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
Alright. I promised some writeups after my exam, so here they are. I also went ahead and got rid of the three bad entries for Tenjho Tenge.
In alphabetical order:
- Angelika Einstürzen from Dogs: Bullets & Carnage is a Mad Scientist whose specialty is human experimentation, and she starts on her test subjects when they're young children. Chronologically, the first thing we see her do is tell Heine, a member of one test group, that if he took part in an extremely dangerous experiment, he'd save all of his friends from the same fate. Once it was clear that the experiment was a success, she no longer needed the rest of the test group and had them go berserk and murder each other, and she forced Heine to watch. Next, she sends a large number of her old test subjects to invade the Underground City and slaughter as many people as they could before she blew her soldiers up. She didn't even do this because she had something against the people she had killed, she just wanted to get rid of her old, defective test subjects and at the same time, get the attention of the mayor, who resided on the surface, and she figured the easiest way to kill two birds with one stone was to blow her men up and take hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians with them. Afterwards, she sends one of her many bodies to one of the districts hit hardest by her attack and tells the people there that their friends and family, who had been kidnapped long ago, were among the attackers that the people had killed, just to see how horrified they would be. It's telling that one of the nicest things we can say about her is that she shocked one of a pair of young twin sisters who understandably didn't want to go back to her for more brainwashing and Mind Rape. She does all this for one of two very simple reasons: scientific research and amusement.
- Isla Yura from PandoraHearts manipulated dozens of politically powerful people into believing that the Abyss was a paradise, even though he knew the Abyss for what it was: a chaotic and very literal hell that imprisons and warps anything that ends up there. Using one of these connections, he was able to gain control of an orphanage full of children who were abyss-sensitive, and he tricked them into contracting with a chain (abyssal creature), a contract that would eventually kill them. He then used these contracted children as Brainwashed and Crazy Child Soldiers to slaughter dozens, maybe even hundreds of people as preparation for plunging the world into the Abyss, and he did all this because his greatest wish was to die laughing in the face of the unknown, and the Abyss was the greatest unknown. Which is fine in and of itself, but the only way he knew how to go to the Abyss was by trying to annihilate a country, so that's what he did. Needless to say, he didn't regret a thing.
- Ukyo from Samurai 7 is a real nasty piece of work. He was born in a feudal Japanese village where he was oppressed by bandits (employed by the Emperor to oppress the people and consolidate his power). At some point, he was adopted into a noble family, where he was pampered into being a ridiculously selfish and arrogant sociopath. When he becomes Emperor (long story), he takes control of the bandits like his predecessor did and has them attack the villages. Apparently not feeling like a big enough dick, he even told the bandits' leader to take the food that the peasants hid away so that they could, you know, not starve to death — even the bandit leader (who knew about these stores) felt that he was going overboard. Then Ukyo personally brings an army to one particular village so that he can wipe it out. He has several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that he wanted the priestess of that village to be part of his Paid Harem, and her reply was essentially, "go screw." He places so little value on human life that when he sees the corpses of his Paid Harem, his only response is to say, "Oh dear, they won't be easy to replace."
- Sohaku Kago from Tenjho Tenge is a power-hungry sociopath who delights in ruining people's lives. Two of his favourite pastimes are engaging in Cold-Blooded Torture and watching one of his subordinates Mind Control helpless victims into fighting and killing each other. He has spent hundreds of years spreading his influence in order to manipulate, use, or kill hundreds of powerful martial artists as well as all the people around them. A few years before the beginning of the story, he experimented on his wife, using her Power Parasite abilities to steal the abilities (and in most cases, lives) of the most powerful martial artists in japan, before judging her too weak, cutting off her arm, and ripping out her eye (which contained the powers she had collected) and giving it to his dragon. Flash forward to the present, and he sets his full plan into motion, indirectly Mind Raping his son, who has the same powers as his ex-wife, into letting his powers turn him into a god-like being whose only purpose is to go on a rampage, killing any powerful martial artists it comes across and steeling their powers. Once this happens, his son goes around the world, killing thousands of people, just as Sohaku planned, before his friends can stop him. The closest Sohaku gets to redemption is realizing that he has no chance of succeeding and quietly admitting defeat as he dies.
edited 5th Dec '13 8:57:36 PM by Erivale
Einstürzen is the Big Bad of a series that isn't finished yet, so she hasn't yet, but it'll come at some point. (although the fact that she enjoys pain and even dying (she has several bodies) will mean she'll probably enjoy whatever our heroes do to her).
Ukyo gets his ass crushed by his own crashing warship when he finds himself on the ground between it and the village he was trying to destroy. Karmic, yeah?
Also, is anybody allowed to edit the sandbox page? I'm looking through the history and it seems only TV Rulez Again has edited it.
edited 5th Dec '13 8:35:11 PM by Erivale
Oh, it is so delicious, isn't it?
any rate, seems Rosario To Vampire is drawing to the end of its current arc, so we should be able to see Alucard go up soon.
As another sidenote, I think the page for Karmic Death could use a touch-up. A lot of it at present seems to be snarking about the trope's use as a sort of cop-out to keep the hero from actually killing anyone, but I actually find it more satisfying if the villain ends up the cause of his own doom. Perhaps a job for the bashing cleanup thread?
edited 5th Dec '13 9:52:06 PM by HamburgerTime
Were the Dance in the Vampire Bund entries gonna be rewritten?
Also, I'm going to assume no one opposes adding Johan Liebert to the sandbox.
Well, I'm not sure. It's just that you said here
that they needed rewrites.
Lighty, thanks for clearing that up about Alucard. I haven't really been keeping up with R+V. Actually, all I really know is that Kahlua died, Alucard is Miyabi, and Gyokuro got what's coming to her.
Also, I'm a bit confused. I get why we would add things to the sandbox— it makes it easier for a mod to find them and add them to the CM page or something, but why would we add examples that are already on the subpage?
Ah, I see.
I was just getting caught up with Fairy Tail, and I figured there might be some more characters to add here. The 9 Demon Gates of Tartaros are, with one or two exceptions that we've seen, ruthless and remorseless mass murderers who take sick amusement from killing at best to being so heartless they don't even care about the people they kill. (and I know the policy against adding groups, but most of the ones we've seen in action is horrible enough on their own) However, they're all demons, and there's a heavy implication that they don't have the moral capacity to be humane, so I'm not quite sure.
edited 6th Dec '13 2:30:56 PM by Erivale
How come examples from The Batman, Crisis On Two Earths, Justice League: Doom and The Flashpoint Paradox are on the Western Animation page and not the DCAU page?
edited 6th Dec '13 2:40:39 PM by Camberf

I'd say no. He's just this guy who gets only two people killed so that he can line his pockets. Unless this is a show where even a single murder stands out as heinous, I'd say a definite no. Furthermore, despite it being for selfish reasons, he does keep a child from being sent back - he may have been using a father's love for his child to his own advantage, but he never put the child in danger. If he hadn't been corrupt, the child still would have been sent back for execution. (to be fair, a guy doing his job responsibly would have to be a pretty cold motherfucker to just send a child back for execution because his parents don't have the papers, but he doesn't have to be corrupt)
And unless this guy's actions were carried out because he knew, or at least expected, they would get these people killed, we can't even hold him morally responsible, if you know what I mean.
This is just my opinion, but Complete Monsters need to have at least some sort of character depth. A guy with only a minute of screentime that he uses to be a dick could still be a very loving husband, or something. We need to know the character through and through if we want to call them a Complete Monster.
edited 5th Dec '13 5:12:50 PM by Erivale