r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 2d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) Endings so awful they completely destroy the legacy of the media.

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  1. Two and a Half Men's final episode teased Charlie Sheen's character coming back and going to harm the other characters whilst also having insults to his character and Charlie Sheen himself. It's clear the director had a grudge and the ending where his character comes up to knock then get crushed by a piano before it cuts to the director before he says "winning" before getting crushed by another piano
  2. This was an upbeat animated show about a magical teen princess. The writers desperately wanted a romantic endgame for her and her best friend, but the way they got there was essentially multiversal omnicide. To stop a villain, the main character unilaterally decides magic is the root of all evil and destroys it entirely. By doing this, she casually commits mass genocide against every purely magical being in the multiverse. It also triggers a massive apocalyptic event that violently crashes different dimensions together into a chaotic hellscape. But the show frames this horrific, mass-extinction catastrophe as a sweet, triumphant ending just because two teenagers get to hold hands in the rubble (Star Vs The Forces Of Evil)
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u/Funkycoldmedici 2d ago

“Somehow” would be acceptable as a start to the characters figuring out how it happened, but no one ever bothers.

You can even have an unexplained impetus that works, like Cloverfield or the Mist. We never really know what exactly made these things happen, but it’s ok. Palpatine is obviously back because they killed the intended Bad Guy in the previous movie and had no plan of any kind. “Somehow Snoke returned” would have work just as well/poorly.

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u/Aridross 2d ago

The intended villain was Kylo Ren. Obviously. Kylo kills Snoke, doubles down on being a villain because he thinks he can do it better than anyone who’s come before, then proves that he’s actually just a petty tyrant with issues he’s taking out on the rest of the galaxy. It works, it’s satisfying as a downward character arc for Kylo because it’s the logical conclusion of his established issues, and Adam Driver would’ve fucking nailed it.

The third movie would unironically have been amazing if they just let Adam Driver ham it up for his share of a 200-minute runtime as a fully unhinged and raving Kylo, driving the First Order into the ground (and the rest of the galaxy with it) to satisfy his personal grudges and prove his (alleged) superiority.

And then the producers got scared of the backlash from jackass fans, so they got rid of Rian Johnson and whatever his plan was, they pulled back JJ Abrams (who didn’t have a plan, because his whole storytelling style revolves around not having a plan), and they filled the script with lame nostalgia-bait because the Star Wars audience had clearly demonstrated that was what they wanted.

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u/grendus 2d ago

Yeah. As someone who has the unfortunate position of defending TLJ, Kylo going full villain was one of the better parts of the movie. He was reckless and easily fooled, but incredibly powerful and would have done a good job being distinct from Vader.

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u/Kerblaaahhh 2d ago edited 2d ago

The best part of TLJ was Rey's parents being nobodies who abandoned her, but JJ had to ruin that too while also making it canon that Palpatine fucks.

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u/StevieMJH 2d ago

C'mon, we all knew. 😏

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u/Banana_0verdrive 2d ago

The situation with his mask resume the whole sequelogie for me: He destroyed it in TLJ because he wanted to be more than just a Vader cosplayer, and then repair it in TROS for no reason whatsover except Abrams was pissy.

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u/AwsmDevil 2d ago

Oh hey, someone else who gets it. Most Star wars fans are braindead and can't read a plot to save their life. Kylo was setup to fall from the first movie. Him taking over the first order and becoming the mainline villain was the natural conclusion. 

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u/BiKingSquid 2d ago

Unless Ren did, which was still up in the air in the first movie (with Finn as the true protagonist). After the second movie there was no longer any hope of anything that interesting happening.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 2d ago

I disagree, and still think the better ending would have been for Rey and Kylo to actually switch "sides" or at least realize that they each had some light and dark in them.

for me, The entire Star Wars saga has the underlying "war" between light and dark sides of the force, while trying to bring home the idea that its NOT light v. dark, its about balance.

the movies should have shown how Rey and Kylo were inevitably linked. Rey's anger over being abandoned and then Luke trying to kill her and such, should have slowly consumed her in anger showing that despite being on the "light side" she had darkness to her.

and likewise, Kylo's connection with her, the guilt of killing his father, and the things he'd done, should have slowly softened him.

until they realize together, that he has light in him, she has dark in her,

settling into the creation, together, of the gray jedi's, who now understand that complete rejection of the opposing side will forever be wrong, and balance is the key.

Gray jedi's are already moderately cannon, and it would have tied a perfect bow on the series as a whole IMO.

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u/kaian-a-coel 2d ago

The light side is balance, the dark side is imbalance. A healthy body is not 50% cancer cells.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 2d ago

Disagree with your assertion.

If you were correct, then the whole

Anakin actually did bring "balance" to the force by becoming Darth Vader, because there wasn't enough dark side in the universe.

wouldn't work anymore. but its clearly a theme in the series. Dark side of the force is required by the force, since it always wants things balanced.

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u/AreYouOKAni 1d ago

Anakin didnt bring balance to the force by becoming Vader. He brought it by killing Palpatine at the end of Episode VI.

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u/-retaliation- 1d ago

Not sure why you blocked me and forced me to use another account to reply to this but,

deal, I can cop to that being the case, sure.

still means dark side is a required part then though. Under that assumption "balance" still requires a hand on the scale of "dark" to keep the force balanced.

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u/kaian-a-coel 2d ago

It's only a theme in the bullshit part of the expanded universe.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 2d ago

cool, and I'm saying taking pieces of "the bullshit part of the expanded universe" is better than what we got.

but hey, if you liked what we got, you do you bud.

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u/brutinator 2d ago

You can even have an unexplained impetus that works, like Cloverfield or the Mist.

The problem is, so much of Star War's lore/"vibe" post original trilogy is that EVERYTHING is explained. Every background character, every event, seems to be inexplicably tied to everything else. This makes have an unexplained mystery feel "off". Star Wars creators/extreme fans seem to have an inability to let any stone being unturned. Like how Han Solo is supposed to be kind of an irreverent character that you're not supposed to know if he's being honest or not, esp. when he brags about himself. He'll claim something that is nonsensical and absurd, and then fans bent over backwards to make everything he said actually true, and thus kind of killing part of the allure of the character.

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

The line literally sets up a line from another character explaining how he returned.

I mean it's still not very good dialogue and moved past very quickly but I feel like people have memory holed the whole rest of that scene just so they can meme on it. The movie gives ample explanation of how Palpatine returned across multiple different scenes.

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u/Navy_Pheonix 2d ago

Right... sure. But the problem is that the event that Oscar's character is referring to was a fortnite event that is only referred to in the secondary tense, once in the opening crawl, and again by OI in the beginning of the movie.

You'd think a galaxy-wide announcement from Palpatine that he's back would be an important enough event to just, I don't know, include in the movie, instead of a character just saying it happened?

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u/Navy_Pheonix 2d ago

Imagine if they did a Fourth Hobbit movie, and in the first 5 minutes, Frodo, surrounded by his friends in the Baggins dining room says plainly: "Somehow, Smaug returned." The movie doesn't show this through any other visual spectacle than Frodo saying it, you had to be playing Roblox on July 18th to see Smaug's dead corpse rise up from the (middle)Earth to fight once again.

It's not just the fact that the line itself is dogshit, it's the entire surrounding context that encapsulates it completely.

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

Well, no, it's more like if Frodo said "Somehow Smaug returned" and then another character replied "Dragons can be brought back to life with magic gold" and then later the film showed us Smaug's huge horde of magic gold and several plot points hinged on him having been collecting magic gold for years.

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u/Martin_Aricov_D 2d ago

"somehow Smaug returned"

"How?"

"Necromancy, Dark Magic, Gold, powers only dragons wield"

More appropriate

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

Hah yes, perfect!

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u/LiftingRecipient420 2d ago

That still sounds dumb as fuck

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

Well, yes. I'm not saying Rise of Skywalker is good. It's awful, and bringing back Palpatine was very stupid. I'm just saying they did explain it.

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

The whole Fortnite thing is very dumb, but it's not required information to understand how Palpatine came back or what they're talking about in that scene. I mean what would have made more sense is if there was just no announcement of his return at all, but we could pick apart the weird creative choices in that movie all day.

All I'm pointing out is that "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is immediately followed by another character offering an explanation of how Palpatine returned - and subsequent scenes confirm that explanation and offer further context.

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u/awaythrowthatname 2d ago

Except cloning was never "a secret only the Sith knew" and most people at that point didn't even know what a Sith was, let alone some grunt in the "Resistance."

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

I'm not saying the explanation is well-written, I'm just saying it exists.

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u/TheActualGrayOwl 2d ago

Literally the next line, my guy. The movie opens on the cloning tanks.

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u/wvj 2d ago

The funny thing is that this is also obviously a through-line all the way back to stuff George had thought about in the very beginning, but kind of wussed out on.

The 'Clone Wars' line in ANH clearly positions clones as the badguys (wars are usually named after who you're fighting). It was just him being gun-shy about the war in the prequel trilogy and wanting to keep the movies PG (Revenge of the Sith is the first PG-13 SW film) that turned it into a dopey thing where they fight droids so they're not killing humans in a war.

But if you go digging through any of the interim stuff, his small amount of interaction with EU authors, the 'clones are the big villains of the SW universe' things becomes glaring. Joruus C'baoth was originally going to be an Obi-Wan clone, and 'Palpatine Returned' comes directly from Dark Empire.

It isn't a bad idea, it's just a bad movie that doesn't fully execute it (or maybe rushes to execute it with the prior 2 not having built it up enough).

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u/ThePopDaddy 2d ago

Yeah, but that would require them to pay attention and not just read reviews on the Internet.

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u/throwaway60221407e23 2d ago

"Somehow" is explained in the prequels with the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise.

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u/Gamerguy230 2d ago

Apparently you needed to play Fortnite at the time for the Star Wars event to get all info not given to you in the actual movie of how he is back and so on.

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u/SugarVibes 2d ago

They did a decent job explaining the whole palpatine clone thing in the bad batch and somewhat in the acolyte but retroactively explaining such a huge thing is pretty lame regardless.