r/TopCharacterTropes • • 2d ago

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

  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/JosephBlowsephThe3rd 2d ago

The fun part of this shitty ending is how many other shows & movies are connected to the St. Elsewhere universe. All of the Law & Order series, for example, are apparently also a part of this kid's fantasy.

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u/MadeOfPoison27 2d ago

That's not even half of it, you know about the Munchiverse? Two characters from St Elsewhere also show up in Homocide: Life on the Streets (an excellent show that was David Simon's kind of first crack at The Wire), suggesting that show is a dream. Richard Belzer plays a character named Detective John Munch on it who goes on to appear in a slew of other shows. So by extension you end up with every show Munch is ever on being just a dream: Law & Order, SVU, The Wire, even like The X-Files, and Arrested Development.

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u/Headstone_Blank 2d ago

Fellas, let me tell you about the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypithesis. It's not just all the shows you mentioned, it's estimated the 90% of all TV, live action and animated, canonically takes place in this kids head. Obviously no one can know for sure, but thousands of shows have been linked and traced back to this kid.

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u/throwaway17197 2d ago

If he was real he could have a monopoly on TV

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u/Rel_Ortal 1d ago

I've always thought this was silly, since a kid's imagination can easily (and frequently does) include things they've seen or read elsewhere. If you have a dream about someone you know in real life or imagine some scenario with them, that doesn't make that person imaginary, after all.

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u/krankydoodle 2d ago

Munch was also mentioned by Idris Elba's character in Luther if I remember right.

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u/MadeOfPoison27 2d ago

Actually wait that's insane, so Munch exists in a universe in which both Stringer Bell and Luther exist and are the same person? Quantum Elba Theory wow

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u/MadeOfPoison27 2d ago

haha that's so rad, love Richard Belzer

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u/Pires007 2d ago

Even if Law & Order SVU never existed, Homicide and Law and Order had a 2 part cross-over episode

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u/JosephBlowsephThe3rd 2d ago

Yep. Munch is exactly why I specifically mentioned the Law & Order shows. That character links so many different shows together.

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u/ChuckCarmichael 2d ago

The entire MCU is part of it.

Characters from St. Elsewhere appeared on Homicide: Life on the Streets. A detective from Homicide appeared on Arrested Development. Tobias Funke from AD appeared in the background in Guardians of the Galaxy.

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u/MurkyInvestigator810 2d ago

Every television show with a bag of "Let's Potato Chips" is part of that boy's mind. Something like 50% of primetime network television shows in the 90s took place in that boy's brain.

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u/Morgan-Moonscar 2d ago

Cheers, Frasier, Wings as well (because of a strange episode where the doctors of St. Elsewhere decided to go to Cheers)

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u/Tobbit_is_here 2d ago

What's wild is that Doctor Who is in St Elsewhere's real world. In Deep Breath and Into the Dalek, it is shown that the Twelfth Doctor has the St. Eligius snow globe in the TARDIS.

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u/ergotrinth 2d ago

See this makes perfect sense that Law & Order is all fantasy. They take place in the U.S. and they treat sexual crimes as especially heinous and we know now that they actually don't.....