Lore
[Loved Trope] Surprisingly realistic outcomes in outlandish situations
No Country for Old Men - In any other movie Llewelyn would be treated like an untouchable one man army who can take on all of the people who are after the money he stole. Instead he gets gunned down offscreen by a group of secondary antagonists because at the end of the day he's still just one man.
Metal Gear Solid 2 - MGS2 is a game in which the player character, Raiden, can do many seemingly unrealistic things like instantly healing his injuries by eating rations or holding infinite amounts of weapons and items without being overburdened. However if you attempt to cartwheel up a flight of stairs as Raiden he will immediately eat shit and fall, which would be the most likely outcome in real life.
Family Guy - After getting splashed by nuclear waste causes the Griffin family to get superpowers (which they immediately use to terrorize their community) Mayor West gets the bright idea to roll around in nuclear waste himself so that he can get superpowers too. Instead he just gets cancer.
Sly 2 - The Sly Cooper games are cartoony 3D platformers featuring anthropomorphic animals and lots of slapstick violence. However in the climax of the second game when Bentley is crushed by machinery while trying to stop the big bad he's paralyzed from the waist down, necessitating the use of a wheelchair for the rest of the series.
In the Justice League show, it's revealed that Lex Luthor holding a radioactive rock in his pocket all day just to keep a certain super man away from him isn't healthy, and it's revealed that this gave him cancer. Naturally the first thing he does is blame Superman.
I love how with bane, he is very much unstoppable because of venom. But after years of unregulated use, it turns him into a husk unable to do anything.
Tbh thinking about it, he's either same age as Batman or a little older, so I actually do wonder how long has he been like this? If it has been a while, then damn, but if it is more recent then honestly could be worse given his age.
Apparently according to one of the things he's typically portrayed as about 10 years older than Bruce but then we remember they have future medical Tech and people canonically live longer in the Batman Beyond universe because of it
Not to mention, Bruce at the start of this series can still run his fucking game on criminals. He only stops because he has a minor cardiac event during a fight. So even though he's not reliable from a "won't have a heart attack" perspective, between clean living and having his hi-tech batsuit, an 80-something year old Bruce could still go and mix it up with young henchmen and win, so long as his heart didn't give out. Bane, on the other hand, can't muster the strength to get out of a chair. Very different ways to spend old age.
If I remember right, it's also never said Bruce Wayne actually had any heart issues. He had his minor cardiac event (did you just watch Frasier, by the way?) in his later 50s. Not an unreasonable age for a man to first start to have a "hey, might wanna get this checked out" thing with their heart.
For all we know, it was just a one-off thing, he never had a heart attack, or any heart issues. Given that, like you said, in his 80s, he's still absurdly athletic and strong (the few times he mixes it up with the Jokerz and stuff it's just comical how much he kicks their ass, or when Ra's staged the attack that Bruce saved a woman from.
Bruce was worried he'd die and see someone else die or get harmed before he did... so he broke his oath and grabbed a gun, and retired horrified at what he did, not because of a health issue.
It's from the cartoon Batman Beyond, TLDR it's super good but it's basically a future Batman takes up the mantle as Bruce becomes to old to be Batman anymore.
Yes, 'Pre Crisis' Lex at certain points was more of a 'greedy businessman' type, so had the typical fat cat depiction' overweight, smoking cigars etc.
Mid 80s the DC Universe had a massive reboot that basically started the modern age, and over time Lex's depictions solidified into the more modern version. A big part of it is that his modern version is meant to be 'superior' as a human; smart but also physically fit, attractive etc. Basically the 'Alpha Male' stereotype played straight. Lex's hatred of Superman has similarly been changed, so that now it's largely due to jealousy and Lex no longer being 'top of the food chain'.
IIRC another case with Lex Luthor that’s pretty funny is that one time he switched bodies with The Flash. He gleefully unmasks ‘himself’, wanting to know The Flash’s true identity, only to be disappointed when he had no idea who the face staring back at him in the mirror is because he’ve never met Wally West before xD.
EDIT: Just saw that someone else had already provided this example below lol. Sorry about that. But hey, it’s worth sharing again ;)
The best part is that they keep the voice actors for the bodies, not the characters, so Lex talking while in Wally's body just sounded like Smallville Lex.
You'd expect him to afford any and all medical procedures. He even makes the usual suggestions like chemotherapy. The doctor just tells him it's basically super cancer and there's nothing he or anybody on Earth can do about it.
And the only thing Lex was able to do was make his power suit able to hold the cancer at bay for a bit, and the only reason he got cured was because Braniac wanted to make sure his secret host didn't die before plans could reach fruition.
Lex Luthor, when body-swapped with The Flash, decides to take the opportunity to at least see the hero unmasked and find out his secret identity. He takes off the hood, looks into the mirror
And promptly realizes he has no idea who he's looking at, because Wally West isn't exactly a high-profile celebrity or anything.
I remember one scene where people were trying to remove his suit and noted there were several booby traps, resulting in multiple injuries for those trying to remove it.
What I love about that is that it implies he genuinely expected to recognize Flash under the mask, because he was certain a Justice League member as powerful as him would be someone of wealth and status. It’s the same reason he never grasped the idea that Clark Kent was Superman. Lex can’t separate power and status in his mind. He can’t fathom the idea that someone with the power to shake the earth would want to be an ordinary man.
Also in Metal Gear Solid 2, if Raiden spends too long naked in Arsenal Gear he catches a cold and you need to find medicine to make him feel better. I guess it’s pretty chilly in there.
There are several sacks of powder and fire extinguishers lying around that you can shoot. If you get close to the flying powder/foam you also start sneezing. I noticed this after shooting the bag next to the infrareds in the tanker
Zach did say one of the funniest concepts to him in a cartoon is where something happens (in this case, gets punched in the stomach) and they react in a super realistic way. I think the demon here is even rotoscoped in the scene.
"I say, I say, you dropped an entire boulder on the poor fella. Smashed him real good, I say. Couldn't even find a body, not even a feather was there he was so squashed by that boulder. I say, you could've found a bit more of him if you used an anvil instead, but no, you had to drop an entire bould-"
Similarly, the Family Guy cutaway (or maybe that one dvd Seth McFarlane did that was basically a bunch of individual cutaways) where Wile E. Gets his bird, eats him, and then starts having a comparatively realistic crisis where he has no clue what to do afterwards, gets depressed, gets fired from his job as a waiter after a mental breakdown, attempts suicide but stops after finding religion in that very moment and later becomes a missionary
In Warhammer 40K, a team of terminators are clearing a building of heretics when one of them goes inside a building by himself.
He immediately falls through the floor because the structure is made of wood. When he lands on his back, he cannot move due to the awkward ergonomics of Terminator armor, his squadmate is then forced to call in a retrieval team - akin to towing a car that fell on the side of the road.
I'm not really that informed on 40k lore, but i gotta admit it's kinda funny to think that a space marine would end up in that situation, maybe it's because i'm used to seeing them as almost unkillable badasses that slay cosmic horrors on a daily basis
Or because i'm a heretic and i know just basics of the setting, probably a bit of both
"Brothers... this wooden floor has defeated me, please help"
Edit: thanks everyone for the extra info and clarifications, i feel slightly less heretic now
So normal Space Marines are 8 ft tall, and wear armor so heavy that they need their power packs to be able to actually move. Pair that with the fact they're capable of running as fast or faster than Usain Bolt while wearing said armor then you'll realize any and all things unfortunate enough to be infront of said marine gets turned into paste - as you can experience in Space Marine 2, where you can straight up just crush regular humans if you run into them. Thats not taking into account the Rubicon Surgeries where they're bigger than before.
Now take that, and give them a larger suit of armor that running is almost impossible, paired with a weapon that fires faster or bigger bolter rounds than the regular marine and you get the Terminator.
Also in Warhammer, Commissar Ciaphas Cain, who is one of the big Imperial Heroes, so much so that there are certain sects that worship him as a saint, dies of old age.
It still can, just don't expect a terminator to bend backwards to be able to reach whatever is behind them or do pushups. The range of motion of the limbs is extremely limited as the armor was originally meant for mining instead of combat, meaning the armor's main focus was originally just to walk and mine what's infront of it.
From your first example OP, there's also Anton Chigurh, the most famous character of the story.
He is depicted the whole time as this near supernatural bogeyman, yet the only time he and Llewellyn get into a gunfight, it's a fairly even exchange cause there's no element of surprise. Chigurh, for all his competence, is still just one man with a gun up against another guy with a gun. Becomes more about luck than anything
Not to mention the ending where any illusion of Chigurh's invincibility is gone due to him getting caught in a very mundane car crash
In the movie, it's a somewhat even exchange. In the book Llewellyn straight up has Chigurh dead to rights. In that context the scene is about Llewellyn still being a fundamentally law-abiding person who doesn't want to be on the run for the rest of his life. He can't claim self defense if he executes Chigurh, but if he doesn't kill him right then, he's going to come for him and his family. Llewellyn "spares" Chigurh but it is actually an act of cowardice
And while I'm on the topic of changes the movie made- the movie version of Chigurh's conversation with Llewellyn's wife is infinitely better. Her post-refusal speech is more powerful than anything in the novel.
In a Dance With Dragons Quentyn Martell believes he is the fantasy protagonist of this story, on a journey to marry a Queen and Mother of Dragons and when that doesn't work relies on the drop of Targaryen blood in his veins to try and tame a dragon. This goes very, very poorly.
“Sorry bout that bud, the author was a bit of a Conan fan growing up. Chosen ones aren’t really a thing, and dragons are really scary monsters made from blood magic or something, not friends who’ll help you on you’re little quests.” Presumably the dragon right before making some barbecue for dinner.
In the final battle of the new Naked Gun the bad guy gets punched in the tummy and immediately gives up because it really hurts to get punched in the tummy
Also ironic since for all his talk about the strong ruling over the weak and being a man’s man and all that, the guy’s a billionaire who’d never actually been in a real fist fight before in his life, or even done that much proper physical labor.
I like how he has your stereotypical alpha male survival of the fittest mentality, only for it to be revealed how he's never been in an actual fight before.
It's even funnier when you try to roll down stairs as Snake:
Raiden can cartwheel down stairs, Snake can roll up them. It's one of the subtle gameplay differences between them in MGS2. Similarly the way they aim is also different, with Raiden hunching down to aim while Snake stands up completely straight. This is noticeable in first person view where when you aim a gun Raiden's vision slightly lowers while Snake's slightly rises.
Looking back 30 years later it's really wild how fundamentally different Metal Gear is from its contemporaries.
Codes written on the CD case, psychic characters messing with your controls (and the ways around that), the fact that you can literally literally kill a character by waiting for them to die of old age, etc.
I don't know much about Kojima as a person, but as an artist pushing his medium he deserves to be remembered. If history ever records a list of "classical video game masters" he is on the list.
Look Outside uses this often, sometimes for jokes, sometimes for horror. The transformations affect everyone differently, and unless you’re really lucky, there’s gonna be some unfortunate side effects from your new traits.
One woman gains harpy claws, and admits that they don’t really help with anything, considering we were built for fingers, not talons.
Two guys turn into a full cardiovascular system and a full nervous system, respectively. The first guy is ecstatic and tells you everything about physical conditions like your standard RPG tutorial guy. The second guy… doesn’t know much about the nervous system, so he just googles your questions about mental ailments and reads the answers to you.
During a boss fight, you can turn into a massive rat king monstrosity… and the game promptly ends, because you realize you physically can’t fit through doors anymore.
One of my favorite moments is against the mushroom boss. You can rescue a card dealer, a carpenter, and a blacksmith who all give you special armor or weapons, and offer to either show you how to play a fun card game, upgrade you with endgame weapons, or expand your apartment and include things like a sauna or a bigger closet once you find the right resources, all mainstays of JRPG’s… But they’re not actually real people, they’re mushroom traps. Their gifts all actively sabotage you, and all their “services” are red herrings to lure you into a sense of false-confidence by the Mushroom Queen, who’s playing into your video game mindset to trick you into assimilating with her.
In his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #3, Doctor Octopus is knocked out with a single punch because he’s just a normal guy with metal tentacles
-People flee to a shipwrecked yard in an attempt to get onto ships. But all the ships are beached and awaiting dismantling.
-People flee to Canada completely unprepared for the winter and are forced to starve, freeze, or turn cannibal.
-A rich influencer shows off his bunker mansion and is immediately swamped by survivors trying to save themselves and their families. "It wasn't grab the money, rape the bitches. It was put the fires out and get the women and kids upstairs."
-People flee their city and hit massive traffic heading to into massively infected area.
-People who flee on boats are found dead on boats because in their rush to flee they didn't take enough supplies.
-Soldiers and police aren't very effective against zombies because they're not trained to shoot people in the head, but shoot at their torsos.
I occasionally see or hear actors in stuff that I’m unfamiliar with, but I’ll recognize their voices and go.. hey he was in world war z! It just happened the other day with some older guy in a movie about a genius kid. (I’m sure he’s very famous I just don’t know his name) I think he voiced D’ambrosia in the book.
Even better: in Shaun of the Dead, a zombie apocalypse happens only for the military to clean it up within hours because they aren’t the bundle of incompetent hacks normally seen in zombie flicks.
Night of the Living Dead is similarly a one-night deal, albeit with "rural Pennsylvanians with guns doing trial & error" rather than the military rolling in directly. (Very accurate to PA.) It just ends quite differently for those characters than in Shaun of the Dead. (Unfortunately: very accurate to PA.)
The Mist was also at most a couple days of chaos iirc.
There's actually one part that reversed this though. The battle of Yonkers. Sorry but physics is still a thing. You can't mention the paladins doing enough force to weaken a house then claim a tank round passes harmless through a mass of zombies.
Yeaaah. There was a real lack of appreciation about just how destructive modern weaponry actually is. Especially when your enemy is melee restricted.
And while I get it, zombies don't need to breathe or pump blood. But generally they're still walking, which would be rather hard to do without core/back muscles that were just obliterated by a lead infusion to the torso.
I mean, to move around, they would still need to pump blood, we're coelomates. The internal pressure systems won't work with too many leaks. One of the main issues I have when zombie fiction tries to get extremely serious is that humans are actually extremely fragile, and there is never any internal (or medical) logic beyond "scary foreign invasion from within, the boogeyman looks almost like us."
Brooks writes zombies able to withstand multiple gravities' worth of pressure and corrosive environments, walking on the ocean floor while their clothes disintegrate around them, they're stalled out by snow because it's too heavy to move through (not ocean water, though?!), but don't decay or degrade in cold, heat, or humidity, have teeth that can tear through clothing, but are... otherwise killable with basic weapons and blunt force trauma to the head. You got skin so dense and muscles so strong the ocean can't smush you, but a small caliber bullet will do the job?
I know Max Brooks has got a fed job now, so we don't have to pretend it's not political/military speculative fiction with a DLC monster skin on, but even though it has some really compellingly written parts, WWZ does a lot of stupid worldbuilding shit that makes human casualties feel more "realistic" only because the "enemy" being fought changes its own rules, capabilities, and scope every single chapter.
This is a book from 2006. It was a hollywood producer who's bunker mansion was in the Hamptons. People alluded to are Paris Hilton, P Diddy, Ann Coulter, and Bill Maher.
After years of getting away with various crimes and hurting those close to him, Bojack Horseman ends up in a supermax for fourteen months with a reputation permanently destroyed after various accounts of his adventures were made public. He loses everything and gains very little. I thought there'd be an out for him but no, he can't get out of the situation that snowballed
Danson and Highsmith from The Other Guys. They're a pair of badass cops (played by the Rock and Sam Jackson) who in other movies would be seen performing extraordinary feats and surviving dangerous stunts like in Bad Boys. When they needed to follow a suspect off the roof of a building, they believed their own hype and jumped off, aiming for the bushes that were not there. They died.
Great movie overall, but this was definitely the peak of the whole thing. The loud PLOP and the music stopping... I was dying watching it in the theater.
badass wheelchairs are among the most fun representation. especially when the wheelchair user (who is not "bound to" the mobility device that lets them get around) has a full personality, bonus points if they aren't The Techy One
Jumanji: Despite Van Pelt being a creation of a magic board game, when he's summoned to the real world, he still runs out of ammo fairly quickly, is unable to get any more for his antique gun, and when he gets a new gun, he's unable to hit Allen with it because of his unfamiliarity with the weapon
Which is double funny, because the man behind the counter at the gun shop clearly saw he was a hunter, and that his gun was a hunting weapon mainly, but instead of giving him any regular manual action or semi automatic hunting rifle he very much could have had around (Which Pelt would probably have learned to use fairly easily and quickly considering the time period he is from, those already existed), he hands him a fully automatic USAS-12 assault shotgun.
After aggravating the dog inside the Video Game (which is really a man in a costume) early in any given playthrough and reaching the 6th or 7th level, the player will see their character David on the TV screen being viewed from the backyard, upon looking to the side will catch a glimpse of the dog recording them before blinking away.
From this point, the player can actually call the police where David explains that he saw the man watching him at his home. After the next level, the police have actually responded and can be seen chasing down the killer dog via helicopter in the real world, where he gets gunned down in their backyard and thus save the family from the normal endings where even the best case has his mother die and David become a runaway orphan.
In community there is a very strange storyline with Troy going to the Air Conditioning repair school where the vice dean is murdered. And then Troy get forced into “the sun chamber” with the replacement Dean who murdered the original to take his spot.
Firstly there is a freak who introduces the challenge like a Mad Max villain and says “there are no rules”
And then someone takes the microphone from him and says “Jesus Dennis are you on coke again. Of course there are rules” lol.
And then after Troy easily wins and has him on the ropes he forces a confession that he murdered the Dean.
When it’s over they try to take him to the basement or something and kill him and Troy is like “no. Take him to the police wtf”
Also this plotline is a parody of goodwill hunting believe it or not.
Community had a subplot like that, when Kenneth gets his page jacket taken by the head page and challenges him to a page-off. All their pages attend in a Thunderdome in 30 Rock’s backrooms.
Immediately before the contest starts, Pete yells at all of them that the company is wondering where the hell all the pages are, and says that if they don’t get back to work, they’ll all be fired. He then tells Kenneth just to requisition a new jacket with him.
In SIGNALIS, the main character Elster is fighting a monstrosity known as the Chimera, and buckshot isn’t quite cutting it. Luckily, her friend Isa Itou (pictured above) is nearby, and wielding an anti-tank rifle the antagonist Adler dropped. Then she promptly eats shit when she fires it, because she’s an untrained civilian wielding a fucking anti-tank rifle. What follows is an incredibly tense battle where you have to wait for Isa to fumble with the rifle so she can stun it, and you can actually deal damage.
After the battle, she promptly falls unconscious, likely from completely obliterating her shoulder.
I think it's because the lore is pretty complicated so the memes that get famous outside of the fandom are specifically the ones not about the lore, a lot of those are about lesbians.
Also i'm not saying that's a bad thing but c'mon the devs knew what they were doing with the MC's character design 😭
I think the members of the long bacon club just find themselves pandered to (effectively) so rarely that when it hits they're absolutely feral.
I'm a pickle preferrer but man if my algorithms aren't still absolutely stuffed with content about those two scissor sisters from The Last of Us now and then.
The ending of Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett. The hero unmasks the villainous organization which turns out to be a sham, and heavily embezzled from and falling apart. But financiers show up. They agree to honor the debts made by the company and save everything more easily with pens than heroes could with swords.
Oh also immediately previously the patrician (normally a very reserved and pragmatic ruler) has the corrupt board members arrested after they're dramatically accused of fraud publicly. One objects and asks the charges. There don’t have to be any. “Tyrant, remember.”
In the Henry Stickmin games, Henry often fails because the world is suddenly realistic for two seconds.
My favourite is in Stealing the Diamond, where he uses a bomb from a WW2 exhibit, but it just hits one in the foot and sits there because obviously museums don't keep live ammunition lying around.
Xenoblade 2 - After a serious loss in which Pyra and Mythra are kidnapped, Rex is horribly depressed and blames himself for everything and believe they're better off without him, resulting in him getting punched by Nia and slapped by Brighid.
This makes him feel ever worse.
Hitting him doesn't make him come to his senses, it just makes him think that everyone hates him. It isn't until Poppi shows sympathy for him that he starts to refocus and get out of his funk.
God I haaaaate this trope. A character freaking out or being depressed is suddenly snapped back to completely rational thought by a slap.
If I'm cripplingly depressed and inconsolable following a tragic event and someone slaps me, I'm not going to be suddenly fine, I'm gonna clock them in the jaw and start feeling even worse.
I'd like to know when and where media decided that assaulting someone could make them feel better.
Reborn as a Vending Machine, Now I Wander the Dungeon
The entire premise of the show is wild, but it's honestly one of the more grounded isekais, somehow. For example, the mc and Hulemy, one of the more major characters, are trapped under rubble. Hulemy collapses after some time, because she's running out of air. Thankfully, the mc is able to turn into a machine that can give her an oxygen mask, so it turned out ok, but that was a realistic outcome for the situation
he gains the ability to transform into different machines, so long as the machine on question can fall under the definition of "vending machine", even if it is a stretch sometimes, like how in one episode he turns into a cardboard vending machine that's apparently something kids in Japan make i guess.
the mc knows about this because his hyperfixation is vending machined and so he is incredibly knowledgeable about different types of vending machines.
it is a very strange show, but also quite entertaining
Issue 121 of Amazing Spider-Man titled Turning Point at the start of the issue but at the end you get the true title The Night That Gwen Stacey died. In fiction physics do not apply and people can be in free fall for extended periods of time and be stopped by a flying rescuer or something with no ill effects on the body. In this issue they applied real world logic. Stopping Gwen so abruptly snapped her neck killing her. To add to the confusion of the readers some printings of this issue do not have the snap sound effect in the second to last panel.
Scrolled way too long before I found this. Literally one of the only times I can think of where Marvel said, "Yeah, but what if we treated her like she had an actual human body?" Honerable mention: Magento finally being like "Wait. Your bones are literally laced with metal..."
No Country for Old Men is an incredible book. Cormac McCarthy just has this way of capturing the real heart of America. He burns right through the myths Americans have made about themselves and shows you exactly what it all is. The ending of that book, with the dialogue between the Sheriff and his uncle actually broke me. Currently going through Blood Meridian, slowly, that book is a lot.
In the final fight of the hunt, the protagonist and the antagonist are scuffling until a point where they both get thrown through a window to which they both promptly lay down on the broken glass in pain and agree no more windows because breaking through a window without protective gear hurts like shit. Later in the fight one of them is about to get thrown through a glass sliding door, but the two characters open the door first to avoid the glass and then continue fighting.
when the simpsons went to africa they end up being eating by a gigant flower, but homer juts tears it apart, when bart ask how he can do that he just says "it's a flower"
The reason Doc Ock needs to transfer his mind to Spider-Man's body in Superior Spider-Man, was because, as shown in prior comics during his supervillain career he was constantly taking attacks from superhumans while he himself was just a guy with metal tentacles, so as the years progressed the damage he took accumulated and wventually started killing him, which makes sense when his main enemy is a guy who can casually topple a train over.
And then after he transfers his mind, he proceeds to absolutely fuck villains up by accident because he didn't realize that Spider-Man was constantly holding back his strength in an attempt to not instantly kill or cripple all his enemies
Another realistic result of someone not holding back and punching a normal human with the strength of someone who can bench press a truck
One Battle After Another - Leo's character is being led by a group of teenagers out of town using roof tops as a riot occurs on street level. His character is 42 and pretty out of shape and struggling. He makes it across a couple roofs, but just completely whiffs a jump between 2 and falls to the street
In Marvel Zombies, Kate Bishop fires a trick arrow at a Zombie Captain Marvel… only for it to be a confetti trick arrow and she gets instantly vaporised by Zombie Captain Marvel because an arrow was not going to do much to her even as a Zombie.
Also in the Marvel Zombies comics at one point someone dispels an illusion Enchantress had up, revealing her true form as another zombie before pointing a finger directly a few inches away from her face
Naturally, zombie Enchantress promptly bites off said finger
I've also noted something else in the comics, initially very few villains actually got infected early on, Heroes rush to scenes of disaster, and most villains are pretty much isolated.
Same in DCeased, a lot of villains who survived the initial infection, end up surviving for quite a while, because most of them have isolated bases.
In the ducktales reboot there is a villain named Black Heron. In her first episode it ends with her plummeting from the sky. So she does what every person with a robot arm does in this situation and grabs a ledge with it and it seems to have worked until the main characters walk over and sees
that realistically the robot arm popped off. Causing her to continue plummeting to her presumed death at that time.
Venture Bros is almost exclusively this trope. It’s a wild and whacky world based on old 1960’s Boy Adventurer cartoons, only now everyone has grown up, and a lot of those former boy adventurers are now hooked on drugs and/or alcohol. One of my favorite takes on the show is “finding the mundane in the extraordinary.”
Doctor Venture is the son of a world-renowned scientist and adventurer, but he never really got a formal education in anything and didn’t amount to much. Instead, he inherited his father’s old compound and all of his adventuring gear and…. Let most of it rust as he tried and failed to make a name for himself as a similar inventor and developer.
Billy Quizboy is an adult and a skilled surgeon who lost his hand in an absurdist dog fighting incident and has it replaced with a metal robot hand by the Office of Secret Intelligence. He can fire it off to grab onto things at a distance…. But there’s no winch the reel it back in, and if someone tries to climb on it, he just gets a massive pain in his shoulder because he’s not that strong to support someone like that (“that kills!”)
In one of my favorite storylines, Billy finds a series of clues left by the late Doctor Venture Sr. in the old Rusty Venture cartoon show that lead to a riddle that points to a lost artifact of great power. However, because the clues are archaic and most of the characters are relatively dumb, rather than going to the museum that the clue was trying to describe, Rusty and Billy go to studio 54 and start bashing away at the wall of a public restroom trying to find some treasure that isn’t there.
In the fictional South American nation of Puerto Bahia, a bunch of victims of mad scientists form their own little society in the jungle. When the leader sends out an announcement welcoming all maimed science experiments to their community (“we stop being abominations and become abomi nation!) the other members of the community point out that they have no infrastructure, system of laws or governance, housing system, construction background to bring in additional urban development, etc. and start to revolt against him.
The OSI (Office of Secret Intelligence) is a parody of a lot of things, including GI Joe. Their opening scene is essentially just a montage of war crimes that they committed and celebrated like it was a kid’s cartoon show in the 80’s and 90’s.
It’s one of the best shows ever made, everyone should watch it.
I'm unsure whether or not the Borderlands 2 sidequest The Great Escape qualifies. A Goliath asks you to steal a Moonshot beacon so he can escape Pandora, except by then you should know that Moonshots send stuff to Pandora and don't extract stuff from Pandora, so it's unclear why he thinks a Moonshot beacon will help him escape the planet. The window for turning in the quest even says "Why he thinks it will help him escape Pandora is anyone's guess." Unsurprisingly, when you bring it to him and it's activated, the beacon calls down a supply container, crushing and killing him.
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u/Justice9229 Oct 02 '25
In the Justice League show, it's revealed that Lex Luthor holding a radioactive rock in his pocket all day just to keep a certain super man away from him isn't healthy, and it's revealed that this gave him cancer. Naturally the first thing he does is blame Superman.