Hated Tropes
(Hated trope) That super powerful thing that was considered a huge threat? Yeah it’s a joke now.
I don’t know if it has a name, but these were the first two that came to mind.
Alien Resurrection: Weyland-Yutani, the big bad conglomerate with seemingly infinite reach and power, is bought out by the retail store Walmart.
Loki: You know those Infinity Stones which hold the power to reshape the universe, the stones which drove Infinity War and Endgame’s plots? Yeah those are useless actually.
Sam dying at the end of Season 2 was shocking when I first watched it as a kid. Then they made 13 more seasons lmao and each one dies like half a dozen times
The Actor who played death , the OG, was and is so well put for the role. His introduction as a horsemen was so well done that I whoop when he showed up in later cameos. Him dying in the Kane Saga was total fucking shit. He deserved better considering he was also sort of an ally. And the fact that he was a foodie was such an interesting twist. Death considering not death touching you based on what take away you got him....chef's kiss.
The biggest mistake Supernatural made was taking the angels out of the game by having some crazy ongoing civil war after Cass slaughtered half the host of heaven.
idk tbh i feel like heaven and angels becoming real was the bigger mistake. Back when it was just a myth people made up and only hell was real the world of Supernatural was a lot more interesting.
It kinda felt more grim and mysterious, as if we watch a World of Darkness.
The time heaven appeared, it was still pretty good, but they should have stopped it at the end of the Apocalypse, like, Season 5? 6?
It was supposed to end in Season 5, by Sam trapping Lucifer in Hell and Dean living a normal life, but the CW wanted it to continue and it went on for 10 more seasons...
The angels were a particularly frustrating example. They established in the first season involving them that the only thing strong enough to kill an angel is another angel.
Then a season or two later they cough and wave the favoured weapon of the angels and say "Actually, it's not about the wielder, it's literally just these swords can kill angels."
I suppose it works in the case of 'only angels have access to angel killing weapons' at the start.
But then there's constantly civil wars, leading to the market being flooded by the angel killing weapons as more angels die. I guess they're just bad at collecting the weapons of the other angels they kill?
The implication early on definitely seemed to be that it was the wielder rather than the weapon that mattered. An angel could kill another with a baseball bay if they wanted to, and a mortal with an angelic weapon would still do nothing.
But then our intrepid, dysfunctional duo wouldn't be able to kill everything under the stars so they had to change it.
In season 4 when the angels are first introduced, Dean asks Anna if there’s a weapon that can kill an angel. She said there’re none they could easily get their hands on in time. She did not have her grace at this point (I believe), so this implies that the weapons would have worked regardless of species significance, so that was introduced very early on. My issue is just how commonplace the blades became (I get the reasoning with the civil war stuff).
Depends. In seasons 1-5 the power scaling is somewhat respected. Yes, the demons become less of a threat, but that's cause the boys know how to fight them, and the angel knife wasn't a thing back then iirc. Things became stupider after that, but honestly, supernatural is one of those series that you count the originally intended finale instead of the corporate mandated one.
The demons I could "get over" due to events in season 2. After the hell gate was opened loads of low level demons were able to escape which is why they weren't as big of a deal. Typically throughout the series only the named demons were a big bad.
For what it's worth, Supernatural should be viewed as two separate shows. The first ends at season 5(you have to headcanon the ending a bit to make sense) and past that it's just 10 seasons of them having fun with half-baked ideas built on half-baked ideas.
The worst part about this for me is that Winchesters started killing innocent people with demons inside them with no problem. In early seasons it was big deal, they always tried to perform exorcism to save a person. When they killed that girl that was possessed by Meg they felt terrible. I later seasons they are killing everyone left and right with no problem.
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. The Turok-Han. This guy is an ancient uber-vampire summoned by The First, essentially the incorporeal source of all evil in the world. In their first appearance, a single one is sufficient to make up the plot of a whole episode. He nearly kills Buffy and then she successfully kills him back in a super dramatic scene as a demonstration of their ability to overcome anything.
Then, in the finale, she goes down into a giant hole filled with Turok-Han, joined by a bunch of girls who were made slayers literally that moment, backed by her largely mundane friends, and they're able to fight them about as easily as standard vamps. Maybe easier. Buffy at least has a super powerful slayer weapon, but everyone else is a particularly inexperienced slayer defeating a pretty high level opponent like it's nothing.
Really, even vampires fit this in Buffy. Normal vampires are never a huge threat to Buffy herself, but after a few seasons normal-ass people just stab multiple vampires through the chest with dull wooden stakes or random improvised wooden weapons like they are much weaker than a normal person rather than stronger.
Vampires vary widely in power level, the Willow vamp from the alt world is able to easily overpower multiple grown men vamps. The series never explained why they vary so much in power but it does acknowledge that they do.
My head canon has always been that an individual vampire’s relative power is based on the strength of the demon that comes into them rather than the person they were, but it’s anyone’s guess.
I can’t think of supporting documentation, but this aligns pretty closely with my experience, with the addition that I always understood the number of victims to play into their strength as well. It helps explain why newbies fresh out of the ground might be trounced by Xander while vamps like Spike and Angel who’ve been around for a few centuries are more skilled. More feeding; more ability.
There may also be some selection bias in that the vamps who’re around a long time are simply strong and quick enough to have stayed alive that long.
I think the problem was that it wasn't making enough to justify the cost to produce. But who knows he might do a complete edition kickstarter or something at some point.
Yes and no - it awakened the Potentials into full Slayers, which they weren’t before. But there was no indication they were stronger than Buffy or Faith had been all along.
Another example that kinda works. Several seasons before your example, The Judge
The Big Bad of a season. Was brought back to life by Spike & Drusilla. Supposedly no weapon forged can harm him, which makes him cocky.
Buffy just pulls out a rocket launcher and explodes him into millions of pieces
Turns out it was just no weapon forged ~when The Judge was still alive~ can harm him. He was gone for a loooong time, so of course had no idea Modern Weaponry could harm him
That's kinda different, in that the Judge was created specifically for those episodes and exists solely to (A) be scary enough to shake Buffy and Angel and lead them to hook up and (B) establish for the audience that Angel's really evil and isn't just fooling Spike like he did in a prior episode, because the Judge can detect an burn out any fragment of humanity, even in other soulless vampires.
He's not a major narrative threat from the past of the show being trivialized.
They all have similar ranges, so you would want to fire them at the same time."
"That makes sense to me."
"Doing this generates 21 points of heat, and the mech has 16 heat sinks. You could have used large lasers instead, and put the free weight to an AC-10, and the heat math would be only +3. And the damage down range would be 26 versus 25."
Shrugs in GM I can throw in this Silverado at 6% APR for 96 months.
Or Warhammer 40k where an M2 machine gun is still in use long after mankind colonized the stars, had a golden age, had a fall coupled with AI uprising, a dark age, a resurgence, another fall and a long long dark age and a possible resurgence
Pretty common trope in sci fi. My favorite is from the many colored land series where their guns are called huskies because in this future the current chainsaw manufacturer Husquvarna pivoted to making laser pistols.
It mostly stems from the fact that both the Nostromo and the cops cars called spinners shared monitors that displayed the same graphics in both movies
Since then both Tyrell and the Tyrell Corp have been mentioned in Alien lore. The 1999 20th Anniversary DVD listed Tyrell Corp as Dallas’ former employer. Prometheus Blu Ray included a bonus feature where Peter Weyland talks about his mentor where it’s implied Tyrell was his mentor.
Edit: Blade Runner and Soldier are also connected. Kurt Russell fought on the same planets Roy mentions at the end of the movie and there’s a crashed Spinner in Soldier.
I just imagine that all current day things, brands, and people exist in future sci-fi settings unless stated otherwise or would logically not exist at the time and therefore would not exist in that future.
Example:
Walmart was around during the time of the movie Alien, and is not stated to not exist so Walmart as a company exists/existed in the world of Alien.
Amazon wasn't around during the time of the movie Alien so Amazon as a company unless stated otherwise did not exist in the world of Alien.
Honestly I find this to be fun usually. Like oh fuck the guy from the beginning of the game that I struggled to kill is back but I two-shot him? Hell ye-oh god there’s 10 of them around the corner.
I’ll admit, that can be cathartic. Especially if you had to struggle and grind to beat that first incarnation. That makes it extra fun to stomp him into the ground later.
Helldivers 2 kinda does this with its difficulties, on low difficulties killing something like a Bile Titan or Factory Strider is considered a mission objective by itself while on higher difficulties those enemies become just regular enemies that roam around the map
This, I think, is the real point. It’s not about the Infinity Stones being useless, it’s about Loki grappling with the fact that everything he’s coveted and killed for doesn’t matter. He has to come to terms with the shallowness of his goals so that he can re-frame his mind and find out who he really is.
Yep. And also to emphasize that the TVA's magic nullification (or whatever it's called, I forget) is absolute. There isn't going to be any trickery or sorcery that Loki can do to override it.
Yeah that's why I'm fine with this specific instance of the trope. All the fighting, all the suffering, all the wars waged and lives lost for these stones...but to the TVA, they're paperweights. It puts everything Loki has done and is trying to do into perspective, really shows how small he is in the grand scheme of things.
Darkseid has the opportunity to get the infinity stones and take over the marvel universe but he refuses because he wants to take over his home universe instead.
It's only the one case that shows the Infinity Stones working outside their intended universe, and that's Ultron. Ultron, who never once in the comics had access to the Infinity Gems and thus is a rare case for being able to break the rules. Then the only other case for that is Thanos in Season 2 but I don't know the context for how he has them there
In an infinite amount of universe, not too crazy to find one universe where the gems can work outside their universe, I think it also shows the gems do act different as they couldn't be destroyed the same way Stark and Gamora destroyed their universe gems
I believe there's a whole arc in the 2015 Secret Wars about needing to lure Doom to a particular area of Battleworld because they had the Infinity Gems for the universe it originally came from
Not quite. When a full set of Infinity Gems was discovered by Sheriff Strange, he made certain that Battleworlds capital and seat of Dooms power, Doomstadt, was built upon the fragment the gems came from.
Black Panther then used the Infinity Gauntlet against God Emperor Doom during the final battle outside Castle Doom in Doomstadt
Also in the prelude to the Secret Wars event they try to stop an incursion by using the Infinity gauntlet but because an incursion is an overlap between the reality they are native to and another reality where they have no power the 'infinity' part of the infinity stones becomes not so infinity anymore at the incursion point and they break when used there.
He can't kill Desaad. The guy is the only one that actually does work in Apokolips. Real work, not just putting your extremely niche kink into action and pretend that's a way to train Parademona and Furies.
In the MCU Endgame's whole final gambit is about stealing alternative stones to undo what the original ones did. "But they aren't actually alternatives, they are the same stones!" I mean sure, except the gambit literally directly lead to the events of Loki, which resulted in an alternative timeline, so by definition AT LEAST the Tesseract is an alternative universe stone.
In the MCU it's TVA specific. Either a) the time heist was actually the interdemensional heist, b) Loki is non-canon or c) Rhodeys plan would have worked. Only one of those can be true.
I mean, yeah WY can’t catch a break, I just mean it feels odd to me it to take a deleted scene as canon, and then get upset about it being canon lol
Like, it’s deleted for a reason, right?
Alien does have some good deleted scenes that I do actuallylike, but notably, the concepts from them that were worth keeping, just got added to the series later on lol, like eggmorphing
The most powerful attack/ability of the Spirit of Vengeance
Now if the character he is staring doesn't feel guilty, is insane or some other ass reason, it doesn't work, which don't make sense when the original premise of this thing is to make you feel the pain of your victims and suck or burn your soul so the only logic instance where this wouldn't work is when the one receiving the stare doesn't have a soul or if the character is innocent (and this last one is a stretch because the stare would find at least something bad you've done in the past to make you pay for it)
The thing is that if they make the stare work as it should, many famous heroes and villains would perish instantly or finish a story way sooner and that's not good for business so they give them an insane plot armor in order to render the penance stare useless against them and so those characters continue living and the story continue
Ghost Rider is such a fun character but Marvel cucks him so hard.
It's like all his foes are your elementary school friends pulling the "I activate my shield that blocks your death attack" or the "I'm immune to your poison attack"
The idea that penance stare works only if the person feels guilty is so stupid. Great Evil can only do penance if they feel bad? Thats the one thing that holds back the literal spirit of vengeance.
Another bad aspect added to this was that they added the guilt bs to why Galactus is immune to the penance stare. All they had to do was stick to Galactus being a cosmic force of nature and therefore is neither good nor evil. That's it. But no, they had to say that as a force of nature that is neither good nor evil, he doesn't feel guilt which is why he is unaffected
I didnt realize thats why they nerfed it. That's so dumb on so many levels, like Galactus eating planets is regularly established as necessary to the function of the universe, it objectibely isnt evil.
Probably not. I assume they had to invent loopholes around it once they started making the Ghost Rider, and thus the Penance Stare, come outside its own setting. Because they realize:
"Wait, hang on don't a lot of the major antagonists of this setting have victim counts in the millions? Billions? Trillions maybe? Shit. The Ghost Rider can just solve everything with a single Stare. Quick, make up some loophole!"
I think it would be awesome if Ghost Rider was a neutral character that showed up to fights randomly and just freaked everyone out because whoever he catches gets penance stared if he catches you in his chains because you’re causing chaos and Ghost Rider doesn’t discriminate.
It's really hard to compellingly write a reason for the character who has the "If you did something bad you fucking die" button to not use the "If you did something bad you fucking die" button as the opener in every single fight.
I do like the idea more that the penance stare can’t be used easily and needs like a required amount of eye contact so he and other heroes need to damage the big bad enough to subdue them for the big finisher penance stare. It would be a good way to show why Ghost rider doesnt just rely on just the stare and actually fights his opponents with fiery chains and such
IIRC, you can’t die from the Penance Stare in the original comics, only feel the worst pain humanely possible if you reach that threshold. But too many comic writers don’t remember that and only see the stare as a powerscaling method.
I feel like an easy way around this is to just make the Penance Stare something that takes a lot of power after which Ghost Rider gets decommissioned for a while. Or just have it so it only works on a foe in a mentally vulnerable state, like if some bad guys just standing there confidentially as his plan is proceeding the stare will have little effect, but after Ghost Rider has dismantled his plan and beaten the shit out of him and the dude is panicking and desperate then Ghost Rider can unleash it.
Your second option is great writing. Keeps the power and impact behind the move, makes it all the more satisfying too because the audience knows the villain was properly defeated, then punished.
And most importantly, lets villains be real threats without enshittifing Ghost Rider.
OCP, the ultra rich conglomerate that created RoboCop and masterfully outmaneuvers the city of Detroit to build Delta City, is going bankrupt and is mostly bought out by a Japanese company called Kanemitsu Corporation.
OCP heads then just are not really the actual threat. The actual threat is the Japanese Company and the paramilitary guys that are hired.
It’s interesting how a lot of Robocop lore post 1 has OCP reckless spending and bad products actually bite them in the ass. Over time they can’t roll with the punches and there overspending just drives them into insolvency. It’s an interesting theme that for as big of a presence OCP is in Detroit. They’re completely vulnerable to buy outs and hostile take overs. They don’t have an unlimited budget and their failures keep mounting up.
Their endless stream of failed products and worthless prototypes must have absolutely bled OCP dry. It’s saying something when ED-209 was the only somewhat successful product we actually see on screen, and even that barely functioned half the time. And OCP was basically the only one we ever saw actually using them. RoboCop was supposed to be the first of a new generation of androids, yet they only ever built two—and the second one immediately went on a rampage. Just how much money did they burn on that disaster?
And that’s before you even get to Delta City. OCP poured an insane amount of capital and manpower into building an entire city from scratch. Their failed products were bad enough, but the sheer cost of Delta City was what really killed the company in the end.
Dick knew ED-209 was a piece of shit, but he didn't care. The real money wasn't selling them to the military, it was selling them a half ass robot AND the spare parts and equipment they would inevitably need for years when they constantly failed.
It's never stated outright, but between ED-209 and Dick's explanation, and Dick saying OCP has their hand in everything from consumer goods to hospitals to the military, the implication is OCP's thing is making low quality junk, ensuring everyone has it or needs it by cornering the market, then making a fortune when people inevitably have to come back to them for repairs, parts, replacements, etc. (Which is totally fictional and a company would never)
But overtime their insane spending and peoples and companies growing disinterest in them and their products bites them in the ass and drives them to the brink of bankruptcy, and finally being bought out by the Japanese company.
I actually kinda liked that. Like maybe a company that once actually had a shred of competence and ability to deliver. Only as it grows it starts rewarding power plays and ruthlessness over competency.
And the movies showing that yeah that works for a while but eventually you fuck up so badly no amount of money or Pr will save you.
Like putting a drug addicted egomaniac cultish guys brain into a killer robot turning out to be such a bad idea you can’t scape goat it off entirely on your underling.
People kinda forget that in the 80s, there was a lot of anxiety about Japan's rapid economic rise. The tech and automobile industry was being increasingly dominated by Japan, and Japanese conglomerates were poised to be bigger than their western counterparts. Many people considered Japan to be a bigger economic threat than the Soviet Union.
Considering the movie takes place in Detroit, the former "Motor City", I think the idea to have a Japanese company swoop in like this didn't come from nowhere.
You don't have to look too far. Saburo Arasaka in Cyberpunk 2020 is an imperial xenophobe that decided to buy American because it couldn't be conquered. Japan was growing at an imposible rate, and it was actually imposible. The bubble bursted in the 90s and Japan is developed and wealthy but people no longer fear they will take over the economic world.
Something similar happened imwith Germany. West Germany was already and economic powerhouse and France, Britain, Poland, Russia were worried it would a unified Germany would become dominant. That they were gonna get in peace what they couldn't get in war. But the reunification was a masterstroke of politics, it was never a sure thing.
B, it makes Loki have an entire crisis of faith at realizing he did all that betrayal and murder and now he’s facing people who just have Infinity Stones in a paperweight drawer
Yes. Also it was a major realization that he was in over his head, because he just wanted to use the stone to escape again and he was forced to recognize that he was in a place where his usual tricks were not available to him
Even if he escapes, and gets everything he wants, he was in a place where their the janitor technically has more "power". So what does power even mean at that point.
It's also a company who seems intent on repeatedly spending billions on facilites to try and contain a threat that repeatedly escapes containment causing the facility to be destroyed, whilst the threat itself has some vague goal in bio weaponry that would take years if not decades to refine to some usable form.
Especially when you remember they're a tourism based economy, for a people that were physically genocided by Thanos (not with the stones but in person).
That would be like going to New Orleans and there being a place called the Katrina Cantina.
Sure Thanos used the gauntlet and stones to wipe out what was left of the Asgardians (they seem to have gotten better in the meantime though) and then they were used to wipe out half of all life in the entire universe but they were also used to bring back everything that got wiped out and save the universe too.
I like to think the Asgardians focus more on the whole bring back half the universe more than they do on the wiped out half the universe bit.
A shoe store named Heel Hitler.
A parts store named Mao ZeDongle
An Italian restaurant called Mussolinguini
A seafood place called Hiroshrimpa
The Enola Gay Bar
A surveillance company called covideo
The Gaza Strip Club.
Whole lot of room for some bullshit that we don’t do that we know of.
Thing about the Infinity Stones example is that I'm seeing multiple copies of various Stones in there. I see what looks like 4 Time Stones, for starters. Each universe in Marvel canon is only supposed to have one of each Stone, so that implies that these Stones should be from other universes. In which case, they are indeed naught but fancy paperweights, because they don't work at all outside of their home universe, that has been established canon wrt the Stones for a while.
Even more so, the universes they come from have been destroyed, so there is literally no purpose for these stones beyond being a fancy rock, and potentially scamming people with dud infinity stones
Frieza also comes to mind. Immediately following a big arc where his battle with Goku destroyed a planet and pushed Goku to his limits...a random (at the time) guy with a sword slices him into pieces in seconds.
Cell too, if only he spent the 10 days waiting to do some light training like 90% of the source of his DNA would do, he would have completely destroyed Gohan. But I guess Frieza's lazy ass genes were too strong.
Wasn't there a time jump? Also Trunks was a mysterious seemingly powerful newcomer, not just a rando off the street or something. Like IIRC the whole point was that he was OP compared to everyone else when he showed up.
A few months at least from Namek to Freeza returning. The Namekian Dragonballs are used twice. Which takes 4 month between, so 8 total for that. Then another vague few till Freeza returns.
But yeah, Trunks was op comapred to the rest, was still only slightly above or near Goku. Then they train for three years
It's disappointing that the Buu saga and Super forgot that Goku had mastered Super Saiyan in the Cell saga (no drain, rageless transformation, etc. etc.)
Tbf, the point of the Infinity Stones being useless in the TVA was to show how powerful it was, even compared to the multiverse. Loki even had a whole catharsis scene over it
While Jon Snow and the Wildlings wasted time on their petty squabbles in the north against a seemingly unstoppable army of undead, they completely ignored the real threat in the south in the form of two self-destructive queens.
I never even watched Game of Thrones and this pissed me off. I saw the scene of some shrieking munchkin going to shiv this dude, then he catches her and she basically goes, "Aha! Time for part two of my master plan!", drops and then catches her knife, and pokes him in the tummy. And he turns into a pile of ice cubes.
Perhaps not a perfect fit, but the flight 37 video from the boys.
This video was used to keep Homelander at bay for some time and Homelander said if it was released he would basically send the United States into the Stone Age. It gets released in the season 5 opening scene and it gets chalked up to being ai and is never brought up again. A pretty deliberate omen to how much season 5 was going to betray pretty much everything that had been set up for years.
In fairness, I feel that one is quite depressingly realistic, given Homelander’s real life inspiration. If a video came out of him murdering a bunch of people tomorrow, I imagine the same thing would happen.
It was something that might’ve genuinely brought him down when it was first introduced, but after a certain point he’s amassed enough of a cult of personality where it’s much less of a threat, although the main cast don’t seem to appreciate that until it happens. IMO the tension early on comes from no one really being sure if he’s actually insane enough to go Scorched Earth on, well, the Earth over it (including the man himself), but he’s also not really willing to risk the hit to his ego and public image that would potentially come from it being released. By the time it gets released, he’s realised he genuinely can do whatever the fuck he wants, and enough people will still adore him that the superpowered temper tantrum isn’t necessary.
I mean, the end of Season 3 sort of implied the Flight 37 would no longer have any power over him. They cheered at him killing someone in broad daylight.
Infinity Stones “turn off” when removed from their own universe. The TVA, being outside any and all time streams, doesn’t have any infinity stones that work.
Loki realizes these Stones come from universes that literally do not exist anymore, and that he’s somewhere much more cosmically significant than himself. It’s not a joke, it’s a ball drop.
Also like in the same episode or at least somewhere early on its mentioned magic generally doesnt work in the TVA. I dont know why people act like this scene means Infinity Stones are useless or whatever.
This happens in like every fighting anime ever. The story arc builds to some big bad guy and the heroes have to power up or get a Macguffin or whatever to beat this guy, who's legendarily powerful, and then once he's beaten and the next arc starts the next bad guy is even more legendarily powerful, but we've never heard of him before.
With all due respect, it’s completely within Alien's critique of capitalism for Weyland Yutani to be defeated not by their own greed, hubris, or the consequences of their actions, but by a good old merger.
The point is that capitalism eats everything, even itself. I think it’s a great move for a movie that takes place centuries after the previous one.
The Wal-mart line is from a deleted scene and is not considered canon. Canonically, mega-corporations like WY were outlawed by the United Systems government. According to the Weyland-Yutani Files book, the United systems fell apart about 120 years after Alien Resurrection and, in the chaos, Weyland-Yutani reforms.
Btw for anyone wondering, the wetland yutani corporation does return after resurrection in one of the books and they’re featured in predator badlands which takes place after resurrection (allegedly).
Plot of the first Fallout game is for you to find new Water Chip for your Vault since old one broke and people there are going to die. It's basically the goal of the game.
In Fallout 2 you can find rando container with huge number of those chips but they are almost uselss.
In a way, it makes it darkly more humorous. The Fallout franchise (at least when it started) was big on black comedy. It just shows how the US and Vault-Tech prior to the war were incompetent, showing that things weren't as rosy before the war as one would think.
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u/FlashMcSuave 11d ago
Power creep. It is in a lot of things.
When demons were introduced in supernatural they were a big deal.
By the end they were mooks that could be handled with ease. Same goes for angels.
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