User blog:EvilLamp/Supervillains and CM

I've noticed a great many supervillains are labelled Complete Monsters and this concerns me, the heinous standards for supervillains is absurd.. every supervillain by design is a near-godlike psychotic terrorist or criminal and engage in horrific acts that dwarf many real-world atrocities, especially in works concerning Marvel and DC.

Don't let the "kid-friendly" versions fool you, supervillains have all done absolutely horrific things and it is a staple of comic books that villains will almost always have a moment of going way beyond the norm in cruelty or sheer destruction.

This means labelling so many supervillains as Complete Monsters is troubling, we need a way to limit this - all supervillains are nasty, evil individuals (yes even guys like Magneto can be horrific, depending on writer), yet this means it is incredibly hard to pick true Complete Monsters.

comics are usually rather crapsack worlds, supervillains are designed to be over-the-top symbols of various social ills and threats - if we went simply by gruesome acts and lack of redeeming qualities we'd need to include nearly every villain in comics, at some point (remember most comics are further complicated by the fact characters have many different incarnations, some are infinitely worse than the other (for example Ronan in comics was nowhere near as bad as the Ronan in the film).

So for supervillains I believe we need to take a page out of DC and remember that in a world of super-powered killers and conquerors it takes a special breed of crazy to be considered a CM :

"when villains want to scare one another they tell Joker stories"

In other words if you want a supervillain as a Complete Monster you should weigh how feared / hated they are by other villains as much as the heroes.. if a villain is truly feared by other supervillains then they are likely to be a CM.. simply being a destructive or cruel character isn't enough in settings with supervillains.