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
Literature.The Defiler has a page, you know.
It may be in the wrong namespace, though.
You may want to put it on the creepypasta page, too.
Edited by SkyCat32 on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:29:37 AM
So, I think I have four more candidates from one of my favorite novel series. One of them was cut, I gather, in the early days of the thread, but I think I can make a good case for her. But that will be in the fullness of time.
What's the work?
Deathstalker, a Space Opera novel series by Simon R. Green, soft as warm butter, and absolutely not to be confused with the low-budget 80s Corman fantasy flicks.
It's the far, far future, and humanity has spread across the stars and founded a great Empire, ruled from the Iron Throne on the homeworld of Golgotha (implied to be Earth, but renamed so many times over however long that no one remembers what it was originally called anymore). Aristocratic Families run everything for the crown, jockeying and currying for favor with the throne, espers, clones, and aliens are third-class citizens, outlaws and rebels just try to survive on the fringes of society. Think Star Wars meets The French Revolution on steroids and laughing gas with a dash of Lovecraftian horror, and you've got the basic idea (and no, that combination should not work, but it does).
Who is Empress Lionstone the XIV? What did she do?
At the time the series starts, the Empire is ruled by Empress Lionstone the XIV, the beautiful and admired, the worshiped and adored. Also known as The Iron Bitch. No one calls her that to her face, but every indication is she's aware of the nickname and doesn't object.
Lionstone is known to have a wicked, mercurial, and dangerous sense of humor. She uses advanced holography, climate control, and so on to transform her court every time, often into something very uncomfortable for her courtiers, like an arctic wasteland, a foul swamp complete with biting insects and predators that are probably holographic, and so on. Of course, she gets be excluded from this discomfort, because she's the Empress. Her court is in the Imperial Palace, which is in a steel bunker far under the surface of Golgotha, deep enough to survive even a concentrated scorching by the Imperial Fleet. The only way in is a train system controlled by Palace computers, and the Empress has been known to use those as a way to quietly eliminate people she's displeased with — stop the train of choice, lock the doors, pump in poison gas. The gas jets aren't even hidden.
And then there's her maids. Handmaidens, attendants, bodyguards, there's a huge list of people wanting to get so close to the Empress, but she rejects them all, and secretly they're glad. Lionstone doesn't like the idea of anyone talking about her behind her back, so she has the maids tongues removed. She also thinks its inappropriate for them to see her in her most vulnerable moments, so they've been blinded and deafened, their senses replaced more efficient and controllable cybernetics. They have retractable steel claws and teeth to defend their Empress (and eat anyone dumb enough to attack her in their presence), implanted bombs to take threats out with them, and have been completely brainburned and reprogrammed into Lionstone's. . . well, I hesitate to say "Bodyguard Babes," since while they don't get to wear clothes, it should be obvious by this point they're not precisely appealing.
And this is just what we learn about her in the first section of the first chapter she's introduced in. And she's the series' Big Bad for three whole books.
She wants her scientists to leash the Grendel aliens for use as footsoldiers. Grendel is a planet that has massive cities with descriptions straight out of H. P. Lovecraft, and in the middle of these cities are massive Vaults, containing these "Sleepers" in a kind of stasis. Picture the Alien cranked Up To Eleven and you've got the basic idea: near impenetrable silicon armor, all teeth and claws and strength and speed and mindless desire to kill whatever it sees. With Eye Beams, if this wasn't bad enough. (Un)Fortunately, the Rogue AIs of Shub beat her to the punch.
The Outlawing of even aristocrats is getting more common during her reign, and in fact it was the Outlawing of one Owen Deathstalker who sets the plot in motion. Lionstone was convinced he had some special Family knowledge that would lead her to the Darkvoid Device, a superweapon which snuffed out a hundred suns in an instant back in the early days of the Empire. She wants it because, with rumors of two advanced alien races out there, Shub acting up, and rebellions growing more frequent and bold, she insists on being the scariest thing in the galaxy.
She crosses the In-Universe Moral Event Horizon when she sacks Virimonde. Virimonde was the world Owen Deathstalker set up his Lordship on, specifically to get away from court and intrigues and all that, enjoy the perks of being an aristocrat, and "write boring histories no one ever reads." After Owen's Outlawing, his distant cousin David Deathstalker took over. It's a pleasant little world, green and lush and a breadbasket for the Empire. And Lionstone sends Valentine Wolfe and the latest word in Imperial war machines to raze it to the ground to tell all these rebellions that she's had enough and they should knock it off. Except Virimonde had nothing at all to do with any rebellions, except for being the place Owen chose to settle down precisely because it was so boring and out of the way and meaningless to anyone.
This galvanized the Empire against Lionstone, and she was relatively quickly removed from power by our plucky band of heroes. She put up a good fight, having several loyal warriors and bodyguards besides her maids, as well having augmented herself beyond what's legally allowed in the Empire to ensure anyone trying to fight her was gonna have a bad time. In the end, that didn't save her, and the galaxy smells better with her gone.
Heinousness?
So, the villains in this series do some seriously awful things, precisely because the author wants to paint them as this trope. Lionstone doesn't do much personally, but the whole rotten state of the Empire is her fault (well, mostly, see below). She's the quintessence of every ruler of every Evil Empire ever, with her draconian policies and rule through fear and no one at all being able to feel safe. Oh, and that sense of humor? Not an Informed Attribute. While she won't straight-up kill people just because It Amused Me, she does love amusing herself with the suffering (minor or otherwise) of those beneath her, and if she really has a reason to see you dead, she'll find a really creative and entertaining (to her) way to do it. And that's not even getting into things like Wormboy Hell, or when the Esper Liberation Front broke into the throne room and threw a pie in her face, and she had her maids slaughter all the elves.
Mitigating Qualities?
Okay, tin-foil-hat time. It's mentioned that the Empire started as a glorious dream, humanity reaching into the stars and yadda yadda, it took 400 years for the rot to set in. It's been awhile since then when The Iron Bitch takes the throne. So one could argue there's simply a vicious cycle in play. . . a more corrupt Empire requires a more stern ruler, who makes for a more corrupt Empire which requires an even sterner ruler, and so on. It may have been inevitable that, at some point, the perfect storm of circumstances would arise: a ruler who was that extra bit authoritarian, a people just discontent enough to revolt with the right motivation, and a powerful and charismatic rebel leadership to light the right spark in the right place at the right time. On that level, Lionstone could be considered less a character and more a plot device, thus potentially failing Agency.
Along those lines, it should be noted that the state of the Empire isn't entirely her fault. She didn't make clones and espers and aliens and such "nonpeople," the Empire's just "always" been like that. She didn't do anything to stop it, and did a lot to make it a damn sight worse (I refer you to Wormboy Hell), but she didn't create the system, she just maintains it. Owen's companion, Hazel d'Ark, makes a point several times that just overthrowing Lionstone, putting a different aristocrat on the throne, and calling it a day isn't going to help. . . the whole system is broken and needs to be (in her opinion) chucked completely and reworked from scratch.
Nor do we really know anything about her childhood or family life. No Freudian Excuse is advanced, but mention is made that she was always a bit off as a child, indicating that perhaps she was just always The Sociopath. She's an unabashedly uncomplicated, proudly pulp-type villain with no motivation other than to be a proudly pulp-type villain. . . but I think that strengthens her case. It's kind of refreshing to see a villain who exists specifically to be the villain.
She does have a sexual relationship with the Lord High Dram, Warrior Prime of the Empire, but she doesn't love him, she may not even like him. She uses him as The Mole in the clone and esper undergrounds, and he actually dies at the end of the first book, and her reaction is basically "Oh, well, time to break the clone out of storage." Yeah, she had him cloned in case he ever died so she could keep him by her side. . . again, not because she loves him, but because he's a damn fine warrior with a reputation guaranteed to scare the piss out of anyone with two brain cells to rub together. And she has control words conditioned into his brain so she can be absolutely certain she can control him.
Finally, while everything she does is for what she considers the good of the Empire, that's not out of any duty to her subjects to be a good ruler. It's because it's her Empire. Rebels and outlaws don't get to flaunt her authority, so they must brutally be brought to heel. The Empire is hers, so those aliens and cyborgs and rogue AIs need to get their grubby mitts the hell off.
Conclusion?
She is a very uncomplicated villain, but she is also a very villainous villain. The lack of any kind of backstory or motive for her initially put me off as I was mulling this over, but the whole series unabashedly embraces the pulp fiction and Saturday-morning-serial vibes that informed Star Wars (which is its most direct inspiration), so a villain who operates on the level of "I exist to be a villain" works. I personally don't feel that undermines her Agency, but I get how others might. I think she fits, but it's up to you.
Edited by ErikModi on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:52:49 AM
Lionstone
She'd go in a new section in Monster.Simon R Green
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."32: I actually wasn't aware of that. I've taken care of it.
I'll read the EP tomorrow, but is the series part of Green's Shared Universe, or its own thing?
ALL of greens works are in a shared universe. Though most like this one are standalone.
Id still put it on that page since secret histories had Owen make an appearance to help in the second book of that series.
Edited by miraculous on Dec 30th 2019 at 3:42:43 AM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Dude is subtle. Though Fuck I'd be lying if I said I didn't love his work anyway.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."All his villains like what? Gleefully, unrepentantly evil? Seems like he'd be at home writing for 2000 AD. And there's nothing wrong with that. Judge Death is so DELIGHTFULLY over-the-top.
Edited by ACW on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:45:50 AM
Delishly evil.
Not all of them are like that tthough. Mr Stab, Mab, walker, Grendal Rex, the walking man are all fairly complex and in most cases sympathetic. It helps the truly pure evil ones stand out even more.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Btw could I add these two quotes from green to the quotes page.

Ah, cool then, we'll leave him at both then.
Sure to the expansion.