Lore
[very common Trope] A universally supposed Good thing turns out to be a Bad thing
1. The Hero defeating the Villain (Gameoverse): You'd think that after the defeat of the very evil Big Bad means the day is saved, right? Well, no. Because the day is about to end, along with your entire world, your friends and family, all because the hero did what they thought was the right thing.
2. Believing into Getting adopted to a new loving "Family" (The Promised Neverland): Hey, Sweetie. What's that? You think you're going to live with a new caring and family? WRONG. You're actually the next new meal to bunch of demons. Hope you're doing well in the next life.
3. The 'Great Beyond' (Sausage Party): same premise as the Promised Neverland. The food all think they going to a wonderful place called 'The Great Beyond', being treated as Nirvana and sees us as their Gods. Well... You all know what we do with food, right?
People believe they are living in a bunker after a nuclear apocalypse because the entire surface is contaminated, except for the titular Island. There is a lottery every so often where people can win a ticket to go live on The Island.
In reality, every one in the facility is a clone being farmed for organs. The “winners” are actually being harvested so their “real” self can have an organ transplant with an exact replica of their own organ.
The only thing i remember about this movie was the trailer with one of the characters saying "THERE IS NO ISLAND", in a trailer for a movie called "the island"
I mean to be fair the vast majority of the movie is Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johanson on the run trying to survive after learning the truth and escaping the cloning facility, so it's not like an end of the movie kinda twist.
This is the same rationale used in Promised Neverland as well. The farm the characters are from is modeled after an orphanage where they are given loving upbringings and kept in good health, because it makes for better product (particularly the brains, which are considered a delicacy and healthy childhoods mean better developed brains)
There is a fantastic scene that always stuck with me, when they manage to track down the real Ewan Mcgregor (a rich asshole) and they explain what they just escaped from, and he fiegns being shocked and appalled by the entire thing and tells them he's going to call and get some help to take the whole thing down. So he walks away, calls Sean Bean who runs the whole cloning facility and says "Why is my insurance policy sitting on my couch right now?".
Probably similar to how in comatosed patients the body is in a long state of weakened and minimum output. There's probably a gazillion biological pathways that keep the body healthy only when the mind is conscious
they explain in the movie that their organs would fail if they were left vegetative
they do not ever once explain how they are somehow keeping the entire operation secret from federal regulators despite employing thousands of people who are explicitly aware that they're manufacturing sentient humans
Honestly that seems the easiest part to explain, good old fashioned bribery and corruption. What's that, Senator? You're going to expose our operation and shut us down? Well before you do that, let me tell you about our exclusive Diamond Membership package, at no charge to you of course...
An absolutely brutal death (when considering it's from SAW, that's a pretty sizeable bar to clear), and 100% just the writers going "Aha! How will Hoffman get out of THIS conundrum next movie!
If you know Jigsaw, which idk if Peter did or not I forget the details of this movie but if you actually know what he's like, then you know you 100% die if you don't get in. If you DO get in, you have a chance of living.
Jigsaw is contradictory in a few ways but one of his consistent features is "Do what you're told to" if he says climb over the barbed wire or die, you will die if you don't do it. "Get into the coffin" is mandatory, if you don't do it you will die.
My understanding was relatively few people knew those traps were inescapable. And even if you knew most of the traps during that era weren't survivable (not all of them were death sentences even during their time) you'd still have a 100% chance of death if you don't get in, and a small chance at life if you do.
So the decisions outcome is the same. You will absolutely die if you don't get in, you MAY die if you do. The choice is easy.
Hoffman only rigged his first trap (before he was an apprentice). Amanda did rig a couple, but Hoffman never rigged a trap once he became a Jigsaw apprentice. He blackmailed Amanda during her trap in 3, but I wouldn’t really say he rigged anything
I’d say that the Fatal Five also kinda fall into this trope. People often call them stupid for not working together, but everything prior to the final room was intentionally made to LOOK LIKE they’re supposed to kill each other. The emphasis on there being four chambers instead of five and only three keys, a tub that very clearly looks like a body is supposed to go there, phrases like “who will be the odd man out” and “who will bridge the gap.” Not to mention the five of them already knew about Jigsaw before, so they knew they were SUPPOSED to follow the tapes, so they did what they THOUGHT was the right thing to do.
Sorry I am a certified saw V dickrider and will yap about it at any opportunity
In a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode, one of the stories revolves around a monkey's paw that grants Lisa's wish for world peace. Unfortunately, world peace leaves the planet unprepared to deal with an alien invasion.
The act of scaring children to harness their scream energy isn't questioned until Sulley sees firsthand how he, and by extension other monsters, look in the eyes of the children they've been scaring for so long after he scares Boo by accident.
The main characters little is a child genius and discovers that a small town in Texas never has any violent crimes. The source is a chemical in the towns water supply, which causes calmness to angry people and animals. He manages to reduce the chemical into a concentrated form. On the verge of a nuclear war, the brother puts the chemical in an erupting super volcano that blows the ash all over the world. This works and causes global aggression to stop.
Unfortunately the eagerness to stop war made him forget to do more research and the chemical they sprayed all over the world causes a condition similar to dementia and Alzheimer's resulting in the eventual death of humanity as everyone can no longer care for themselves.
I havent read this by King yet but this is kind of interesting because he mentions the Texas town in IT where it is categorized as the opposite of Derry
What bothers me is that in every single movie they try to "understand" death's modus operandi and every time death seems to be working with a different list system. Sometimes it's the order they would have died, sometimes it's the reverse, sometimes death skips a person if it can't kill them (only ever temporarily), sometimes it doesn't move on with the list until it kills whoever's next.
There's a really good Youtube video by Jeffiot where he goes through every FD movie (except Bloodlines, as that hadn't come out yet) trying to pin down death's method and it's always inconsistent. I guess the lesson is that death is a bit sadistic and enjoys pretending it's following some logic.
I think the point is that death doesn't like it if you fuck with it, so it will switch up the rules to keep you from fucking with it. Like in Bloodlines, a guy who wasn't even in the line-up got killed as a punishment for getting involved.
Bloodlines was my first FD, and I didn't like Death. It felt like it was supposed to be a force of nature trying to balance the scales. Punishing certain people for being the catalyst of deviations is fair enough (not really but it's the closest to being fair). What I didn't get was why Death was so cruel to the kids, or people caught in the crossfire of the catalysts saving them. They didn't do anything to upset the balance, it's not their fault they were born. They should have been given decently painless or quick deaths IMO.
Bloodlines definitely didn't invent "death is a petty prick", because it is pretty petty in the other ones as well. Also, iirc, Death also doesn't seem to have a concept of pain or the speed of the death. Nothing makes a person suffer more or die slower than someone else. It wants you to die, it wants the specific cause of death to be foreshadowable, and it wants creativity, and those are the main points it cares about.
yeah like as the series continues you can tell Death is actively getting pissed off, especially when you compare 3's kills (i consider them kills because Death goes out of its way to rube goldberg the survivors) to 2's, and both 2 and 3's to 1, it's obvious that in-universe Death is a petty little shit throwing a tantrum because its grand plan got messed up by people understandably stopping themselves and others dying in brutal accidents multiple times. like even when you consider how Alex dies off screen (death by falling brick) or how much more extreme shit gets as the films progress through their run time you can just feel the pettiness
as much as i hate how unfair the FD films are on the protags, they're incredibly good films and i love how they subvert the usual "Death is just doing his/her/its job" to make it the pettiest mf i've ever seen in a horror/thriller film
It's the difference between "I could not stop for Death, so Death kindly stopped for me," and Death taking personal affront at you dodging your expiration date.
Except, you know the vision the main character had that allowed him to cheat Death? It turns out Death was the one responsible for the vision. Death wanted them to survive the initial disaster so they could be hunted for sport.
Wasn't there an adopted kid who got himself killed because he tried to save his to-be-culled brother and die in a horrifying way while is culled brother died instantly?
I always thought this was such a lame and boring premise because it makes death look like a really petty bitch and the concept that “you have to die lol” loses interest (for me at least) after the first time.
The third ending of Silksong sees you rejecting the traditional route of absorbing grandmother silks power ascending to godhood, instead trapping her in the void infecting all her threads with void and causing the literal apocalypse turning a bad situation worse The result of this catapults you into Act 3
This isn't a side effect though, it's a risk built into how your curing it, the virus. A Percocet will always be a Percocet, we know all about Tylenol and oxycodone and all of its side effects. It won't ever just one day mutate like a virus can. Anytime we use any kind of viral methods to cure diseases (and we do) it's always a possibility. The chances of mutations are already pretty small (well, massive with the generational time of a virus) and the chance of a single mutation having any noticeable effect is astronomical. But it is and will always be there unless we can come up with self correcting mutation free processes.
That last part is something we did for computers. There's the famous Mario speed runner and then another noteable case in England where cosmic rays struck tland switched a bit from a 0 to a 1 and warped Mario upwards, and in the election it added more votes than were possible and the number was exactly what that one bit would have added. So we have error correcting code now so that doesn't happen in sensitive situations.
And as a double whammy, the MC is trying to cure the infected group throughout the movie including abducting them and applying some type of cure. He thought that he's doing good to the world which I guess was in the theatrical cut. But in the original cut and original short story, the vampire mutants are more or less paleolithic humans and are developing a new culture. The homo sapians are basically extinct, but humanity will continue to live on within these mutants and they began telling stories. The title "I am Legend" doesn't mean the MC is a legendary hero, but is actually the boogieman that the parents used to scare kids because of the amount of suffering the MC had done them.
Miquella's goal is to get rid of wars, discriminación and peoples suffering by forcing everyone to be incapable of being cruel or violent. Tho his intentions are genuine his child like mind doesn't left him understand how ironically cruel It is that.
That isn't the irony in the story. The irony is that Miquella had to give up his humanity and empathy to achieve godhood and in turn would become cruel and violent in his deification and pursuit of his goal.
I struggle with this one because I don’t think Miquella is completely wrong. We’ve seen what Miquella’s spell looks like; People still have free will, a lot less of it, but for certain people, like Leda, that’s probably a good thing.
I think if I could talk to him in the end, I wouldn’t have a good argument to convince him to abandon his vision. There really isn’t anything great happening in the Lands Between going on where I could say, “look at this, do you really want to take this away by stripping away people’s feee will.” Everything is basically ruins. I guess that’s why our only option for rebuttal is to slay him and hope we’re right.
Miquella is a genuinely compassionate character who is forever cursed with youth, physically and where ith gets interesting, action wise. I think part of his curse is that none of his plans can ever come to fruition. Thats why the Haligtree never got even close to rivaling the erdtree and ultimately why we kill him before he can obtain divinity.
Very good analysis, but I have to “erm actually” and say that we do actually kill him after he becomes a god. His circlet’s description says that he “returned in divine aspect”. Still, we stop him the moment before his plan for an age of compassion comes to pass. Maybe we got him at the very last possible moment before he really broke free of his curse? Anyway, he, like his mother Marika, are greatly written characters
Miquella wouldve been better off if he didn't strip himself of his love (St. Trina) to reach godhood. You can't really bring an age of peace without love.
Btw you DON'T get free will. You are under his spell and control, thats why you lose when be Charms you. Leda herself is a bit crazy and chose to follow miquella even after being free compared to others who hesitate and have second thoughts about it
In FFXIV Shadowbringers you are transported to a world where heroes fought the darkness. They fought a similar fight to you and won at every turn until eventually there was so little darkness that the opposite element was so abundant that it caused a flood of light. With some help from another world the heroes sacrificed themselves to stop it just short of consuming the world.
What is left is not doing well. In this universe Light is the element of stasis and an infusion of light does really bad stuff to your body and soul. So you got lightborn monsters tormenting the remaining populous and 100 years later the heroes are remembered as traitorous villains that heralded the end of the world. Pretty much everyone is just waiting to die.
Also there is no more night. The sky is just blinding light 24/7. Darkness becomes something to be cherished and even worshipped. As such you go from being the Warrior of Light in your world to The Warrior of Darkness in theirs because bringing back the darkness is rather heroic in this case.
To be fair, wasn’t the flood of light the bad guy’s plan? The Warriors of Light in this world were being manipulated, whereas your fight isn’t about dominance of the light because darkness is already reigning supreme in your world.
Mind Flayers - an alien species of psionic squid folk who eat people's brains and transform people into more Mind Flayers - are all psychically linked to a local hive mind. The source of which is the Elder Brain: a giant collective entity that leads each faction of Mind Flayers surrounding and supporting it.
As part of the Mind Flayer's natural life cycle, they will eventually join the Elder Brain and be absorbed - both physically and mentally - into it, living forever in unity with its greater mind in a higher state of being that also further empowers Mind Flayers as a whole. This is an event the Elder Brain welcomes with a loving sense of endearment and duty, and the Mind Flayers see it not just as a good thing, but The Best Possible Thing worthy of celebration and jealousy. Joining the Elder Brain is such a dedicated part of their life cycle that, should a Mind Flayer be killed outside the colony, others will take lengths to retrieve and preserve its remains just so it can be brought back and joined with the Elder Brain.
Buuuuuuuuut what's actually happening is that the Elder Brain is just feeding on Mind Flayers outright and constantly brainwashing them into thinking joining it is a blissful unified afterlife scenario. Joining the Elder Brain isn't even part of their natural life cycle but rather a curated social behavior the Elder Brains propagate to keep themselves fed. In truth, their individual identities are deleted and they just become psionic fuel for the Elder Brain's survival. The Elder Brain will also happily devour Mind Flayer tadpoles - essentially, their babies - on a casual daily basis. Should the Elder Brain ever be in a genuinely deadly situation, it'll just bail out of its physical form into the Astral Plane to escape to safety, leaving behind its entire community of Mind Flayers who are lost and suddenly untethered from the anchor they've relied on their whole lives and dreamed of joining with in death.
It also turns out that the practice of Mind Flayers turning people into more Mind Flayers (thus keeping the Elder Brain fed with a steady supply of brainwashed prey) isn't part of the Mind Flayer's natural life cycle either. Rather, it is an aberrant mutation process that needs to be artificially curated and is not part of their natural ecology. If allowed to grow naturally and uninterrupted by an Elder Brain's influence, a Mind Flayer tadpole will develop into a completely different kind of creature - basically a kaiju called a Neothilid - that actively preys on Mind Flayers and Elder Brains alike.
They turn into a gigantic worm-like monster called a Neothilid. Quite the glow-up from its initial tadpole phase and its pre-growth spurt Illithocyte phase where it's about the size of a dog, but you can certainly see the biological similarities.
Your party spends the first 2/3rd of the game trying to reach her only to find out she was holding back the true danger of the main characters world. Shortly after defeating her, her husband's power erases nealy everyone
Honestly I was thinking about that game earlier. Other than the pacing of Act 3 where so much story is optional, it has an absolutely legendary run from when you go where the final boss is and storm the "dungeon" to head there. Incredible and 15 out of 10 for hype, could not put the controller down until those credits rolled and then the "holy shits" happened.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - The oppressive Lordgenome keeps all of humanity living underground. Turns out he was doing so to prevent humanity's population from reaching 1 million on the planet's surface, which would trigger the Anti-spiral's Human Extermination System to wipe out all of mankind.
Yep. That’s capitalism for you. In order for something to keep existing in a capitalist society, it needs to turn a profit. And, to turn a profit, it needs to either charge money directly (which most social media platforms don’t do) or keep you latched to it so companies will pay to put their ads there so you’ll see them. And nothing keeps people focused on something more than rage.
If I see another meta ad talking about how "they would have you believe AI will push us farther apart" I'm gonna combust because IT LITERALLY DOES DIPSHITS, cope harder Fuckerburg.
Fate\stay night: The holy grail and in general the holy grail wars
Spoilers for one of the twists of the series.
The holy grail war is a ritual where 7 mages(masters) summon 7 legendary figures from the past/myth or even the future(servants) to fight in a battle royal over the titular "holy grail"- an omnipotent wish granting device. The last servant\master pair standing gets to use the grail for whatever wishes they may have
Now forget everything I just said because all of that was only the half-truths that gets sold to people to get them to participate. First, the grail isn't omnipotent. It's very powerful, but it can't preform miracles; it can only grant wishes that the bearer knows how to grant. In other words, it has to be provided with a method. Second, to grant certain wishes it turns out that all 7 servants have to die, meaning that if the last master standing wants to ask for a particular wish then they would have to sacrifice their own servant, meaning that the servants are effectively scammed into fighting without even necessarily getting their wish granted at the end of it. Third, due to one of the participants of the third war trying to cheat, it ended up cursing the grail and turning it evil and making it twist every wish in a monkey's-paw kinda way into the most evil version of the wish possible(the picture above is how the grail actually looks)
So in summary: The masters don't get their wish, the servants don't get their wish, and even if they do get their wish it's the most evil version of it possible. The grail war is a scam.
Pretty much everything in Elden Ring, but specifically the immortality. No one can die, but everyone is a literal husk incapable of anything other than base aggression
The Good Place - final season spoilers: While meant to be a reward for being or becoming a good person, spending eternity in the good place where everything you want is readily available and extreme pleasure can be felt constantly eventually numbs people to the point where they become apathetic brain dead zombies.
I was just thinking of this. If I remember correctly, it's because the people who ran the Good Place aren't human, and can't understand why humans aren't content with eternal pleasure and happiness. It eventually leads them to trying more and more outrageous ways to stimulate and make humans happy until they give up and toss the job onto Michael
This is also kind of a major plot point in FFXIV: Endwalker. You visit "Dead Ends" which is a conglomerate of the memories of extinct races created by The Endsinger, the expansion's final big bad. Their stories vary but one race got rid of everything that didn't bring joy, but in doing so they forgot trials and subsequently even joy itself. The Endsinger says what they gained from ease, they lost to apathy. They eventually created a god that would kill them all because they were immortal and wanted to die.
I always thought Bioshock 2 had an interesting take on this. That when taken to it's extreme absolute altruism and selflessness is just as completely monstrous as Ryan's ideology of greed and selfishness. When everyone's life is equally worthless for the greater cause and that to take away selfishness would take away being human.
I feel like bioshock 2’s story is pretty underrated. I love the way that it explores the the extreme inverse of Ryan’s philosophy. Lamb is all about the collective as opposed to Ryan’s individualism. But at the end they’re basically the same. They’re both despots who end up contradicting their own beliefs to maintain power.
Eyes are what people call the areas on a potato that can potentially sprout into new stems. Hence they gave the potato lots of eyes.
But eyes extend a little bit into the potato and generally tend to form in a small concavity in the potato so when you peel a potato you will usually leave behind the eye often with a small ring of skin around it.
This one's a bit of in-universe meta, but the worship of Vlaakith.
All of the githyanki loyal to Vlaakith believe that she forces them all to challenge their limits and to excel at all costs, ruling above all other races, so that they can eventually be "ascended" into supremely powerful beings.
What she's actually doing is weeding out the weak so she can create the strongest in body and soul, which she then kills so she can absorb their souls and become stronger in an attempt to attain godhood. Being "ascended" means being killed and having your soul consumed by an arch lich.
Which, ironically, proves that she's not actually a deity. A deity wouldn't need to use a Wish spell to kill a mortal. They can just will a mortal to die.
Well, yes and no. There are rules to divine intervention. Ao, the overgod, doesn’t just let divine beings go around doing whatever they want (anymore). So, Vlakith just wishing you dead DOES prove she’s not a real god, but mostly because real gods would have to be a lot more roundabout with killing you.
Never ask for immortality, ask to control time and space and your aging within it. Like being 29? Stick with it for a few years. Feel like your friends/family are aging away from you? Start the timer back up. Want to just skip ahead a few years? see who shot Kennedy? tomorrow’s lotto number? take a trip to Andromeda? Done and done
True immortality would be an absolute nightmare because you're going to experience the heat death of the universe. But odds are your brain will be mushed by that point and you won't even know who or what you are having sat in a void of nothingness for multiple epochs of time
No brother, I have seen this before. I have observed many things. From the roaring beasts that the tall skinny figures crawl inside of to travel far beyond the horizon, to how the figure weeped when the other had fallen into a deep sleep. And from my experiences I have learned that they will give extra oats to one of us before taking them into the shed of no return.. They will do terrible things in that shed, brother.
Advertised across centuries as the ultimate, law-defying artifact that can bypass equivalent exchange and heal any injury. The horrific truth? It's powered by screaming, condensed human souls harvested through mass genocide.
That's the thing; it has the power to deliver on all the wishes people would have because it has the energy to bypass typical transmutation laws.
It just does them with the energy of human souls. So it doesn't bypass the Law of Equivalent Exchange, it is just a price to balance the equation that nobody of good conscience would ever want to do it.
FWIW when Ed is in front of the Gate, gets hit with the knowledge beam, he says human transmutation is possible but they are missing something to it. Lo and behold...
In Madoka Magica, Kyubi grants wishes and makes magical girls. Turns out doing so dooms them to turn into witches, twisted creatures of destruction and despair.
Personal 3, SEES thought defeating all of the monthly great Shadows would make the damage they cause stop. Instead, it just made the final one wake up and nearly cause the end of the world if it wasn’t for the main character sacrificing him/herself to seal it away again.
In Bloodborne, the healing Church founded by Laurence, the First Vicar, gave out Old Blood (blood of ancient alien gods) as a cure for everyone's problems. Have back pain, old blood. Have a rash, old blood. Just can't find passion for anything anymore, old blood. It worked for a while until people started going crazy then people started turning into monsters.
Master Willem told Laurence to fear the old blood and disaster happened. Laurence literally lost his head over it and turned into a lava Cleric Beast.
In Honkai Star Rail. The world of Amphoreus revolved around the completion of the Era Nova. Where the deliverer must gather all the coreflames from various titans. This was just a mask created by Lygus so that when it's completed, Irontomb rises and destroys Nous and the universe.
Khaslana (Phainon) and Cyrene prevented this by looping the journey into cycles so that Phainon can go through it, collect the coreflames, and repeat. It went on for 33,350,336 cycles when the Trailblazer showed up.
Delicious in Dungeon. Spoilers if you havent read the manga, which is completed. The lion the group is sent to find is actually a demon trapped by the master of the dungeon
Only manga Ive actually stayed interested in long enough finish.
Not quite a 'universal' good thing, but the entire Covenant believed that finding and lighting the rings would set them on a Great Journey... and kill the galaxy.
And specifically doing the thing that they are primed to think of as good and self-sacrificing makes things bad, and if the main character had acted "selfishly" things would probably have been better.
And even the third time they fix it, we get Harmony, a god so at odds with himself he can't really do anything in a world where the gods will absolutely make big moves against each other.
all the turkeys but Reggie (pictured) believe the farmer takes them to Turkey Paradise, where in reality they get taken to the slaughter (none of them learn this though but Reggie)
Kirby’s Adventure is another example involving stopping the villain’s plan. Dedede broke up the Star Rod, robbing the people of Dream Land of their dreams, to protect everyone from Nightmare. By returning the repaired Rod to the Fountain of Dreams, Kirby lets Nightmare become a threat again.
In Avengers Endgame the heroes do everything they can to reverse Thanos' snap. They succeed but by bringing back all those missing people they allow for the celestial sleeping in the planet to have enough energy to awaken. So instead of half of humanity being gone due to Thanos all of humanity will die with Tiamut emerges from earth
The sun. The light giver. The life giver. Its hard to imagine a planet with life if it didn't have a burning ball of gas and plasma nearby to give it all the energy it needs to grow life from the smallest of cells to the biggest civilization.
One day, like the flip of a switch, it goes bad. In an instant, a majority of humanity is melted away into amalgams that only wish to pull more victims into the sunlight to be with them, just like them, together forever. No one dies. Its not torture. Its totality.
The SCP foundation gets sent into overdrive with trying to save the human race and all life on the planet in general. While they're at a major disadvantage, witg any sunlight (including light reflecting off the moon at night) being a death sentence, they have the edge with extremely advanced anomalous technology and underground bunkers all over the world.
They die in the light so you may live in the dark. So be happy you lived to see another night.
Subversion of the trope
Sol is actually saving the population from certain death from another, jealous star that hates us. The form she gives is the only way to survive the roasting of the planet that's coming.
This doesn't make it less existentialist horrifying, but it does have to widen your scope of what "bad" entails. Is being one with everyone worse than being extinct? Is there a functional difference? Can what's left be considered the totality of Earth's biology or merely a horrifying lump of flesh with no real thoughts or emotions?
Personally, I find any sort of afterlife or immortality that involves bliss existentialist horrifying, but it's definitely a personal choice.
When Gorr finally meets his God after losing literally everything and everyone, he learns the devastating truth- that his life and the lives of his loved ones were worthless, and that there is no eternal reward for worshipping the Gods, just death. That his God he sacrificed everything to worship considers him little more than a stray dog.
So he does the logical thing and bonds with a symbiotic ancient weapon of living darkness, and begins slaughtering every God across every pantheon.
I haven't seen it neither, but I think they are kinda taking a literal interpretation on what happens when you finish the game or make a new save. Seems rlly cool tho, I wanna watch it!
One of my favorite moments in Slay the Princess is a transition from Adversary to Fury if you refuse to fight. It may seem that refusal to engage in violence should be a good deed but Fury chapter itself clearly shows you understood smth incorrectly
Moreover there would be Voice of the Cold with you who is usually summoned after slaying any Princess. And Hero would try to explain this noble pov of Adversary chapter, he will say:
I thought we were breaking the cycle of violence. I thought we were practicing pacifism in a face of mortal peril. I thought we were being brave. Heroic, even
And Cold replies:
Oh, you're funny. There is no such thing as heroism if you can never truly die
Frankly, this anti-violence quest can be continued in Fury cus with Cold you will survive Fury's torture and then when she sits down tired and empty you can tell her that you didn't want to engage in violence and there is so much more there, outside of the cabin, to which she'll say that violence is all she's ever known and then you can help her
I like this route as a concept, as a metaphor for relationship but honestly I don't think it's worth dragging the Princess through this suffering just to prove a point. The Adversary has another third chapter where the kind of same result can be achieved with much less pain
This transition between chapters is very interesting. Cold always shines when his analysis puts things into perspective, without worrying about others opinions or beliefs
Cold is kind of an antithesis to the rest of the Voices because they all have some kind of impression of mortality, of an "ending". And they all cling to it one way or another even if mc is getting reborn. They fear pain, confusion, loss of their spark. Cold on the other hand doesn't have this "spark" initially - he doesn't have any specific desires and he doesn't have this mortal way of thinking about stuff so he kinda always looks "beyond" whatever it is that awaits mc
Argent energy is a virtually infinite source of energy that humanity exploits by tapping into a dimension full of said energy
Turn outs, argent energy is sourced from hell and it originates from the suffering of countless souls through multiple ages and dimensions, and when humanity loses control of it, hell is figuratively and literally unleashed
Its been a hot minute since I played the game, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details but (spoiler warning) The early retirement district is a lottery advertised as a chance to live as the richest of Byzantium do; parties, luxury, never having to work, etc. In actuality, you are sent down a long elevator and immediately gunned down by robots. The belongings you brought with you are also probably sold.
Seems like a valiant struggle against the age of dark at first, but it's later revealed that the age of fire being extended unnaturally caused the world to fall apart at the seams, eventually leading to a slow and miserable end
The movie largely takes place inside a facility whose inhabitants are told that they've escaped a global cataclysm. Despite the best efforts, most of the world is uninhabitable save for one place : The Island. Supposedly, the only available landmass safe from devastation. There's limited resources and transports, and the island only has so much space, so people are chosen by a random lottery to go.
In actuality, everyone there is a clone, grown with the express purpose of being euthanized for organ transplants for wealthy customers. Once the main characters start unravelling everything and the people behind the facility realize the latest batch of clones are defective, they announce that everyone gets to go to the island, which the audience now understands to mean that they're all getting exterminated to cover tracks and redo the whole thing.
Memorial the WEBTOON I highly recommend going into it blind, but here are spoilers if you must that progressively reveal more twists.
Protagonist discovers an evil corporation is killing people in a way that makes everyone forget they existed and lying about what they do the entire time. Naturally the protagonist works hard to expose the evil corporation and stop their heinous actions.
After he succeeds he discovers, actually the evil corporation was sacrificing everyone in order to save their world.
Specifically, they are all in a computer and deleting the people and their memories was a way to save hard drive space so that the computer wouldn’t run out of energy. Now that the protagonist destroyed the delete function, the whole computer will crash in about a month and everyone will essentially die.
the premise of the book Gideon the Ninth is that the necromancers of all the emperor's Houses and their cavaliers (basically like a ceremonial bodyguard/counterpart) will go to the abandoned once-seat of the emperor's power and attempt to attain sainthood-- to join the ranks of Lyctors, the kindly emperor's own gestures and hands. Lyctors have enhanced, seemingly unending necromantic powers while typical necromancers get tired and sick easily. they're also super immortal. the original Lyctors from the emperor's resurrection have dwindled in the centuries since, and his saints have pleaded with him to renew their ranks.
unfortunately, eventually the gathered chosen from all the different houses realize the secret to become a lyctor... you have to murder your cavalier and absorb their soul. in the lore, violent or sudden death releases a burst of energy, and if it is absorbed it basically acts as a neverending generator of necromantic energy. cavaliers and necromancers have extremely close relationships: sometimes familial, sometimes they are married or in love, almost always codependent and full of a deep sense of duty and loyalty. the cavaliers.... mostly go willingly, that's how metal they are.
Tenpenny Tower quest in Fallout 3 where there is a conflict between ghouls and residents of the Tower. Tower is run by anti-ghoul bigots who refuse to let Ghouls into residency. And there are three options: kill the ghouls, kill the residents or try to set peace between them and let them all live together in the Tower. The last option seems morally correct... but eventually ghouls kill all the residents including the ones that weren't against ghouls in the first place
That quest pissed me off so much the first time I played Fallout 3. I played as a morally good character and I wanted to resolve as many problems without violence as I could. I put in a ton of work trying to facilitate a peace between the tower residents and the ghouls and I may have been a naive 12 year old but I believed the best in everyone involved.
Imagine how angry I was when I returned several days later from adventuring elsewhere in the Capital Wasteland and found half the people I’d worked to bring together had been murdered. By the same people whose inclusion I had advocated for no less.
Fuck you Tenpenny Tower. Fuck you Bethesda. You both killed a little of my innocence. 10/10 game.
Planet Of The Apes: The thing that made monkeys intelligent and killed most of humanity was originally believed to be something that could cure issues with brain and enhance mental faculties.
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u/Junk4U999 Sep 15 '26
The Island.
People believe they are living in a bunker after a nuclear apocalypse because the entire surface is contaminated, except for the titular Island. There is a lottery every so often where people can win a ticket to go live on The Island.
In reality, every one in the facility is a clone being farmed for organs. The “winners” are actually being harvested so their “real” self can have an organ transplant with an exact replica of their own organ.