: I think the key hangup here is the "never presented in a positive way" part. In the real world, no matter how cruel, sadistic, and brutal a person was, there are likely to be some other

@Si5022468

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I think the key hangup here is the "never presented in a positive way" part.
In the real world, no matter how cruel, sadistic, and brutal a person was, there are likely to be some other people somewhere who benefit from their actions and at least some of the time see them in a positive light. That's because humans are very complicated, and we all have a tangled web of relationships, and those relationships "step on each other's toes". Say you have a brutal dictator. He may throw his enemies into gigantic paper shredders, but I'm sure his immediate family views the perks that come with his office in a positive light. Even an average citizen in his country (who has never had a personal run in with the secret police) might view him as mostly benign: he assures stability, law, and order, which are the basic requirements of any civilization. There are surely better rulers, but there are worse ones as well.

Stories that do the best job with a complete monster type character really bend that rule about "never presented in a positive way". This can be thought of as the central theme of Godfather: a fundamentally evil character who nonetheless has motives that make sense to the viewer and who we can root for. Breaking Bad is a good example as well. Take Walter White and if we "zoom out", taking into account everything he did and who he is in totality, he seems like a sociopathic monster, but if you zoom down and look at little details, things get more blurred and we can even sympathize with him. To me, the most successful "complete monster" character who remained true to the trope would probably be Darth Vader in the original Star Wars series, but he would not have remained interesting if his character hadn't been broadened significantly in the second film, and it was his character development, not Luke's upon which the entire emotional weight of the third film ultimately hangs. So in that case, while the character did follow the rules of the trope in the first film, it did so only based on the knowledge that we were not being presented with a complete picture. As soon as there is more information, his status as a "complete monster" gets fuzzy.

I think if you want to really stick to the trope, be prepared for a "cartoon bad guy" character who gets boring fast. You can play with the trope by presenting incomplete information to the reader, or play with the trope by presenting only selective viewpoints into the monster's behavior. You can hint that there is more to the story but just not show it, which would pique a reader's interest if done well. What I would not do is make it clear that this is the whole story and this character is a complete monster and that's just it. If you do that, then you have a "monster movie" plot, where the only way to keep up interest is not telling anything about the monster, because we know everything we need to. Instead, the plot revolves around hiding the monster so it can pop out at the most interesting time (think of Jaws or Friday the 13th or Scream). This can be done effectively in a book, you just have to be prepared for the kind of story it will be and work to scare and thrill readers instead of working to expose anything particularly deep or meaningful about human nature through character development.

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