r/TopCharacterTropes • • 10d ago

Characters (funny trope)While their fate is left intentionally vague, with real life historical context we know they’re absolutely fucked.

Ramon from Scary stories to tell in the Dark: Ramon’s a draft dodger of the Vietnam war trying to avoid the same fate as his brother but after he goes through his character arc of becoming a braver person he decides to finally go to Vietnam at the end of the film. The problem is the movies set in 1968 which means they’re still 7 years out from Saigon. While it’s possible he’ll be fine, there is the likelihood he either gets seriously injured or straight up dies.

Agent Mansley from the Iron Giant: Mansley acts as the main antagonist of the film with it coming to head when he steals a five star general’s walkie talkie and orders a nuke to be sent directly to the town to kill the iron giant. We see him getting arrested after this and then he disappears for the remainder of the film. With that being said the movie takes place in the 50s in the peak of McCarthyism/Cold War and he did just commit high treason against the US by launching a literal nuke on American soil. Best case scenario is he gets executed by firing squad outside of city limits and buried in a shallow grave never to be talked about again. Most likely scenario is he gets disappeared by the government and taken to some unknown black site to be tortured by CIA to figure out when he was compromised by the Soviets.

Edit: since so many people have pointed out (some more rudely than others.) that only about 2% of American soldiers died in Vietnam, I decided to add to the original post as to be more accurate. Hopefully this will be enough for my transgressions to be forgiven.

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u/FarutaSarado 9d ago edited 9d ago

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

One of the final scenes has President Lincoln decline the offer from Henry Sturges to make him immortal, before riding off in a carriage to Ford's theater.

Edit: Pedantics in comments want you to know that this was not THE final scene, just close enough to the end of the story for most people to understand the example.

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u/DissociatedAuthor 9d ago

The book and movie have no business being as good as they are.

I'd love to see more movies like this but the few movies I've seen with a similar premise seem to misunderstand that it wasn't Lincoln's name or history that made it so good. They fail to write memorable stories and characters and just ended up seeming very goofy and scy-fy channel goodness.

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u/FixFun1959 9d ago

It was an incredible combination of spinning 2 random wheels and one landed on ‘Abraham Lincoln’ and the other landed on ‘vampires’, and it was a success, and then a good writing team took on the task, along with a good director and good actor.

None of it was ‘great’, it was a movie that was more than the sum of its parts and very much a product of its time. I don’t think the stars could ever be forced to align again to make something comparable.

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u/trimble197 9d ago

Like old man Elvis Presley fighting a mummy in Bubba Ho-Tep

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u/jpterodactyl 9d ago

Jim Butcher wrote a book series(codex Alera, which I love) with that method. He just picked two things randomly out of what he considered bad ideas to write about. It was Pokémon and the lost legion.

And he made it actually a lot of fun and a lot of heart.

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u/ShepRat 9d ago edited 9d ago

Agreed. I Haven't read the book, but I love scifi, fantasy and horror. I only like them at either end of the spectrum though, they've got to be great, or terrible, mediocre is unacceptable.

I went in thinking this one would be enjoyable, and it was, but I was mistaken which end of the spectrum. 

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u/WhatTheyTookFromUs 9d ago

Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter is pretty good too, but in a campy, goofy way

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u/OcherSagaPurple 9d ago

This feels like the best example

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u/Asairian 9d ago

*pedants

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u/taylorpilot 9d ago

That’s not the final scene in the book

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u/FireZord25 9d ago

For Lincoln it is, for extra semantics.

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u/taylorpilot 9d ago

No it is not.

Last scene in the book is him alive watching the I have a dream speech

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u/neophlegm 9d ago

That doesn't sound remotely "intentionally vague"

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u/FarutaSarado 8d ago

I mean it would be pretty vague if you haven't been taught American History, and therefore you would not know what comes next.