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
to Victor Marquez.
Okay well it looks like Harris is a bust (to be honest I was kind of having second thoughts about him as well). Oh well there are still a lot more to come.
Moving onto season four of Wire In the Blood, we have something quite different to shows the usual affair, one of the shows few non Serial killer antagonists (as in there is like three).
From “Hole In The Heart” I give you Professor Martin Sutton.
Who Is he:
On paper Professor Sutton seems like a friendly and charismatic fellow lecturer at Doctor Hill’s university, a respected American academic, with speciality being renaissance paintings.
However, in reality Sutton is not a fraud and a conman who gained his position through faking his qualifications, but more seriously is also a perverted Christian fanatic, with a disturbingly misanthropic outlook at the modern world. Believing that the rapture isn’t coming soon enough, he decides to give it a kick-start.
What Does He Do:
Using both his respected academic persona and the invented identity of “Martin Mann” to get involved with organisations that support the vulnerable and the depressed, Professor Sutton began recruiting vulnerable individuals, manipulating them until they joined into his Apocalypse Cult.
His last recruit being Kurtis Merrick a young biochemist who Tony saved from committing suicide at the beginning of the episode. Having complete over his followers, Sutton orders them to kill those whom he considered corrupt using methods designed to mimic the executions of Christian Saints, then afterwards to immediately kill themselves.
His first target being property developer Ahmed Khan who had recently bought an old church planning to turn it into a night club. Sutton had Khan’s accountant Peter Durbridge drug (not enough to knock unconscious, just too docile to resist) and chain up his employer to an empty bed. Then putting the petrol soaked mattress beneath, Durbridge set it alight causing Khan to die in agony, recreating St. Laurence’s death. Following Sutton’s order to commit suicide, Durbridge just sat down and let the flames to consume him.
Sutton’s next target was the compassionate and attentive Bishop Sacker who had agreed to the sale. He had Mary Knight meet with him on evening supposedly for spiritual guidance (Mary being a former drug addict and prostitute whom Sutton recruited from prison), where she drugged his tea (again not enough to render unconscious), fasten the poor Bishop to a pillar and stab him six times in different spots all over the body (of which he thankfully died sometime during) with a long knife, finally climaxing by plunging a compass into his neck (a mockery of the fact that Sacker was also a Mason) to recreate St. Sebastian’s death.
Then to commit suicide, Mary went up to the church’s belfry and hung herself from one of the bells.
The next morning at the university, Professor Sutton himself stepped in to seemingly congratulate Tony at the University for helping Kurt, although enquired about Tony’s own lack of faith. He also later helped him identify what Khan’s death was mimicking with a renaissance painting.
A few days later, Sutton had Danny Elis, a former small time drug dealer and prostitute, visit Judge Hynes who secretly had a taste for younger men. Waiting until the drugs kicked in, Elis hacked Hynes head off with a butchers knife then left it on silver plate to recreate John the Baptists death, then Elis slit his wrists in Hynes bathtub.
Knowing the police were closing in, to throw them off the sent Professor Sutton ordered his next follower Reverend Roger Tallis to simply commit suicide by chaining a millstone around his neck and jumping into the sea. Hoping the police would mistake it for Tallis being the ring leader and killed himself out of guilt, when in reality it was to mimic St. Florian’s execution.
Personally assisting his next follower June Prince, a former industrial chemist in building a homemade bomb, he sent her to Assistant Chief Commissionaire Eden’s home and then set it off the moment Eden opened the door. Eden only managing to survive due to Tony warning him just in time that he was the next target, although was hospitalised by the blast.
Tony finally managed to figure out that Professor Sutton was the mastermind behind the cult and thus Alex Fielding brought him in, but as they had no real evidence they couldn’t get him to budge.
However, Tony came in pretending he had got it wrong, then asked Sutton to explain his faith to him. Drawing him out, Professor Sutton confessed his belief it was too late for Tony, too late for everyone the world was corrupt and would soon all be dead. The discussion going, he let slip a phrase that made Tony realise that Kurt was the final cult member.
Being a biochemist, Sutton had had Kurt engineer a modified strain of bubonic plague which he had infected into several local pigeons, it being Sutton’s plan for Kurt to release the birds and thus start an epidemic. Realising that Kurt would do it from the site where he tried to commit suicide in the beginning, Tony managed to make it in time and getting through to Kurt, got him to question Sutton’s words making him realise he couldn’t explain why he was doing this.
Tony was able to persuade Kurt not go through with it, but having nothing else to live for, Kurt threw himself off the top of the building.
Meanwhile in his cell, believing his work was complete Sutton committed suicide by forcing several pages of his bible down his throat till he choked to death.
Any Freudian Excuse or Redeeming Traits:
Nothing I think stands up. Throughout the episode Professor Sutton initially comes across as a friendly if a little insensitive, sympathetic figure. However, whilst talking to Tony he lets his veil slip and it becomes clear that he is really smug, self-righteous man who holds everyone else in contempt.
Now his beliefs seem to be genuine, but Tony analyses that he’s merely using them to fulfil his own twisted fantasies, with it being revealed by Mary’s former Cellmate that he in fact masturbates whilst reading through biblical punishments and the end of the world. His judgements are arbitrary and his overall distain for the corrupt comes across as hypocritical.
Being fair to him the judge he tried to kill was legitimately corrupt, although it wasn’t so serious he deserved to die, and again his condemnation comes across more as fantasy of purging the sinners rather than any real moral repulsion.
Now as he’s committing suicide Professor Sutton does imagine each of his cult members committing their murders then suicides and imagines them looking happy, however, I don’t think this is a sign of actual care towards them, more just a sign of his own conviction in himself.
Heinous Standard:
Sutton is the only cult leader in the show, whilst not the only proxy killer (there are about three altogether counting him) he is arguably the worst. Responsible for three brutal murders as well as five suicides (six if you count Kurt who was also supposed to kill himself) with Tony stressing every member of his cult is also his victim.
Likewise Sutton has easily the highest intended body count in the entire show. No other antagonist plans mass murder on such a scale (and most don't even plan it all together), even a terrorist from an earlier episode only succeeded in killing one person.
Conclusion:
A twisted, vicious cult leader who plans to start a plague just because of his fantasies. I’d say Sutton is an easy keeper.
Still what do you think?
Edited by MGD107 on Dec 13th 2020 at 4:03:22 AM
Joseph, Vic, Sutton
Have anyone seen the newly released Episode 23 of Ultraman Z premiered just last week?
That episode... oh damn, I can predict seeing Cerebro (the series' Big Bad) as a candidate in the near future. I mean, just, motherfucker is simply evil incarnate after what he did in episode 23 (that's NOT accounting for what he had done throughout his screentime for most of the show)
Edited by RobertTYL on Dec 13th 2020 at 8:04:36 PM
Yes to Sutton and guys, as we've said, many times now, we try not to gush about things that aren't past the two week grace period. It's not nice to people who aren't caught up to start waxing lyrical about how bad something someone just did was, try not to spoil the contents of episodes, even with implication please.
No worries, I'm not going into spoiling a week-old episode, I'm just saying I can see the candidate being added in the foreseeable future.
Not calling dibs on the candidate though, there's a few other Ultra-fans in this thread who can claim Cerebro if they want.
Edited by RobertTYL on Dec 13th 2020 at 8:43:00 PM
Sutton.
What is the work? Michigan: Report From Hell is a PS2 Survival Horror from the same developers of Killer7 and No More Heroes; like most of their games, Michigan is now a considered a Cult Classic. In typical Suda51 fashion, the game is incredibly bizarre (and unique) in good and bad ways. You take the role of a ZaKa TV cameraman working alongside sound engineer Brisco and a number of potential female reporters in investigating a mysterious dense fog that is covering the southwestern area of Lake Michigan, centering on Chicago. It doesn't take long for them to discover that the city has been overrun by monstrous abominations.
Who is he? Dr. O'Conner, a sociopathic, misanthropic Mad Scientist and David Bowie look-a-like, was hired by the three most powerful organizations of the country (The government, the military and the ZaKa conglomerate) and commissioned to develop a bioweapon that would be deployed against the enemies of the United States. Experimenting on a young man—"poking and prodding a guy's body like he was nothing"—until he was reduced into a psychotic child-like state before abandoning him to die, O'Conner created the dangerous Gagne, a virus that makes people turn into monsters and kill each other. When a small plane containing the virus crashed into Lake Michigan and infected the surrounding area, O'Conner hid inside a club while waiting for his contact, Glen Buckland, to arrive.
Feeling no remorse for the lives that were lost because of him (including that of Glen) and viewing the monsters as imperfect for being uncontrollable weapons, O'Conner mockingly explains everything to the ZaKa trio that came to uncover the truth behind the death of Glen Buckland and his ties to O'Conner, his only concern? The military promised him a "joint research" but they stole all of his experiments and the vaccine without contributing to his work. Something of a Evilutionary Biologist and a Mad Artist combined, O'Conner is excited at the prospect of becoming a "wonderful, beautiful new form of life" himself while laughing at Brisco for trying to "play hero" and chastising the news team for insisting on protecting their humanity, allowing Gagne to overpower his own body before attacking them.
Mitigating Qualities? Nope. ZaKa's reporter even sensationalizes his lack of redeeming qualities by claiming that he's allowing himself to turn into a monster out of guilt.
Heinous? He appears in only one level and still manages to be the worst character in the entire game. His only rival in this department is the chief of ZaKa TV, Deborah Flair, who keeps sending her employees to Chicago and is even suggested to be the one responsible for the Gagne outbreak, but the theory doesn't get much elaborated on. Additionally, the cameraman of the High Immoral route, Diego Morales, briefly claims to be behind the incident... his claim also goes nowhere.
Conclusion?
Edited by TheMadCr0w on Dec 13th 2020 at 2:03:18 PM
Alrighty. I finished my Creepypasta short story binge to finalize the purge. Here's who I conclude as keeps or cuts from the page.
Some of the keeps I listed are easier than others. I ended up losing my first draft of this because I lost it when my computer restarted.
Keeps
- The Defiler by our very own Austin. I'm gonna say a cautious keep, but I do have issues with how rushed it is as a story. To it's credit we do get some background on the protagonist, the people that have been going missing in his home town, and the poor bastard that ended up possessed by Y'golonac; the problem is they are told in single paragraphs respectively. Another credit is that Y'golonac is bested here, albeit he just moves on to another victim, but the bulk of the story is the protagonist going through the defiler's house of horrors after being introduced to him at a book store. So I lean to keep, but I would like to know if there's counter opinions ?
- I Grew Up on a Child Farm: I am iffy about, but I lean to "Keep" to Clark P. Ganes. because the story covers a lot; we get descriptions on how the farm operates, the villains background and motives, the protagonist's background in a Tomato Surprise twist and his history with his new adoptive father. We also get a plot about the protagonist planning to murder the villain and carrying out said murder; a perfect balance of narrator exposition and dialogue; as well as a plot point about an organization trying to bring down the child farm and discusses Ganes' anomalous properties. This really feels like the writer wanted to make this an SCP story. My point is this story is more than just "Bad guy doing bad shit because evil". I am actually a little surprised by this because it has a 1869 word count. Take from that what you will, but I feel that it does a lot in it's short time.
- The Boogeyman's House: Another cautious "Keep" for me is Uncle Ryan. Despite being 2009 words long, we get a fair amount of story from the protagonist's family and even some characterization of one of the victims and their home life, and a brief epilogue of the protagonist having to deal with the trauma of her family being murdered. I do have one real issue is that the protagonist doesn't meet Ryan face to face in the story, and much like the Nightmaker, his crimes and motives are revealed after his arrest.
- It Only Takes the Good Kids: The Dark Man is one of the easier keeps. There's no issues length wise, being in the 5000's in word count. Bullshit The Bad Guy Wins ending aside, there's fair amount of characterization from the main characters, them looking into the history of the creature's murders and even going into details with some victims. Really the one thing that makes it feel like one of those Invincible Villain stories is the Cruel Twist Ending, but that doesn't mitigate the above.
- The Blood Keeper: Another easier "Keep". It's far from a "Bad Guy Does Bad Things" story - the protagonist is characterized as a paranormal enthusiast, we learn the cults history from a grounds keeper that saves the protagonist, which gives the story a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane angle. The protagonist survives the story relatively unscathed and it ends with the villains death, with another bit of characterization in a man looking to avenge his wife's murder - which he ultimately succeeds in. It's short, a little rushed, but it still manage to cover it's bases with a story in the 2300 word range.
- Nyarlathotep Visited My Home Town: Eeeehh, on one hand it is ultimately an Invincible Villain story, let's not beat around the bush. On the other hand there's a bit that characterizes two of Narly's victims before the lynch mob tries and fails to kill him, and then he enslaves the Pinball Protagonist.
Cuts
- Entombed - Not only is it short, but it lacks any real substance. Aside from Harn's killings being Offscreen Villainy, he exposits to the "priest" he's talking too, he's virtually the only character with any real characterization, as he goes over his own past regarding his sister. It's really no different the way I see it to Lyndon and Bobby Fields after cutting them yesterday; it's like "Look at this bad guy; he's a real bad guy! Let's give him a Fate Worse than Death that would make Black Mirror: White Christmas bush with envy!". Also call me prudish, but I find something rather tasteless when the first five paragraphs open with the villain trying to masturbate, and failing to get an erection.
- I Don't Have A Good Feeling About This One: Not going to lie...but I don't have a good feeling about this one. The issue I have with this story is not one of length, but rather of quality. Aside from Kristen Cullen and the protagonist Elle, there isn't that much in characterization, and even then Cullen gets the more focus. The story is really about how Elle discovers Kristen's secret murderous history and futile efforts to stop her. By the end, Kristen is completely unchallenged throughout the story (and when a claim is made against her, the hospital half asses the investigation). I don't know, but it seems to be to be one of those Invincible Villain stories that got us to crack down on Creepypasta standards in the first place. The story boils down to "Look at this bad guy! There's no possible way they can be stopped! The end."
Edited by Beast on Dec 14th 2020 at 7:23:44 AM
"It's like...a cliff, and if I do it, I'm just gonna...fall." "I think we're already falling."@Papyru He's still the creator of Gagne. Brisco is the one that suggests Deborah's involvement and Diego just looks at the camera and says "Look closely, it's me!" before jumpscaring the player
Cut Harn and Kristen. Thank you, Beast
Edited by TheMadCr0w on Dec 13th 2020 at 12:23:10 PM
to O'Conner.
Regarding Pastas, is RED good to stay? We learn a good deal about the protagonist, as well as RED himself, the story's long as hell, and RED's pretty unique as pasta villains go, as well as his crimes being well established.
Good with the current cuts, BTW. Also, in Gnarly's defense, when wasn't he portrayed as an Invincible Villain (comes to mind)?
Edited by DoodSlayer136 on Dec 13th 2020 at 7:29:23 AM

Fun fact he's played by Greg Bryk aka Joseph Seed from Far Cry 5
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."