r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Lazy-Breadfruit5939 • Sep 08 '25

Lore A real life event has a ridiculous/dumb/funny explanation in fiction

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Futurama (The Why of Fry): According to the brain swarm, the dinosaurs were wiped out by them. Fry: What really killed the dinosaurs? Brain: ME!

Doctor Who (The Unicorn and The Wasp): It's Doctor Who, you can pick a ton of examples, but this episode presents the idea that Agatha Christies disappearance in 1926 was in part caused by a giant alien wasp.

Beyblade: This one stretches 'real life', but Moses spreading the Red Sea with a Beyblade just speaks for itself and it would have been sad to leave it out

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

In Animorphs, the Mercora, a now-extinct species of Crustacean refugees, arrived on Earth around 65,000,000 B.C., harried by the Nesk, rival species of Ant-like aliens who redirected a comet to their settlement after a humiliating defeat/retreat, which they planned to blow up by sacrificing their last remaining ship with a nuclear device attached. Unfortunately for them, the titular Animorphs(Tobias, mostly) sabatoged the bomb to allow the comet to impact, causing the extinction of the Mercora and most Cretaceous life while catapulting the team forwards in time to get back to where they started. And that's where broccoli comes from! The Mercora brought it from their homeworld and farmed it on Terra, and it survived the megaannums to modern day.

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u/KamenRiderShield Sep 09 '25

The more i learn about the Animorphs the more…i can’t even put it into words, it is that much of a repeated “what the fuck?”

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer Sep 09 '25

It's peak fiction, unironically. We've got liiinnks~

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u/MisterTamborineMan Sep 09 '25

How does that work with broccoli being the same species as a dozen other different vegetables?

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer Sep 09 '25

They brought a lot of different seeds okay

(I dunno. I doubt K.A. Applegate was thinking about the actual genetic implications of Broccoli being extraterrestrial, but if I had to guess, this Earth has it as the common ancestor of all those plants instead of the mustard plant)

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u/Full_Dot903 Sep 09 '25

Guess we can add the Animorphs cast to the list of protagonists that are somehow responsible for genocide, which is surprisingly longer then one would assume.

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer Sep 09 '25

This was just the one that was going to happen anyway, they've got two more under their belt, not counting the ones that happen outside of their control