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If the height of your arguments is "if he was X, he would totally do Y!" that's a sign you're reaching. We don't measure what a candidate could hypothetically do. We measure what's onscreen.

I'm saying "no" outright. It doesn't seem Balagos pushes the standard, vile as that rap sheet is.

Edited by Scraggle on Oct 9th 2019 at 9:46:16 AM

Balagos. Yeah... Just don't compare fictional stuff with the real world, man, not cool.

Major, major to Balagos.

Alright for Balgos. The upper mid tier bad guys we have up for comparison are :

• Aerisi Kalinoth who tripped to wipe out the city of never winter as well as killing her minions. She later plans to unleashing the air elemental to ravage entire nations
• Adolican Rhand: Evil Sorceror whose also a Serial Killer and Serial Rapist of women. Kills dozens including kids and plans to harvest the souls of the chosen.
• Akhlaur: Mad Scientist who experiments on elves. (MAY need a rewrite as it's uh not the best entry)
• Akar Kessell: Takes icewind Dale and mind controls women into being his sex slaves. And lets an army lose on Ten-Towns which kills thousands.
• Matron Yvonnel Baenre: Runs her city as The Caligula while planning to wipe out rival Drow houses. With her ultimate goal to conquer the dwarvish kingdom with deaths to anyone who stands against her.
• Arklem Greeth: Evil lich that kills Thousands in the city of Luskan
• Sylora Salm: Actually did destroy neverwinter killing thousands.
• Kymil Nimesin: Elf who nearly leads the genocide of his own people
• Rivalen Tanthul: Wants to help his mistress Shar wipe out the entire planet.
• Jon Irenicus : Mad Scientist who commits gruesome experiments with some of his subjects in And I Must Scream fate
• Amelyssan the Blackhearted: Kills other children of bhaal, plans to plunge the entire world into war.

Yeah........Balagos

Goddamn, FR had lots of keepers. I'm sure I've asked this, but if all the settings, why did that one become so popular?

Because Wizards of the Coast has tended to promote it the most and it's the most used setting, in part thanks to a ridiculously favorable contract to its creator.

Thanks, Mir... You know, this list should definately have been included in the original post.

Edited by TheMadCr0w on Oct 9th 2019 at 1:19:23 PM

Yeah... Come to think of it? Balagos. Heinous standard is ridiculously high that I'm uncomfortable to vote for him

Reading miraculous's additional information, switching to a no. The guy could've counted anywhere else, but here? Not even sure he'd make it as a Hate Sink.

So guys Sloan. Voting on him seems to have stopped.

Holy shit, you're not kidding about that contract!

Sloan.

BTW, the Beria that we DO HAVE is apparently TONED DOWN.

Edited by ACW on Oct 9th 2019 at 12:34:19 PM

to your candidate, Mir

Edited by TheMadCr0w on Oct 9th 2019 at 1:35:20 PM

Sloan sounds like a yes. I think I can say Asimov has enough votes too btw. And I'll work on his writeup later

Edited by ElfenLiedFan90 on Oct 9th 2019 at 9:37:44 AM

About the "Don't compare to real world tragedies thing": if Executive Decision were released today, don't you think people would view the terrorists as more heinous than when it was originally released (i.e pre 9/11)?

Edited by Bootlebat on Oct 9th 2019 at 9:38:47 AM

I...don't think it COULD get released today.

I'm just using as a hypothetical for how if a fictional character does some horrible thing and someone in real life does similar it can make the villain seem worse than they were when the work originally came out.

BTW what exactly do you mean by "jacked up"?

But you do realize that you compared a dragon to a real tragedy? There is a clear Harsher in Hindsight between Executive Decision and what happened in real-life... Which is not the case with your example.

Basically, it means that the Heinous Standard is already filled with depraved characters.

Edited by TheMadCr0w on Oct 9th 2019 at 1:44:54 PM

Action films have a basis in the real world. Many are inherently political as well. Dirty Harry, classic that it is, has an open disdain for rights of the accused and skews the film directly to that effect by making the hero a hard-bitten cop hamstrung by red tape, obstructive bureaucrats and the damn law that protects bad guys...and the film makes Scorpio a psychopathic thrill killing rapist child murderer so we take the side of Harry Callahan.

This is not comparable to "the dragon ate someone who criticized him, just like the Charlie Hebdo shooting." To paraphrase Pulp Fiction: "It ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same sport."

Fantasy can likewise exist to draw parallels with the real world and make sense of it. Things can happen that draw parallels, even unintentional. But, flatly and bluntly speaking, "the dragon killed a guy for badmouthing him" isn't a parallel to that. Dictators and tyrants have been killing their critics for millennia if they spoke against them. It's no more an allusion to the Charlie Hebdo killings than it is to Mark Antony having Marcus Tullius Cicero murdered.

Edited by Lightysnake on Oct 9th 2019 at 9:51:12 AM

What said. For another example, Warhammer 40,000 has a REALLY jacked up heinous standard, where I think all the current CMs have billions of deaths on their hands.

Or, for a lesser example, Criminal Minds, where having a body count in the double digits is extremely common; even having 20 deaths may not necessarily be enough.

Edited by ACW on Oct 9th 2019 at 12:50:02 PM

Ok I'll drop that part. Another question about him though, is saying "the villain did something I found really disturbing" a valid reason to add to his heinousness or not? I know it's a matter of opinion but the trope is YMMV to begin with.

Having a particular opinion on a candidate doesn't make them extra heinous or vice-versa. That's the reason why we vote...

I'm sure there has been Expies, but a fictionalized version of him that is a keep? None that I remember.

Edited by TheMadCr0w on Oct 9th 2019 at 2:07:52 PM

So, regarding fictional incarnations of real people being keepers such as as various forms of Hitler, or Goeth in Schindler's List, are there any fictional portrayals of Osama Bin Laden, or anyone else involved in the September 11 attacks, that keep? Just curious.

Ok I got permission from ACW to do this. It's a CM from a game demo and the incarnation of Dirglewagner I was talking about.

What is the Work

The New Order Last Days Of Europe is a an upcoming Hearts of Iron IV Game Mod that is set in an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan utterly wins World War II. They divide Eurasia between them and force America into isolation. Fast forward to 1962 and Germany is failing economically. They land a man in Space but in the years leading up to 1962 they have alienated their allies in fascist Italy and Francoist Spain and their economy and military is decaying rapidly. In response to this decline, the worst of the Nazis, led by Heinrich Himmler and the SS, vow to destroy the world by engineering a nuclear war that they think will kill all non-Aryans. Hitler's death would trigger a civil war between pro-Himmler forces led by Reinhard Heydrich(who is unaware of Himmler's endgoal but is very happy to help), the Nazi Old Guard led by Martin Bormann, reformist Nazis led by Albert Speer and ultra-militarists using Hermann Goering as a puppet. If the civil war drags on enough, a fringe National Bolshevik-esque(Communism and Fascism combined in one ideology) movement drawn from dissidents in the Hitler youth may attempt to coup Speer, and the militarists may decide Goering has outlived his usefulness and take direct command under General Schoner.

Now the game itself is not out yet. So what I am discussing here, in the vein of Deltarune(which had a similar sort of EP for the King), is a demo centered on one of the story arcs in the mod. The demo focuses on a small area in what was the Soviet Union, but has since dissolved into warlordism following the Nazi victory following an earlier failed attempt in the 1950s to strike back at the Nazis. Two of the warlord states, the libertarian socialist Orenburg Commune and the Ural League, are featured in the mod, and both have to contend with their more hostile neighbors—the rogue Nazi unit of the Dirglewagner brigade and the Russian warlord state of Magnitogorsk, the leadership of both which are nasty enough to be receiving E Ps. This EP will be focusing on the leader of the Dirglewagner brigade, Oskar Dirglewagner.

Who is he?

Oskar Dirglewagner is the leader of the Dirglewagner brigade. In the 1950s, during the counterattack of the Russian warlords led by the remnants of the Soviet Union, they and other SS forces in the east were tasked by Himmler to undermine the Wehrmacht from within while Himmler plans a coup against Hitler to take command and implement his ultra-genocidal ideals. Wehrmacht commander Hans Speidel, however, saw this and planned to nip the SS coup in the bud. Together with men loyal to him, he organized and led Operation Fehlzündung, named after the term ‘Backfire’, or the method for starting fires to fight them, against the SS. Speidel and his men descended in the dead of night on SS camps and on marching formations and rapidly disarmed and captured the units and their entire chains of command. The operation was a rousing success, with only three wounded and several hundred SS fighters and their leaders imprisoned by Speidel's loyalists. However, they failed in capturing Dirglewagner's brigade, whom shook off their attackers and fled into the Russian wilderness. Now they live like bandits, raping and killing everything they see....starting with Orenburg and the Ural League.

What does he do?

Dirglewagner can choose to ally with the leadership of Magnitogorsk to destroy Orenburg, the leadership of Magnitogorsk wants humans to experiment on to create an army of super soldiers. Both side plans to backstab the other. If Dirglewagner takes over Orenburg and the Ural League then it's not a pretty picture. The events following Dirglewagner's victory describe entire villages being burnt to the ground, men and children being killed while Orenburg's rivers are filled with blood, and anyone they can't kill is sent to Magnitogorsk for human experimentation. The surviving women are then raped to death(the events for his faction specifically mentions rape). He then invades Magnitogorsk and this either results in the leadership of Magnitogorsk killing him and using his human body to be experimented on, or he kills their leader(will be the topic of my next EP) and decapitates said leader's corpse and leaves it to rot on the ground.

Apart from this Dirglewagner also has other personal moments of sadism as well. He forces his men under threat of death to put a big artillery gun on a truck, then tested out said gun on truck, laughed as it recoiled so hard that it crushed two of his bandits to death, and then got mad it didn't work. He also kills a Kazakh man for not washing his truck hard enough. He also wants to be remembered as a boogeyman that children in Russia will forever fear.

Heinousness Standard

The heinousness standard for this setting is very, VERY jacked up. Through the game isn't out yet Word of God has revealed that Nazi victory has changed the world decisively for the worst and has gone into detail about some of the most nasty things that can happen in the TNO world. You have Slavic Nazis that have adapted the genocidal ideas of the Nazis, only that they want to either join Germany in dividing the world between them or destroy all Germans(and potentially all non Slavic Europeans) in retaliation for Nazi atrocities, the most notorious of these Slavic Nazis include the nation of Omsk, which has been known to have death squads beating up non-Slavs and political dissidents to death with shovels, along with a mysterious Russian warlord operating in the nation of Komi that has yet to be revealed that wants Russia to have it's own SS divisions and do the same thing that Omsk plans to do all of Europe(kill all non-Slavic people in revenge for WW 2).

Outside of Russia you have Himmler wanting to do a even bigger holocaust with nukes and in the Nazi civil war, you have Heydrich, who already has his crimes in real life for us to consider and in-game would heavily depopulate German society and help Himmler indirectly in his genocidal endgoals, a National Bolshevik-esque movement drawn from dissidents in the Hitler youth that kills anyone they deem to be Nazis despite being corrupted by Nazi ideology themselves, willingly takes a fascistic interpretation of Communist ideology and subscribes to Nazi racist ideology—wanting Germany to maintain control of Europe, and General Schoner, who controls Goering like a puppet to declare endless wars on Europe to maintain German control and Take Over the World. In Spain, one faction of Francoists, assuming Spain falls into a second civil war, can try to make an extreme theocracy and essentially turn into Catholic ISIS.

Despite this huge bar, I think Dirglewagner passes this. He has considerably limited resources and is a noted rapist and sadist to boot that helps another potential CM with human experimentation with the events going into great detail about his crimes.

Player Character Rule

Not an issue, Dirglewagner is playable but much like other HOI 4 modding multiverse C Ms such as Theresa Brasier and William Dudley Pelley his route is railroaded to be as totally evil as possible.

Redeeming qualities?

Now what makes TNO interesting is that TNO tries to move away from portraying Nazis and Fascists as totally evil and depraved, with some Nazi leaders getting Hidden Depths. Hitler himself is portrayed as not wanting to fire on political dissidents in Germany and makes a tearful speech encouraging his subjects to follow their dreams during the opening of an art gallery, Albert Speer is portrayed as having some remorse for his crimes and this drove his motivations to reform a rotten system from within, Goering is presented to not be interested in Schoner's plans to Take Over the World, but can do little to stop them. Reich Kommissar Siegfried Kache had a My God, What Have I Done? moment over his role as Reich Kommissar after a attack by anti-Nazi partisians and is actually acting as a shield protecting the Slavic minority groups from the Germans in Nazi-occupied Russia. A Luftwaffe general stationed in Nazi occupied Africa, Wolfgang Schenck, genuinely wants to atone for his actions as a Nazi and is helping the CIA undermine Nazi rule in Africa from within). Also Carlo Scorza, the politician that wants to maintain Fascist rule over Italy is presented rather sympathetically.

This is because the developer of TNO wants to show that even the worst of us-even Nazis and Fascists-are ultimately human. However, this characterization has gotten the developer of TNO into a lot of controversy, particularly with those sympathetic towards the modern-day antifascist movement, whom believe that we should have more of the Nazi characters in this trope than not. I was not kidding when I said during the discussion over Bryce being cut that TNO will be very controversial when I do the full EP hopefully in Q2 next year, through the criticism of TNO by those sympathizing with antifa is something that we shouldn't really delve too much into.

But does this mean that Dirglewagner gets some sudden sympathetic quality?

HA! No way(probably because Dirglewagner was such as psycho in the real world too). The most he does is sparing a boy, but that's so he can recruit him into his bandit army as a child soldier.

Other Mitigating factors

Not really. He has enough personality to qualify, the in-game events described his actions in great detail and showed how much of a sadist he is.

Verdict

Despite the game not being out yet, I think the case with Dirglewagner is very much like the case with Spades King in Deltarune. to him.

Will discuss the leader of Magnitogorsk next.

Edited by xie323 on Oct 9th 2019 at 10:49:34 AM

Going with Nay until the official release.