Thread:LucidPigeons/@comment-2175012-20160509175734/@comment-26205772-20160529042055

Right, then.

I think, aside from Malcolm, there's really only one other character in Earth Negative I could see coming anywhere close to being a Monster, and that's Weston Church (or Dr. Trauma). He's essentially a mad scientist posing as a psychologist who was run out of his previous town for unethical behavior towards some of his patients. He shortly thereafter discovered a chest containing a strange white gem, containing information about the Remeditary and a world of "infinite knowledge." Church develops an obsession with unlocking the secret of the Remeditary, intending to use the knowledge learned to advance mankind into a new state of society.

Now, that's all fine and dandy, and Church could easily pass as a Well-Intentioned Extremist at this point. The problem is, he suffers severe motive decay as his research goes on. His way of trying to connect with the Remeditary (as it's a mental plane) is drugging and kidnapping people he believes are compatible, then hooking them up to a machine that has him torturously stimulate their neural patterns, driving them catatonic and essentially mind-raping them, some for up to seven weeks at a time before they finally die of exhaustion and the mental strain. On his own record, Church is an asshole: he stalks a thirteen-year-old girl (Zyra, the protagonist of Nevermore, which Weston appears in), murders a baby to stop it from crying, and kills three members of the Blades (a cult worshiping death) to send a message to its leader. After the beings of the City attack the town he's living in, Church uses the time to set a fire and destroy his research, inadvertantly killing a dozen people and destroying many valuable resources, kicks someone to be mauled by an eldritch beast to save his own skin, murders a teenager named Nate Marx (who witnessed the deed) before callously gunning down his grieving father figure, tortures a child before shooting him dead as well, beats his former friend to near-death, and ultimately drugging, beating, and attempting to hook Zyra up to the same machine after learning she's a Seer. Church operates with a dickish regard for everyone and everything around him at all times when he's not pretending to be a normal member of society.

He'd likely count under any other circumstances. The problem is, Earth Negative's heinous standard, even among the human villains, is ludicrously high; even ignoring the presence of the members of the Order of Inverse and Lucia, Church directly shares a setting with wonderful people like James Greek, who's a shameless serial killer-rapist who tortures people to death in horrible ways and has a body count implicitly in the hundreds. Church's only real redeeming quality is that he loves his cats (which wasn't much a bar for Marlo Stanfield, if I recall) but Church is too much a self-serving villain and lacks the scale needed to really count in his own setting (resources doesn't really apply as many of the human villains only have as much as he does and still surpass him in heinousness). I could easily rewrite this, but strangely, I'm satisfied with having him be a simple Hate Sink in a world that already has five Monsters.