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/Inevitable-Fish2739 2d ago

The Star Wars sequels were contentious but no one liked TROS. It's most enduring legacy is the infamous "somehow, Palpatine returned". Oscar Issac's delivery of that line is hilarious. 

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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/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.