know the reason why they wanted Amalek wiped off the map? Because the Amalekites followed them around during their forty years in the desert and picked off the kids and old people For the Evulz. So, really, no good guys here, is what I'm getting at.
Would it be okay if I added folders to Sandbox.Film Monsters? I'm thinking of using the "Directors / Film In General" folder and then listing the rest in alphabetical order. Sound good?
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No kidding there's no good guys here. But that's the point I'm getting at. The Old Testament, being more or less a history of the Israelite nation, is filled with people doing evil unto each other. The Amakelites do unto the Israelites, who then do unto them, and then get done unto by Haman. Sounds to me like the Cycle of Revenge is in full swing. The Israelites butcher the Caananites (and the populations of several dozen other major cities over the course of their ascendency in the region), and then in turn see ten tribes butchered and/or "dispersed" (never to be seen again) by the Assyrians, and two enslaved in Babylon. The kings of Israel abuse, rape, and kill both their neighbours and their own subjects, with and without God's orders, while the neighbours in question plot horrible revenge, and Assyria and Babylon, as the local superpowers, effectively screw over anybody who gets in their way. With so much bloodshed and misery, I don't think that anybody, Israelite, Assyrian, Amekelite, Babylonian, or otherwise manages to stand head and shoulders above the rest. Even moreso than Greek myth (and I can't believe I'm writing that) it portrays a dark time period filled with people who think that the only way to get by is to do unto others before they can do unto you. It isn't until the New Testament that things get even a little bit better, and that all goes away once Revelations roles around.
edited 14th Sep '13 10:11:10 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
On this particular subject? Don't know, though I totally agree with your verdict. The question really boils down to where do you want to draw the line, when we're dealing with something as ugly as Old Testament morality vs somebody as nasty as Haman? Personally, I think he's a cut, though by a narrow marigin; if he was in another story, or Hell, another mythos, he'd likely be a qualifier.
On a sidenote, I hope you've enjoyed this debate as much as I have. I find Biblical morality as fascinating subject, and I don't often get to discuss it or its ramifications (in my experience the fundamentalists don't want to debate it, and moderates tend to think that you're accusing them of wanting to follow that sort of morality if you bring it up) in a civilized way.
Sounds great, TV rulez. I submitted a bunch of rewrites/cuts/new additions we agreed on to the edit request thread so be on the lookout there.
Oh, and here's another rewrite:
- William Hamleigh in The Pillars Of The Earth It's actually faster to list the acts of his that AREN'T heinous, some of them include: nearly kills Tom Builder over wages, killing the steward Matthew, cutting off Richard's ear, and raping Aliena, burning Kingsbridge to the ground for no apparent reason, having his soldiers gangrape a prostitute, and is impotent on his wedding night until he beats his wife so she'll stop SMILING AT HIM.
Yeah, William's pretty much a dick. All that's accurate, but this entry is...RANDOM CAPS! Here's a breakdown of William
Who Is He?
William Hamleigh is the son of a minor noble family with an eye on the Earldom of Shiring, in the time of King Stephen and his feud with would-be Queen Matilda of England. William starts as a handsome, but boorish noble who is betrothed to the Earl's daughter Aliena. She has her father break the engagement when she's put off by his arrogance (it's mentioned at this point William is a rapist as well, but Offscreen Villainy). He and his groom Walter, when the Earl is overthrown, find Aliena and her younger brother Richard. They kill her steward when he tries to defend her, then William rapes her while Walter forces Richard to watch, then allows Walter to rape Aliena as well. William proves himself an adept social climber, always maneuvering himself so he's in favor with the people in power until he himself becomes Earl of Shiring
What Does He Do?
Besides the rape and murder above, William's first appearance is nearly murdering a hired builder over a wage dispute. In a visit with a prostitute, William has issues with impotence if there's no...violence involved, so he beats the prostitute and rapes her. He later begins terrorizing his subjects, brutalizing those who can't pay taxes and raping the women for his 'trouble' as well. In addition, when he finally marries a young woman, he finds himself impotent on the wedding night until he beats his wife when she gives him a reassuring smile. He also leads an attack on the city of Kingsbridge for no reason, which costs many lives, including one of the novel's main characters Tom Builder.
Oh, and he later helps kill Thomas Beckett....no, Ken Follett does not believe in subtlety, why do you ask?
Any redeeming features?
Besides his fear of hell? No.
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No, I mean any other characters in need of review; I think we've gotten about as much as we could out of this conversation.
But yeah, we should get this archived or something. It had everything: Religion! War! Politics! Philosophy! Fresh fruit! A brief aside about talking pigs!
edited 14th Sep '13 10:22:51 PM by HamburgerTime
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I could get behind that idea. I like the idea of someone months or years from now going through the archives, finding this conversation, and trying to figure out what on earth was wrong with us.
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I've read that book. He qualifies big time, and the fact that it takes as long as it does for somebody to do something about him is agonizing. Though frankly I don't hold killing Thomas Beckett against him.
edited 14th Sep '13 10:33:29 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

edited 14th Sep '13 6:02:24 PM by DrPsyche