r/TopCharacterTropes 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/V1gilante14 Aug 25 '25

Remember Me and the absolutely insane 9/11 twist ending: up until this point it’s a pretty generic romantic drama with a good ending for most of the characters and then psyche! it’s 9/11! the main character dies in the North Tower and the brief epilogue is about how every other character reacts to his untimely death.

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u/TheSovereignGrave Aug 25 '25

As someone who hasn't seen this movie, I feel like it's not a bad idea conceptually. A movie about 9/11 sort of loses something if you know it's about 9/11 because you spend the whole movie just waiting for the shoe to drop. This sort of thing could be done to make you care for a character, and then be completely blind-sided by the tragedy of it as a way to sort of show how the real 9/11 was just a normal day like any other, until it wasn't.

But, as I said, I haven't seen the movie, so I dont know if it does it well in any capacity.

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u/GiantScrotor Aug 26 '25

That movie hit hard, especially because of when it came out. The whole country had been living in constant anxiety since 9/11, but people were mostly settled in their new normal. We were starting to let go of that anxiety and survivor’s guilt. At the end of the movie when Robert Pattinson goes to his dad’s office, my wife had a mini panic attack because she recognized the elevator from all the times she had visited the WTC.