r/TopCharacterTropes • u/shinjidrivekari • 3h ago
Characters [Tragic Trope] The hero makes an "evil" decision but it's understandable given their state of mind
Lord of the Rings - Frodo finally succumbs to the ring's influence and puts it on
Neon Genesis Evangelion - Shinji suffers a complete ego death and triggers the third impact
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u/Boring-Dig4583 3h ago
Anakin turning into Darth Vader over visions of his partner (Padme) dying
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u/ScaredTemporary 3h ago
Also him slaughtering the Tuskens after his mom died on his arms due to their torture.
Not just the men, but the women and the children too
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u/BSKFZ 3h ago
In The clone wars it is better explained/shown how Palpatine manipulated him into the dark side, the Jedi council being stupid and pushing him off every time didn't help and off course the visions of his wife's passing. So yeah, valid crashout.
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u/RevolverMFOcelot 3h ago
PLus he was a slave child who recently lost his mother, and also fresh out of the clone war. Bro has shit tons of PTSD
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u/Level_Counter_1672 3h ago
Oogway Once said "one often meets their destiny by taking the road to avoid it"
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u/ScaredTemporary 3h ago edited 3h ago
Star-Lord pushing one of the High Evolutionary's subordinates to throw him off ship, man begs not to be shot...Star-Lord agrees, says that would be premature, jumps with him, and with Groot, proceed to bash him against the floor. Loved the moment but it's rarely talked about.
this is because of what they did to Rocket. Ngl, while I like Peter in general, I think this was one his best moments and lowkey where he looked the hottest
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u/raidenjojo 3h ago
Not evil, but a pathetic, selfish and shameless decision. Naruto, a formally Rookie Ninja (although a village hero, which makes it worse) begs and pleads the political head of a foreign state to forgive his friend Sasuke, who at that point, has joined an international terrorist organisation and has already infiltrated terrorized the state and kidnapped the chief's younger brother.
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u/Berserker-Hamster 3h ago
Buffy Summers trying to murder her friends because some demon poison made her hallucinate that her life in Sunnydale was just in her imagination and she needed to kill the people in her imaginary world to escape from it.
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u/kylenator14 3h ago
It wasn't even Frodo. Yes, his will was slow being whittled down, but The Ring can't voluntarily be destroyed. He had been carrying it for so long and he was running on fumes for weeks. It wasn't a conscious choice he made. He was just so tired that he didn't have the strength to resist The Ring's pull.
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u/shinjidrivekari 3h ago
Similar thing with Shinji suffering a complete ego death. I suppose I could've worded the post a little better.
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u/AzraelTheMage 2h ago
It was also the very place it was created where the rings influence is at its strongest.
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u/giantcoc69420 3h ago
Eren committing a calculated genocide to save his people after they were persecuted and hated just because of their existence.
Tho he does admit it was done also out of his desire to recreate the image of the world outside the walls that he envisioned after reading Armin's book. In the end, he was still the kid he had been at the start of the series; someone whose only answer to everything was violence and rage.
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u/smasher_zed888 2h ago
He also gave up on changing his future after seeing that he couldnt bring himself to change it
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u/F1Fan43 3h ago edited 3h ago
Pike giving her blood to the Whispered One (Legend of Vox Machina). She’s spent a year isolated from the group, watching their rise to leadership positions in Whitestone and Zephrah enviously, having had the seeds of doubt in her faith already planted by Zerxus, and witnessing first hand the suffering inflicted by the Chroma Conclave. Then she watches Wilhand die, then is (as she, unfairly, sees it) rejected by her love interest Scanlan, then she watches Grog die, and is immediately confronted by the Whispered One whose sales pitch is specifically geared towards grieving, suffering people like her.
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u/shinjidrivekari 3h ago
Thanks for using the spoiler tag. I just got flashbanged with a major spoiler because another user didn't use them. I think it shoud be mandatory to use spoiler tags when discussing major spoilers.
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u/I_Make_RPGs 3h ago
James Ironwood in RWBY.
In volume 7 and 8 Ironwood decides upon a plan that involves abandoning an entire city (Mantle) of civilians to die due to a massive Grim attack and instead launch his own city (Atlas) higher into the atmosphere. Mantle however is defenseless since essentially all of their goods and economic outputs was instead shipped off to Atlas, part of the agreement of this was that Atlas' military would protect them in return.
The reason he decided to take this action was after meeting the shows main antagonist for the first time and realising that his military had zero chance at ever defeating them, discovering that his idol actively lied to him about the cause of the conflict between the antagonist, and that an all knowing being told his idol that victory was impossible in pretty much the span of 2 hours. The man was completely terrified during this time. His hope is that by launching Atlas further into the sky that their life supports would hold and some form of humanity would survive no matter what happened on the surface.
This motive was in fact so sympathetic that it is still debated by a lot of the fandom if his plan was all that unreasonable. (Pretty sure that the creators later clarified that it wouldn't have worked as he envisioned and the show implies that this is the case without explictly stating so.)
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u/thenumbers42 3h ago
Its also important to note that the 'heroes' of the show knew all of this for months before Ironwood even met the main antagonist and lied to his face over it while he was open and welcoming to them from the start.
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u/I_Make_RPGs 3h ago
To add to the tragedy here the reason for this was also due to the core team being more paranoid towards basically any authority figure since they also just discovered all these secrets said idol was hiding from them a few days ago. They were also concerned how Ironwood would take the news since he also mentioned said idol was what kept him going the past few months since V3.
(On a side note; don't think it's months in-universe between Ironwood discovering the same. V6 takes place over a few days. V7 appears to only span a few weeks at most and V8 is all one day.)
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u/lasagnaiswhat 3h ago edited 3h ago
(TLoU) Joel changing his mind and deciding to save Ellie from the Fireflies.
(I’m pretty sure just about everybody in 2013 was collectively rooting for Joel as he slaughtered the Fireflies without a thought about what it meant for that world going forward lol)
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u/Super_Rocket4 2h ago
Keiwa sakurai is the goody two shoes audience self insert for most of geats. He never really has time to shine or win compared to the main character geats, but he's always doing his best.
When his sister is turned to a monster and one of the main characters kills her by mistake however, he falls into a sheer depression and forces a goddess to give him the power to get revenge, taking the goddesses freedom from her
He is given the bujin sword power up, and gets revenge for his sister before going on his crusade to revive everyone who's died in the DGP games
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u/Loose-Step3115 3h ago
Maisie Lockwood releasing the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is seen as evil, but like... she's a kid who emphasizes with the dinosaurs since she's a clone like them ("They're alive... like me"), and also went through a ton of trauma in one night that made her act on impulse, from learning that she's a clone to being stalked by the Indoraptor for half the climax.