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
You mean both of his rewrites, or both his and mine?
@Lightysnake
Rewrites look alright to me. I don't know either film, but the way you describe them makes them both sound like keepers.
@Tommy Fresh
Thank you. That makes two votes to add Monroe and cut the other three, plus my own. Do you have any thoughts on Emil Fouchon and Pik Van Cleaf?
@17936: Eh, the demon may not have redeeming qualities but I'm not sure she's heinous enough compared to other X Files villains. Gonna say cut.
@17937: Gonna agree with all of your suggestions on which examples to cut and which to keep except for Boris the Animal. Actually Selena probably has a larger body count than him. If I recall correctly, the opening credits for the second film has her blowing up multiple planets while searching for the Light of Zabildy-doo, or whatever it's called. Seriously, she's like Tarquin on a bender. However I wouldn't think of putting her up either seeing as the film never specifies if there's any life on those planets and the film itself seems to treat these destroyed planets as "no big deal," weirdly never even addressing the implications of their destruction.
@17945: Gonna say yes to Fouchet and no to Van Cleaf. Since Van Cleaf's nominally subservient to Fouchet and the scheme is Fouchet's idea, I'd put most of the accountability on him, since Van Cleaf doesn't sound like he does anything of his own accord. Also, agree with cutting all the examples from the The Expendables except for Monroe, and the entry you provide for him @17960 is good.
@17950: Yeah, cut those Sisterhood examples due to the heroes making the heinous standard too high.
@17952: Going to have to agree with lighty. Being a strawman isn't an automatic ground for dismissal, no matter how abysmal the writing or message may be.
@17959: Those both look good to me.
edited 15th Oct '13 6:23:29 PM by OccasionalExister
Couple bad entries:
- Complete Monster: This incarnation of X-Force was put together for the purpose of wiping these off the face of the Earth. The Purifiers, Reverend Craig, Selene, etc. Arguably the only one to whom this doesn't apply is Eli Bard. He's just a guy gone completely insane over his miserable eternal life and desperate for someone to love him. Unfortunately the only way to get the one he loves to love him back is to kill millions of people. Which he doesn't have a problem with anymore thanks to a few centuries of crushing loneliness driving him ALL the way round the bend.
- Complete Monster: A candidate for this title is Dr. Scid, Yuon and Oure's father for his treatment of X for his own revenge and his possible involvement with Essi's mother's death. However, Scid is meant to be a more gray-shaded character and his involvement with Emma's death is left ambiguious.
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I'll vouch for Azazel being heinous enough. Getting people to form a devil-worshipping town with the sacrifices an angrily destroying them when they fail, including murdering their children? That's bad even by X-Files standards.
As for Boris...we know he does plan to wipe out occupied planets. It's even a plot point that that Bogladites need to destroy those. As bad as, say, Edgar was, he never wanted to destroy earth unless they started a war first.
@Very Melon
I didn't see your post echoing what Tommy Fresh said. You must have posted just as I did. With Occasional Exister that's four votes, plus my own to put up Monroe, and cut the rest of the Expendables villains and the Sisterhood villains.
@Exister
Fouchon, not Fouchet (Fouchet is the villain from Bad Boys, who I also proposed and did a writeup for though, so I can see how you got confused. What is it with French gangsters?). Thanks for the vote though, and no Van Cleaf doesn't do much of his own accord, though we don't see Fouchon order the killing of Randall, and the shooting of the cop was all Van Cleaf. Anybody else have thoughts on Fouchon?
edited 15th Oct '13 7:13:33 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Going through the YMMV list, I found...umm...this.
From YMMV.Temptation
- Ayabe can qualify for this if his last lines are anything to go by. Keep in mind, this is after he had sex with Sakura, and she said that she loved him during it.
The content, subject matter, dialogue and terrible spelling of the word 'paid'....hm, this just might be a hentai.
Also, here's one example we voted to add a loooong time ago, with a writeup even!
- Sora from Air Gear. He's an absolute bastard who emotionally abused his brother and his girlfriend, the two people who loved him and trusted him most. He even brainwashed the latter, and when they stopped being useful to him, he threw them aside like trash. While he does have a slightly sympathetic past that paints him as a failure, this justification rings hollow when it's shown that he's orders of magnitude more powerful than every single rider except Ikki. Furthermore, he remorselessly killed several friends who were once in the same situation as him and who even helped him, all in the name of gaining personal power. He is either directly or indirectly responsible for all of the deaths in the series and he doesn't even think highly enough of the lives he's taken to feel something like satisfaction, let alone remorse or regret. After he is defeated, he spits in the face of redemption and even tries to turn his girlfriend into a bomb so that he could kill everyone in the tower in which he was fighting so that even if he were to lose, his opponents wouldn't win, and he only gave up afterwards when faced with overwhelming power that convinced him he would never be able to succeed. Even his terrifyingly Ax-Crazy brother looks tame and compassionate in comparison.
Also a cut I want to discuss...
- In Perfect Blue, Me-Mania is an example of a very creepy fan with an obsessive crush. He's first seen admiring Mima on the stage and doesn't come across as threatening, even stepping in to defend Mima from heckling audience members. Unfortunately, after Mima quits her singing job, Me-Mania starts murdering people connected to her and appearing at sets before disappearing just as quickly, another eerie thing in the film besides Mima's madness. Near the end, Me-Mania, re-enacting an earlier scene of Mima acting like she was being raped by a group of men, attempts to rape and kill her for real, all the while throughly enjoying himself. His ugly appearance highlights how ugly he is on the inside.
Here are my issues:
1. Me-Mania is the heinous standard. He's a psychotic murderer and stalker who graphically kills multiple people and attempts to rape Mima. With that said. 2. I had previously argued for Me-Mamania, but this was largely based upon the fact he exists. To explain, Perfect Blue is a story of a former pop idol trying to become a mature actress. Her fans are angry with her for it, to say the least. Eventually, after degrading herself on camera, Mima, the heroine, begins suffering a total psychotic breakdown and the loss of identity to the point she can't tell reality from fiction, hence the...difficulty in deciding Me-Mania's existence. However, he exists, that's incontrovertible overall. 3. Me-Mania's insanity doesn't really disqualify him, except for the fact that someone else is posing as Mima to him, convincing him the 'sellout' is a fake. Me-Mania seems to care about the 'real' Mima and says "she's nice to me, she speaks to me every day!" while he's trying to rape and murder the one he's decided is a fake.
Me-Mania is a monster, but he's quite insane to the point he's created anew Mima and really cares for it.
edited 15th Oct '13 9:41:15 PM by Lightysnake
Yeah Boris and his race would be an example of an Always Chaotic Evil race. They were only made that way because the film directors wanted their extinction to look justified once Boris is killed. They have an unsatiable appetite and eat everything on the planet, its inhabitants included. Is Boris similar to the Grand High Witch and stands above the other members of its species?
edited 15th Oct '13 9:38:54 PM by AustinDR
He's the only one we see, so he's the worst by default. That said, he doesn't seem to care for his own race at all.
Oh, and here's a writeup for Mr. Todd.
- Sweeney Todd himself from the original Penny Dreadful stories that began with The String Of Pearls. While later given sympathetic qualities in the retelling of the legends, the original Sweeney Todd was a monster whose only motivation was cruelty and greed. Sweeney would lure customers into his barber shop and proceed to drop them down a tunnel to break their skulls or necks, before 'polishing them off' with his straight razor if they still lived. Coming up with another plan to make more money, he and his partner Mrs. Lovett cooked the bodies into meat pies to sell with a hefty profit. Hundreds of corpses are seen in the preparation room, and Sweeney also keeps a kidnap victim to work the furnace to keep the meat coming, with full knowledge that he'll eventually join the pies when Sweeney decides he's been there too long.
edited 15th Oct '13 10:44:43 PM by Lightysnake
Yeah cut Me-Mania.
Was there ever a decision for Baka the Master Builder from The Ten Commandments? Back when I brought him up Lighty and Paireon voted keep, Hodor voted cut, and I was on the fence.
How so? Vilain kills Billy but lets the rest of the team go, assuming that they will have learned he's not to be messed with, and leave him alone. Like it or not, he releases the Expendables when he could have slaughtered them, which is a redeeming quality—and one that Monroe certainly doesn't share.
I'd say that while the characters see it as the latter, the film sees it as the former. Vilein's got this whole Social Darwinist, "respect must be earned" thing going on, and views killing Billy as the way to establish said respect. He also never does anything that contradicts what he says, so I think we have to take him at his word. It's particularly notable given that Monroe, from the first film, has no such moments, and explicitly cannot be trusted.
I'd also note that while Vilein enslaved a small enclave to retrieve the plutonium, Monroe turned a small nation into a Banana Republic Police State and forced the populace to grow drugs for him. Monroe and his goons also engage in the onscreen torture of first Sandra and then Ross, while Vilein never tortures anybody. To me, Monroe comes off as the worse of the two.
edited 16th Oct '13 9:52:08 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Permission to request making Visual Novels a subpage of Video Games and to folderize V Ns (one each for Ace Attorney, When They Cry, and Other)?
I don't think it needs to be a subpage. That's just digging deeper than necessary. For people looking for it, it's much easier to find on Complete Monster than on Monster.Video Games. All pages I know of have it as a section on the same level, as long as Visual Novels have a section of their own at all.
Just merge the subpages on Monster.Visual Novels to that page, and it's enough, I think.
edited 16th Oct '13 3:24:50 PM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!Counting votes on the long list of examples I brought up in this mega-post
, the suggested cuts all seem unanimous 4-0 for cut. I've performed those. Boris the Animal needs further discussion in relation to Serleena. The Night slasher counts despite the film's horrible message. The suggested keeps needed rewrites and more info for some.
Re: Harry Potter: In addition to the examples that passed through, I would like to propose that any example from the Potterverse be kept on the Monster.Harry Potter page, even those that do count. I don't see much purpose in listing the specific actions of any of the examples in single books in addition to their full write-ups on the subpage.
I'll get back to Ong-Bak and Men in Black later.
Preliminary write-ups for the keeps:
- Dr. Meddows in the 1988 remake of The Blob is a military scientist specializing in bioweapons. He's inadvertently responsible for developing the Blob by sending the satelite and the proto-blob sample in space, where it mutated before it fell back down on Earth. He didn't expect it to develop into a ravenous, all-consuming monster, but is more than pleased at this development and the military potential. He cardons off the town where the blob has started its spread so he can test its killing potential on all the inhabitants and to perform further experiments on the survivors. He's even willing to sacrifice his own men to further his goal, as he orders the sewers blocked off when two of the heroes and one of his men try to escape from the pursuing Blob.
- The Night Slasher in Cobra is a psychotic murderer responsible for terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles at night. He starts a nihilistic murder cult of psychopaths so he can indiscriminately kill dozens of victims of whatever background, including children. He prefers to carve up his victims and perform the kills himself to satiate his sadistic nature. He pursues a woman for witnessing one of his murders, and orders his army to lay siege to an upstate town for the sole purpose of killing her. He sees himself as killing off the weak and his movement as heralding the start of a new order where violent killers such as himself rule through terror.
- Dr. Bartok from The Fly II is a corrupt technology business magnate who will do absolutely anything for money and power. Veronica, Seth Brundle's lover from the previous film, has been implanted with Seth's mutated offspring. Bartok lies to her and Stathis about the incredible danger, and she dies during the birth. He keeps the seemingly normal infant, now named Martin, as a test subject until his mutations will reappear. He presents himself as a fatherly figure to Martin while manipulating him for his own ends. He uses a lab dog which Martin grew attached to for the telepod experiments, and when the experiment fails he keeps the mutated creature alive in agony for years for further study. When Martin grows up at an accelerated rate he gives Martin a private home for himself and allows him to make some human contacts, but installs secret surveillance to continue observing him. He wants to use Martin's unique physiology to control the morpology of all life on Earth and make his company truly hegemonic.
- The Jackal of the 1997 remake The Jackal is a Professional Killer hired by the Russian mob to carry out a public assassination of the First Lady, as revenge on the United States for playing a part in dealing their organization a blow. Being paid 70 million dollars for completing the mission, he has no problem killing or manipulating anyone to reach his goal, and his lack of emotion at anything including murder showcases his complete Lack of Empathy. He orders a remote-controlled machine gun built which he then tests on the guy he hired to build a mount for it, blowing off his arm before tearing him down completely. With the authorities on his tail, he seduces a gay man to infiltrate the country and casually shoots him when the man sees his face on the news. When he learns that the FBI enlisted the help of an atoning former IRA militant to catch him, he tries to execute the man's old flame to prove that he can't protect those he loves, but ends up killing several agents instead. When his plan is foiled he tries to escape with a hostage before he's finally killed.
- Stuntman Mike of Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, is a former stunt man and expert driver who becomes a serial killer of women by using his car as a murder weapon. He modifies the car to make it "100% Death Proof" to immunize himself from harm. Then he can use it for vehicular homocide by crashing into cars full of people and killing them in the process, or drive so dangerously that any passengers will die from the blunt force trauma caused by being thrown around in his car and hitting hard surfaces repeatedly. He extensively stalks his victims beforehand, and seems to derive sexual pleasure from his kills. He also toys with his prey, as he pursues a group of women attempting a stunt where one of them is on the hood of their car at high speed. He chases them down the road in a lengthy pursuit to see them terrified for their lives, getting kicks off the whole thing.
- Hugh Crain of The Haunting (1999). Child-killer extraordinaire, though Nell does say at one point after she's connected to the house and its ghosts that Crain "just wanted children, but it all went wrong", implying he wasn't always so. The short version of his crimes: wanting a family, he abducted children from his mills, and when they tried to leave his house he murdered them, mutilated their bodies, and burned them in a fireplace (then covered this up in his records by merely claiming they'd died of illness or factory injuries). He also drove his first wife to suicide and (it's strongly implied) murdered his second for discovering his secret. After his death he comes back as an all-powerful ghost who keeps the spirits of the children trapped in the house and kills any newcomers.
- Captain Dudley Smith of L.A. Confidential is a corrupt police officer who tries to get control of all criminal activity in Los Angeles after the fall of gangster Mickey Cohen leaves a power vacuum behind. He chases away or kills off all criminal opposition in the city. When officer Dick Stensland and private bodyguard Buzz Meeks try to get more out of a major heroin deal they made with him he kills both of them, one in a diner massacre that leaves a dozen innocent people dead. He frames a trio of black criminals for the massacre, and orders them killed during the arrest by his associates to make sure they won't talk. His plan is undermined by other cops arriving on the scene, but he manipulates the men of the department into killing the fall guys later on anyway. He arranges to execute any cop who discovers his corruption, and kills off all his business partners to tie up any loose ends. Even after a major shootout with the last two good cops that leaves all his minions dead he just carries on as usual, intending to use his position to get away with his crimes and restart his organization anew.
- Horace Pinker of Shocker is a psychotic mass murderer in a near-constant violent frenzy who butchers entire families for fun. He kills the main character Jonathan's mother, brother, and sister after his police detective father gets on Pinker's trail. He kills a handful of cops who try to capture him in his lair. He murders Jonathan's girlfriend in her bathroom. He mutilates two prison guards with his teeth as he's being led to the electric chair, where he reveals that Jonathan is in fact his own son and tried to stop him as Pinker murdered Jonathan's real mother when he was still a little kid. He makes a Deal with the Devil to become an undead being of electricity. He proceeds to possess person after person to continue trying to kill Jonathan, draining their lifeforce completely before discarding his hosts, including a little girl. He possesses people close to Jon so he will be forced to kill his loved ones. All his screentime is spent trying to kill or hurt someone, insulting people, or taunt them with the people he's murdered.
edited 16th Oct '13 3:49:33 PM by Morgenthaler
You've got roaming bands of armed, aggressive, tyrannical plumbers coming to your door, saying "Use our service, or else!"

Great for Munroe. Any thoughts on my rewrites there?