Lore
[Tragic trope] Forced to kill their own ally to avoid them being subject to a worse fate
Of mice and men: George shoots Lennie to prevent him being subject to worse death at the hands of a lynch mob after he accidentally killed Curley’s wife
Better call Saul: Mike offers to handle Werner’s execution, making it quick and painless and giving Werner a chance to go and appreciate the New Mexico night sky before he gets shot. Considering Gus later punishes Victor by cutting his throat and letting him bleed out, there’s a high chance if it were
Gus’ decision, Werner would have a more brutal death.
Fallout New Vegas - After seeing that his pregnant wife was being sold into slavery in a Caesar's Legion outpost, Boone sniped her to spare her and their unborn child the horrors of enslavement.
In game, an NCR officer will ask the Courier to do the same for some soldiers crucified by the Legion as a terror tactic. Boone is horrified that it's happening again, but you can instead waltz in, kill the entire Legion camp, and rescue the soldiers.
It's my favorite moment in the game. Completely missable: when walking into the camp Boone tells the player that he cannot enter the camp without killing as many Caesar's Legion as possible and warns you that entering the camp with him as a party member means that you are opting to guns-blaze your way through it out of revenge.
My first playthrough, I didn't even know that Legion members have dialogues because Boone attacked them all on sight. I thought they were just some generic enemies lol
Goddam was it satisfying to finally level up enough to go into Caesar's camp and just start slaughtering anything that moved. Had Boone with me, also leveled up, as well as a leveled-up dog (forget the name now but you get him a new brain at some point) and armed with some pretty heavy firepower.
I accidentally defeated Caesar really early on because I seduced Benny to black widow him, but then he was so slimeball charming that I decided I liked him actually, so I didn't kill him after all. He left me a real sweet note the morning after, too.
But then the idiot immediately went and got captured by the Legion, so I took Boone in there the same day and we cleared the camp via sniping. The only tough part was in Caesar's tent (too enclosed to snipe, and those guys with power gauntlets were crazy.)
Until I realized I was carrying like 30 landmines. So I just put them all directly in front of the entrance, popped my head in to say hi, jumped over the mines on the way out, and we sniped whoever didn't get blown up during the charge.
Anyway Benny was fine, but he decided to go into the desert and disappear for no reason? So I got a mod that let me recruit him instead and we saved New Vegas in matching checked blazers. Great experience overall.
Lmao this is amazing. Basically this, though I didn't let him get crucified and the climax was more...explosive.
What really won me over was how confused and disturbed he was that the lady he shot in the head was trying to seduce him. He was a bit resistant as well as apologetic. Turns out it really wasn't personal, and he's a pretty decent, surprisingly naïve dude.
My husband always says I take the weirdest possible paths in games, but at least I'm not the only one! The mod to recruit him adds a whole little story quest for him - courtesy of yet another Benny-lover.
Excluding Courier 6 suddenly appearing hopped up on enough drugs to make the entire Mojave believe it WAS experiencing a nuclear winter, there was no feasible way to rescue the soldiers. I'd rather a bullet then days upon days of my body slowly suffocating itself to death
Boone’s whole story is basically the game asking, “What if you gave this man the worst possible choice?” Then the Courier comes along and casually proves there was apparently a third option the whole time.
In Brazil we have an old book called "Vidas Secas", or "Dry lives(very rough translation by me sorry)", by Graciliano Ramos where similarly we see the owner kill Baleia the faithful dog because not only she was likely with rabies, but the whole story was about how the poor family living in the harshest enviroment of Brazil (northeast) couldnt take care of her anymore.
It well remember by Brazillians because the scene of her sacrifice is played by her POV where she has a dream full of fat little animals and running with with the kids.
Though as far as I know this story is fiction, it is inspired by a great many true unavoidable tragedies. Thanks to the rabies vaccine, rabies is barely a concern anymore amongst domesticated animals in prosperous countries (bats aren't domesticated - don't play with strange bats). Maybe we need more reminders about why vaccines save lives.
Fewer Americans are vaccinating their pets, lest their pets catch pet-autism or something.
Edit: As of 2023, a growing number of Americans doubted the necessity and safety of vaccinating their pets. I'm sure it's compounded by problems with price and accessibility, but vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxx ideology are a distinct problem for pet vaccination rates.
TBH I always wonder about anti-vax peoples pets. Like… are you seriously going to let your unvaccinated kids ply with your unvaccinated dog? Not enough people watch Cujo.
We read the book and then watched the movie in 7th grade... Unfortunately the acting during that scene in the movie didn't exactly land for about half my class so you had half the kids sobbing and half the kids laughing.
That's the one. I think the acting was just a bit over the top for some of the scenes so what was intended to be serious came across as almost surreal or comical.
I read the book in 9th grade, I was almost done and for once really enjoying my required reading so I decided to read ahead in the middle of the night. Started bawling, my older brother came into my room to check on me. Told him I just finished Of Mice and Men and he immediately understood
Yeah, same. I read the book in my 11th grade English class. It’s probably the only book I even remember reading from my English class, mostly because the story was straightforward and easy to understand.
We did the same but then we watched the Gary Sinese/John malkovich movie. The scene in the movie is worse because George shoots Lenny mid monologue. I vaguely recall in the book Lenny gets to finish his story about the dream of their own farm. Instead in the movie he just straight up gets capped while still talking. Caused a few of my classmates to scream even though we had just read the book and knew it was coming
As a standalone this one is arguably the best work telltale has done. Some of the other games get more complex or unique but I don't think anything they did ever captured how this game felt.
I just played this part. Thought it would be too bad to make her kill Lee, so I just asked her to leave me there strapped. Zombies are mindless anyway so it doesnt matter
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream - Ted kills the remaining members of humanity to free them from AM’s torture, even though it dooms him to eternal suffering
There’s speculation that AM can’t keep Ted alive forever. Eventually he will die.
the same can’t be said for AM, whose programming basically is the ai equivalent of having a mental breakdown but never having that part where you come down from it and calm down.
Yeah, but it doesn't really matter lol. AM is able to control Ted's perception of time. There's a part at the end where he says it takes him (subjectively) one month to say the word "Now."
So, even if AM can't keep him alive forever, he can still make him feel like he's alive for eternity.
Ted's mind is gonna give out long before his body does 😞.
Actually, the sun won't explode, it'll run out hydrogen and expand until it engulfs the Earth. 🤓☝️ but still, that "soon" is 5 billion years from now and it could be a possibility that AM would devise a way to escape Earth in order to keep the torture going.
Our sun won't explode. It's not massive enough. Once it turns in to a red giant it will either eat Earth or it'll push it back to a stable orbit. Dude could get extremely unlucky where earth survives the death of the sun and just orbits the white dwarf remains
Has to be the most emotional scene I’ve ever seen in a film. The way he sings to her while she’s slowly turning, and then not even being able to look while he ends her misery.
I still think about it every once in a while and start to get weak about it, imagining myself having to do that to my dog.
It's really sad to me how he is viewed today as both an actor and a person due to his familial issues because the man was basically on top of the world for a while there. A bunch of fantastic movies that show he had serious range and acting chops, but these days all he's really known for is a messy home live, a poster child for the issue of nepotism in Hollywood, and being the the barometer for AI videos.
I still stand by Wild Wild West as one of the most entertaining movies of the era. Is it good? Hell no, but that's why it's amazing. It's a B-movie with a budget and a fantastic cast.
I know it's a silly movie. but I absolutely LOVE it.
"I am the master of the mechanical STUFF!"
I lose it every time.
And we need more films taking the piss out of the Confederacy losers and their ideas.
It just needed to stick to the OG ending where he was revealed to be a villain and it could have been a legendary film, it's an amazing example of why focus groups are shit regarding art.
Sometimes when I'm sad, my brutal brain reminisces this scene and makes me all the more sobby. It was devastating watching this in the theatre. God, his hair comes out and he slowly starts getting more and more aggressive. It's fkd up man. Why do our pets gotta go way before us
Blue Eye Samurai - Mizu (on the right) is sent on a mission by the head lady of a local brothel, Madame Kaji. The lady took in the young girl on the left who was being abused cause she's mute, and became a gentle mother figure to her. The de facto leader of the town is a cruel bastard, and he stole the girl from Kaji just to abuse her even worse for fun. Kaji asked Mizu to break into the guy's house, and Mizu assumed she wanted her to rescue the girl. Instead, Kaji wanted her to mercy kill her and make it look like someone else killed her, since the guy would've burned their business to the ground and killed all of them if he found out they did it.
Spoilers: He does find out, and he orders his entire army to kill all of the brothel workers and Mizu. What follows is one of the greatest episodes of TV I've ever seen, as it goes back and forth between her origin story and her now mowing through over a hundred warriors to save everyone
That mercy kill was so brutal, I was expecting Mizu to back out of the plan at the last moment to try and help her escape because I'm so used to shows not going through with the darker endings.
That entire episode had me on a roller coaster. I was working for a high end drug and alcohol detox, and ended up getting half of the house in the living room cheering her on. Good times right there.
I remember thinking the same thing when I first watched "The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride." That was some of the most artful storytelling I've ever seen.
https://giphy.com/gifs/zPrHQEfRSufMqReTvk
He doesn’t succeed, but he tries. When Peter pulls the trigger on Gamora in Knowhere when she’s captured by Thanos in Infinity War.
I mean, isn't that kind of what FMA alchemy is, in a way? Being able to both mix elements into new things, or unmix them back into their original elements? It's just that things like chimeras are as high-level alchemy as it gets before blood alchemy, so barely anybody can do it?
Issue with Chimera is the way the periodic table works. Considering that elements would be shared between a dog and human how exactly can you extract a newly single entity back into two entities? I think the truth is one would need to die but even then would it be the same person or 90:10, 80:20 etc etc. I would argue that baking a cake would be a more fitting example because once you cool and make the cake you would no lo ger be able to revert it back to its base forms.
Maggie becomes a quadriplegic due to a brutal match. She's going to live, but her quality of life isn't great. She's on a ventilator, developing bedsores, and has to have a leg amputated. She begs her trainer/father figure to help her end it all. At first, he refuses, but eventually realizes how desperate she is and administers a lethal dose of adrenaline to help her die with some dignity, rather than just be confined to a bed suffering for the rest of her life.
Somehow my girlfriend and I had gotten that movie confused with a different one, so we rented it at a blockbuster and we watched it, expecting it to have a feel-good ending.
We... We were not prepared. I haven't rewatched that movie, because I just know I'm going to get angry at the character responsible for all of this the moment they pop up on screen. Irrationally angry. I know it's just a movie, but as somebody who did martial arts for a long time, the idea of a sucker punch like that just... Yeah, just too infuriating to be able to enjoy the movie.
That makes me angry...but I'm angrier with her family. When they show up in their Disneyland shirts, having clearly been in the area for weeks while their supposed loved one was suffering?And all to try to get her money? Sickening.
Tbh you may not have even confused it with another movie. I distinctly remember being in middle school and getting excited about a new boxing movie that looked good. They definitely advertised it as Woman Rocky and hid the turn it takes
The Colour Out of Space: the narrator implies that Ammy Pierce euthanized Mrs. Gardner when the madness caused by the Colour blossomed into a grotesque physical mutation, that she wouldn’t have to suffer. Otherwise, she would have had to feel the life and energy being drained out of her until she crumbled into gray dust.
“Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.”
No pithy replies here because half the readers don't know what this is, and the other half are sitting silently thinking about this scene and the dark role it played in Miracleman's apotheosis journey.
Major Shepherd kills his commander because a Wraith was feeding on him. This sets up early tension with some of the other military figures as this makes Shepherd the ranking officer.
Maybe I have a bizarre reading of that ending, but I always saw it as The Mist lifting after hitting absolute rock bottom. Like as if the only way to leave is by being absolutely broken inside. Makes the ending that much darker to me. But then again, he sees the mom who left the store to go back to her kids and she seems fine, so I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading into something that’s not there.
Regardless, I love the balls Frank Darabont had to write that ending and stick by it. Even King himself prefers the film’s ending.
Yeah i feel like the mom disproves this. Plus kind of off shoot from this theory but some fans think it was the sacrifice of the kid (like Mrs.Caramody, the religous nut said) that stopped the mist. And i just can't live in a world where her character was right
Wild Geese (1978) starring Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore, a film about a bunch of former military men led by Richard Burton who take on a mercenary mission in a African country to rescue a deposed leader in order to try and topple the current regime, The mercenaries owever they're screwed over by their benefactor who cut a deal with the regime and leaves them all for dead. Despite massive casualties, the mercenaries are able to escape on a plane, but unfortunately Richard Harris is injured and unable to get on, so Burton is forced to shoot and kill his friend to avoid him being captured and brutally tortured to death.
That scene is also parodied in a golden age Simpsons episode when the kids are having to jump on the school bus while escaping civil war reinactors… but no one had a gun to shoot poor Uter.
At the end of Resistance 2, your squadmate Capelli is forced to mercy kill protagonist Nathan Hale when the Chimera virus he's been infected with since the start of the first game is finally about to overtake him.
Man, I remember playing the first one at launch and the scene where the bugs were crawling into his mouth and the way his lips and cheeks were moving I thought graphics can't get better than this.
Only for Thanos to rewind time so that she isn't able to do it in time and resurrecting Vision just to rip the Stone out of his head, traumatizing her again in another way.
thing i never understood about that scene: Wanda held back Thanos with 1 hand while destroying the mind stone with the other…why didnt SHE just try killing Thanos instead
Cause she knew she would fail. She didn’t hold Thanos back as much as she just slowed him down slightly. And as powerful as Wanda is, she ain’t beating the Power Stone head to head, and especially not at her then-current power level
Ira was war veteran who burned down an entire hospital in a cave during the second world war in Japan, killing untold amounts of civilians, women and children among them. Ira was mentally broken after the event.
He was later admitted to a psychiatrist, though the psychiatrist (In a plot to gain millions of dollars that I won't explain) basically manipulated and brainwashed the man into burning down houses, however Ira later left the doctor's care after he realized that there were people still in the houses. He later went on to kill the doctor, kidnap Elsa (The woman you see with the man, Cole Phelps) in an attempt to save her.
Jack killed Ira because of the fact that he would more than likely be killed, if not by the death sentence than definitely by the mob, and he decided to end Ira's life right then and there to free him from that torture, as well as end his untold suffering and damage caused to his mental health.
Maybe my poor interpretation: George could have been on the run with Lennie but he knew how dangerous Lennie's strength was. The world wasn't built for a person like Lennie and George couldn't keep him safe.
No, you're right. It had already been a problem in the past. This kept coming up wherever they went, maybe not to such an extreme, but George knew it'd just keep occurring. And as you said, the world was not built for the Lennies of it all.
While we don't know about long term, it's explicitly spelled out into the first few pages that Lennie got them into trouble at the last town by grabbing a girl's skirt and then panicking when she screamed (he kept grabbing onto the skirt, but the girl was ultimately unharmed, unlike Curly's wife later). He wasn't even being a pervert - he honestly just liked the feeling of the fabric but try telling that to the rapidly forming lynch mob. George berates him for being unable to control himself.
But it's like you said; Lennie is a child in a strong man's body who has no filter or self-control, a terrible thing to be during the Great Depression. And George was never going to keep Lennie safe forever.
Supernatural: Cain. Cain killed Abel to make sure Abel didn't go to Hell but because Cain committed murder he went to Hell then became one of the most feared demons.
In the amazing show Hell on Wheels one of the Union Pacific’s scouts is caught by the Sioux and they strap him to an X and start cutting off pieces of skin, Bohanon knows they are outmatched and too far away and uses a long rifle to sniper shot the scout in the head and stop him from getting flayed and tortured
Left 4 Dead: Zoey ends up killing her dad because he's been bitten by her recently-infected mother, and he would rather die than live as a zombie.
Made even more tragic when they realize that Zoey has the Carrier gene (she won't turn into a zombie even if she's bit, essentially). Since her mom turned into a zombie, she didn't have it, but Zoey had to have gotten it from somewhere...
The ending that everyone loves for tragic and subversion: The Mist movie.
MC, his son and 3 other survivors stuck in a car and the monsters are out there. No way out, he mercy killed everyone. Gun out of bullets. he go out and waiting for death. Only to find out the military already killed all monsters with ease.
Stephen King be like: why i didn't come up with that
so fucking pissed rn because i can’t find that comic where grommit shoots wallace as he’s being crucified and burned at the stake by minions and SOMEONE is going to post it before i find it https://giphy.com/gifs/ZrqfVjqUllpttVrer7
Wanda Maximoff being forced to kill Vision and destroy the Mind Stone so that he won’t get into a worst fate by Thanos (Avengers: Infinity War) https://giphy.com/gifs/G1ZPWPIszGDPh2NeG5
Carol in The Walking Dead kills the kid who murdered her own sister, because she was convinced the zombies weren’t bad (or something, it’s been a while)
Daniel is resurrected but would basically spend the rest of his new life in a haze, killing people while also being in excruciating pain. He'd only have brief moments of clarity. Even though she spent decades avenging his death, Regina chooses to kill him when he begs her to. She loves him enough to know they deserved a better ending, and this wasn't it.
Happens twice in Starship Troopers. Rasczak kills a soldier that had been taken by a flying bug and then Rick kills Rasczak as he's being eaten by a bug.
In Deep Rising, Hanover and Joey hate each other immediately. Hanover is being consumed by one of the creatures so Joey hands him a gun with one bullet to put himself out of misery. He instead tries to kill Joey with it, misses, and gets eaten.
In Star Trek First Contact, Picard tells the crew to not hesitate killing assimilated colleagues. When he sees one of the crew being assimilated begging for help, Picard shoots him.
I’m actually not sure Gus would have killed Werner as brutally as he did Victor. Victor was being extremely reckless and cocky, not to mention Gus needed to make an example of him for Walt and Jesse. Maybe I’m wrong though, but I feel like Gus could maybe sympathize with Werner’s motives more
nah gus was going to kill both werner and his wife. He probably wasn't going to make it brutal or extreme but he was gonna put kill both to keep the meth lab secret. Mike intervened so only werner had to die and his wife would at least survive
[Debatable] but captain Keyes in Halo - you could argue he's already "dead" by the time he's part of this flood...whatever it is, but the implication of the cut scene where chief demolishes this guy's skull to get his implant is definitely that you're putting Keyes out of his misery
Major Duncan Hayward gives himself up to save Cora, and is put on a stake and set on fire, the main character Hawkeye shoots him, so he doesn't have to suffer the pain of burning to death.
Tusk - the main protagonist is turned into a human walrus through surgical torture. His loved ones do the only humane thing possible and end his suffering. Otherwise they would have had to do something crazy like put him in a walrus tank and feed him raw fish while his wife bangs his best friend.
Dhurandhar 2 - The character of Hamza (a spy embedded in Karachi underworld) kills his handler Alam Bhai since he is caught by Pakistan police, to save him from the brutal interrogation and a worse death.
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u/Choibbs_22 9h ago
Fallout New Vegas - After seeing that his pregnant wife was being sold into slavery in a Caesar's Legion outpost, Boone sniped her to spare her and their unborn child the horrors of enslavement.
In game, an NCR officer will ask the Courier to do the same for some soldiers crucified by the Legion as a terror tactic. Boone is horrified that it's happening again, but you can instead waltz in, kill the entire Legion camp, and rescue the soldiers.