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. "![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thumbs_up_emote.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
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
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
to Nazi officer and William de Soulis.
to William de Solis.
![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_down_emoticon_3571.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
on the Judge Death quote.
Got another candidate.
What's the Work?
Fleeing the Childrens Crusade is a Web Original story that is set in the summer of 1944, the twilight of World War 2. It focuses on a young Hitler Youth soldier named Otto Krueger, who's joined the Waffen SS and details his experiences during the conflict. Although we never directly meet the ones in charge of the German war effort like Hitler, one vile figure stands out in the story.
Who is Sergeant Lessing and What Has He Done?
Sergeant Lessing is the leader of Krueger's company, where he's first shown training them. Through it all, Lessing verbally abuses all of the boys under his command. In particular, one boy named Hermann falls behind the rest of the company, so Lessing forces him to run in front of the entire company, despite the fact he's near total exhaustion. Apparently, this treatment is normal for Lessing, as Krueger notes how his fellow soldiers are often left with broken limbs and face starvation. Lessing stops the training session briefly when he's called to receive an Iron Cross First Class medal in recognition for his efforts. When he returns, he catches Krueger giving Hermann a drink of water. Believing that they both disobeyed his orders to return to their tents and that Hermann doesn't deserve any water, he makes them do somersaults back to their tents as punishment.
The next day, Lessing displays his soldiers to his own commander, whom is impressed with Lessing's work. To test their skills, Lessing releases a goat into the forest they are in and orders them to capture it, in which it will be their dinner and thus they won't eat if fail in their task. When the goat is killed by Hermann, Lessing orders them to gut and eat it, but also threatens to punish them further if they don't properly butcher it, as he'll make them do another exercise. This makes Krueger shudder because he remembers the last "exercise" as discipline left the boy with gashes. They're successful and Lessing joins them to eat the goat, in which he acts surprisingly pleasant with the rest of his company. Unfortunately, it's not to last.
The next day, Lessing realizes that Krueger can speak Slavic and presents him before two of his superior officers, obviously hoping that he'll be punished in some way. Instead, both officers are actually impressed with this, noting how it might be useful when the war against the Soviet Union transitions into a partisan war, especially when they learn that, despite his mother being half Slavic, his father is a pure Aryan and thus Krueger would still be considred Aryan as well. Irritated, Lessing orders Krueger to patrol the camp, still trying to find a way to somehow punish him indirectly. Lessing later meets Krueger in his tent, where he puts his loyalty to the SS in question and even threatens to kill Hermann if said disloyalty comes to fruition. In the middle of his (awfully boring) speech, Krueger accidentally yawns, which infuriates Lessing, who punishes him by making run around the camp (about a hundred yards) and repeat doing so for even minor infractions (i.e. going a bit too slow).
Eventually, a driver arrives to the camp, taking Krueger and the rest of Lessing's men to the front, specifically to suppress the resistance movement in Yugoslavia. Lessing disappears for a while in the story, until he's also sent to the front and put in charge of Krueger's company again. While he's leading his forces, they come across an innocent elderly peasant, who reveals that there's a village nearby. Suspecting him of being a partisan, Lessing first beats the peasant in front of his company and then shoots him. After a brief firefight with a sniper, Lessing and his company reach the aforementioned village. There, he meets an old woman, whom he attempts to rape, until Krueger intervenes and Lessing realizes that he has the more important duty of rounding up all of the vilagers. Regardless, Lessing still executes her and brings out a table to begin checking the villagers to determine if they are partisans.
Eventually, the superior officers determine that the entire village is filled with partisans and order Lessing to kill everyone. He starts by rounding up all of the children in a shed and blows it up, killing everyone in there. He then follows his orders to hang the remaining villagers, but he occasionally goes out of his way to give some villagers more gruesome deaths. For example, when he finds several villagers hiding under a bridge, he orders his men to release their dogs to maul them to death. He even allows some of his men to use flamethrowers to burn them, as Krueger sees one unfortunate villager suffer that fate.
When Krueger protests against this plan and refuses to gather rope to hang the villagers, Lessing has him arrested, planning to deal with him after he's finished exterminating the village. Eventually, a partisan army led by Josip Broz Tito arrives to liberate the village (or what's left of it) from the Germans, in which Lessing decides to spend his final moments raping a girl he found and orders his men to hold off the partisans. Sick of Lessing's vileness, Krueger officially betrays him by giving a gun to the girl he's raping, which she uses to shoot and kill him.
Does He Have Any Mitigating Qualities or Freudian Excuse?
Initially, he just seems like a Jerkass boss who does have some Pet the Dog moments with his company. However, he's revealed to be much worse when he gleefully assists in exterminating a village. Although his superiors technically ordered him to do so, he takes obvious enjoyment in it and even goes out of his way to be more brutal than his superiors asked like having them mauled or burned. Any care he may have had for his men is also nullified by his extremely abusive treatment of them, even by Drill Sergeant Nasty standards, occasionally leaving them crippled. Not to mention that he hardly reacts to some of their deaths in this story. This is further shown when he prepares to execute Krueger when he defies his orders. No Freudian Excuse to speak of either, as he's just a full-on Sadist.
Does He Meet the Heinousness Standard?
For a guy with few resources and power within the German military command, Lessing stands out. Beyond his extermination of the Yugoslav village, he murders two villagers out of sadistic glee and tries to rape two women, successfully so in one case. The other German commanders don't do much beyond ordering the extermination of the village and operate on a higher resource tier than Lessing, which makes him stand out all the more.
Final Verdict?
For a villain who operates on a local level, I'd give him a slight .
Edited by DrUnknown on Jul 25th 2020 at 6:04:13 AM
Yes to Lessing.
Lessing (where do you find all these fics/web originals)
Also, with the shift in opinion, is Bulganin a keep?
Edited by nwotyzal on Jul 25th 2020 at 6:33:03 AM
to Lessing
Lessing
New proposal, from Macabre's "The Ted Bundy Song".
Who's the candidate?
Ted Bundy, a charming young man and secret sadist.
What does he do?
Lyrics:
Here's a story of Ted Bundy, murdered young girls Monday through Sunday Lure them into his car, then they wouldn't see tomorrow He killed Monday through Sunday, his name was Ted Bundy He murdered young girls and left them in the woods He would get them in his car, they wouldn't go far He would hit them on the head, with an object until they were dead Murdered young girls in several states, from jail two times he escaped Until the end he denied his crimes, he was convicted, then he fried He killed Monday through Sunday, his name was Ted Bundy He murdered young girls and left them in the woods He would get them in his car, they wouldn't go far He would hit them on the head, with an object until they were dead Heinousness?
Only villain, sets it.
Mitigating factors?
None. Dude's a brazen sociopath who kills for jollies.
Verdict?
to Bundy. Would this be his second or third?
Ultimate Moral Compass
Ted Bundy and Lessing
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I believe third.
Edited by therealjackieboy on Jul 25th 2020 at 6:59:43 AM
"No running in the halls!"
Bundy (fun fact: even Charles Manson was disgusted by him)
also, 3rd version, after EWSE&V and The Deliberate Stranger
Edited by nwotyzal on Jul 25th 2020 at 7:26:41 AM
Yes to Lighty's duo and... shocker, Bundy!
to Lessing and Ted Bundy.
"Cool. Coolcoolcool."
Yes to Bundy and Lessing.
Edited by Bullman on Jul 25th 2020 at 9:28:09 AM
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup thread
de Soulis easily
Edited by NattesNovgrel on Jul 25th 2020 at 9:15:25 AM
to Ted Bundy.
@nwotyzal: I sometimes wonder that myself.
Edited by DrUnknown on Jul 25th 2020 at 7:29:30 AM
de Soulis.
Self-Declared King of Everything
to Lessing and Bundy.
One other guy I wanna get up tonight. Returning to The Kindness of Devils for this one, from the latest short story compilation Stories Never Told that takes a few cues from the works of Clark Ashton Smith, as well as a few of his villains. I present Knygathin Zhaum, from the story "Shadows in the Ice."
Who is Zhaum? What has he done?
Knygathin Zhaum is a Voormi notable among his kind for his unique parentage and wicked, sadistic cunning. Zhaum's historical rapsheet is taken from the original Testaments of Athammaus, explored in flashbacks presented in the text. Zhaum was a Humanoid Abomination bandit who let swarms of Voormis to slaughter entire villages, dragging off whomever they didn't savage to death to infinitely worse fates in the Voormi caverns. His exploits led him to the city of Commoriom, where he played a cruel game; submitting himself to the blade of executioner Athammaus, only to return and devour more people the next day.
Zhaum eventually tired of this game, and this is where Adaptational Villainy comes in; instead of merely driving out most of Commoriom's population, Zhaum devoured everyone within the city and the city itself. Athammaus was forced to seal Zhaum underneath the earth, where Zhaum kept the souls of millions, everyone that once lived within Commoriom, in unending torture within him for ten billion years, including Athammaus himself.
Zhaum is eventually freed by an Antarctic expedition led by the Seer Jeanne Dreyfuss and Hardestadt Delac. Zhaum devours many members of the expedition to plunge them into the same agony the rest of his captured souls are in, and then one-ups himself by revealing his awakening is a team effort. One of Hardestadt and Jeanne's allies, Nathan O'Hare, is actually a wicked sorcerer named Nathaire (again, another Clark Ashton villain) who willingly conspired with Zhaum to unseal him and then let him loose upon the world.
Zhaum undergoes a Fusion Dance with the evil sorcerer and gleefully boasts that he's going to teach the planet a new lesson in terror; find a new Commoriom to start with, then start obliterating cities one after another all across the planet, devouring their souls to drag as many millions as he can into the depths of And I Must Scream the rest of Commoriom suffers. Thankfully, Zhaum and Nathaire are thwarted when Hardestadt uses the blade of Athammaus to decapitate it, this time for good, killing Zhaum and releasing the souls of everyone he's kept prisoner.
Any mitigating factors?
Mmmkay. Zhaum does not have a whit of a redeeming quality, no more so than his original incarnation—he's an even easier keeper here than in the source material due to the addition of more crimes and actual spoken dialogue. What we need to have a hard look at is the heinous standard.
Stories Never Told, on its own, doesn't introduce too many remarkably new evil villains; the villain of one story is the infamous serial killer Marcel Petiot, and another is the leader of a group of cannibals with a hefty body count, but none come close to the standard. Nathaire himself does not count. He enables Zhaum's freedom and certainly doesn't mind contributing to Zhaum's copious amount of And I Must Scream, but he's totally removed from the worst of Zhaum's atrocities (ten billion years of constantly torturing Commoriom's population, which is a deed bad enough to shine even in Kindness of Devils) and comes off as less vile than many other "evil sorcerer" types in the setting. He's an opportunist, but he's not as bad as Zhaum.
There are, however, multiple other villains in the series I think we're gonna need another look at. We've reached the point where the murder of thousands is, frankly put, old hat.
First off, Von Krolock needs to go. There is literally no argument you can make to keep him at this point. Other villains have committed and attempted genocide. Other villains of much lesser power have far worse body counts than him. Coyte, Zhaum, Ruthven, and particularly Helen make his brand of villainy and his end goal look utterly tame. Rich Jacobs, the Starter Villain a single fuck-off vampire with no powers whatsoever until Nyarlathotep gives him a minor boost, is worse than him. Nathaire is worse than him.
Dietrich Boehmer is also a piece of work, but I find myself question if he's bad enough compared to Heydrich and Mengele; the slag-pits (where concentration camp inmates are basically raped by eldritch horrors) is his initiative, but it's Lucia's idea and it's supported and contributed to just as zealously by the other SS members. Furthermore, Jacobs' snuff film ring is arguably just as bad and came from someone with far, far less resources than Dietrich, and he can't even necessarily get by with Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil compared to the horrors Helen Valentine is responsible for in that regard.
There's a handful of others I'm...somewhat worried about. Among the evil sorcerers we have, Helen is the worst with her Coyte gets by almost purely by scale (the sacrifice of a city and his wicked experiments are nothing new for the series, but he's scheming with a god to potentially cause multiversal-level destruction, so he's punching out of his weight class) and Ruthven is notably worse than others like Nathaire, Joseph Curwen, and von Krolock, so I think he's safe.
Jacobs can stay, so can Hargrove. The snuff film ring easily, easily stands out even years later and Hargrove is literally an ailing old man on his death bed when most villains in the series can destroy cities. Siegfried makes such a specialty out of hurting children and has a body count that well exceeds most over villains in his tier, so he's probably fine; Nomura I'm somewhat less confident on, because she has to stack up to Josef Mengele, who does everything he does in history and much, much more. Even Dietrich's own slimy mad scientist Kurt Sindermann is the one responsible for directly running the slag-pits, which—while he comes up short compared to Mengele—gives him a body count that should be taken notice of. That said, Nomura's body count and her vital role in Sieg's scheme make me not as apt to cut her as I would, say, Dietrich.
The other guy I think needs, at least, a relitigation is one I can't say much on since I myself wrote his story—Vladik Cardinous from The Red Monarch. Being objective as I possibly can, Cardinous' end game is the only reason he's worth discussion, but he's also an unspeakably powerful Eldritch Abomination where other human cultists have attempted to damn the world to fates just as horrible as what he has planned—even the incredibly sympathetic Anti-Villain Thomas Nero attempts to awaken Cthulhu and destroy the world. Never mind Morviak and Yamada who are responsible for the serial destruction of worlds.
Zhaum himself sticks out on this totem pole, I think, because of the density of And I Must Scream in his rapsheet and his relatively low standing. He's not an outright Eldritch Abomination like Cardinous, but his end goal implies about as much general horror and destruction for the world as Ruthven's or even Helen's might. With Nathaire being clearly so much less worse than him and other mid-tier villains kinda falling out of the ring, I think Zhaum can clear.
Conclusion?
I lean to a weak keep for Zhaum, but with the caveat the series is gonna need a more thorough overview. If I was to vote: cut Krolock, cut Cardinous, and at the very least give Dietrich and Nomura another look or two.
Edited by Scraggle on Jul 25th 2020 at 10:03:10 AM
Ultimate Moral Compass
Weak for Zhaum
The Draftsman of Doom
Bundy.
Sure to Zhaum.
Stay safe, Islanders.
Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 25th 2020 at 11:23:29 AM
Feels good, don't it?
Zhaum
abstain on all those other guys
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
stay safe
same with me
Edited by nwotyzal on Jul 25th 2020 at 9:05:52 AM
to Zhaum, Nazi officer and William de Soulis.
Well Hawaii is now preparing for Hurricane Douglas and its schedule to hit Oahu tomorrow. Well wish me, Kylo, and the other islander luck
Ultimate Moral Compass
Wish you and the rest of Hawaii luck. Texas is also getting hit with Hurricane Hanna, though because I live in central Texas the worst I’ll get is rainstorms.
Edited by therealjackieboy on Jul 25th 2020 at 8:22:00 AM
"No running in the halls!"
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
Zhaum. As for the others, never before have I seen such a massive case of Criminal Minds Syndrome since Warhammer 40,000.
Stay safe, everyone.
Edited by MasterN on Jul 25th 2020 at 8:37:55 AM
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.
Zhaum
Krolock, Dietrich and Cardinous
I might be able to contribute a 24th there soon.