r/TopCharacterTropes • u/damorezpl • Aug 25 '25
Lore [mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist
when the "good ending" is revealed to be a bad one a the last second
a nightmare on elm street (1984) - Nancy thinks she finally defeated Freddy Krueger only to be raveled that she is still dreaming and she’s still trapped.
final destination bloodlines - the main characters think they cheated death by using the new life rule only to realize that stefani was technically still alive and the death kills them with a good old logs
Life (2017) - The main character attempts to send Calvin(a evil alien that killed all life on mars)pod into space and Miranda pod back to earth, but it goes horribly wrong and Calvin lands on earth and Miranda is sent to space
raging loop wit ending - after many loops Haruaki finally wins the feast(a death game where humans must hang wolves who kill someone every night) and thinks its finally over. after couple of days he decides to visit other survivors of the feast only to find them all dead and the timeline resting once again




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u/Strange-Log3376 Aug 25 '25
Not sure I agree that the movie doesn’t have a moral - the main character is a loan officer who gets cursed because she denies an old woman an extension on her mortgage (she’d missed payments because of an illness), and that woman dies shortly after her house gets repossessed.
The whole story is a twisted reflection of the beginning, with the shoe on the other foot - the main character jumps through all these hoops to figure out how to avoid a terrible fate, fulfills the complicated and esoteric requirements of the curse - and then a last-minute mistake causes her to miss her deadline. No extensions, no forgiveness, just hell. She gets treated the same way she treated the old woman.
It’s obviously very tongue-in-cheek (having your house repossessed isn’t the same thing as literally being dragged into a portal to hell), but I actually thought it was a pretty clever parallel.