Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

Clancy

Cinder

Also RIP Alan Parker, who directed some of my favorite movies.

New proposal, from Sparzanza's "Mr. Fish".

Who's the candidate?

Albert Fish, a sadomasochistic child killer.

What does he do?

Lyrics:

Eyes... cold dead eyes. Staring from the shadows to get you, And he'll get you. 'cause you don't have a chance. Get away if you can, stay away from the gray man. He could be harmless, but he is craving for blood Prey on the young, he's playing god. Cutting in bodies, perversion of his Please mr Fish, please mr Fish. Lives... all these lives. Extinguished by life in perversions. They don't stand a chance How they cried when they ran, ran away from the gray man. He could be harmless, but he is craving for blood Prey on the young, he's playing god. Cutting in bodies, perversion of his Please mr Fish, please mr Fish. He could be harmless, but he is craving for blood Prey on the young, he's playing god. Cutting in bodies, perversion of his Please mr Fish, please mr Fish. Please mr Fish, (please mr Fish)

Heinousness?

Only villain, serial child murderer.

Mitigating factors?

None. Dude's entire motive is sadism and megalomania, and it's strongly implied he feels little else. The real Fish's Freudian Excuse is also omitted.

Verdict?

. Fifth Fish, I believe.

Abstain.

to Albert Fish.

Gonna say to Fish

Speaking of number of incarnations, on the Bluebeard section it lists the 1944 film as an incarnation, even though (correct me if I’m wrong) that version isn’t the real deal and is more based on him, and we said versions based on a cm don’t count (same goes for the Ghostbusters and Sleepy Hollow versions of the Pied Piper, which I have considered deleting, Running Scared and Freeway versions of the Hansel and Gretel!Witch I’m more lenient on because they’re stand ins)

Also, I’m kind of concerned about the Bogeyman section since there is no one bogeyman

Edited by nwotyzal on Jul 31st 2020 at 9:36:55 AM

Yes to Fish. Honestly? Don't care about the incarnation page and it's pretty informal.

Fish.

Edited by AustinDR on Jul 31st 2020 at 9:54:51 AM

to Fish

Fish

Fish

to Fish

Fish.

Easy to Fish, Black Wolf, and Koga. I'm also willing to give a to Clancy and Strange. It's a for Cinder though given Cranker's findings on this version of the character.

I'd like to dispute Yami Bakura/The Spirit of the Ring from YuGiOh on the "99.99% monster is not 100%" rule. I looked up his other mentions in this thread and I don't believe that what I'm bringing up has been raised here before. It's this really brief moment, but it happens in both the manga and the anime. Let me set up some context first:

Ryou Bakura: Spirit of the Ring's host. His consciousness is suppressed for most of the Battle City arc, either by the Spirit or Marik controlling him. Peripheral member of Yugi's friend group in the manga, very peripheral in the anime (he's the only member everyone is still on Last-Name Basis with).

Marik: Arc villain of the Battle City arc, has mind control and limited telepathy powers. Teamed up with the Spirit but they're both just using each other.

Yugi: Protagonist, host to the other Yugi.

Other Yugi: Protagonist, Spirit of the Puzzle, "Yami Yugi" to the fandom but his real name is end-of-series spoilers and everyone just calls him "Yugi" or "the other Yugi" in-universe at this time.

Spirit of the Ring's host, Ryou Bakura, has an injury inflicted by the Spirit for earlier plot reasons, but he's been either unconscious, possessed, or mind-controlled for the entire interim period and does not yet know he's injured. The Spirit of the Ring is about to lose to Other Yugi, who is about to attack him with Sky Dragon Osiris, a more-supernatural-than-the-rest monster. However, if Other Yugi does not win on his current turn, he'll lose because of a turn limit the Spirit set up. Marik has one of his minions interrupt before Other Yugi can order Osiris to attack, and telepathically tells the Spirit to give control back over to Ryou because he has a plan to get the win. The Spirit does this and Marik withdraws control from Ryou. Ryou immediately collapses in pain and doesn't know why he's in pain, where he is, or how he got there. Marik, through his minion, and tells Other Yugi that Ryou doesn't have the physical/mental/magical fortitude to survive Osiris's attack (literally says "the shock" would kill him). This naturally gives Other Yugi some very serious pause, and the ref takes the extra step of threatening to disqualify Other Yugi if he stalls out on his turn by taking more than the allowed thinking time.

Then, with less than a minute left on the clock, the Spirit tells Marik to shove it on the grounds of, quote, "Even I have ways I like to win and ways I hate to win!" [citations: manga chapter 149 and anime episode 84] The Spirit of the ring takes back over, stands up, throws his arms out in a "come at me bro" fashion, announces that he's gracefully accepting his loss, and tells Other Yugi to shoot him without worrying about Ryou, because he can take it and his host is too important to him to let die. If it matters, he's got a manic grin on the entire time, too, but that might just be because he's playing the long game and this loss isn't much of a setback for him.

Other Yugi wins the battle, and takes a moment to reflect that he and the Spirit of the Ring are Not So Different when it comes to protecting their hosts. Yugi says that there is a difference: Yugi wants to help Other Yugi.

Now, of course, there's still the obvious fact that the Spirit really does need Ryou, his destined host, alive in order to complete his plans. (For the sake of completeness and intellectual honesty, I'll also point out that the other Yugi is also no angel himself, although he's reformed from his murdery Early-Installment Weirdness days.) But even if one goes with the least charitable interpretation of all this, that Other Yugi is wrong and the Spirit of the Ring only values Ryou for purely practical reasons, he still, at minimum, finds Marik's method here distasteful. And that should disqualify him, because nothing is too distasteful for a Complete Monster.

(As a sidenote, he also expresses pride in Ryou's artistic handiwork in building the Tabletop RPG gameboard he uses in the last arc, but that could still be interpreted away as the Spirit considering Ryou his property and he's just bragging to Other Yugi about how awesome his stuff is.)

[edit: Accidentally gave Other Yugi italics instead of bold]

Edited by Pig_catapult on Aug 1st 2020 at 1:24:06 AM

That is Pragmatic Villainy. You even said yourself, he needed his host alive.

I've never touched Yu-Gi-Oh before, but that sounds a pretty legitimate reason to cut, particularly if there's a convincing explanation to the Spirit's behaviour other than Pragmatic Villainy.

Anyway, I got an unfortunate cut myself, maybe two, from Ice-T's Hunger Games. Three years back I covered a movie called Surviving the Game. I proposed Rutger Hauer's character named Thomas Burns and his Dragon for a really nasty hunting scheme.

Unfortunately, Burns at the least needs to go. I brought up that Thomas killed Cole after the latter had been wounded to a point he can't even move. I interpreted this as You Have Outlived Your Usefulness; unfortunately, rewatching the scene, Burns looks briefly if genuinely broken up about having to kill Cole and elects that moment to ditch the game entirely. I think the intention was a Mercy Kill and that means Burns has to go.

Cole himself might be able to stay under a technicality (he never gets any of the same explicit moments to show his genuine affection for Burns) but I'm more inclined to cut under the implication of a mutual Villainous Friendship. So that leaves us with no keepers, right?

Well...

Who is Doc Hawkins? What has he done?

Burns' and Thomas' hunting team in Hell's Canyon consists of a variety of members, but easily the most Ax-Crazy of them is Gary Busey's character, a CIA psychologist on the team for the thrill of murdering innocent people. Hawkins unnerves even Burns with his gleeful psychotic tangents and gloats to Ice-T's character, Mason, that he became a man by killing his childhood dog with his bare hands.

Being a sadistic nutcase wouldn't qualify him on his own as Hawkins doesn't last very long, but I forgot something pertinent in the old EP; Burns may be the leader of the hunting party, but Doc Hawkins was the one who founded the whole human-hunting party, and he's the only one who's unambiguously been there from the start. And the "game's" been going on for a long time; during his battle with Hawkins in a hunting lodge, Mason runs into a room full of jars upon jars upon jars of preserved human heads, all of them disgusting trophies from earlier hunts. Hawkins elects to slowly kill Mason with his bare hands instead of a knife solely to gratify his sadism. Mason insteads turns the tables and sets the lodge on fire, burning down Hawkins and all of his perverse trophies.

Any mitigating factors?

Hawkins is the worst of the hunters not named Burns. Two of the other hunters are outright Anti-Villain types, one of the others has a blatant redeeming quality (he loves his son, one of the other hunters) and Hawkins has them all outstripped in body count. Cole is the one who procures victims and Burns is the actual authority, but Hawkins is the one responsible for starting everything, doesn't ever display a remote whiff of a redeeming quality and is sadistic to the point Burns very obviously struggles to rein him in.

The standard's even less of a problem; the only notable crime Burns and Cole get past Hawkins' death is the murder of one hunter who refused to keep going. Hawkins gets most of his points through the ultimate culpability he has in every single past murder the party is responsible for.

Now, with that said, the dog story is a touch concerning to me as an explanation for his Ax-Crazy behaviour; Hawkins brings up his father made him kill the old family dog to prove he was a man. This, though, runs into the issue of Hawkins being an Unreliable Narrator; he brings up the story not as a sympathetic way to explain away his insanity, but rather as a means to cruelly taunt Mason before the hunt starts. Either way, Hawkins seems cheerfully aware of everything messed up with him—he's a shrink, after all—embraces it, and disregards the "rules" his father taught him in order to be a man just to gratify his sadism. Nothing adequately explains or excuses the card-carrying lunatic he is in the present day even if we do take the dog story at face value.

Conclusion?

In hindsight, Hawkins seems a more clear keep to me than I once thought, and surprisingly only the third for Busey. What say we?

Edited by Scraggle on Aug 1st 2020 at 3:36:57 AM

Abstain on Hawkins, but keep Yami Bakura. The fact that he injured his host in the first place and pretty much never allows him any free will makes it quite clear he only cares about keeping his vessel alive for pragmatic reasons.

Keep Hawkins; Cole...eh, I could go either way, but cut Burns.

I think the issue with the Spirit is less Pragmatic Villainy and more the inference Even Evil Has Standards, no matter how minor.

Hawkins

Burns

Keep Cole if it's not explicit he cares about Burns.

I'll sleep on the Spirit.

Yes to Fish and Hawkins. I'm fine with keeping Cole, but cut Burns, and it sounds like the Spirit should be cut as well barring counterarguments.

Just finished reading Death and the Arrow. Pretty good, especially for a children's book. So far, I've found a pretty good candidate, however, this is only the first book in a trilogy, and even though this candidate's story is done, I don't yet know what the heinous standard is gonna be like for the following books. For all I know, the next two books could have villains so monstrous that the villain of the first book pales in comparison. Should I go ahead with typing up an EP now, or should I hold off until I've read the rest of the trilogy to compare the heinous standard?

Re: Yami Bakura: He was about to win by default, knew it, and explicitly acknowledged it. He was there for the time Kaiba blackmailed a win out of Other Yugi by threatening suicide/putting himself in a situation where he'd fall to his death if he lost. The Spirit's motive for switching out at the last minute, stated in private telepathy to the guy he's 2scummy4me-ing at, was "Even I have ways I like to win and ways I hate to win," not "I can't take the risk he'd actually do it." The explanation he gives out loud to Other Yugi and spectators is that Ryou's too important to risk, and while that's true, all signs point to the Spirit knowing Ryou wasn't at risk.

If he really didn't care about scumminess and was going full Pragmatic Villainy, then A) he would have given Marik the same explanation he gave to everyone else, and B) it was a plot point in Yugi v. Pegasus that control-swapping outspeeds Calling Your Attacks. Either Other Yugi wouldn't shoot before the last 20 seconds on the clock ran out, and the Spirit would win, or Other Yugi would order Osiris to attack, which takes long enough to say that the Spirit could easily switch back in before it hit. The Spirit would lose the match, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory for the Other Yugi on a social level. Ryou being loyal to his friends has caused the Spirit problems before, but the Spirit is an emotional abuser in the manga (IIRC Ryou's too Out of Focus in the anime for that to show). If he could factually say "the other Yugi tried to kill you to win, but I stepped in to save you, unlike Yugi's friends" he would play that to the hilt. So the Spirit would have won something either way if he'd waited the clock out, but he chose to bow out and try later instead because he'd hate to win that way.

Don't get me wrong; I like the entry the Spirit currently has on the page. The Spirit of the Ring is definitely the most evil guy in the series and I hold no Draco in Leather Pants for him. But I've gotten back into the series for the first time in ages, and been reading old pages of this thread on and off, and when I ran into this line, it pattern matched to the kind of lines that I'd been seeing DQ characters here.

Is the Spirit terrible to Ryou? Yes, absolutely. He's an abusive piece of shit on multiple levels. But if there's any action to his advantage that even he finds too distasteful to use, then he's only 99.9999% monster, and that's a very thin hair short of the mark, but it's still a hair short.

Edited by Pig_catapult on Aug 1st 2020 at 5:05:18 AM

Eh I don't know his treatment of him otherwise never indicates any kind of affection, I still say keep.

"Otherwise" should not be a factor when it's one scene/line that ends up being the issue. We're not scrutinizing the character's behavior 99% of the time "otherwise"; we're scrutinizing the character's behaviour within this scene to see if it impacts his overall qualification.

I'm a firm "cut" for Yami Bakura.