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
TBH I'm less concerned about the "what" and more the "why" for All The Rest. Delphine admitted explicitly the story was born out of the notion of getting a CM candidate up with a joke name. Maybe a cute one-time joke, but I'm not sure it's a pattern we want to be setting.
Edited by Scraggle on Dec 6th 2019 at 7:22:59 AM
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
Gonna give a possible compromise here. Not sure how well it will be received, but want to try anyway.
How about we keep All The Rest, but establish a rule preventing any more candidates that were written 'as a joke', so to speak? This way, ATR would be kept, but the 'evil photograph' would not be allowed on account of the new rule? I know it has been said that we should be able to function without a rule about this, but I feel as though ATR got up partly because this rule was unwritten and unenforced.
Just an idea.
Also, the original Nyarlathotep was an example of 'fearing the villain and what they do', and he got up.
Edited by MasterN on Dec 6th 2019 at 6:16:28 AM
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
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Got thumped for making posts that made no sense beyond 'trying to be cute', decided to Rage Quit. From what I heard.
Edited by MasterN on Dec 6th 2019 at 6:15:44 AM
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.The reason this happened the first time is Delphine said they would make the story and no one else raised an issue.
I think this whole conversation is enough to make it clear this isn't something to be encouraged, so I don't think we're risking this becoming a recurring issue.
Things are really about to get Fun around here
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
Which is why I propose the new rule
. With this, if anyone else tries to do the same thing, we can point to the rule as a reason to reject them.
Edited by MasterN on Dec 6th 2019 at 6:25:46 AM
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.Right, so...I've been trying very hard to not get involved in this debate, but I'm putting my foot down here.
As someone who has read multiple NoSleep stories filled with deplorable villains, and other stories I'd rather not get into (I SEE YOU, THREE YEARS IN HELL
), I'm not inclined to agree with the notion here.
I get what people are saying. "Oh, All the Rest came from a joke idea; we shouldn't encourage that kind of notion!"
No. We shouldn't. But someone took this joke idea, and made into an actual story with effort put into it. Admittedly a dark story with a Downer Ending, but a story nonetheless. We've had multiple examples from short forms of entertainment where the villain still counts. We've had multiple examples focusing on a Villain Protagonist where said protagonist counts—my go-to example being Louis Bloom. Soooooo...why is this a problem now? Why are we debating this now?
"Tyk, All the Rest only exists over a joke someone made. It should be scratched."
Okay, so, um...lemme ask y'all this. Hypothetically speaking, if I only wrote T.O.T. because I wanted to make a story with a werewolf villain who's a CM, does that mean we gotta axe Maximus Slade? If I said I only wrote Smirvlak's Stone so I could have a gnoll CM, would we cut Lorko Maeliss? If I said I only wrote Help Not Wanted just to have an ogre CM, we gonna cut Ogrell Syn'Gorrsh?
"But Tyk, your stories are far longer than Day of the Choosing."
Irrelevant. My point still stands. If Word of God admits that "Oh I just made this story for a CM villain" then does that mean they get axed? Now no, this is not what I did; I barely have time to do an EP in this forum anymore. I damn sure ain't gonna spend weeks, sometimes months writing a story just to have a "CM badge" pinned to it.
I've read stories that were clearly made just to have a CM in them. And nothing else. No substance. No class. No point. No nothing. Like those Kirby fanfics that were barely over a thousand words long. So why is Day of the Choosing getting the same treatment just because of the idea behind said story's villain?
I feel like this whole discussion only started because a lot of tropers have been pumping out short stories lately with CM villains in them and it was becoming aggravating/annoying.
I write stories and shiz. You can read them here.Especially when we're supposed to employ Death of the Author here.
Found another unapproved Complete Monster pothole. This was on the Funny subpage for Zoids: Chaotic Century. I cut the pothole and linked to the thread. Anyone familiar with the series can weigh in:
- In probably the only funny moment Raven has, he shows remarkable Genre Savvy when he refers to Irvine as Van's Sidekick. Irvine is, of course, livid.
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
I mean, you have a point, Tyk... leaning towards
keep for All The Rest, but I understand where Scraggle, 43, and... well.. all the rest are coming from. The pumping of short stories with CMs is something I can see as clogging up the thread. Perhaps we should address that instead?
Edited by MasterN on Dec 6th 2019 at 6:36:40 AM
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.Yikes. I was just about to come back and catch up, and I ended up in the middle of a war zone with my own story as the target. I'd just like to say that, while a joke was indeed what got the idea rolling, I made it into a story of my own. Personally, I don't care if my character gets booted or not, because I still enjoyed writing the story and nothing can diminish that for me.
Everyone, please vote however you want, it really doesn't matter either way, as this is just a piecd of fiction that has zero impact on anybody's lives.
RIP KissAnime.

A 5K word horror story with time to fleshing out its setting, even with a downer side...I mean, I think that just hits it for us. I proposed from short horror stories that have some genuinely awful misery to them. Like Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper is a short investigation story that ends with the ripper murdering the story's hero and getting away free and clear. Cold Print is a short one involving Ramsey Campbell's god of rape eating the protagonist alive at the end.
Is it so different from other horror stories or even short horror films? I proposed one recently from Innsmouth, a 10 minute short with a woman investigating murders who is seduced and murdered by a victorious monster at the end, too...it just has solid production values and tight writing. I've given Delphine my review of the story, so I won't rehash that here, but...